Giana Sisters STE - New Game!

[AtariZoll]

...
I'm curious, which capture / Tv chip is on the winfastpro.

Good old BT878 . I was forced to buy used card because analog capture cards became practically retro in last couple years. Nothing in shops here - can only order some external USB one.

[FedePede04]

...
I'm curious, which capture / Tv chip is on the winfastpro.

Good old BT878 . I was forced to buy used card because analog capture cards became practically retro in last couple years. Nothing in shops here - can only order some external USB one.

i have a couple of old ones
i don't know if you know Dscaler it was the best tv veiwing / program for the BT8x8 chip, you could also capture from it, it was so much better then the software the came with the card.
i have not use it for years, and it does look like that some have problem using it with win7, but try check it out..
or try finding a old tv-card using the Philipsh SAA7135 chip it was also much better then the BT8x8 chip..

http://deinterlace.sourceforge.net/dscaler4.htm

http://deinterlace.sourceforge.net/phpB ... 9a86b8a8b7

[AtariZoll]

I have installed DScaler and used it in some cases, although Pinnacle's TV Viewer is better. SW supplied with WinFast installs not in XP. Drivers installed well, and surprisingly even well in Win 8.1 . But Dscaler gives lot of errors in 8.1 . Maybe I should look for newer version ...
Anyway, I have better quality with Virtual Dub, and it works well in 8.1 too. Not so comfortable, but noise filtering is better, and that's crucial for me. And can use BT Tweaker . For capturing much-much better than DScaler.
Considering that I paid 5 Euros for WinFast, and got delivered it quickly, I'm satisfied

[tresas]

Amazing job @Zamuel_a!!!
I would like an overscan like "pacmania" , 32 colors intro screen and sid voice ( yes im greedy!!! ) but in any case what i saw was marvellous!!!!
Please give us more projects pleaseeeee!!!!

Well, overscan in this type of game would look strange. Why would you want to see more sky?

Ha! Ha! You are right! But im jealous of the amiga overscan modes!

[bod/STAX]

Just want to thank Zamuel_a for this idea to get stable rasters with the blitter. It's fixed a problem I've had
for a long time now.

I've spent a couple of hours implimenting it into R-Type this afternoo and now I have a stable colour split
for the status display thus I just point the video counter to the status graphics instead of blitting it to the
screen each frame. I also have a stable lower border routine and now have the status display back to how I
wanted it to look - just like the arcade version.

[TwiliteZoner]

Thank you. I have always loved this game and now its even better.

[Zamuel_a]

Just want to thank Zamuel_a for this idea to get stable rasters with the blitter. It's fixed a problem I've had
for a long time now.

I've spent a couple of hours implimenting it into R-Type this afternoo and now I have a stable colour split
for the status display thus I just point the video counter to the status graphics instead of blitting it to the
screen each frame. I also have a stable lower border routine and now have the status display back to how I
wanted it to look - just like the arcade version.

That's great that you got it to work. I read your old thread when I tried to find a solution for the blitter sync problem. Since the screen was always jumping one line I thought that there must be a way to sync it. You lose 3 lines in total, but it works.

[Eero Tamminen]

...
Does it work with Hatari in Falcon mode? That emulates both VGA & RGB screen and has screenshot functionality.

It works not - serious video error - only horizontal line instead play field. And I post only real HW screenshots, especially in case of Falcon, where emulation is still not at desired level.

Haven't still tried the game myself, but if you're interested, you could try with both WinUAE and oldUAE Hatari CPU cores. WinUAE CPU core is in general more compatible to Falcon software, but there are few rare cases where oldUAE CPU core still works better.

[evil]

Haven't still tried the game myself, but if you're interested, you could try with both WinUAE and oldUAE Hatari CPU cores. WinUAE CPU core is in general more compatible to Falcon software, but there are few rare cases where oldUAE CPU core still works better.

At least for v1.7.0, Hatari does not support split screen in Falcon mode. That's the reason why Bad Mood display no status bar in Hatari (without special code path that works around it in a less efficient way) and I guess it's the same reason this game doesn't work.

[darwinmac]

I just wanted to post to say "Great Job!". I also appreciate the workaround to eliminate the flicker in Hatari since I do not own any Atari hardware anymore.


Bob C

[Zamuel_a]

GREAT GREAT GREAT Giana Sisters!!!

Superb work! I just have tried it in Steem 3.2 and works just fine. I have to transfer this to disk and try it on a real machine. This will be perfect for the "demo room" at Retrospelsmässan 2014! If it´s ok to run it there?

Sure, maybe I should come to "Retrospelsmässan". I live not so far from it.

[jmetal88]

Oh, this is great! I'm so glad I finally decided to read through some of the posts here and saw this. I was actually introduced to Giana Sisters via the game Giana's Return for the Gamepark GP32, and since then I've always wanted to be able to play it on one of my vintage computers. I was disappointed in how poorly it ran on an NTSC Commodore 64 once I got my hands on one, though, so I'm really glad you came up with this version for the STE (especially since I just managed to get one late last year)!

[AtariZoll]

...

- Ths best title soundtrack for Giana Sisters imho in order is; Commodore 64, then Atari ST and finally Amiga. .... Would you consider a playback routine with SID voices and usage of one or two sample voices for drums and some sounds like on the C64 title soundtrack. This would in essence bring back the C64 soundtrack with much better audio out, and would be the most awesome title soundtrack for Giana Sisters ever!...

