New game: Droid Special Edition (Atari STE conversion)

[rabidgerry]

Originally Posted by junosix

Just watching Amiga Bill's latest games roundup video and he had to hold both mousebuttons on boot and disable CPU caching in order to get rid of graphical glitches, might be worth giving that a shot.

Oh excellent, I'll give this a go then and see what happens!

[rabidgerry]

Originally Posted by junosix

Just watching Amiga Bill's latest games roundup video and he had to hold both mousebuttons on boot and disable CPU caching in order to get rid of graphical glitches, might be worth giving that a shot.

Absolute legend thanks! That got me running the game fine! And it seems like a great game so far

[junosix]

Ace! Glad that's sorted it

[rabidgerry]

Don't suppose there is a quit key? I was toying with the idea of writing a little script to disable the cache upon launching. I don't have to go through early startup either, just need to CPU NOCACHE from shell in workbench.

[tomcat666]

Originally Posted by rabidgerry

Don't suppose there is a quit key? I was toying with the idea of writing a little script to disable the cache upon launching. I don't have to go through early startup either, just need to CPU NOCACHE from shell in workbench.

You can use a generic Workbench 3.1 whdload slave and get a quit key that way. Works like a charm.

[rabidgerry]

Originally Posted by tomcat666

You can use a generic Workbench 3.1 whdload slave and get a quit key that way. Works like a charm.

Don't suppose you know how to edit the install script for WHDload to do that? I tried to give it a crack using an installed for another game but I couldn't avoid the fact it was looking for an image named something else.

[rabidgerry]

Oh yes! ESC key has been added really enjoying this game

[TjLaZer]

Hello, nice to see this ST game ported. Tested on my NTSC A500 with 1MB Chip, and it hangs to black screen. Forced machine to PAL and it worked. Can you make it run on NTSC? Looks like it doesn't use the whole screen so will work if you can make it run. Thanks and nice work!

[junosix]

I did have a try at getting it working on NTSC. Although the screen dimensions fit, the 60Hz rate caused it to not have enough time inbetween refreshes to build up the screen buffer completely, leading to graphic corruptions and inconsistent framerate. Also, the music routine is triggered every screen refresh, so at 60Hz the music plays too fast and would need to be adjusted in order to sound okay.

If you can get it working by switching to PAL then that's great news.

[alexh]

Originally Posted by junosix

I did have a try at getting it working on NTSC. Although the screen dimensions fit, the 60Hz rate caused it to not have enough time inbetween refreshes to build up the screen buffer completely, leading to graphic corruptions and inconsistent framerate.

You could consider switching the module playback from ptplayer to LSP (light speed player) and that would possibly give you enough savings for 60Hz.

https://github.com/arnaud-carre/LSPlayer

Originally Posted by junosix

the music routine is triggered every screen refresh, so at 60Hz the music plays too fast and would need to be adjusted in order to sound okay

I'm not that familiar with LSP but some replayers allow you to use the CIA timers instead of VBL. You can program the timers for NTSC and PAL to give approx the same interrupt frequency.

[paraj]

Originally Posted by alexh

I'm not that familiar with LSP but some replayers allow you to use the CIA timers instead of VBL. You can program the timers for NTSC and PAL to give approx the same interrupt frequency.

Or ye olde only call UpdateMusic routine every 5/6 VBLs (musicians hate this one simple trick that coders love)

[junosix]

The music routine's not the problem in terms of processor time, even with music disabled the screen glitches on NTSC.

I might look into ways of getting it to work on NTSC machines but for the moment the game is PAL only.

[tomcat666]

Originally Posted by rabidgerry

Don't suppose you know how to edit the install script for WHDload to do that? I tried to give it a crack using an installed for another game but I couldn't avoid the fact it was looking for an image named something else.

Download the Workbench 3.1 install: https://whdload.de/apps/Workbench31.html
Put the Workbench31_1.slave in a directory and create a dir called 'data' , copy the whole content of the game adf into this 'data' directory then just start whdload Workbench31_1.slave .

[troupe86]

I'm only just seeing this now! This looks great and I'll definitely give it a try over the weekend. Well done!