American Laser Games (Mad Dog McCree and others)

[malko]

Originally Posted by DamienD

So now that I've finished adding in all these American Laser Games to my collection... thought I'd improve the "Gun Calibration", set "1 coin = Play", and rename all ROMs in a uniform / consistent manner

Here's how the "Gun Calibration" now looks for each game: [...]

Thank you my friend

Isn't a reopening of your thread planned ?

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by Viceroy

Nice to see you back DD ;-)

Originally Posted by Sandancer

Awesome work Damien, and welcome back

Originally Posted by malko

Thank you my friend

Isn't a reopening of your thread planned ?

Thanks guys, but you've all missed part of my first return post in this very thread:

Originally Posted by DamienD

Heya all,

This will be my one and only final post on EAB since my 7 month banning expired on the 30th of November...

<snip>

So guys, enjoy!!! This is my last contribution of many to the Amiga scene. Adios amigos!!!

Oops, oh yeah... my collection is still being actively worked on / improved constantly; and has been all throughout my ban. If you want to continue to get updates then please don't try to do so via EAB, as you will get no response. There are other methods to contact me

I've only returned briefly to share these ALG games with you all; as I know how difficult it was for me to source etc, and that you won't be able to get them yourself without purchasing a Dexter unit.

EAB; I've wasted enough of my valuable time / energy / effort over close to 2 decades now... and for what?

I'm done with this place, fuck EAB

[DamienD]

I've improved the "Gun Calibration" slightly further for these games:

Crime Patrol:



Crime Patrol 2 - Drug Wars:



Mad Dog McCree:



Space Pirates:

Now all games are perfect

Replaced archive in The Zone!

[mrbabbage]

Just to say ,I don't know if this explains the issues people are having with WSJR,but there are two different revisions of the expansion card ALG used, and they aren't compatible with one another in terms of RAM and ROM location and size. I've left a PM with Toni to check, as I don't yet have a compile environment for WinUAE, but it is something that could explain the weird behaviour on those games.

[ransom1122]

Originally Posted by phasermaniac

I got an easy fix for Fast Draw Showdown orientation:
Use _original video file. I think that if you use _rotated file it wont line up with the rom hitbox data.
Use either the native windows screen rotation ( verical inverted) or Reshade with ArcabView to rotate entire screen or game window.
In Winuae, set Xaxis - Lightpen Vertical Inverted, Yaxis - Lightpen Horizontal

I can only rotate my monitor clockwise which means in native windows I can only chage to "Portrait" Not Portrait Inverted as my monitor will not swivel anti clockwise.

Now...

Can you please screenshot Your Input TAB with the Controls working on rotated monitor?

set Xaxis - Lightpen Vertical Inverted - I don't have this in my dropdown list?

Yaxis - Lightpen Horizontal - This is for Player 2 Control not Player 1.

I am using winuae 4.9.1 Beta 5 and as far as I know Damien has set the controls correctly for Player 1 meaning...

... Dual Lightpen Horizontal #2
... Dual Lightpen Vertical #2

Are the only controls for Player 1

If I flip X& Y Then Up and Down works but Horizontal is inverted (On a Windows rotated Portrait setting)

[malko]

Originally Posted by DamienD

Thanks guys, but you've all missed part of my first return post in this very thread:
[...]
I'm done with this place, [...]

Looks like, you're right : I missed it
Cheers

[Fiery Phoenix]

Damien remember the fine words of KC and The Sunshine Band.....

Please don't go, don't gooooooooooooooo

Eitherway good to see you here again and thanks for previous help - always appreciated

[phasermaniac]

Originally Posted by ransom1122

set Xaxis - Lightpen Vertical Inverted - I don't have this in my dropdown list?

Yaxis - Lightpen Horizontal - This is for Player 2 Control not Player 1.

If I flip X& Y Then Up and Down works but Horizontal is inverted (On a Windows rotated Portrait setting)

Yes you are right, it's Dual Lightpen for p1.
Inverted is not in the dropdown, it's a checkbox (invert) on the right.
Adjust for your needs. I suppose you have to invert x axis in your case.
There is some program to rotate the screen from commandline, so you can make a batch to automate this.

[Toni Wilen]

I am not going do anything ALG related (and anything else not important enough) until 4.9.1 is out.

[DamienD]

Guys,

I know a few people who have my collection had issues with "Platoon [Nova]"

jwallace gave me the ultra rare original source video, so now I've re-encoded...

Obviously the video / audio quality won't have improved, but now maybe it will work for those people having issues previously?

