CT60 and games compatibility

[nativ]

ok perhaps you need an ai robot to re-engineer the software, perhaps it could be done with the Atari (tm) Robokit !

[wongck]

ok perhaps you need an ai robot to re-engineer the software, perhaps it could be done with the Atari (tm) Robokit !

You just need to clone a few more Klaz.... along with other prominent people who's supporting the Atari now

[Klapauzius]

Here's a little update for Oids.

It should now work perfectly on multitasking systems and will be fine when launched from a CTPCI/ATI screen or with software screen enhancers on the Falcon. I also fixed 2 minor bugs in my code that appeared when using certain functions in the game's galaxy editor. Please see the README.TXT file for more info.

[Klapauzius]

Pang has been updated for the CT60/3.

Another CT60 upgrade that took some time and effort, but as Pang is such a nice game I think it was worth it.

[Xerus]

Out of curiosity, the most difficult issue was the overscan, the rasters or other?

[Klapauzius]

It was the rasters. The colourful play screens have tricky palette switches, although you don't recognize them as such when they are working properly.

They were totally unstable on the CT60 at first, but were working perfectly on the F030, which I didn't understand.
After some tinkering it became apparent that the CPU cache filling on the 060 worked differently than on the 030, so the raster routine was rarely fully cached. That's due to the 060 clearing it's cache pipeline when it encounters a branch instruction, the 030 seems to pre-fill the cache just fine in such a case. So regardless of the much larger CPU caches on the 060 (8kB compared to 256 bytes in the 030), the raster routine wasn't cached and therefore executed too slow.

The solution was to freeze the CPU instruction cache after the raster routine had just been executed and so keep it from falling out of the cache again. Then, when the raster play screen is left, the caches had to be unfrozen again, to keep the game loading/working fast in other code segments.

You may wonder why the rasters obviously work fine on a plain ST, which doesn't have any caches at all and is much slower.
Well, that is due to having much, much less horizontal 'border' time on VGA monitors, which is what Falcons will often run on. There would have been no raster issues at all on RGB monitors/TV.

There was also some self-modifying code that worked with the F030 but not on the CT60.

The overscan on the other hand wasn't problematic at all. It works just the same as on the F030 here: use a 320x240 Videl screen and disable the border removal stuff in the code.


Phew ..... well, you asked for it.

[Xerus]

Good job as usual and nice explanation, thank you Klapauzius

[Klapauzius]

Some new bits today:

Erik has been updated for the CT60/3 now.

AtFaCT has provided new icon sets for two games: Spot and Kid Gloves
Thanks again for your great work!

Swiv had a bug in the highscore list that resulted in the scores not being sorted properly when a new high score was achieved. Fixed now. Please re-download and replace your SWIV.KLP file with the new one. And once more, thanks to AtFaCT for discovering this bug.

[rian_ata]

Just today I remembered playing Metal Masters on a friends PC back in the days and never played it myself on Atari. Luckily I found this game again through one of the topics on this board (3D mapping: http://atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=20585) after looking at the videos of JimPlayesGames on Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/user/JimPlaysGames?feature=watch).

Now I'm thinking how awesome would it be to be able to play that game on my CT63 + CTPCI? Klaz, can this little gem (in my opinion at least ) be put somewhere on the topspots of your long list of games to be patched?

[Klapauzius]

I'm taking a break right now, but I guess I'll be back sometime in autumn/winter.
Metal Masters is a nice game anyway, and it sure would deserve a patch.

[AtariZoll]

Just some thinking about patching for the CT60: what is the point, when you can simply deactivate it ? Why patching games working often too fast even on bare Falcon ?
Wouldn't it be wiser to patch some games which can really benefit from fast CPU ? Like F1 GP Microprose, Flight Simulator ... ?

[christos]

Just some thinking about patching for the CT60: what is the point, when you can simply deactivate it ? Why patching games working often too fast even on bare Falcon ?
Wouldn't it be wiser to patch some games which can really benefit from fast CPU ? Like F1 GP Microprose, Flight Simulator ... ?

Well, you are writting your new program and you get bored, you launch a game play for 15-20mins. You press ctrl+D and you go back to your environment. That's the point.

[AtariZoll]

That sounds reasonable. I guess that several people working day by day on new CT60 SW. Or I'm just stupid, and did not realise that CT60 is ideal for developing new WEB pages

[jvas]

That sounds reasonable. I guess that several people working day by day on new CT60 SW. Or I'm just stupid, and did not realise that CT60 is ideal for developing new WEB pages

You have to admit, that rebooting a computer whenever you want to play with a game is not very elegant and practical ...

[MacFalcon]

That´s true! I love to play the games directly out of MiNT on my CT60. That´s much better than booting in 030 mode...

[christos]

That sounds reasonable. I guess that several people working day by day on new CT60 SW. Or I'm just stupid, and did not realise that CT60 is ideal for developing new WEB pages

No but some of us do, and going by that logic why have a 060, why bother with a falcon instead of an ST and in the end why not use an emulator to play that old game you miss. As for new software, in the past 2-3 months we had 3-4 releases just in GEM software. It's not bad for a dead platform.

[wongck]

As for new software, in the past 2-3 months we had 3-4 releases just in GEM software. It's not bad for a dead platform.

4 from me and another one should be coming out in 1-2 weeks time, hopefully, plus at least 2 more on the drawing board. All small applications.
All need Mint & network as they will be internet applications.... but not games, unfortunately.

[christos]

Yeah, i just had a vague idea, didn't follow things as closely as i wanted..

[wongck]

don't worry.... no offense. Just want to advertise my wares

[calimero]

Hi,

I just try couple (RGB) demos in F030 compatibility mod with CT63 inside my Falcon and I notice that graphics in demos is somehow faster than it should be !!

I try:

Built in Obsolesce / Avena
Knockout / Mugwumps

music runs fine but whole graphics runs twice as fast and whole demo finishes before music even run out!
I use composite output but I did only cut (open) M0 pin on Video connector (pin no. 19) - this should be RGB mod, right?

btw
LostBlub only show intro picture with menu and than crash.
Dream Dimension / DHS work fine.



Does anybody have same issue?

[nativ]

Do you have a nemesis or Powerup fitted?

[calimero]

no.

[calimero]

ok, I find what is problem:

PIN 18 on video connector! I left it grounded (so I get "RGB" mod)!

PIN 18 Videomode 1 / M1
PIN 19 Videomode 2 / M0

M0 M1 Monitor
0 0 mono
0 1 VGA
1 0 RGB
1 1 TV via CINCH

from (http://old.pinouts.ru/Video/atari_falco ... nout.shtml)

but why Demos run faster in RGB mod??? It should be same as TV? Right?
(or above schema is wrong and PIN 18 is for VGA mod...?)