Death Rally Amiga port

[fgh]

I've tried it again now - it's working great! Awesome work!

I get 35-40FPS with "fast 16bit stereo ++ " with my AD516 sound card.

A few comments:

• "Fast 16bit mono", produces a guru/reboot.
  
• I'm only getting sound on one channel for some reason. Could be the sound card, haven't used it in a year or two. Will investigate.
  
• And the FPS counter is quite unreadable btw, it would be more useful if you only updated the number every 5 or 10 frames

(A4000T / BFG@100mHz / OS 3.2.2.1 / AD516 / Comp pro CD32 joypad)

Originally Posted by fgh

It would perhaps be more logical if enter in the menu and accelerate were mapped to the same button though. (I stood still on start, and unintentionally pressed esc and left a race a few times, haha)

Originally Posted by BSzili

I'm not sure if making the Fire button Escape in the menues would be much more intuitive. Could you tell me more about where did you press escape accidentally?

I think having accelerate and enter on same button would be more logical, but it's not a big deal.

(After a race, before I got used to it, I'd press the accelerate button in the menu, producing Escape instead of the intended Enter.
And a couple of times while waiting to see which players entered medium race, I'd press the accelerate button, intending to start, but instead producing Escape/leaving the round without entering a race.
But as I said - not a big deal, I'm used to it now)

Keep up the great work!

[BSzili]

Originally Posted by fgh

I've tried it again now - it's working great! Awesome work!

I get 35-40FPS with "fast 16bit stereo ++ " with my AD516 sound card.

A few comments:

• "Fast 16bit mono", produces a guru/reboot.
  
• I'm only getting sound on one channel for some reason. Could be the sound card, haven't used it in a year or two. Will investigate.
  
• And the FPS counter is quite unreadable btw, it would be more useful if you only updated the number every 5 or 10 frames

(A4000T / BFG@100mHz / OS 3.2.2.1 / AD516 / Comp pro CD32 joypad)

The sound issues could be caused by driver issues, especially since the mono mode crashes the system. Stereo++ with panning is used specifically to avoid sounds being forced to the extreme left or extreme right, but you never know how the driver behaves with a lot of sound channels.
I can average the FPS value with the one from the previous frame, that should make it a bit smoother.

I think having accelerate and enter on same button would be more logical, but it's not a big deal.

(After a race, before I got used to it, I'd press the accelerate button in the menu, producing Escape instead of the intended Enter.
And a couple of times while waiting to see which players entered medium race, I'd press the accelerate button, intending to start, but instead producing Escape/leaving the round without entering a race.
But as I said - not a big deal, I'm used to it now)

Keep up the great work!

Thanks. For me the primary button (Button 1 or Red) is more natural as the positive one, but this comes down to personal preference. The solution would be to restore the proper gamepad support to the game, but I'm not particularly good at x86 assembly, so this is pretty far down the list.

[StevenJGore]

Originally Posted by BSzili

I have to check the AHI source code before I can give a definite answer to this.

Just noticed that you've implemented this (reading the current AHI Prefs setting and selecting it as the default), many thanks!

[jurassicman]

@BSzili
I've just tried the new version but I'm experiencing some issues with it... initially the screen remained black for quite a few seconds before the first race, after that everything seemed to work well but after the third race the screen became black again and my monitor even went to "power save mode" like it had no signal. I had to reboot the system.

Did you change anything video related or is it me?

I'm using an A1200 with BlizzardPPC 1260/66 and mediator card with Radeon 9200, SB128, etc... AmigaOS 3.1.4

[BSzili]

Nothing video related was changed, I basically inlined a ton of functions to save on the cost of calls.

[jurassicman]

Originally Posted by BSzili

Nothing video related was changed, I basically inlined a ton of functions to save on the cost of calls.

I haven't changed anything on my system as well...
Could you send me the previous version (unfortunately I overwrote it with the new one) so that I can see if I have the same issues with it?

[BSzili]

Unfortunately I don't have it, maybe someone else can upload it for testing.

[nikosidis]

On Pistorm32 and A1200 the game works as normal with latest build. Nothing changed for that setup. No more time to wait before racing as one reported.

