Win yourself 2 free copies of Mysterious Song :) Details inside...

[OldMan]

I don't have any intentions of rewriting pceas....
My intention is to write a post-compiler/pre-assembler...

I'll have to think about that...I hate doing file i/o and string handling in C. But it does seem that we could use the .s file huc produces. Since we can figure out how big the macros it uses are (in bytes), we could come pretty close to the actual size in bytes for reach .proc/.endproc setup. Then we could re-order as needed.....

I think I'll play around with the idea after I finish figuring out wtf's wrong with the psg player code....


Question for you: What's after Mysterious Song? Right now I'm looking at starting Jungle-Hunt yet again, but I usually end up working on two or three things at a time. I found a bunch of old floppies the other day, and was thinking about maybe porting Apshai....

[esteban]

Very nice!

[OldRover]

I'll have to think about that...I hate doing file i/o and string handling in C. But it does seem that we could use the .s file huc produces. Since we can figure out how big the macros it uses are (in bytes), we could come pretty close to the actual size in bytes for reach .proc/.endproc setup. Then we could re-order as needed.....

Oh, I wasn't planning on writing the tool in C. I hate doing string handling in C as well, so I'm going to write it in fbc instead... excellent string handling functions there, so moving string data around is a snap.

Question for you: What's after Mysterious Song? Right now I'm looking at starting Jungle-Hunt yet again, but I usually end up working on two or three things at a time. I found a bunch of old floppies the other day, and was thinking about maybe porting Apshai....

After MSR, I have Project MONOLITH for Eponasoft and Jungle Bros for Frozen Utopia. And both will be excellent candidates for the proc optimizer.

[Keranu]

Saturday is the expected release of the final beta; my daughter's been sick so I've had to stop working to take care of her but now that she's doing better, I'm back to work on this. Friday will be the final audio cuts, which will lead to the inclusion of the last cutscenes. The next two days will be dedicated to completing the special extended game mode... going very smoothly so far.

Woooooo!

HOOOoooooo!

MOOOoooooo!

Shooooooooe!

GOOOoooooooooooooooo!

HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOS!

[Arkhan Asylum]

Question for you: What's after Mysterious Song? Right now I'm looking at starting Jungle-Hunt yet again, but I usually end up working on two or three things at a time. I found a bunch of old floppies the other day, and was thinking about maybe porting Apshai....

Which Apshai?!  Way to keep me out of the loop on that one.

Gateway, Temple 1, 2 or 3?

the whole trilogy?!

Either way, yeah. I'm game.   I have Gateway memorized...

BUT FIRST WE NEED TO FINISH RETROCADE.

[ParanoiaDragon]

These are your orders oldman, finish Retrocade!?!?!?!!!!!

[VestCunt]

Is that an order or a question?

[ParanoiaDragon]

Is that an order or a question?

My answer is.......MAYBE!

[anRPGlegend]

Where can I order a copy? Is there copies left ? Will it work in Magic Engine?

[BlueBMW]

Where can I order a copy? Is there copies left ? Will it work in Magic Engine?

It hasn't been released yet.  Stay tuned

[ParanoiaDragon]

Where can I order a copy? Is there copies left ? Will it work in Magic Engine?

Pre-orders are down till it's done as I understand it, though, maybe sooner, maybe when final beta testing starts?

[OldRover]

Where can I order a copy?

frozenutopia.com once orders are open again, but we won't be opening preorders until we're at the release candidate, which will likely be the end of March.

Is there copies left?

Yes, there are plenty of copies left, and even a few bonus items left (but not many).

Will it work in Magic Engine?

Yes. It was recently reworked to be 100% compatible with Magic Engine without sacrificing function on proper emulators or the real thing.

[VestCunt]

Here's a request when you get to the replication:  could you please have it manufactured with a BLACK cd tray in honor of the Grafx/Duo instead of going PCE-style on us like Insanity and the Mindrec games?  Thnx. 
yr pal,
-VestCunt

P.S. Don't go bringing up Valis II and Final Zone; they're abominations.