All experts say that quality conversion from SID (C64) to YM is not possible. Now, doing some mixture of using YM for some SID voices, and sample playback for others (drums) seems for me as not realistic idea. Almost impossible to sync. them, if not totally impossible. Not to mention time needed to do it.
So, I made straight conversion of audio from YouTube record - of C64 SID title soundtrack, and converted it to 50066 Hz, stereo STE DMA compatible format. What is max quality on STE. Used my special delta lossless packing, so 3 min 38 sec audio file is 13 MB only
Without packing is 22 MB, just to mention.
http://atari.8bitchip.info/GGSIE.ZIP
It works on STE, Mega STE, TT and Falcon, equipped with hard disk, Flash card storage. Satandisk is OK too - no big transfer rate needed.
Will see this during playback:

ggs16ct.jpg

[npomarede]

All experts say that quality conversion from SID (C64) to YM is not possible. Now, doing some mixture of using YM for some SID voices, and sample playback for others (drums) seems for me as not realistic idea. Almost impossible to sync. them, if not totally impossible. Not to mention time needed to do it.

Who are those "experts" ? I think Jochen Hippel proved it was possible in the early days, and later Tao comes to my mind for writing really great conversions of C64 tunes with digidrums and sid voices.
With STE being able to play sample through DMA, you save a lot of cpu power to do realtime emulation of the PSID file, as in PlaySid by Cream http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=48984 (this first appeared on Amiga in 1990 with "the 100 most remembered c64 game tunes" http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=28589 which also emulated 6502 + sid chip with a 68000, a very good emulation at its time).

Maybe Cream have a replay routine that could be included in the intro.

Nicolas

[AtariZoll]

Under quality conversion I mean something what sounds like original. And I already tried that PlaySid. Sound is much different, especially drums in case of Giana title music.
The question is that is it possible to have enough samples in some 40KB long player to play all variations of C64 SID generated voices faithful ? I say that far from that.
In any case, I posted this not to start some discussions here. If have space on your hard disk try it - or do code for SID file playback and post it here, so people can select what likes

[npomarede]

Under quality conversion I mean something what sounds like original. And I already tried that PlaySid. Sound is much different, especially drums in case of Giana title music.
The question is that is it possible to have enough samples in some 40KB long player to play all variations of C64 SID generated voices faithful ? I say that far from that.
In any case, I posted this not to start some discussions here. If have space on your hard disk try it - or do code for SID file playback and post it here, so people can select what likes

Why do you want samples ? The 2 links I gave do real time waveform generation, so no sample are needed ; depending on the CPU time you allocate to the player, it will be able to increase emulation's quality.
Decades ago, I wrote an YM2149 emulator for Amiga, and it didn't require any sample, it's just about generating waveforms, the more CPU you have, the better quality you get.

Regarding conversion, "Sanxion Loader" by Tao is I think a good example of simulating sid like effect, but I don't think he wrote a conversion for Great Giana sister.

[Zamuel_a]

If someone can make a player that doesn't take to much memory and would improve the music for the intro scroller, then I can easily add it. Almost all cpu time is free here so it can use some of it.

[evil]

Under quality conversion I mean something what sounds like original. And I already tried that PlaySid. Sound is much different, especially drums in case of Giana title music.
The question is that is it possible to have enough samples in some 40KB long player to play all variations of C64 SID generated voices faithful ? I say that far from that.
In any case, I posted this not to start some discussions here. If have space on your hard disk try it - or do code for SID file playback and post it here, so people can select what likes

The ST version of Giana have a quite unique title music. It's a "soundtracker"-like version by Hippel. It is in my opinion a lot better than the Amiga track and compared to the C64 it's ... different. A big thing to the crudeness of the song I believe is due to a pretty low quality replayer. If my memory serves me right, ST Ghost / Sector One once ripped out the ST version and converted it to Soundtracker format, but later lost the file . It would have been a nice homage to play that Soundtracker conversion with a high quality STe player (such as the Lance routine) - high quality player with the Hippel touch intact.

[AtariZoll]

Why do you want samples ? ....
Regarding conversion, "Sanxion Loader" by Tao is I think a good example of simulating sid like effect, but I don't think he wrote a conversion for Great Giana sister.

The answer is simple: because STE can play samples Many people have mass storage, and space is cheap. So, why not doing best possible C64-like playback ? Especially if already have SW for it, and conversion self can be done pretty fast.

[dma]

I'd say either hi-quality replay of the ST digital tune as Evil suggested, or replay of the C64 SID using Cream emu-replay as npomarede suggested would be very cool indeed.

[AtariZoll]

I'd say either hi-quality replay of the ST digital tune as Evil suggested, or replay of the C64 SID using Cream emu-replay as npomarede suggested would be very cool indeed.

In fact, all what is needed is available for both above. But no easy way - I mean since no sources, people accessible, should do same as with Giana game self Using SID player program and taking out from it SID player part. About Soundtracker we have some threads here, and possibly sources too. Just need to find some quality MOD.
WEB is full with diverse Giana soundtracks, mostly in MP3 or AV format. There is even version played by symphonic orchestra.
If you want to help Zamuel_a better would be to dig out some sources, audio files instead ideas.

[Mug UK]

I had a listen to the NDS rips and they would need a lot of rework due to most of them using 16+ channels (due to most NDS music being MIDI-based).

Sent by my Note III

[dma]

I had a listen to the NDS rips and they would need a lot of rework due to most of them using 16+ channels (due to most NDS music being MIDI-based).

Hey, why not (finally) use Paulo's tracker replay routine for replaying that NDS multichannels title tune?

[Mug UK]

Is there an Open MOD Tracker / Impulse Tracker converter? I can save files from it to .MOD but way out of touch for what can/can't be played on STe these days

Sent by my Note III

[Zamuel_a]

I have uploaded a new version with some minor graphical glitches fixed. (Giana won't disappear if she walks to far in the top part of the screen, some animated blocks could show up on random locations after a bonus pit was visited)