WIP Atari ST ScummVM-lite

[nemo]

nemo, do you know if it by any chance works in a totally clean boot to TOS 4.04? Basically nothing in the AUTO and so on - this is how I start the emulated Falcon in Hatari and maybe that is why it works there (I really doubt it - it's more likely Hatari is just not being 100% accurate to the real thing).

Hey, yes forgot to mention: I now do all testing both under TOS 4.04 (clean control boot) and MagiC 6.

In both cases there was this crackling/distorted noise instead of proper sample playback.

[agranlund]

Hey, yes forgot to mention: I now do all testing both under TOS 4.04 (clean control boot) and MagiC 6.
In both cases there was this crackling/distorted noise instead of proper sample playback.

Brilliant, thanks! :)


This is not going to help with any of the sound related issues, but there's a new version that fixes an incompatibility with the P.Putnik HDD driver.
It would result in a hang when loading Indy4 talkie edition under certain circumstances.

Not sure what the age of that driver was, or the disk partition type, but it wouldn't reliably service >128Kb reads on one guys Mega STE, and in Hatari with a disk image.
HDDriver, EmuTOS and Hatari GEMDOS drivers are all ok so I'll assume that driver is broken somehow or the wrong version is used.

Fixed in scummvm by splitting large reads into smaller 64Kb chunks, else it would sometimes return garbage data but report that the read was successful.

[tteclado]

A great job, it is wonderful to be able to play these games in an old ST, almost in basic models; since they work on a 520ST with 2Mb, with TOS 1.02.
Thank you

[agranlund]

Monkey Island 2 is starting to approach playable speed on 8Mhz machines :)
Or at least it doesn't feel too far off the original Atari releases of Monkey1/Indy3/Loom/etc..



Mega STE and up is able to run it a lot smoother of course :lol:

[GadgetUK164]

This is incredible! Especially how well you have it running at 8Mhz too =O Do you think it will handle The Fate of Atlantis and Sam & Max? Or will those be a problem - not sure if they are 256 colours only or something.

[agranlund]

This is incredible! Especially how well you have it running at 8Mhz too =O Do you think it will handle The Fate of Atlantis and Sam & Max? Or will those be a problem - not sure if they are 256 colours only or something.

Thanks, yes it's pretty cool finally seeing the game working at a decent speed on stock CPU :)

Fate of Atlantis do run decently on 8Mhz as well, as long as you don't enable speech. At least the beginning parts - I haven't really tested it very far. Mega STE at 16Mhz runs it fine with speech.

Day of the Tentacle really needs a Mega STE or better to be enjoyable at the moment (Falcon or better for the intro sequence to look smooth)
These three games all work on the 256 colour data, remapped down to a 16 color palette, so in that respect Sam & Max is not a problem.
But Sam & Max is quite broken for other reasons, it has a bunch of extra graphics features which would need to be Atarified for that game to look alright.

To be honest I'm more tempted in trying to backport the Sierra SCI1 stuff from one of the later versions of ScummVM and get that stuff running at a good speed on the Atari so Sam&Max support will probably not happen anytime soon.

[EvilFranky]

Monkey Island 2 is starting to approach playable speed on 8Mhz machines :)
Or at least it doesn't feel too far off the original Atari releases of Monkey1/Indy3/Loom/etc..



Mega STE and up is able to run it a lot smoother of course :lol:

Looking really good, that looks just about the same sort of frame rate the ST achieves on MI1.

Amazing to see.

What's the chances the GFX could be manually tweaked to improve the drop in on screen colours and imported? The standard way SCUMMVM does it isn't actually too bad! But some dithered GFX would improve them no end.

[terriblefire]

@agranlund let me know when you have your TF536 built and i'll fire you over an ST FIrmware.

[agranlund]

Looking really good, that looks just about the same sort of frame rate the ST achieves on MI1.
Amazing to see.
What's the chances the GFX could be manually tweaked to improve the drop in on screen colours and imported? The standard way SCUMMVM does it isn't actually too bad! But some dithered GFX would improve them no end.

Thanks! Yes it does feel about the same as MI1 on the ST. I don't expect it to ever run silky smooth but a little bit faster still would be nice :D

I agree on the colours and I would really like to explore dithering as an option at some point. Right now everything is simply statically mapped to a fixed 16 colour palette which makes things quite fast and uncomplicated at the expense of colour cycling and other palette manipulation features.
The original scummvm VGA to EGA conversion code can't be used but that's not saying dithering is impossible. The trick would be to not impact 8Mhz performance too much, even with the option turned off.


Right now, I'm quite happy that I'm now able to repack the sprite data inside the resource files so I'm going to spend some time exploring different approaches here. This first test showed some good signs at least.
I'm actually considering if I should go nuts with this and store the sprites twice.. one for use when scaling and one when not.. I do have the luxury of not having to care about diskette count after all :lol:

[agranlund]

@agranlund let me know when you have your TF536 built and i'll fire you over an ST FIrmware.

Brilliant, thanks!
Got a bunch of stuff from DigiKey and hoping I have everything I need to start building it this weekend :)