You'll find the file on the TURRAN FTP under: /~Uploads/DamienD/ALG

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

I am not going do anything ALG related (and anything else not important enough) until 4.9.1 is out.

Totally understand Toni

Appreciate the fact that you'll look into this sometime in the future

[lesta_smsc]

Originally Posted by DamienD

Heya all,



This will be my one and only final post on EAB since my 7 month banning expired on the 30th of November...



Thank you to apeezyfosheezy for informing us all of the legal method in which to purchase the Dexter images of ALG games.



...unfortunately that's not enough though; you won't be able to do so. Trust me, I tried and failed.



So 3 months back, I purchased all ALG titles, but afterwards ended up swapping numerous e-mails back and forth with Matt.



Matt is not prepared to sell just the video files if you do not own a Dexter unit, which he of course sells; and ended up refunding my purchase.



I won't go into further details, but let me just say that I went through months of hardship and these probably cost me more than double what they should have in order to acquire.



Anyway, these original ALG video files are in .LDIMG format.



Next thing to do was to work out how to create usaable .AVIs from these .LDIMG files... luckily one very knowledgable / helpful gentleman, who wishes to remain anonymous, stepped forward



It's not the most straight forward process, and takes about 4 hours per game to process. High level details are as follows:

• Rip the 200,000 plus individual .PCM, .JPG and .YUV files from the .LDIMG file.
  
• Pad / rename the .PCM, .JPG and .YUV files into a logical sorting order.
  
• Combine the .PCM files into a .RAW audio file.
  
• Convert this .RAW audio file into a .WAV file.
  
• In VirtualDub2, load all .JPG files and the .WAV file, select various settings and encode the final .AVI.
  

When encoding the .AVI I used the Xvid codec with the highest quality setting. I also tried using ffdshow and Lagarith, but the quality wasn't as good, and the resulting file was 2 to 3 times larger.



These are the details of the .AVIs:

• 720 x 480 resolution.
  
• 59.940 fps.
  
• .MP3 320 kbps.
  

A note regarding "Fast Draw Showdown". The data in the .LDIMG file is the wrong orientation:







I've produced two .AVIs, you want to use the second one:

1. Fast Draw Showdown [American Laser Games]_original.rar
   
2. Fast Draw Showdown [American Laser Games]_rotated.rar
   

Anyway, all available ALG titles are currently uploading to the TURRAN FTP under my account for your playing enjoymemt



The reason I've done this is two fold:

1. This does not take away any business from Matt. These converted .AVI files are absolutely useless in anything besides WinUAE.
   
2. Matt did say to me, if I can somehow acquire the images from the one and only person he sold these to, who didn't actually own a Dexter unit, then all good... and I quote below from the e-mail I received:
   

====================================================================================================





Hi Damien,



It is true that I did a one-off favor for someone else in regards to these images. However, I am in the business of selling hardware that includes software, not selling raw .AVIs.



So if you can convince your contact to share with you what I shared with him, then I think that would be a reasonable compromise here. If not, I will be happy to either sell you a Dexter unit loaded with the images you purchased (in the .LDIMG file format that I linked earlier) or refund you for what you paid.





====================================================================================================





So guys, enjoy!!! This is my last contribution of many to the Amiga scene. Adios amigos!!!



Oops, oh yeah... my collection is still being actively worked on / improved constantly; and has been all throughout my ban. If you want to continue to get updates then please don't try to do so via EAB, as you will get no response. There are other methods to contact me

Hello Damien, surprised by your sudden ban and then exit after all you've done over the years. Surprisingly came across the AGL post and realised it was you posting!

Hope you're keeping well. You mentioned other means of contact since your time on EAB is probably going to be shortlived? Your PM is too full to accept any msgs lol.

Glad to read you're still working on your database of games

In other news, I've managed to get my RPi4 output natively to 240p! It's working great but just need to configure an Amiga set up on there.

Keep in touch.

[ransom1122]

Originally Posted by phasermaniac

Yes you are right, it's Dual Lightpen for p1.
Inverted is not in the dropdown, it's a checkbox (invert) on the right.
Adjust for your needs. I suppose you have to invert x axis in your case.
There is some program to rotate the screen from commandline, so you can make a batch to automate this.

I can rotate my screen via windows fine, that's not the issue...

I do not see an invert checkbox you are talking about?




Anyway DD gave me a config for Fast Draw, and it seems only one axis needed to be inverted, so it looks like this..



