Berusky CD32

[BSzili]

As I previously mentioned in the original thread, I started working on a CD32 conversion of Berusky, a Sokoban style puzzle game with ladybugs.


Compared to the original game, it runs at half of the resolution (640x240) to avoid the interlace flicker. This still has some glitches I have to iron out, but it works OK most of the time. I plan to convert the FastTracker2 music to CD audio, and hopefully restore the sound effects as well. Getting the memory usage down under 2MB was a real struggle, and it's still ongoing.

For those who are insterested I uploaded a work in progress CD32 bootable ISO, with no music or sound effects, but a lot of bugs (and not only the ladybug kind ):
https://drive.google.com/drive/folde...vJgS3s8wTW6c8h

I plan to post about the CD32 progress in this thread. That's it for now.

Besides the regular mouse and keyboard, it supports 2+ button joysticks/gamepads:

• D-pad: arrow keys / movement
• Red (Button 1): Enter / select the next ladybug
• Blue (Button 2): Escape / back

[Amigajay]

Looks interesting, good job converting it so far, will give it a try out!

[saimon69]

I remember looking at this and considering whether to do adaptation of the xm tunes in three channel mod files for normal amigas; will start if there is request but might take some time as am working two jobs and am full of other gigs to do

[BSzili]

The original port plays back the original modules via xmplayer.library, the CD32 version will have regular CD audio tracks.

[BSzili]

I thought the music was going to be relatively hassle free, as all I have to do is to render the tracker files into PCM wave files and make a mixed mode disc image. I was wrong yet again. First of all, there are 89 minutes of music, and that won't fit on a single CD. No problem, I removed all the outro music and few of the longer (4+ minutes long) ingame tracks. Then I realized that you can't read data from the CD while you are playing an audio track. I had to carefully reorganize when the music is started/stopped, which also means I can't load data on the fly after the music started playing. To save some memory I had to remove another feature: the options menu. Not a huge loss, it only had two volume sliders for the sound and music. Speaking of sound, that's going to be the next milestone, although I might tackle some of the graphics glitches first.

A new preview version available via the link in the first post. I used the iso+wav+cue format, so I can update it without uploading 700MB files. WinUAE supports it natively, and so do most modern CD burning software (although I wouldn't recommend wasting discs at this stage ).

[kriz]

Interesting wil try this out asap !!

[BSzili]

I just noticed that I forgot to update the iso the last time. Better late than never, now it has music and sounds as well. I also realized that the password input doesn't work without a keyboard, so I have to add some joystick compatible input as well. Then I can finally tackle the graphics issues.

[BSzili]

I uploaded a new version. The main changes are the gamepad input on the password screen (how did I miss this?), and the game now only updates the native screen at most once per vblank. This should get rid of the long black screen as the level tiles get drawn in the background. For the password input use the D-pad, it should be self explanatory (up/down changes the letter, left-right deletes or adds a new letter, red accepts).

Unfortunately not all is perfect, as the game has some stability issues. If you keep starting levels, and going back to the main menu, the game eventually locks up. This is not something you would do in a normal playthrough, where you are unlikely to repeatedly exit from a level to the main menu. I suspect it's caused by stack exhaustion, but this is yet to be seen.
The other problem is that the loading times are quite bad on a real machine with the 2x CD drives. Previously I took out the zlib compressed dat file, because the decompression used too much memory, but I might have to find some other algorithm that can do in in-place decompression.