Dread & TF536 - Doom clone demo

[coonsgm]

Hey there folks,

So I've finally figured out how to adapt the some of my PP hard drive adapted game files I have to run in Altram on my TF536.

My question now goes to the awesomeness (at least in my book it's awesome) of the recently released Doom clone demo, Dread. When I try to run from Altram, I get the music and a blank screen and nothing else.

Has anyone here had any luck running Dread from Altram? It runs well enough normally, but as is usually the case, I want more....

[Steve]

Have you joined the Dread discord server? The developer is very active in advising/helping with this kind of thing.

[coonsgm]

I haven't joined...yet. Thanks for the tip! Although my guess is that the TF536 Atari community is pretty small....I could be wrong though.

[Steve]

I haven't joined...yet. Thanks for the tip! Although my guess is that the TF536 Atari community is pretty small....I could be wrong though.

They have a dedicated Atari sub channel :)

[stephen_usher]

I wonder if they're using the same engine as the Wolfenstein 3D port as that does the same sort of thing on my TT.

[Steve]

Yeah it doesn't run on my TT either, just black screen. I told them about it but I honestly cannot remember the answer, but I know they are working on a more advanced version for all platforms soon.

[Badwolf]

Hey there folks,

So I've finally figured out how to adapt the some of my PP hard drive adapted game files I have to run in Altram on my TF536.

Oh, cool. How'd you do this?

I have started work on a Google Sheet to try to identify AltRAM capable games. It's not got very far yet... 3 lines and one's a no :lol:

docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DoCuoaZWKlp8o5fuXkc4uR4DwcqiGPFXq3wPiYAcFEo/edit?usp=sharing

I'd love to know what you got working and how.

BW

[coonsgm]

So I got Frontier working by replacing the .prg file in the PP Frontier folder with one from a floppy disk image. I thought....well if that works for Frontier, maybe it will work for others.

I did the same with Ultima 6 and Civilization...two other games that had lackluster performance in general (Civ was ok...Ultima 6 not really).

Trial and error really. Perhaps I'll run into issues later, but so far I've played Civ and Ultima a fair amount and work well (minor glitch in the Ultima 6 intro).

[coonsgm]

You can see videos I've posted to the Atari ST / STE facebook group....

[DaveC]

I haven't played much with my TF536 yet. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade worked quite nicely running from Fast RAM. Though malloc's a secondary screen buffer so couldn't let it use Fast RAM there. Fast RAM disks can be nice for for similar games with a lot of loading files from disk.