[lord_cack]

Here's a request when you get to the replication:  could you please have it manufactured with a BLACK cd tray in honor of the Grafx/Duo instead of going PCE-style on us like Insanity and the Mindrec games?  Thnx. 
yr pal,
-vestcunt

P.S. Don't go bringing up Valis II and Final Zone; they're abominations.

Don't forget Ys Book I & II and Gate of Thunder for the Turbo Duo pack in..... so there are some precedence

[TheClash603]

I hope that the limited edition item has something to do with Mysterious Dong.

[VestCunt]

Don't forget Ys Book I & II and Gate of Thunder for the Turbo Duo pack in..... so there are some precedence

I wrote the book on this unsightly business!
https://www.pcengine-fx.com/forums/index.php?topic=3237.msg44059#msg44059

[ParanoiaDragon]

Just for you, we'll make the cd tray's plaid!    Kidding, ofcoarse.

[Nazi NecroPhile]

Go with a clear tray and a double sided liner.  Woo-hoo, more artwork!

[anRPGlegend]

Thanks for the info guys. I will wait till its out to buy it, I want it asap after buying it

[OldRover]

A quick lil update here... the extended game is wrapping up nicely, though it was delayed a few days because of a very odd glitch that couldn't be solved and was chalked up to a compiler fault. If not for that, it'd be done already. Anyways, just a few more days until final beta.

[mrhaboobi]

looking forwaard to this, glad my duo didnt die during our 2nd earthquake ;).. at least thats something positive, cant shit in my own bathroom but looking foward to getting this ..

[Arkhan Asylum]

Here's a request when you get to the replication:  could you please have it manufactured with a BLACK cd tray in honor of the Grafx/Duo instead of going PCE-style on us like Insanity and the Mindrec games?  Thnx. 
yr pal,
-VestCunt

RACIST.



Just for that, Ultima ][ will be in a fucking CLEAR tray.

what now.  lol

[Mishran]

Here's a request when you get to the replication:  could you please have it manufactured with a BLACK cd tray in honor of the Grafx/Duo instead of going PCE-style on us like Insanity and the Mindrec games?  Thnx. 
yr pal,
-vestcunt

RACIST.



Just for that, Ultima ][ will be in a fucking CLEAR tray.

what now.  lol

That better mean your porting it to turbo... otherwise I'm calling a hitman. Ultima is no joking matter bro!

[VestCunt]

Yeah, I brought it up and Arkhan keeps dangling the possibility over my head. 
(My avatar, btw, is a magician from Ultima Quest of the Avatar on the NES.)
Arkhan - You make Ultima II for the Turbo and I don't care what else you do.  You can wrap it in chewed gum, hair, and teeth and I'll worship the packaging.

[Mishran]

Yeah, I brought it up and Arkhan keeps dangling the possibility over my head. 
(My avatar, btw, is a magician from Ultima Quest of the Avatar on the NES.)
Arkhan - You make Ultima II for the Turbo and I don't care what else you do.  You can wrap it in chewed gum, hair, and teeth and I'll worship the packaging.

Rover, THIS man deserves two free copies of MSR!

[ParanoiaDragon]

Yeah Ark has been threatening us with Ultima for awhile, & it seems like there's some other old PC series he's threatened us with, Exile maybe?

[OldMan]

Arkhan - You make Ultima II for the Turbo ...

Was that available for the commodore 64? Would make portage a lot easier if most of it was for the same cpu....

[Arkhan Asylum]

Arkhan - You make Ultima II for the Turbo ...

Was that available for the commodore 64? Would make portage a lot easier if most of it was for the same cpu....

The Ultima in question (Ultima II) was, but I don't want to port it.

I want to fix the game.  Ultima II in every form ever, has been very empty.  It lacks alot of things. 

Also the way C64 does video/sound stuff will make a majority of the code pretty useless.  It'd be just as simple to start over.  The game's not exactly that big/complex.  It needs meat.

