Millennium 2.2 doesn't work correctly in WinUAE

Update: issue resolved: play with ECS, not OCS
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I believe that the classic strategy game Millennium 2.2 unfortunately is not playable beyond about 10% of the game with WinUAE.

The problem is that the game cannot display a crucial screen required to gather all-important resources:-
When a 'grazer' finds an an asteroid you should be able to click on the ship roster, click on the ship name and then see a 'cockpit' view in which you control the grazer - with option to take or leave the asteroid (i.e. to mine it or not). What happens in WinUAE is just that you see a bit of screen corruption, often from a screen you have recently used. The cockpit view does not appear at all.

This issue does not appear if you run the same game in WinFellow.

I tried loading a saved game (from B2R, further into the game) but the same issue is there as well as the issue of screen corruption and crashing (Guru Meditation) when you pick a colony out of the list.

Obviously I can choose to use WinFellow, but I mention this for others to realise that it's the emulator that causes the issue.

Details:
Doesn't work on
WinUAE 2.3.0 (on WinXP SP3) and WinUAE 2.3.0 x64 (on Win7 x64)
Kickstart 1.3 / OCS / 0.5 MB chip (also tried with 0.5MB chip + 0.5MB slow)

Works on
WinFellow alpha v0.4.4 build 3 (on WinXP SP3 and on Win7 64)
Kickstart 1.3 / OCS / 0.5 MB chip

ADFs
ADFs from The Game Archives (cr Quartex, Leaders, Defjam)

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[Toni Wilen]

Feels like wrong configuration (too fast CPU). Always use A500 quickstart most compatible configuration first when testing.

EDIT: attach statefile or saved game just before the problem if it still happens. (and try 2.3.1 beta or 2.2, there is at least one disk related issue in 2.3.0)

Here is the savestate and a description of the error as suggested.

Settings are all standard quickstart for A500 OCS (list of tried settings in file)

No disk access at time of fault (the whole game appears to load into RAM at the start anyhow)

I'll try an older version, but Googling turned up a guy with what sounds like the same issue some years back.

[Toni Wilen]

Problem found. Not a WinUAE problem. Guess why I usually always demand real A500 test, some ages old emulator does not really mean anything today..

It is buggy crack which only works with ECS Agnus.
If it is loaded on A500 with OCS Agnus, part of code gets overwritten with zeros. (0x70000 to 0x700b0)

Confirmed on my OCS and ECS A500s. ECS=works, OCS=borken.

All cracks except AGA fixed one seem to have same problem.. IPF works fine.

Technical details:

Game uses ETD_READ (Why? Stupid coder.) trackdisk.device command without initializing iotd_Seclabel ("random" data is 0xffff0000) which Agnus see as 0x70000 (OCS) or 0xf0000 (ECS, 0.5M chip = write goes nowhere, 1M chip overwrites unused part of chip ram).

KS1.x loader uses blitter to copy sector labels.

EDIT: Where is working OCS crack hiding? Game was released in 1989, before ECS..

[Galahad/FLT]

Millenium 2.2 is just Copylock protected as far as I can recall, so there would have been no need for any cracker to touch anything other than the Copylock routine.

...if i'm wrong, my memory is fading badly

Seems my memory is just fine

SPS 537 is the Copylock protected version
SPS 1511 is unprotected

At no point would a cracker need to do anything to the first one other than crack the Copylock.

I'm wondering however, if by virtue if the other versions tried, load a cracktro up first, allocating memory and thus giving Millenium 2.2 problems?

But as Toni said, no-one reported problems with the game back when it was created so.....

[Toni Wilen]

I compared versions: original version creates new trackdisk IOExtTD structure from scratch (=zero in sectorlabel field), cracks use original IOStdReq that bootblock gets in A1 (=crap in sectorlabel field)

[Galahad/FLT]

So, one of the few instances of the crackers doing it right, which then makes a games programmers code fall over.

Thanks very much for this solution.

Millennium 2.2 works fine with ECS
The Quartex / Leaders / Defjam crack does not work with the OCS

I didn't even think to try the ECS as I always played the original game on an OCS A500, 21 years ago.

It looks like 3 crews took the credit for the work of one - but I guess that wasn't unusual then.

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by Nicko

Thanks very much for this solution.

Millennium 2.2 works fine with ECS
The Quartex / Leaders / Defjam crack does not work with the OCS

I didn't even think to try the ECS as I always played the original game on an OCS A500, 21 years ago.

It looks like 3 crews took the credit for the work of one - but I guess that wasn't unusual then.

Er no, you obviously don't understand how the 'scene' worked back then.

All three groups would have been in competition to crack and release the game first.

They would all have separately released a crack of Millenium 2.2 without any kind of copying anyone else.