No need to rotate Windows, leaving it native landscape mode I launched the game which the convig above and it works when monitor is rotated Clockwise

[phasermaniac]

Many thanks to anyone that made this possible. We can finally play these games 2p and without broken hitzones. Amazing!

Anyway DD gave me a config for Fast Draw, and it seems only one axis needed to be inverted, so it looks like this..

Ok there you can see the checkbox I said, true it is not a checkbox visually, but you can see the third row: invert. There you can change the value yourself.

No need to rotate Windows, leaving it native landscape mode I launched the game which the convig above and it works when monitor is rotated Clockwise

Yes, you can do what you want, rotate screen or rotate window, but it has no sense rotating both.

[jwallace]

Originally Posted by DamienD

Guys,

I know a few people who have my collection had issues with "Platoon [Nova]"

jwallace gave me the ultra rare original source video, so now I've re-encoded...

Obviously the video / audio quality won't have improved, but now maybe it will work for those people having issues previously?

You'll find the file on the TURRAN FTP under: /~Uploads/DamienD/ALG

Totally understand Toni

Appreciate the fact that you'll look into this sometime in the future

Should just mention this is the one I 'synced' to WinUAE, if Toni changes any of the emulation it might need changing again, but I'm trying to keep an eye on this thread in case things do change.

It's been nice to see someone do far better with me over these image files anyway - looking at the Gallagher video Damien's done it seems to look a lot better than the one I messed around with. Will have to try these out.

[mrbabbage]

So, I guess people are seeing issues with the bottle breaking round at the beginning of Mad Dog McCree? Don't worry, it's not the video (not directly anyway) - I think what's happening is that the 'play' command for showing the bottle breaking should be stopped as the game seeks to the 'Nice shooting' clip. On real hardware, it has an idea of what frame is playing, same as here and the seeking blacks the screen out as soon as it starts.

In this implementation, that doesn't quite happen in time, so you see the next bottle scene on the video. I haven't checked the VBI data that comes with these LDIMG files to see if it uses the Stop Code feature that autopauses the player, if it does use that then I would be surprised, but that would not be possible to read out of the AVI directly so it might have to be ignored anyway.

[phasermaniac]

I resized the videos posted by DamienD to 360x240 as it's the resolution I use in a Crt, and the problem with Mad Dog 1 with the bottles seems to disappear.
It may be the codec, as other codecs I tested did not display in Winuae or had frame issues.
I used XMedia Recode 3.5.4.8 with default settings but:
Motion JPEG codec at quality 1.
Resolution 360x240 Nearest Neighbor.

I tested platoon. I didn't know it was 2p, nice! But when you shot something it takes some seconds to go to the next viedo, do you all have this problem? As I have read it can't be fixed right?

[jono1975]

Was great to see you back on the board but understand your decision... Loved the contribution to the community you will be missed.. stay safe...

Originally Posted by DamienD

Guys,

I know a few people who have my collection had issues with "Platoon [Nova]"

jwallace gave me the ultra rare original source video, so now I've re-encoded...

Obviously the video / audio quality won't have improved, but now maybe it will work for those people having issues previously?

You'll find the file on the TURRAN FTP under: /~Uploads/DamienD/ALG


Totally understand Toni

Appreciate the fact that you'll look into this sometime in the future

[mrbabbage]

Originally Posted by phasermaniac

I resized the videos posted by DamienD to 360x240 as it's the resolution I use in a Crt, and the problem with Mad Dog 1 with the bottles seems to disappear.
It may be the codec, as other codecs I tested did not display in Winuae or had frame issues.
I used XMedia Recode 3.5.4.8 with default settings but:
Motion JPEG codec at quality 1.
Resolution 360x240 Nearest Neighbor.

I tested platoon. I didn't know it was 2p, nice! But when you shot something it takes some seconds to go to the next viedo, do you all have this problem? As I have read it can't be fixed right?

For the resize, the videos are the native resolution of the disc, but there's certainly something strange going on. I've posted in support to see what the issue is. As for Platoon, not sure if it's just really slow code - the game didn't see wide release, so it may be that it isn't optimised.

[mrbabbage]

Bumping to share a edit/conversion of the Italian capture on the Youtube channel American Laser Games Fans.

I had to patch in some missing frames, and the quality isn't great but some might enjoy it:

https://mega.nz/file/H9YyhLTa#uOiqzT...o7Z51lds7FVvn4

[Westonboy88]

hello I haven't used this in ages and i forgot how to set the system up and I'm not sure where the roms are can someone help please?