The towers/dungeons are completely optional, there are no quests, theres hardly any interaction with the townsfolk.  It is almost an arcade game.   That needs fixed, severely.

That will probably become my pet project after Retrocade.

[BlueBMW]

Arkhan - You make Ultima II for the Turbo ...

Was that available for the commodore 64? Would make portage a lot easier if most of it was for the same cpu....

The Ultima in question (Ultima II) was, but I don't want to port it.

I want to fix the game.  Ultima II in every form ever, has been very empty.  It lacks alot of things. 

Also the way C64 does video/sound stuff will make a majority of the code pretty useless.  It'd be just as simple to start over.  The game's not exactly that big/complex.  It needs meat.

The towers/dungeons are completely optional, there are no quests, theres hardly any interaction with the townsfolk.  It is almost an arcade game.   That needs fixed, severely.

That will probably become my pet project after Retrocade.

You've piqued my interest... I know I've got Ultima 1-4 on the old atari 800, might have to pull em out.

[Mishran]

Got a better idea... FM Towns version of Ultima 6 with full speech and mouse support ported to Turbo.  I believe there are working U6 engine source codes out there that people made. Definitely be a good push in the right direction. Man, that would be so cool. I'd help out in any way i can if that would happen. Heck I'd be happy to help people out any way I can NOW if asked to help support the cause. O:)

[Arkhan Asylum]

Ultima VI is already perfect on the PC and doesn't really need to be fixed up.  The point of the doing the Ultima II thing is because the game needs fixed.  Its a great story, but a busted game.

[VestCunt]

[Ultima II] will probably become my pet project after Retrocade.

I'm no programmer, but let me know if, for some reason, you need any assistance in the audio department (engineering, editing, sound effects, or creepy ambient industrial sound design).

[OldRover]

Quick lil MSR update: the game itself is now at 100% completion! All that's missing now is some cutscene audio and some bonus content. The final beta test will begin once the audio is completed... the bonus content will be added during the final beta phase, which includes the completion of the alternate languages as well as a super-secret on-disc bonus that I won't go into right now.

[TheClash603]

Ohhh yeah!  Can't wait!

What do you anticipate a ship date will be now?

[OldRover]

Probably May. Ran a little behind due to there being more work than I expected. Final beta should start up in just a couple of days... that is, if I get the chance to do the audio. That's the only thing keeping it back right now.

[Nazi NecroPhile]

.... as well as a super-secret on-disc bonus that I won't go into right now.

Pr0n? 

[Mathius]

I must be in the dark on this one. What's MSR???

[spenoza]

I must be in the dark on this one. What's MSR???

Mysterious Song (Revealed or Reputed or Revised or wRonged or Really awesome or Rapscallion or Rental or somesuch like that)

[Mathius]

So what's the deal with it? I've heard the name batted around here and there, but have no clue what kind of homebrew it is.

[Senshi]

Its a dating Sim...you have to write the perfect song to woo your love interests :-p...(kidding..its an RPG)

[Mathius]

Sounds cool! Count me in on a pre-order!

[VestCunt]

Probably May.

No more estimated completion dates!  You'll jinx it! 

[OldRover]

Just a quick heads-up... the CDRs arrived today, and they are of extremely high quality. Thus, the hardware test has begun! Nine issues have been found so far, one of which has been corrected, leaving eight issues to fix so far. They're mostly relatively minor issues... but a couple will take some real work to correct. In any event, with these CDRs, the game plays as it would play with real pressed discs, so one of the things I've been testing for is load speed... I'm happy to report that it's not all that long... except when it has to reseek, which doesn't happen often but it does happen. It's less than 3 seconds per load, but if there's a seek problem it becomes about 10 seconds or so. This happens with pressed discs sometimes too so it's more an issue of the hardware itself than the media it's running. Obviously pressed discs are more robust than CDRs, so the chance of reseek is going to be even lower then. Anyways, one of the issues that is going to take some tweaking is the palette snow issue... it doesn't happen during fades but it's happening right before the fades, which indicates to me that even *reading* the palette registers at the wrong time causes palette snow. This is really odd...

