Scumvm

[OL]

I don't know what you mean by AES mode. I tried it under Mint with SDL_VIDEODRIVER=gem at 640x480 and then without any varibles/parameters.

The Gobliiins intro ran at almost right speed except the fade in/out, that was like 1fps. The Secret of Monkey island was almost unrensponsible even in the title screens. Maybe I'm doing something wrong. Is there any Atari related doc and list of possible swithches?

AES mode is as you use it : SDL_VIDEODRIVER=gem

Olivier

[mikro]

I can confirm that Olivier's changes do make a difference. So here you are, my build with Olivier's SDL: http://ge.tt/7nBDSJD2?c

I'm really happy to see this, the change will benefit for OpenTTD for sure too. All you have to do is ask :)

So if you guys like it, please test it and then, same as with OpenTTD, I can make a proper release. I do it not because I expect hundreds of fans but as soon as I release the official build, I don't want to mess with it anymore, so this is the only chance to force me to do some additional changes to both projects.

And of course - Olivier thanks for your contribution!

[Eero Tamminen]

I can confirm that Olivier's changes do make a difference. So here you are, my build with Olivier's SDL: http://ge.tt/7nBDSJD2?c

Games are still fast, mouse is now fast, sound works and there's no freeze in Aranym. Great version!

PS. IMHO "Full Throttle" has best intro of all the point & click games ScummVm supports. What's your favorite?

[ctirad]

I tested some more games and it seems and I was very surprised, because many newer VGA games are actually pretty fast. Namely Elvira1,2 and Waxworx or Beneath a steel sky seem to work at full speed including their intro animations. Strange.

[mikro]

I've got some interesting news. Ctirad inspired me to do some more tests and I've made an interesting discovery -- ScummVM uses solely 16-bit graphics output for rendering! That means that if you play an EGA game an 640x480/8-bit, this is what happens for every rectangle:

- game engine writes pixels as 4-bit values into (at least) 8-bit buffer (i.e. leaving the upper half of pixels unused)
- scummvm graphics backend converts this 8-bit pixels into 16-bit values along with the overlay (scummvm menus etc) (hopefully directly to the screen surface)
- Atari SDL realizes that the source is 16-bit but the destination is 8-bit so it *dithers* the source to make it 8-bit (again!)
- Atari SDL realizes that the destination is planar, so it runs C2P from that rectangle

Quite a lot of operations, isn't it. While the first step (making 4-bit or even 2-bit modes "native") isn't that easy to change (all the game engines expect 1 byte per pixels as minimum), having an 8-bit output isn't that hard, one just has to either change the ScummVM SDL backend to our needs or to code a new backend, same as NovaCoder did for his Amiga port. This will eliminate the need for dithering in non-hicolor modes (like the mentioned 640x480 example) and decrease the amount of transferred data by 50%.

You could argue that if we set "no scaling" + SDL xbios output, we're using 320x240/16bit on our Falcons and therefore the overhead isn't that big and I agree but still it's slower -- twice as much data to copy to Atari screen what makes it visible during the palette fading for instance. 8-bit output brings the need of C2P but luckily on 68060 C2P is for free, so called copy speed. And on SuperVidel there's no C2P involved at all.

I'm not sure about my spare time for this kind of hacking but it looks like a good candidate to something to play with ;-)

[mikro]

OK CT60 (esp. with Supervidel!) guys, take a look at this: http://ge.tt/7bO6bVD2/v/0?c ... try to run it in XBIOS (i.e. not in GEM). Ignore the palette and graphics errors, focus just on speed. I tried Gobliiins -- nearly no change (a lot of fullscreen updates!) but Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (adventure; Amiga version) went quite smoothly.

Please report your observations :)

[ctirad]

Wow, it's much faster now! Even the Curse of Monkey Island seems to run at normal speed and it's a 640x480 game.

[mikro]

For those adventurous types... another CT60 build to try out: http://ge.tt/6x4SjmE2/v/0?c ... sound performance should be much better, courtersy of instane/tscc ;)

Please report your results ! :)

[jvas]

Finally I moved my ct60 to an old PC house and ready to test your releases (with or without SuperVidel). But since I have not too much time, it would be a great help if you (or somebody else) can say some words about the installation and/or links where the actual game contents can be loaded...

