exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

There's a new one which I think is mainly interesting for 8Mhz machines.
http://www.happydaze.se/scummvm-lite-atari/

I revisited what was left of the scummvm audio code and found some obvious performance gains.

- 8Mhz STE is now happily playing 12.517 khz samples again just like the big boys.

- 8Mhz ST can play Indy4 with YM speech enabled at interactive framerates.. I never thought that would happen :shock:
It doesn't sound all that great of course, and the framerate drops quite a bit when the actors are talking but it is playable, barely.
Personally I'd probably play with speech disabled or use a "Covox Speech Thing", that improves both performance and quality.
The B.A.T cartridge should behave similar to the Covox but I don't have one to test - someone on the forum did mention it working some versions ago at least.

Hey,

finally had the chance to test the latest release.

As always all testing done both with a clean boot to TOS 4.04 and booting to MagiC 6.2.

First the DMA sound issue:
Running FPATCH2 doesn't make a difference. There is just a short crackling noise instead of sample output unfortunately.

YM sample output:
Now this option actually works on the Falcon now. Previously crashed. :)

New issue with Talkie versions - but just under MagiC 6.2:
While Monkey 2 and the disk versions of Indy 4 and DOTT run fine, there is a problem with the Talkies where the games hang after the LucasArts Logo.

Performance:
No surprise here. It's great. All games are perfectly playable. Great job with the optimizations!

Game specific:
The colors in Indy 4 are quite desaturated now. But I guess that's intentional. :)

Cheers, really great job!

nemo wrote: 28 Jun 2020 21:55 Hey,

finally had the chance to test the latest release.

As always all testing done both with a clean boot to TOS 4.04 and booting to MagiC 6.2.

First the DMA sound issue:
Running FPATCH2 doesn't make a difference. There is just a short crackling noise instead of sample output unfortunately.

YM sample output:
Now this option actually works on the Falcon now. Previously crashed. :)

New issue with Talkie versions - but just under MagiC 6.2:
While Monkey 2 and the disk versions of Indy 4 and DOTT run fine, there is a problem with the Talkies where the games hang after the LucasArts Logo.

Performance:
No surprise here. It's great. All games are perfectly playable. Great job with the optimizations!

Game specific:
The colors in Indy 4 are quite desaturated now. But I guess that's intentional. :)

Cheers, really great job!

Many thanks nemo!!
The color palette for Indy4 is indeed an artistic choice, I just really liked it like that (maybe it's a bit too desatured though?) :)

I do recall DMA sound may have worked on the Falcon in the very first releases, before I switched to using TimerA for swapping play buffers.
I'm slowly working on going back to some similar setup as back then, but hopefully without all the sound glitching this time around :lol:
The sound code is all a bit horrible anyway, sharing path with the ST playback since I made that one first. It could do with a rethink and rewrite.


Ideally I'd just like to be able to grab a pointer to the sound and hit play instead of the streaming-like api in scummvm so I'm investigating this option as well - it becomes non-trivial due to how sync-points are handled based on how much has "streamed" out of the scummvm mixer.
(This streaming-like api makes perfect sense in ScummVM proper where it does a bunch of processing and mixing on each sample, but in our case that source data is almost ready to just play anyway)

Oh, that hanging you mentioned in MagiC is most likely due to something causing audio to not be consumed, and the game has a sync point waiting for that sound to fully stream out before it continues. Perhaps I cannot use TimerA freely in MagiC? that would cause that type of hang for sure.

The Monkey Island 2 "Ultimate Talkie" works fine in ScummST :yay2:



Someone made an easy to use script to generate MS-DOS talkie data from "Special Edition" and it works great the little I tested it:
http://www.gratissaugen.de/ultimatetalkies/

WOW :shock:

Incredible work mate.

Yes, DMA sound worked fine on the Falcon in your first releases (maybe cut off a little early here and there)!
Only stopped working once the first batch of optimizations went in.

agranlund wrote: 01 Jul 2020 08:34 The Monkey Island 2 "Ultimate Talkie" works fine in ScummST :yay2:



Someone made an easy to use script to generate MS-DOS talkie data from "Special Edition" and it works great the little I tested it:
http://www.gratissaugen.de/ultimatetalkies/

:shock:

That's totally amazing!

agranlund wrote: 01 Jul 2020 08:31 The color palette for Indy4 is indeed an artistic choice, I just really liked it like that (maybe it's a bit too desatured though?) :)

Indeed I find it a bit too desaturated. Maybe you can play around with it again?

I also found a reproducable bug with Indy4. The game always crashes for me in Tikal when trying to use the whip on the jungle rodent to move it to the snake. Even tried to re-install it again. But the error remains. Can anyone confirm this?

agranlund wrote: 01 Jul 2020 08:34 The Monkey Island 2 "Ultimate Talkie" works fine in ScummST :yay2:



Someone made an easy to use script to generate MS-DOS talkie data from "Special Edition" and it works great the little I tested it:
http://www.gratissaugen.de/ultimatetalkies/

Which install*.bat do you use? Despite doing it for a living i seem to suck at software on Amigas and Ataris

I've been messing about manually processing images and converting them down to 8 and 16 colours with the STE palette, more out of curiosity than anything else.

I'm beginning to see why I think they didn't bother releasing an ST version, other than the platform slowly dying off.

The big difference between MI1 and MI2 is, MI2 uses scanned hand drawn artwork that requires a fairly good range of colours to reproduce on a computer.

You essentially have to build the backgrounds with consideration for which sprites may be in that scene. And either limit your colour use to allow room for palette entries for the sprites, or hope that some of the sprite colours can be used in your background to help. So my initial thinking was you'd have to use on most scenes just 8 colours for the backgrounds and you'd be left with 8 colours for Guybrush and which ever other character was in the scene also, so maybe 4 colours each (Guybrush would be fixed colours that can't change and will be in every scene).

There are some exceptions:-

Some backgrounds only ever have Guybrush in them, so you could improve these to maybe 12 colours.
Title, intermission and map screens can use the full 16 colours.

You'd need a tool that would take your fixed Guybrush and NPC palette entries, then with those 8 colours and the 8 remaining free colours, analyse, reduce and dither the background so you are making the most of all 16 colours the ST can display. Even then you'd need to think about the player inventory! Ideally you'd probably do a palette split after the play area so you could have a separate selection of colours just for that...phew :oops:

Looks to me like the Amiga backgrounds are reduced to 16 colours, no dithering just a simple colour reduction. Leaving 16 colours for everything else, it's a big help.

Anyway, few examples of backgrounds converted to 8 colours:-
Couple of 16 colour screens:-

terriblefire wrote: 02 Jul 2020 00:47 Which install*.bat do you use? Despite doing it for a living i seem to suck at software on Amigas and Ataris

Just the plain install.bat, then copy the output generated to the "MI2_Ultimate_Talkie_Edition" subfolder (you only need monkey2.000, monkey2.001 and monster.sou)