[ParanoiaDragon]

When you say pallete snow, if it's what I think it is, it seems like a really common problem.  It'd be cool if it can be eliminated.

[OldRover]

Palette snow is when you do a palette operation at the wrong time and it produces stray, random pixels on the screen.

[OldMan]

When you say pallete snow, if it's what I think it is, it seems like a really common problem.  It'd be cool if it can be eliminated.

Palette snow is when you do a palette operation at the wrong time and it produces stray, random pixels on the screen.

Yeah, same thing happens if you access VRAM while screen is being displayed; you get random pixels and/or streaks of color. Best solution is probably to mark palette/vram buffer area as needing updated, and then doing the actual update immediately after a vsync. You have a few blanks lines there where it won't affect the display.

If you're really good, and can time things to the scanline; there's a small period at the end of each scanline where you can get away with updates, too. But timing updates then is really tricky...

BTDT. PITA.

[OldRover]

PITA indeed hehe

The sourcecode for MSR is pretty archaic nowadays... I did a lot of things back then that make me cringe now. One of the things I did notice is that there is no wait for vsync before accessing the palette, even for just a read, so that could be contributing to the snow effect. I've altered the source now, but I only have a few discs left so I'm gonna wait till more changes are made before doing another test burn. Tons of other things got fixed in the meantime though. And the one area which I feared was going to be loaded with snow issues... ended up being crystal clear despite the blatant palette abuse. I guess I got the timing right.

[TurboXray]

Yeah, same thing happens if you access VRAM while screen is being displayed; you get random pixels and/or streaks of color. Best solution is probably to mark palette/vram buffer area as needing updated, and then doing the actual update immediately after a vsync. You have a few blanks lines there where it won't affect the display.

Accessing vram during active display isn't going to get you snow or stretched pixels. You might get 'tearing' effect akin to early PC animation if the beam is somewhere in the area you're updating. If you're writing to the BAT, that's a different story. There's an 8 pixel dot clock the VDC divides access to for fetching BAT, tile planes, and cpu access (read/write). There's a dummy BAT read in there (marked as ??? in the docs). If you happen to change that BAT entry before it re-reads it (while it's onscreen), then you'll get a weird 8 tile pixel line with alternate colors. Other than that, you should be fine.

 It's always better to chase the scanline/beam rather than race it anyways. Unless you're double buffering or writing to the BAT for offscreen areas, then it doesn't matter.

If you're really good, and can time things to the scanline; there's a small period at the end of each scanline where you can get away with updates, too. But timing updates then is really tricky...

If you're using your own clean hsync interrupt code, you can easily change up to 3 colors per line. Possibly 4 with a slight fringe on the overscan area of the left edge (clip it to 248 pixels wide and you'll be alright). Else, all other writes to VCE regs (color updates or not), cause the VCE not to read the VDC pixel bus and you get pixel stretching (last color on the VDC output) :

. Might be something you want to do with timed code for an effect, or just want to avoid all together. Using cpu opcodes causes interesting jitter like in that video. But you can draw solid lines if you use the Txx instructions. Laser sprites and such ;)

 An area of hblank is off limited to vram read/writes as it's fetching all the sprite pixels for that line. It's fairly short amount of time though. Accessing VDC regs are fine, but touching the data port (read or write) will halt the cpu for about 10+ cycles during this time.

[Arkhan Asylum]

RACE THE BEAM.  ATARI 2600 MODE ACTIVATE. GO GO GO.

Hey Rover, why didn't you just get CDRWs, lol.  Just curious.

[OldRover]

Because CDRWs don't work for shit in the US Duo. Even my regular CDRs failed to work properly on this machine. Had it been an original TG-CD setup, then CDRWs might have worked... besides, the thing has enough reseek issues as it is, I don't need it causing more.

Of course, this is when you chime in with the "no no it works fine, everything is great, I do it all the time" bit.