[Seiya]

i have a previous version

[jurassicman]

Thanks @Seya, I'll check if I have the same issue with the previous version. If so it is related to my system (even if I haven't changed anything), if not there are some incompatibilities between my system and the newer version.

[BSzili]

A new version is up with better performance. You may notice that the machine guns sound a bit different, as I had to reduce the frequency for the sound effects. This doesn't affect the actual fire rate, jus the sounds, as it's costly to start a new one every frame. Now it's limited to 14/sec. The tire screeching sound loop also has a timeout so it doesn't restart needlessly when it would only get interrupted for a few of frames.

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by tomcat666

Oooh I just thought I was shite at it since Jane Honda and Duke Nukem had x10 score Starting over then...

I was playing the flawed Windows port on the medium difficulty (because the hard difficulty is severely unbalanced in that port) and by playing cheesy by saving and reloading a lot I got to the hard races with them being around a 100 points ahead of me. So likely it won't be AS bad as you had it, but it'll still take a lot of races where you gun both of them down to catch up to them

[jurassicman]

Originally Posted by BSzili

A new version is up with better performance. You may notice that the machine guns sound a bit different, as I had to reduce the frequency for the sound effects. This doesn't affect the actual fire rate, jus the sounds, as it's costly to start a new one every frame. Now it's limited to 14/sec. The tire screeching sound loop also has a timeout so it doesn't restart needlessly when it would only get interrupted for a few of frames.

Thanks for the new release, BSzili.

I did try it for about 10-15 minutes and I got the same issue, black screen after the third or fourth race. I noticed that powering off and on the monitor I get the image back.

It seems to me that now, since the time to wait after a race is lower, my monitor isn't able to keep up with the pace and goes "out of signal".

I see the light led of my hard drive flickering quite fast, I hear the music (and if I click the buttons I hear the sound effects of the shop menus) but the screen stays black.

I did try the version you released on may 9th (not the one uploaded by Seiya that is older and doesn't have the sound card prompt) and it works well (I played for at least 40-45 minutes without having any issues.

At this point it seems something related to my monitor/video card (and maybe screen configuration).

Would it be possible to have a prompt to choose among the video configurations available like the one you implemented for the audio configurations?

If not, is there a way to force the screen to use through a tooltype?

[BSzili]

A screenmode requester is not really feasible as the game switches back and forth between two resolutions. You can use the FORCEMODE tooltype to use a specific native monitor (the default is RTG):
https://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p...29&postcount=1
I uploaded an icon with an example.

[jurassicman]

I see... I'll try if forcing mode to AGA will fix this issue. Hopefully the game won't be too slow, though...
Thanks for the hint.

[tomcat666]

Originally Posted by jurassicman

I see... I'll try if forcing mode to AGA will fix this issue. Hopefully the game won't be too slow, though...
Thanks for the hint.

Use BlazeWCP (aminet) to get much better performance on AGA screens (especially the hires menus). Otherwise the game plays even better on AGA than on RTG

[jurassicman]

Originally Posted by tomcat666

Use BlazeWCP (aminet) to get much better performance on AGA screens (especially the hires menus). Otherwise the game plays even better on AGA than on RTG

Interesting... I'll check it out, thanks!

[BSzili]

Just as a note, the gameplay will be the same whether or not you have BlazeWCP, but it does help to make the menus less sluggish.

[fgh]

I played the latest version a bit tonight. Still fun after all these years.

Game runs fine here. Just below 40 FPS with 44kHz stereo ++ (Didn’t use the ‘fast’ mode tonight.)

Saw only a few small issues:
- Bombs drop by themselves sometimes.
- Once there was a bomb that never exploded on impact.
- Loan shark will keep giving you loans even if you never pay back.
- Once my car was wrecked while I was broke and already had a loan. Then I was stuck, no way to get cash to fix the car or enter a race.
- Once the stats screen had a bug. See attachment.

All minor things. Still very enjoyable. But damn - this game is hard, even on the easiest difficulty level!

[BSzili]

That loan shark thing is a good candidate for another endianness issue I missed, I'll check it out. If the stat screen bug happens again please attach your save, maybe I'll be able to reproduce it.

edit: Can't reproduce the loanshark issue. If you have softlocked the game, just send me a save, otherwise there's little chance I can fix this.