exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

jeloneal wrote: 09 Nov 2020 14:15 Thanks for your continued efforts in this wonderful project!

Slowly but surely :)

I've just tried the 9th November build on my TT with a new monster.sou file extracted from the Remastered version of "Day of the Tentacle".

I have music!

However. plenty of crashes.

The first time I ran it there were two bombs just as Bernard got the note from the hamster. The second time, three bombs just as the Doctor was explaining that the pumps would have to turned off yesterday.

I've not tried the other games yet.

stephen_usher wrote: 11 Nov 2020 19:00 I've just tried the 9th November build on my TT with a new monster.sou file extracted from the Remastered version of "Day of the Tentacle".

I have music!

However. plenty of crashes.

The first time I ran it there were two bombs just as Bernard got the note from the hamster. The second time, three bombs just as the Doctor was explaining that the pumps would have to turned off yesterday.

I've not tried the other games yet.

Cheers Stephen!
My ST is taken apart but I'll have a proper go with DOTT to see if I can replicate the crashes once the machine is back together again.

If you get a chance, does it make a difference with either the music or speech disabled? I'm thinking if it's one of those that are causing issues.

I'll have a play and report back.

No music + DMA sound - crashing
No sound + YM music - no crash

Testing YM sound and YM music now.

P.S. That's bombing too.

I've tried MI2 & Indy4 but neither of those have sounds, probably due to the iffy downloads. :-)

stephen_usher wrote: 11 Nov 2020 20:29 No music + DMA sound - crashing
No sound + YM music - no crash

Testing YM sound and YM music now.

P.S. That's bombing too.

Thank you!
Seems sound/speech related then, I'll see if I can replicate the issue here when the Atari is back from surgery :)

As a test I turned off the TT-Ram flag (data) in the program and so far no crashes and I'm getting reasonably far into the game.

I'm guessing that your sound sub-system is allocating memory in TT-Ram and trying to DMA it or similar.

P.S. Spoke too soon!

stephen_usher wrote: 15 Nov 2020 14:16 As a test I turned off the TT-Ram flag (data) in the program and so far no crashes and I'm getting reasonably far into the game.

I'm guessing that your sound sub-system is allocating memory in TT-Ram and trying to DMA it or similar.

P.S. Spoke too soon!

It should allocate ST ram for the DMA buffer. This buffer is allocated once at startup so if you hear sound at all then that's proof enough it's in ST-RAM :)

There is usually a lot of disk activity when speech is played so this is rather high up on the points of investigation - especially since you mentioned you had the same crashes when using YM for speech which is a quite different codepath from DMA sound. This leads me to believe the source of the issue is not with the end playback but something on a higher level where the code is the same no matter the output device.
Out of curiosity, what type of drive do you have, which driver do you use, and which bus is it connected to?
One specific Mega STE, with the P.Putnik driver, had issues when loading too much/fast so I had to do some workaround to get the game stable on that one machine.

Not using TT-RAM also means data from the disk wont have to go through the FRB buffer in ST-RAM before being copied to TT-RAM, so there is a difference even with disk access when a program is using TT-RAM (for DMA devices at least).

TT + SCSI (SCSI2SD V5.1) + HDDriver 10.x

I could try putting it on my UltraSATAN on the ACSI bus to see if that makes any difference.