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Diagnosing issues between Emulators and Hardware


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Hey

 

Huge thank you to @ZeroPage Homebrew for demoing my game Legacy of the Beast last night, especially with so many other games out there, it means a great deal to me.

 

Something that came up though is that there are some issues with it running on actual hardware. I tested the game in 3 different emulators. Of course emulators are no substitute for hardware but I was quite surprised to see this.

 

Is there anything specific about why there would be problems, and any way to prevent or diagnose these issues ?

I read somewhere that there was a compatibility issue with Harmony cartridges but only for games that used some bank-switching techniques ? My game is standard 4K though.

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I didn't catch the show last night, so I missed what issues appeared on hardware. The most common is screen jumps or rolls caused by an inconsistent number of scanlines. 

 

Also, when testing on Stella, do you have developer settings enabled? That will show a number of issues that aren't obvious when player settings are used.  

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most likely you left out a # on an immediate mode instruction, it's a very common bug that causes problems like you're seeing. Check the following topics for examples of this, as well as how to make those problems show up in Stella.
 
from reply 10 onward http://atariage.com/forums/topic/258401-trex-aka-first-attempt-at-6507
 
from 34 onward http://atariage.com/forums/topic/269701-nyan-cat-game-work-in-progress/

 

 

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2 hours ago, pvmpkin said:

I think I found it. It was a single missing # needed before doing the SetHPos routine — so silly !

 

Awesome! I encountered this with Medieval Mayhem about a year after it was released!

 

I forgot that @batari wrote a tool that analyzes the list generated by dasm to locate code that appears to be missing a #. However, the link to the source is broken. Hopefully he still has it utility and can fix the blog entry. Might make sense to add it to Club DASM as well.

 

 

 

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Just now, splendidnut said:

Just tried it real quick on my 4-switcher and the beast animation is running good now.

amazing—thank you for checking that. Oddly I didn't find anything in the code that was causing it to not work so glad that works !

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Spoiler

It is, there should be lantern around there somewhere !

 

It would mean a lot if you could go everywhere possible and see if any sprites fail to show properly, please.

 

If you encounter spikes that don't move, that's the end of the area.

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