flashjazzcat Posted June 9, 2021 Author Share Posted June 9, 2021 3 hours ago, Level42 said: Quick question: Is the Prince of Persia ATR known to not work on S2/U1MB ? Can't get it to load. Can ypu upload it here? I will test it myself. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+DrVenkman Posted June 9, 2021 Share Posted June 9, 2021 9 hours ago, flashjazzcat said: Windows and Linux CR/LFs should be handled properly, as well as Atari EOLs. If you make no headway, please upload the MAP file and the ATRs and I'll have a look. Hi Jon - Thanks for the pointer about the EOL; I edited my .map file and made sure to hit a carriage return at the end, then saved it back to my CF card and it worked perfectly. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flashjazzcat Posted June 9, 2021 Author Share Posted June 9, 2021 4 minutes ago, DrVenkman said: Hi Jon - Thanks for the pointer about the EOL; I edited my .map file and made sure to hit a carriage return at the end, then saved it back to my CF card and it worked perfectly. Thanks for confirming. I guess this explains why there was no error message; the unterminated line was simply discarded. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+DrVenkman Posted June 9, 2021 Share Posted June 9, 2021 6 minutes ago, flashjazzcat said: Thanks for confirming. I guess this explains why there was no error message; the unterminated line was simply discarded. Yeah, I definitely did not see any error messages before. With this updated .map file, I did see that it seemed to take maybe an extra second or so for the system to reboot into the game in D1:; that would make sense if the Loader is parsing the properly-ended line in the file and assigning the slot. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Level42 Posted June 9, 2021 Share Posted June 9, 2021 (edited) 1 hour ago, flashjazzcat said: Can ypu upload it here? I will test it myself. I downloaded the most recent version (2020/05/14 release) from here: Oh and I meant S3/U1MB of course Edited June 9, 2021 by Level42 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mazzspeed Posted June 9, 2021 Share Posted June 9, 2021 (edited) 4 hours ago, Level42 said: Quick question: Is the Prince of Persia ATR known to not work on S2/U1MB ? Can't get it to load. I can only get PoP to load by mounting the image via RespeQt and loading at default SIO speed. I assumed it had something to do with XBIOS.COM, as even at HSIO 1 it refuses to load and my system handles HSIO 1 just fine. I'm pretty sure it's brought up in the PoP thread? Edited June 9, 2021 by Mazzspeed Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flashjazzcat Posted June 9, 2021 Author Share Posted June 9, 2021 Oh... If it uses XBIOS, all bets may be off. 3 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+CharlieChaplin Posted June 9, 2021 Share Posted June 9, 2021 XXL and U1MB, they benchmark, errm, do NOT like each other. Regarding XBIOS, you can see the same behaviour (which you describe for POP), several years earlier with Stunt Car Racer. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flashjazzcat Posted June 9, 2021 Author Share Posted June 9, 2021 I don't think the U1MB hardware itself has any opinion on the matter. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mazzspeed Posted June 9, 2021 Share Posted June 9, 2021 5 minutes ago, CharlieChaplin said: XXL and U1MB, they benchmark, errm, do NOT like each other. While the game loads at purist snail's pace... 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+DrVenkman Posted June 9, 2021 Share Posted June 9, 2021 13 minutes ago, Mazzspeed said: While the game loads at purist snail's pace... That it does. Worse, it spends so many cycles looking pretty and animating sprites, it's damn near impossible to jump over that first pit of spikes. Controls are VERY unintuitive to me, but I've never played the Apple II original either. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Stephen Posted June 10, 2021 Share Posted June 10, 2021 1 hour ago, Mazzspeed said: While the game loads at purist snail's pace... If you turn the DMA off, it will put the CPU into the powerband though, and really get things cooking! 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rensoup Posted June 10, 2021 Share Posted June 10, 2021 I see this is the grumpy people's thread ? 3 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mazzspeed Posted June 10, 2021 Share Posted June 10, 2021 (edited) 1 hour ago, rensoup said: I see this is the grumpy people's thread ? Please Rensoup, I didn't mean to offend. Honestly, it gives me time to get my coffee ready! My comments were mostly aimed at another individual that's opposed to Candle's hardware. Edited June 10, 2021 by Mazzspeed 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flashjazzcat Posted June 10, 2021 Author Share Posted June 10, 2021 11 hours ago, Level42 said: I downloaded the most recent version (2020/05/14 release) from here: Oh and I meant S3/U1MB of course Tested here, and sure enough the custom SIO loader completely ignores PBI devices and ends up stuck in a loop polling the serial bus: 7 hours ago, rensoup said: I see this is the grumpy people's thread ? Well, the user wanted to run Prince or Persia and can't because it uses a loader which is totally incompatible with PBI-hosted disk images. Quite who benefits from this (and XXL's continuing efforts to ensure nothing he produces runs on U1MB machines) I do not know, but fortunately as someone who doesn't play games and is even less inclined to play any title which is deliberately designed not to work with ubiquitious modern storage solutions, at least I don't personally have any skin in the game, so to speak. That being said, it's highly ironic that while the author of XBIOS has referred to me as 'Snowflake' in the past (supposedly because I am 'over-sensitive' to criticisms and bug reports regarding my firmware), here I am explaining it's the chosen boot loader and not a firmware bug which prevents PoP from working with U1MB/SIDE3. If I was feeling grumpy, I would think back to the list of 'firmware bugs' as long as my arm which turned out to be bugs in third-party software (or hardware... like accelerators, *cough*) which wouldn't work. Any developer who doesn't want to hear about bug reports is a damn fool, but it seems that my earliest invitations to 'please report any issues' were misinterpreted by the people you would expect to know better - i.e. other developers - as 'please jump to the conclusion that the firmware is to blame the moment you encounter a problem'. Of course, there are a number of older games which use custom SIO loaders and these will never work on a PBI hosted solution. But didn't I hear of an XBIOS version which works with PBI devices? It's up to the developers, anyway. By all means use PBI-exclusionary solutions so that I have to repeatedly go through the formality of confirming things don't work for the usual reasons they don't work. I will try not to get too grumpy. 6 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mazzspeed Posted June 10, 2021 Share Posted June 10, 2021 I actually loaded POP today and got a bit of a shock, it took a while... I was reminded of downloading Frogger off cassette.? 1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
