LinkoVitch

Sorry, I wasn't aware anyone was specifically waiting for tweaks to get their bits complete. Which of the things you have asked for do you need for Classic Kong? I am pretty busy at the moment, but if I get some time I can have a look and may be able to get you something sorted.

You probably shouldn't be getting them from the fab house, go for a regular or boring house.. fab house is probably having too much fun being fab and having awesome parties and stuff

Perhaps this may be of some help? GCC Alignment in structs

Maybe this is why gcc doesn't work and vbcc does? perhaps gcc is treating char as a unicode char? Instead of char perhaps use uint8_t instead? it's more explicit and *may* read single bytes rather than trying to optimise with a word? Without knowing what the compiler is doing to your code it's all guesswork, sorry.

I get the feeling this *might* be an alignment issue, where the code is moving a data structure further down in the code out of long alignment, or even word alignment. I am not sure how you could add 1 or 2 bytes via C however. I have had things mysteriously stop working when I added a nop once, and then add another nop and it worked again in sections of code that were not being called even. It was an alignment issue.

Rather than dropping a char directly into a decimal, perhaps convert it 1st? skunk_print("char %d\n", ord(ch)); Might be down to how the different compilers are treating the translation between char and numerical value? When you say it works with it commented out, do you mean the string appears as you intend or is the graphical string being displayed incorrect?

So essentially move the timing to an external function. Should be do-able. I'll make a note Dig Dug is ossum sauce, and I know what you mean (and now it's stuck in my head! )

Changing colours on a scanline is simple, that gives you a different 16 colours in one row of 320 pixels. If you want more than 16 within a single scanline then you need to swap colours partway along a scanline rendering.. That's another timer, and occurring at a higher frequency, and with more precision needed. Each palette swap is CPU resource used up, and if the CPU is meant to be busy doing everything else, it's going to impact you elsewhere. When porting a game to the ST, I'd imagine a lot of the teams working on it were on tight deadlines, they would have been working toward a specific launch date and maintaining a specific amount of playability. If they are not being paid to make the game achieve specific goals why would they bother? So no one is going to strive to push the best out of a target platform for free (back in the day of getting paid to do this ) I am sure there are the odd edge cases where someone has, but on the most part I'd imagine not. I often heard that the STe was too little too late. If the STe had been released instead of the ST, or a year or two after the initial ST launch, maybe it would have mattered.

I was originally aiming to try and make it as "easy to use" as possible so people could just drop it the .obj file and boom, sorted. No one has asked for these things before Certainly a good idea, I'll add it to the list, I need to stop worrying about the size of the releases too no one cares about a few KB here and there, so I can easily throw in a few extra build options in the releases. That's what I am planning to do, plus the code isn't anything magical, so I will also do as Bastian has suggested and look to release the source of modinit too. Cheers guys

Actually, just had a quick scan through the code of modinit, and I am obviously too tired and have too much beer in me (and it's been a while since I last looked), but modinit doesn't copy anything to DSP RAM.. DOH.. Alas it is all pretty much relocatable EXCEPT it has the variable U235SE_moduleaddr at the end, and this is used a couple of times to find where the mod is in memory. So that's going to end up with some absolute address in main RAM :/ Shouldn't be too difficult for that to be tweaked to make it relocatable however.

For the most part I'd think it should be OK, except for the portion of modinit that copies the DSP code into the DSP, all the variables for the SE are within the DSP so their addresses are fixed, but obviously once you link it, the address of the actual DSP code blob is going to be absolute and written into modinit's code too. I can probably just release the dsb.obj without the 68K helper code in and include the source for that so you could craft your own init routes ? Unless you say link it for the top end of RAM/ROM so you know it's not going to move and just call it from there?

I can help out there if you like, have built Mac versions of JCP for Intel and PowerPC Mac's recently, happy to attack a makefile to get a native Mac build together. Give me an excuse beyond remote working to fire the thing up too

You could imagine it as a hotel/shop in Curse of Monkey Island

This is a very good point.. another example... You go into an art studio that has been advertised everywhere as being the home of one of the best artists of all time, the artist themselves often posts about how skilled they are, how they are making breakthroughs all the time that have previously been thought impossible. They are better than the old greats (by their own admissions).. You enter the studio and there is the artist, surrounded by his work, most of the canvases are blank, poorly fitted to frames, in some cases on the easel backwards or held on with drawing pins, a few canvases have something on which looks like it has been drawn on by a pre-school child who has eaten more of the crayon's used than actually drawn with them. You can easily see that even someone with almost 0 artistic talent outshines this fraud. The artists looks at you with an air of superiority and aloofness and whilst drawing from some old pipe to try and make himself look intelligent attempts to use pseudo psychology to tell you how he is much better than you are, and only an idiot wouldn't commission him to paint the family portrait you desire. Unfortunately he is currently locking in a painting spree as can be seen from all the various (blank) canvases around him, he might consider allowing you to employ him for a commission once he has finished around... he gives you a date that has already passed.. Clearly the guy is deluded and in love with himself. Any sane person would at this point turn around and leave, rather than continue in the face of all the evidence before you actually attempting to get anything from the guy. Of course, after you leave, you find random badly written letters stuffed through your letter box attempting to insult you for not admiring his apparent mastery, even claiming that his work is better than the picture quality of the brand new UHD TV you just bought. All the letters are written in brown crayon... you hope it's crayon.

You have achieved peak rotary! nothing else you ever do will match this moment! :D

That's not true! For jaguar it needs to be just over half baked... about 64% baked to be ready for release

Not sure if it would work but define your own types with that included? Or a way that should certainly work, create your own macro's for types you wish to be 4 byte aligned? I know a lot of people view macro's as dirty, but that should work if you can stop yourself from using the actual real types by mistake. There is probably a cleaner way, just my 2p

You should probably take that as a positive, it means you haven't lost years of your life playing World of Warcraft Full thing: (Illidan's the guy at the end )

So Illidan was right then! (showing my geek/nerd there)

Totally, you would be kicking yourself if you miss the limited run of carts.

Nudge nude, check your PM

If it's still sealed then it's worth looking at the back of the box. Official sealed games had a fold down plastic loop on the back. If someone has sealed a game themselves I doubt they would have the ability to affix a plastic fold out tab on the cellophane.

So this isn't a Jaguar project? I'm confused by "TOS executable". I have had a quick google for brownout but obviously most of what I found was related to power and the one link I found for Atari related stuff was dead. What does it (or is supposed to) do? Sounds like the issue lies within Brownout? Maybe if it's targetted for TOS machines it's not understanding the alignment and attempting to reclaim lost bytes by moving stuff around? making it long aligned?

Weird, I have done similar in my stuff and it has to my knowledge worked fine. Are you using RMAC for the pure ASM side of things?

It's sample code written for clarity not performance and I'm still half asleep