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ggn

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Posts posted by ggn

  1. Posted

    4 hours ago, Rybags said:

    Generally Amiga bootable games didn't use a filing system, as per Atari 8-bit and many ST games.

     

    That cover disk I suspect would be files only... and generally ST cover disks only used an AUTO folder.

     

    But even AUTO folder implies the use of FAT, so you'd need a few more sectors in the first track to contain the necessary info. Not that it's impossible, just probably a bigger hassle than just writing some code on the bootsector that loads the data using more primitive calls.

     

    4 hours ago, Rybags said:

     

    The thing I'm interested in though is whether you could have coexistent boot sectors for both ST and Amiga.  I suspect the answer is yes.  And I suspect that such a track could probably be created on the Amiga (and ST uses 512 byte boot sector - though that said, DBasic for the ST used a 1K sector custom disk format, with 512 byte boot sector - though I've never seen a disk image of it suitable for emulation)

    There exists a dump of DBasic and it is in my TODO list to make a custom format routine, write the sectors from that dump and then image the disk using Pasti or similar (first of course I'll verify that the thing works!)

     

    1 hour ago, ivop said:

    Interesting. As they both run a 68k, I suppose it should be possible to detect if one is running on an ST or Amiga. Do Amiga disks use the same FAT12 boot sector? Otherwise, it could become tricky.

    I assure you that the boot sectors on ST and Amiga are really different. Amiga's boot block (as I've read it being called) is 1k, so it uses 2 512b sectors. The ST's is sort-of-kind-of FAT compatible, so ST disks can be read on DOS machines.

     

    From the description of the Amiga disk format I can speculate that the special disk has an area that has the markers for a few Amiga sectors, and the rest formatted in a way that the ST can find the FAT sector markers. The above disk picture says that it's made by Rob Nothern, who had access to a TRACE machine, so it wouldn't be too difficult for him to program a custom format that has the scheme I described here.

  2. Posted

    4 hours ago, thorfdbg said:

    The Amiga does have a boot sector in track #0 for booting, thus bootable disks that boot off the  boot sector without a file system cannot be shared with the Atari ST. The latter uses FAT as file system and hence uses track 0 for the FAT and the MBR.

    I'm not exactly sure what you mean there, but according to the docs (and from my sparse knowledge of the Amiga) there is a bootblock area on the Amiga that's 1024 bytes long. Same goes for the ST, the first sector contains disk info but can also contain executable boot code. File systems are irrelevant during boot, this is read before the file system touches the disk (at least on ST, but I suspect the Amiga too).

     

    Unless you meant something else here?

     

    4 hours ago, thorfdbg said:

    However, the Amiga file system (OFS/FFS) has its directory in the middle of the disk at sector 880, and this does not interfere with FAT. Thus, in principle, one could create "dual-play" ST/Amiga disks as well, provided the Amiga version uses a custom "startup-sequence" type of boot procedure.

    You assume that one will be using the file system at all to read and write data. The much easier thing would be to format one side of the disk (barring the first track of side 0) as ST and the other as Amiga. Then both bootsectors can contain code that will just read raw sectors off the disk and thus boot the game (or anything else) in question.

     

    Alternatively, if you want to use a file system you could do similar tricks to what trixter described in the linked article, i.e. mark some sectors as "bad" in one file system so they won't be used, and inverse that for the other file system. Since (as you said) the file system areas for both machines reside on different parts of the disk, it's not that impossible.

     

    And a small bit of trivia: When we did our version of Lethal Xcess for the Atari ST/E we noted that a large area of both disks wasn't being read at all, so we simply discarded these areas, so we were able to fit the game into a single disk instead of two (which is pretty much what every other group did).

  5. Posted

    I had a look at how the old C libraries did this (in my case I looked at Sozobon C). They seem to be outputting each string character using Bconout():

      

    move.w   ch,-(sp)
move.w   #2,-(sp)
move.w   #$03,-(sp)
trap     #13
addq.l   #6,sp

     

    "2" is the output device, the console.

     

    Try outputting a single character using this and see if redirection works. If it does, you can use this to print each character. For more info on Bconout, have a look at reference books like the Atari Compendium.

     

    Hope this helps.

