Black Dawn series to WHDLoad?

[Solo Kazuki]

Hello


Maybe someone would be interested in making WHDLoad version of Black Dawn series games?


At least Hellbound, because it's best part (not counting new one). It have HD installer, but it's very configuration dependant if it's working correctly (or at all).

[jotd]

are there some reliable images that we can download?

It seems that there's whdload work until 2030 at least...

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by jotd

are there some reliable images that we can download?

I can upload all the disks that I use for the series if you like?

[Aladin]

The whole series requires a real slave

Works well with WB slave generic:
Black Dawn 6 Champions of Dawn (1996 Zsoft)
Fever (1996 A Campbbell/Black Dragon)

works with WB Generic with the novbrmove tooltype under wb3.1 / 3.9 but not under amikit (afaos ?):
Black Dawn 1 (1993 A Campbell)
Black Dawn 2 (1994 A Campbell)
Black Dawn 3 Legions of Dawn (1995 A Campbell/Black Dragon)
Black Dawn 4 a New Biginning Remix (1996 Zsoft)
Black Dawn 5 Hellbound (1996 Zsoft)
ThunderDawn (1996 A Campbell)
Parasite 1 (1995 Zsoft)
Parasite 2 (1996 Zsoft)

note that BD1 and BD2 works well with slave D7 ks1.3 but you cannot save with BD2

I used the numbers with Shaun's name:
http://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p=...6&postcount=11

[jotd]

okay. Is there any protection ? are the disks cracked ? I hate working on cracks. Lost a lot of time with Asterix "Le coup du menhir" cracked (and botched) version.

The NOVBRMOVE requirement is because game gets hold of the VBR to modify vectors, and whdload doesn't like it unless whdload VBR vectors aren't installed (novbrmove)

I suppose a generic slave could search for MOVEC VBR constructs and remove them. That would be more interesting than doing specific installations maybe specially if nothing else needs to be fixed. I'll try Black Dawn 2 for starters. The generic install contains the diskimage. Installing to files is probably possible and would probably fix the "unable to save" issue.

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by jotd

okay. Is there any protection ? are the disks cracked ?

Protection... not that I know of.

All disks that I use are not cracked, an archive "Black Dawn .ADFs.rar" is now in The Zone!

[Aladin]

For BD2, I recreated an adf (OFS) to work under ks1.3, initially the available adf (FFS) did not work under ks1.3
And for BD1 ADF, I removed the parasitic files which were from another game (the files (iff) which were in lowercase)

[NeoHippie2016]

@JOTD Look also here:

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=99437

[Solo Kazuki]

@JOTD

These are PD/Shareware games, they aren't protected (AFAIK).


@NeoHippie2016

Same link is in my first post


@Alladin

Working of generic WHDLoad slave versions hardly depend on configuration. On my config many generics (including Black Dawn ones) aren't working (back to WB with exception even with NoVBRMove and/or NoCache switch).

[Aladin]

@Solo Kazuki
In my test. With the same hardware configuration (winuae 060), that work (bd1 bd2 bd3 bd4 bd5) with 3.1/3.9 but not working with amikitWB (it may be afaos the culprit). Out of curiosity does the 1 and 2 in whdlg d7 version work? (those don't ask for novbrmove). Bd6 works with 3.1/3.9/amikit.

For the most part I have included a native launch icon in the data directory (I have not yet found for bd4 (new biginning) and bd6 (champions) for launching natively but the generic of bd6 should work better than the others, it does not use novbrmove and works under amikit). (BD3 legions and BD5 hellbound works natively with 3.1/3.9 but not with amikit (afaos?). (BD1 and BD2 works well natively under 3.1/3.9/amikit)

(generic test versions were uploaded on May 22)
Anyway, we have to wait for jotd to make them official

[Solo Kazuki]

I'm using my old good WB3.0 very customized (by adding many libs, commands, utils, etc) and working fine with (almost) all WHDLoad and standard installs. I had always problems with generic slaves since first ones which i get in late 90's (or early in XXI century) and rather no problems with other installs. It was used with 040@40MHz and now with WinUAE.

I'll check first two (which i'm not interested, sadly) later. Hellbound doesn't work neither with normal nor WHDLoad install, i must use floppy images.

[Aladin]

out of curiosity, do you have afaos or dopus5 installed? (to research which tools could cause these inconveniences). Apparently your wb looks like my amikit. It makes the same problems

[Solo Kazuki]

Nope. Just plain WB3.0 without any major modifications.

Edit: Did You test generics with 68040 processor?

[Aladin]

my real amiga is a bppc1260. This is why I am set to 060 in winuae

I just quickly tested bd5 hellbound with 3.9 in 040. crash lol

/historically, the 040 has always posed problems with whdload, Unfortunately the official slaves often had to be fixed for the supported

[Solo Kazuki]

@JOTD
I just see that You made Black Dawn II slave. Maybe You can try Hellbound next? It's HD installable, i don't know why standard install is not working.

@Alladin
So it's 040 problem as i suspected. 040's series were (from what i read) least compatible with 000/020.

[jotd]

the 040 has always posed problems with whdload

the processor is not in cause. Bad game programming is.

When you're using whdload generic slave, you're using kickemu, which loads a copy of the kickstart in RAM. So the addresses are different and depend on your accelerator board Z2 or Z3 memory location.

When the game has issues like uninitialized variables, reading out of bounds, it can read contents it should not read, and interpret the addresses as data. It works by sheer luck on the developper machine but may fail with a different config. Check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undefined_behavior

That's exactly the issue I had for years with Goblins 3. The game reads somewhere it should not and fetches a 32 bit address that is passed as width for a rectangle fill using the blitter... guess what happens? chipmem corruption, which depends on where the kickstart/fastmem is installed...

People think that CPU speed/instructions/cache configuration is the main issue, but it's only one of the issues you can meet when trying to run a game on all configurations.

If someone has issues to run a game, that is becoming interesting for a whdload fix. Do you have crashes with whdload generic or just running it in normal AmigaDOS mode?

[Solo Kazuki]

Originally Posted by jotd

Do you have crashes with whdload generic or just running it in normal AmigaDOS mode?

With generic WHDLoad slave i have exception error, with normal install game just doesn't work - after double click i have black (loading?) screen for a second and after that i have back to WB without any error mentioned. Of course i copied two missing files mentioned during installation (which should be done during installation, IMHO).

Edit: or should i run it from CLI (not WB)?

[jotd]

sold!

[CrashMidnick]

Originally Posted by jotd

sold!

Thanks !

[jotd]

beta in the zone. I have briefly tested on winuae, there seem to be graphical glitches / flickers on the main action area. Also maybe sound issues. but it runs.