Suppress System Request Prompts

[mcgeezer]

I know this is going to sound like a crazy question but I'll try and explain where I'm coming from.

As my game is a bit chipram hungry I use add21k to get me a little extra back, which as I understand removes some of the Workbench bitplanes.

My game is across three disks and I use LVOLock + LVOCurrentDir to request different disks to be inserted, relying on Workbench to do the background work.

However when I tried my game on real hardware, the game crashed at the Insert Disk # prompt (not a full crash but my copper list got corrupted), when I removed add21k from the startup the problem has went away.

My theory is, that the system request prompts are not aware that the bitplanes have been removed and taking the screen shot below, and looking in ram I can see that the OS has made a copy of the bitmap data that is under the system request prompt - probably in order to restore it, that bitmap data has stomped all over my game code.

So my question is, is it possible to surpress these graphical prompts in workbench somehow?

[paraj]

Originally Posted by mcgeezer

I know this is going to sound like a crazy question but I'll try and explain where I'm coming from.

As my game is a bit chipram hungry I use add21k to get me a little extra back, which as I understand removes some of the Workbench bitplanes.

My game is across three disks and I use LVOLock + LVOCurrentDir to request different disks to be inserted, relying on Workbench to do the background work.

However when I tried my game on real hardware, the game crashed at the Insert Disk # prompt (not a full crash but my copper list got corrupted), when I removed add21k from the startup the problem has went away.

My theory is, that the system request prompts are not aware that the bitplanes have been removed and taking the screen shot below, and looking in ram I can see that the OS has made a copy of the bitmap data that is under the system request prompt - probably in order to restore it, that bitmap data has stomped all over my game code.

So my question is, is it possible to surpress these graphical prompts in workbench somehow?

Setting ThisProc->pr_WindowPtr to -1 disables requesters if that's what you mean (info here: https://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/AmigaDOS_Data_Structures) and if it's sufficient for your case (be sure to restore the previous value when exiting).
So maybe something like this (untested):

    move.l  $4.w,a6
    sub.l   a1,a1
    jsr     -294(a6) ; FindTask
    move.l  d0,a0
    move.l  #-1,184(a0) ;pr_WindowPtr

[ross]

http://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p=...3&postcount=26

Pay attention to Add21k, there are different versions and in many configurations they create problems (video corruption and possible crashes).

EDIT: if I remember correctly there is a proper tool, compatible with KS2.0+ and which does not create video corruption.
It's called WBDepth and it's in one of the Fish Disks.
It has also been used in some commercial games with slightly different names ("WB2", "PAL", "addsomething",..).
But the function is always the same: lower the number of bitplanes and free up some memory.