    • Like 1

  7. Posted

    This reminds me of the "fun" I had while adding support to the JagCD encryption program. My first try was to call skunkFILEWRITE with the maximum allowed size, which would freeze the machine. Once we ruled everything else out I just went ahead and reduced the write size to 32 bytes just to see what happens. The transfer became slower but we didn't mind. I mean, how many JagCDs are you going to encrypt in a single session? More than one? :)

     

    So yeah, probably try sending less messages or apply a rate limiter.

  8. Posted

    4 hours ago, R L said:

    Beats me what is the use case of the PF family of algorithms, honestly. It's supposed to be a better Shrinkler, but it sometimes isn't. Marginal benefits, big buffers, sucky Windows-only packer, etc...

    PackFire was released many years before shrinkler, so there's that.

  9. Posted · Edited by ggn

    On 3/31/2021 at 3:21 AM, rensoup said:

    One thing I'm wondering is why every tracker author insist on creating their own GUI for their editor ? I'm guessing refresh speed is an issue ?

     

    What's wrong with Winforms for a tracker editor ?

    Do you really want to have a .NET dependency? That potentially rules out anything pre-Vista (or maybe even Win7, who knows), plus all other older Mac and Linux boxes. Generally, perhaps people are biased because of the Win32 API used for GUIs on Windows has a really bad reputation.

     

    For my projects I'm usually in favour of using something like Dear Imgui (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui), since it looks and behaves exactly the same across all platforms that support it, is very lightweight (only a couple of files to include in your project) and doesn't consume a lot of resources.

    • Like 3

  10. Posted

    22 minutes ago, +Adam+ said:

    @ggn You've written about three titles, including "Two Days to the Race", but I haven't seen any mention about Atari 8-bit version of this game. Are you sure that such version exists?

    Hmm, you're quite right, I didn't check that one either (that first post is turning into a disaster!). However I will get in touch with Davide, see if he can create Atari versions of that adventure too.

    • Like 1
    • Thanks 1

  11. Posted

    1 hour ago, Philsan said:

    I mentioned The Queen's Footsteps and Silk Dust here

    https://atariage.com/forums/topic/315811-atari-8-bit5200-homebrew-completedwip-in-2021/?do=findComment&comment=4746970

    but those games deserve a topic.

     

    I made a colorful title screen for Silk Dust (titlescreens above are from other platforms) and author is willing to add it and to make a menu to select the desidered part of the adventure.

    Sorry about that, seems like I didn't read that post fully!

    • Thanks 1

  12. Posted

    Hi,

     

    For the past few years author Davide Bucci has been creating multi platform text adventures. I came across them myself only recently, and I thought I'd share them on this forum since I don't recall anyone else linking them here. (Also, I had a hand at helping with the Atari ST ports but that's another story)

     

    Two days to the race: http://davbucci.chez-alice.fr/index.php?argument=varie/two_days/two_days.inc

    The Queen's footsteps: http://davbucci.chez-alice.fr/index.php?argument=varie/queen/queen.inc

    Silk Dust: http://davbucci.chez-alice.fr/index.php?argument=varie/silk/silk.inc

     

    image.thumb.png.b196b5b81bed605ab5366b5aa0a26ca7.png

     

    image.png.2cc6823472749b6751fc4d23d80745fb.png

     

    image.png.94f02e93875ebb445356b1cad2eab02d.png

     

    All games are free to download and play. The Queen's footsteps also exists as a boxed physical item, but sadly no a8 version of it in the box. Very nice box art though:

     

    image.png.c6b33e21b556590912e1ac99cc40029f.png

     

    The games are split into multiple parts in order to fit inside all the machines' memory.

     

    What I've noticed is that the A8 versions of the games have no splash screens, but if someone can assist Davide with an easy way to include the images in his binaries, he'll be more than happy to update the versions.

     

    So anyway, I've had fun playing the games, maybe others will too :).

    • Like 5
    • Thanks 1

  15. Posted

    22 hours ago, Stephen said:

    I find it ironic that when we had our real Atari hardware, we spent as much time as possible making the video sharp and crisp.  Now that we have these awesome emulators with razor sharp video that can run on 4k displays, we spend all this time downgrading the displays to make it look like old fuzzy blurry CRT.

     

    Nothing wrong with that, it's just funny how things have come full circle.  I will say that as much as I love my 20" Sony PVM with VBXE (so RGB), when I switch back to the emulator, it's definitely easier on the eyes.  No flicker, no pincushion or bow, no convergence issues.