_The Doctor__ Posted June 10, 2021 Share Posted June 10, 2021 (edited) the Parallel Bus Interface should be taken into consideration by any software made since it's inception. Most software before the standard was introduced may be patched to work on such devices (save a handful that do every last I/O interaction at it's bare metal level). There are many PBI devices these days but there were a few available way back when it was made standard. There were parallel storage devices before that though... with custom cards and drivers... so a purist shouldn't have an issue with making consideration to that end... lets not even talk of I/O joy port support for Corvus in this matter though... that would be even more fun to support for sure because unlike PBI it would eat some memory... I was slightly taken aback though, as I remember testing POP on MIO, Black Box, AVG, and MyIDE at one point and they all worked... might have been image slots or other to do it with... but still, maybe it's time to re-visit POP Even if it's an issue that can't be dealt with for now, I'd hope P.O.P. would continue in it's development and the industrious wizards of Atari devs can sort it out later... Edited June 10, 2021 by _The Doctor__ 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flashjazzcat Posted June 10, 2021 Author Share Posted June 10, 2021 (edited) 1 hour ago, _The Doctor__ said: the Parallel Bus Interface should be taken into consideration by any software made since it's inception. It's really easy as well to guarantee PBI support in one's software: JUST ? USE ? SIOV ? Edited June 10, 2021 by flashjazzcat 3 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rensoup Posted June 10, 2021 Share Posted June 10, 2021 The next PoP version will support various cart formats... I'm not worried though, someone will complain? 3 1 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rensoup Posted June 10, 2021 Share Posted June 10, 2021 12 hours ago, flashjazzcat said: Tested here, and sure enough the custom SIO loader completely ignores PBI devices and ends up stuck in a loop polling the serial bus: Well since a bunch of folks have been complaining about XBIOS for years, how about providing an alternative ? Something that works with every device, and if that means hotswapping the OS, how about a proper example on how to do it (with everything that needs saving/restoring) ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mazzspeed Posted June 10, 2021 Share Posted June 10, 2021 (edited) 7 minutes ago, rensoup said: The next PoP version will support various cart formats... I'm not worried though, someone will complain? That would be cool. As far as gameplay is concerned, it seems fine to me. I compared both ports yesterday, the Apple port of PoP has been ported to other machines, and both the Apple port and the A8 (BBC port) behave identically. PoP isn't a runner as such, you're not supposed to run and jump over gaps in one fluid motion, you're supposed to creep forward, stop, then make a jump. Edited June 10, 2021 by Mazzspeed 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Stephen Posted June 10, 2021 Share Posted June 10, 2021 The last time I mentioned XBIOS being single SIO speed only, I was told by the author I was basically an asshole and didn't know what I was talking about. I will fully cop to being an asshole, but was I or was I not correct about it being locked to 1X SIO? There's so much conflicting information and gaslighting going on, it's hard to tell. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flashjazzcat Posted June 10, 2021 Author Share Posted June 10, 2021 37 minutes ago, rensoup said: Well since a bunch of folks have been complaining about XBIOS for years, how about providing an alternative ? Something that works with every device, and if that means hotswapping the OS, how about a proper example on how to do it (with everything that needs saving/restoring) ? The complaints barely match the volume and vigour of the author's relentless self-promotion; if the thing is billed as the one-fits-all wonder solution, it's hardly surprising if expectations are high. My absurdly fanciful solution would be to make games which need to save and load data work with DOS. Anything which doesn't need to save and load data can be an XEX or bootable file on a disk image, avoiding custom SIO loaders. Neither solution requires any work from me. Of course XBIOS was designed to have a small footprint and allow music during loading, etc. So I guess compromises have to be made. But simply using the PBI-compatible version of XBIOS would probably have solved the problem in this instance. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+CharlieChaplin Posted June 10, 2021 Share Posted June 10, 2021 As far as I did understand it, it is up to the programmer to make use of certain routines in XBIOS so that it will run faster than 1x SIO. But maybe these (additional?) routines cost precious RAM and thats why they do not use them and so as a result we have only 1x SIO ?!? If POP could live with a save-function that always has the same length (and there are one or more pre-generated saves already on the disk), then maybe a bootsector-DOS like XBoot DOS or uDOS could be used ? These ultra-small / ultra-short DOS versions behave similar to a gamedos, but they can save a highscore (or something similar), by simply overwriting an already existing one. The memlo of uDOS is $0937 (or was it $0938 ?), not sure if that's low enough for POP however. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+CharlieChaplin Posted June 10, 2021 Share Posted June 10, 2021 11 minutes ago, flashjazzcat said: My absurdly fanciful solution would be to make games which need to save and load data work with DOS. I have heard, that the A8 has more than one DOS... 1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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