Thanks,
Jozsi

[jury]

Installation is rather straight forward, just copy it where you want it
As a reference for games to use in this VM I used:

http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/Datafiles

And the games itself can be found in the first link in google after searching "scuumvm games download" phraze

[jvas]

"Sam & Max" and "Full throttle" works fine! All with fullscreen and sound! Great! Thanks Mikro! Downloading "The Dig", my alltime favourite...

[Eero Tamminen]

Unlike OpenTTD, ScummVM doesn't work with normal TOS under Hatari emulation, it bus errors when starting most of the games from the list.

"The Dig" demo seems to start, but fails later to "graphics/scaler/thumbnail_intern.cpp:115: void scaleThumbnail(Graphics::Surface&, Graphics::Surface&): Assertion `targetWidth <= out.w' failed."

(And ScummVm doesn't work with TT as it requires modes not supported by TT.)

[mikro]

I must find time for both ScummVM and OpenTTD again, damn it.

Palette in ScummVM is seriously broken, that games must look terrible.

Thank you for your reports, keep testing if you can ;)

[jvas]

Yes, the palette is wrong, though I thought that can be "fixed" by altering the GFX options...
I haven't experienced the error in the "The Dig". Will give it a try.

I tried it on real HW with SuperVidel.

[jvas]

Just watched the full intro of "The Dig" without any errors...

[Eero Tamminen]

Just watched the full intro of "The Dig" without any errors...

Was this with plain TOS with nothing in AUTO folder (= what I tested), or with e.g. MiNT?

[Eero Tamminen]

Testing is done with Hatari Falcon emulation + 68882 FPU + 256 MB TT-RAM, using plain TOS (no AUTO programs).

So far following adventures seem to start (didn't have time to wait all slow startups to complete):
- Broken Sword II
- Drascula
- Elvira demo (non-interactive)
- Freddi Fish 3
- Freddi First 4
- Full Throttle (full)
- Gobliins demo (non-interactive)
- Goblins 3 demo
- Humongous Interactive Catalog
- Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
- Nippon Safes Inc. (loads fast, game slow)
- Passport to Adventure

Startup sequence + music are horribly slow in about all of them, in emulated Falcon even with DSP emulation disabled and fast forward enabled. Normal FT usage is slow, but playable in that environment, don't know about real Falcon.

These crash early at startup:
- Beneath a Steel Sky (floppy version)
- DOTT demo
- Fatty Bear's Birthday Surprise
- Flight of the Amazon Queen (floppy version)
To:
- M68000 Bus Error reading at address $1f8 PC=$1f8.

Other issues at startup:
- Dig demo: crashes later during startup (as described earlier)
- Goblins 2 demo: freeze with black screen
- I have no mouth and I must scream: illegal instruction later during startup
- Maniac Mansion: Unknown FPU instruction
- Monkey Island 2 demo: Unknown res tag 'LECF' encountered (expected 'ROOM') while trying to load res (Room,5) in room 5 at 0+0 in file mi2demo.001

Worst issue currently is that although ScummVm saves the changed options to .scummvmrc, it will empty it at start so that it doesn't remember any of the options I set. However, I just noticed that this can be worked around by giving differently named config file from command line, then also option saves work.

At start there's always this warning from ScummVm on Falcon (Hatari emulation):
WARNING: SDL mixer output sample rate: 49169 differs from desired: 44100!

To be continued...

[jvas]

Just watched the full intro of "The Dig" without any errors...

Was this with plain TOS with nothing in AUTO folder (= what I tested), or with e.g. MiNT?

Mint 1.19

[Eero Tamminen]

...Continued.