     

    I wonder if Avery can add an option to Altirra to give it a constant 15.75kHz squeal for the full on retro experience?

    Personally my preferences are split into 2 very distinct areas: a) doing anything with text (reading, writing, programming etc), b) playing games/watching demos/anything that has to do with animating stuff on screen.

     

    For (a) I'll use newer displays if I get the chance to. My eyes are very thankful of this, this can make long sessions much more bearable. Text rendered crisply is a definite win.

     

    Predictably for (b) it's the other way round, CRTs if the option is there. I have a 100/120Hz TFT monitor that almost shows smooth movement, but there's still visible ghosting. A typical example of this is a scroller with white text on black background, or high contrast in general. It's a disaster, the graphics start looking super muddy. There's also the detail that the graphics were designed with CRT monitors in mind, so any imprecisions or less sharp image provided by the CRT was a part of the graphic design. So it's certainly going to look "odd" in TFT monitors.

     

    Some people have said that very specific TFT monitor brands can be tinkered (via settings) to eliminate the ghosting problem almost 100%. There's also those new fancy 240Hz monitors that also promise little to no ghosting. I'll see when I get my hands either of the two options. But for now my setup includes both CRTs and TFTs.

     

     

  16. Posted · Edited by ggn

    The new graphics are certainly an improvement IMO, the graphics that the released version has make it oftentimes very difficult to distinguish foreground tiles (i.e. active) from background ones. Well done to @TIX and also to @xxl for persisting in improving this nice game :).

  17. Posted · Edited by ggn

    Right, I finally got issue #142, #143, Sondermagazin #52 and my membership card :).

     

    Everything arrived in pristine order, all disks worked on the old XF551, great print quality, all good :). The fact that I don't speak a word of German doesn't alter my opinion a bit: this is a very high quality mag and I congratulate all the people that contribute to making it.

     

    Now I have to make good on my promise and write something for the mag - it will get done @skr, no worries!

  18. Posted

    16 hours ago, Mazzspeed said:

    Now I have no bloody idea how to use VIM (does anyone?)

    Sure, here's a super condensed crash course:

     

    • vi/vim has 2 modes, one is where you edit text (insert mode) and one where you issue commands by pressing keys (command mode).
    • By default you are in command mode. To switch to insert mode press i. You can now start typing as usual. No commands can be entered while in insert mode (well, they can, but it's outside scope for now)
    • Switch back to command mode by pressing ESC
    • There's a whole bunch of commands built into vi/vim, depending on the version you're running. Here's a few of the most useful/common ones apart from i:
    • A to go to the end of the line and switch to insert mode, i.e. append. (Note that this is capital A, you need to press shift+a)
    • /TEXT to search for the string TEXT (change that to the string you want to search for). Execute the command by pressing return
    • ^ will move to the start of the current line
    • $ will move to the end of the current line
    • Type a number and press G to go to that line
    • GG will move to the end of the text
    • yy will copy the current line to the "copy" buffer
    • dd will delete the current line and copy it to the "copy" buffer
    • p will paste the copy buffer before the cursor
    • P will paste the copy buffer after the cursor
    • m[a-z] will mark the current cursor position into buffers a to z
    • '[a-z] will move the cursor to the recorded position a-z
    • :efilename.ext will load filename.ext
    • :wfilename.ext will save filename.ext

    That's enough to get anyone started. There's a whole culture of tricks and features to discover - even the page vi65 is hosted has quite a few of them. I'll leave it for people to discover if they feel comfortable with vi/vim.

    • Like 4

  20. Posted

    If we're going to mention Infocom's adventures, might as well add Level 9's as well.

     

    There's an interpreter for the games here and a disassembler for the game which includes the depacker. Nothing too complex, they seem to be stuffing 8 bytes into 5 by simply keeping 5 bits off each character (so it should be 24 letters and the rest should be spaces and punctuation).

  22. Posted

    Ah c'mon now. Let's not lead this thread into a 10 page bikeshedding about things like syntax. I'm sure what we're all most interested in is to see what features this language have in order to solve real problems with it. If people start arguing about largely insignificant things like keyword naming (and hey, the language is still in development, things can change) then many will lose interest, possibly including the language's author.

     

    All I'm saying is: maybe we should wait a bit until we can see more big/serious/complex examples of what this language has to offer before anything else :).

    • Like 2
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