These too start under plain TOS:
- Freddy Fish 2 demo
- Pajama Sam 1 demo
- Pajama Sam 2 demo
- Pajama Sam 3 demo
- Pajama Sam's Lost & Found demo (horribly slow)
- Putt-Putt Enters the Race demo (horribly slow)
- Putt-Putt Goes to Moon demo
- Putt-Putt Joins the Parade demo
- Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo demo
- Putt-Putt Travels Through Time demo (horribly slow)
- Sam & Max Hit the Road demo & full
- Simon Sorcerer 1 demo
- Simon Sorcerer 2 demo
- Space quest 0: Replicate (fan game, starts fast)
- Spy Fox 2 demo
- The Curse of Monkey Island demo
WARNING: BundleMgr::open() Can't open bundle file: music.bun
- The Legend of Kyrandia demo
- The Legend of Kyrandia: Hand of Fate demo
- The Secret of Monkey Island EGA demo
- Touche: Musketeer demo
- Zak McKracken demo

Don't work:
- Freddy Fish 1 demo: doesn't find files
- Freddy Fish 5 demo: doesn't find files
- The Secret of Monkey Island (full): freezes at start

> These crash early at startup:
> - Beneath a Steel Sky (floppy version)
> - DOTT demo
> - Fatty Bear's Birthday Surprise
> - Flight of the Amazon Queen (floppy version)

These work now as does "The Dig". Only changes I did were to ScummVm global config settings [1], to disable sounds & music, and changing all game/demo files to read-only.

[1] as by using different config than the default ".scummvmrc" one, I got settings to be persistent (ScummVm doesn't anymore just empty the config file).

[Dal]

I just tried Curse of Monkey Island using the CT60/SV build posted by Mikro.

Sound is very good for the intro, but then nothing when I get into the game itself (is this expected or do I have a problem with my resource files?). I have just left everything set to default. I notice in console, I get a message saying that SDL mixer sample out put rate is set to 49169 (41000 preferred). Do I need to set something to make this message go away?

The graphics are OK - seem to be forced to 16 colour mode and frame rate isn't unbearable, but I think higher is possible on a 90Mhz CT60.

I have messed with the GFX / Audio settings, but nothing really seems to change for me. I have SDL_Videodriver set to xbios.

Looking really promising so far - thanks for all the effort!

[MadMax2023]

I tested the lastest version from Mikro.

But i can't understand, on my computer it runs very slow (slower than official releases), and sound is "dirty".
I tested it in two situation :
- Windowed mode with CT60 (95mhz) + CTPCI (radeon) under freemint
- Fullscreen mode with CT60 (95 mhz) + simple videl under freemint

Of course Monkey Island 1 is running good, but with more complex games like Day of the tentacle which i always play, it's unplayable.

Offical scummvm version like 1.20 or 1.30 were far faster and playable, and the best of all for sound quality was 0.90.

Is it normal, or do i have to add a parameter when launching scummvm?
I know it needs to be set-up to "no scaling" in option menu, since the first releases.

[mikro]

MaxMax2023: are you sure this isn't a CT60 setup issue? Like the infamous 5s cache delay? I guess others would have noticed, too.

[Dal]

Do you have sdl_videodriver set to xbios or gem?

[jury]

I just tried Curse of Monkey Island using the CT60/SV build posted by Mikro.
Sound is very good for the intro, but then nothing when I get into the game itself (is this expected or do I have a problem with my resource files?).

Haven't tried Course of Monkey Island, but the same case I had in Full Throttle. Sound working fine in the intro and total silence in game :/ ( will try to run FT on PC today to check if its resource files problem )

but with more complex games like Day of the tentacle which i always play, it's unplayable.

I had the same case on my monster setup ( F030 + CT63 + SV ) but I lowered sound to 11 ( or even 8 ) KHz and strangely sound finally was good and the performance was absolutely normal. The rest games I tried ( Full Throttle, Sam and Max Hit the Road, The Dig ) speedwise performed well from the start.

Now just the palette stops me from starting adventures

Edit:

"Sam & Max" and "Full throttle" works fine! All with fullscreen and sound! Great!

In Full Throttle do you have sound in the game also or just in the intro?

[MadMax2023]

i have sdl_videodriver set to gem to have it windowed in desktop with ctpci, and no setting (so i guess xbios) when i run it from another system partition without ctpci.

Hum good question about the 5s delay, normally it is well set, but as i did it a long time ago il will have a look to my ct60conf cpx.

I will tell you about next time i run scummvm, thanks for your answers.