WIP Atari ST ScummVM-lite

[stephen_usher]

Music works on Monkey Island 2.

[stephen_usher]

Indy4 has music but no digitised sound with DMA

[agranlund]

Thanks for the detailed reports, and the video capture! Awesome that it runs on stock TT's :dualthumbup:

Oh, I've just had a stutter where the sample repeated a few times. (I'm typing this whilst the "Day of the Tentacle" is running through its start-up sequence. OK, some stutters when the eyes appear in the time machine sequence.

Mine @50 Mhz slows down to the point of audio stutter in the cutscene with the eyes as well :)

I can't hear any music on my TT but the sampled audio is fine, though suffers from compression artefacts, which may be in the original anyway. Music works on Monkey Island 2. Indy4 has music but no digitised sound with DMA.

So music in MI2 and Indy but not DOTT? There must be something I'm doing that is not quite correct, for your TT at least.
The original sound fx is already of pretty low quality and it's going to be ever so slightly worse here since I'm taking performance improving shortcuts when resampling it for a frequency DMA sound accepts.
It should sound noticeably better than the YM2149 playback I'm stuck with on my ST though :lol:

Atlantis = again, graphics flawless, I don't hear any sound effects? Is indy meant to make sound crashing through the window? Atari music sounds great, MT32 works!
Monkey2 = Graphics get a bit corrupted in the intro overlay sequence, other than that it is fine. Atari music works great, MT32 works great, again not too sure where I should be hearing sound fx though (haven't heard any up to the bridge encounter)

Yeah that graphics corruption in the intro bugs me a lot. The game relies on palette manipulation to fade out and hide the parts drawn from the previous screen. I'm not supporting that stuff, but that intro is lovely so I'm working on a game-specific hack to clean up that intro.

I'm not sure what different releases there are for the different games.
I have the CD version of Indy4 and it has full digitised speech and sound (it's 150MB), it does indeed make sound when Indy crashes through the window, and all characters are fully voiced.
Check if you version of the game(s) have a file called MONSTER.SOU. If it does then it should play digitised sound, else it doesn't have any.
I suspect some floppy releases doesn't have digitised sound, the version I have of Monkey2 does not.

(I believe PC could play non-digitised sound effects through adlib cards, could be a good idea for the future to see if we can detect and play something at these triggers)


Again, thanks for reporting how it runs on the real hardware! Much appreciated :)

[agranlund]

Looking good so far though, very surprised at how well the GFX process down to 16 colours.
Have you thought about looking into the Hatari profiler for when you come to taking a look at optimising the drawing routine? I'm not a coder at all, but have read enough on some Atari forums to know it can be a useful tool for optimising projects.

Yeah I am surprised as well! Dithering may or may not improve it further, it's something I would like to try out at some point at least.

Didn't know about the Hatari profiler, that's brilliant, thanks for that! It will come in handy.

While there would be plenty of opportunities to optimise the current drawing routines, I don't think it could ever push the system requirements all the way down to stock Falcon and much less stock ST by doing so.
Changing it to operate in an Atari conscious manner all the way, rather than drawing as if it was a PC and then converting to something the Atari understands, is the only tiny chance of achieving that I think. After that, that profiler will certainly come in handy for lower level optimisations.

[stephen_usher]

I'm not sure what different releases there are for the different games.
I have the CD version of Indy4 and it has full digitised speech and sound (it's 150MB), it does indeed make sound when Indy crashes through the window, and all characters are fully voiced.
Check if you version of the game(s) have a file called MONSTER.SOU. If it does then it should play digitised sound, else it doesn't have any.

The downloadable version of Indy4 has a file called monster.sof. I renamed this monster.sou and it made no difference.

[EvilFranky]

Looking good so far though, very surprised at how well the GFX process down to 16 colours.
Have you thought about looking into the Hatari profiler for when you come to taking a look at optimising the drawing routine? I'm not a coder at all, but have read enough on some Atari forums to know it can be a useful tool for optimising projects.

Yeah I am surprised as well! Dithering may or may not improve it further, it's something I would like to try out at some point at least.

Didn't know about the Hatari profiler, that's brilliant, thanks for that! It will come in handy.

While there would be plenty of opportunities to optimise the current drawing routines, I don't think it could ever push the system requirements all the way down to stock Falcon and much less stock ST by doing so.
Changing it to operate in an Atari conscious manner all the way, rather than drawing as if it was a PC and then converting to something the Atari understands, is the only tiny chance of achieving that I think. After that, that profiler will certainly come in handy for lower level optimisations.

Understood. That translation layer is going to be hard to make any dent in, unless completely recoded for the ST and with all GFX assets reworked into a native ST format for easier processing.

On the Falcon side, it may be worth exploring 16-bit chunky mode rather than convert to 8-bit planer?

Anyway, nice work so far 8-)

[agranlund]

The downloadable version of Indy4 has a file called monster.sof. I renamed this monster.sou and it made no difference.

Ah, then someone has compressed it with the ScummVM tools specifically for being used with ScummVM.
Using the Flac option, hence the .sof extension. Likewise, if it's called monster.sog then someone has compressed it with ogg-vorbis.

This build will only support files in the original format as they came from Lucasart (playing back compressed audio would be way too heavy, both for this Atari build and for the original MS-DOS release)

[agranlund]

The power of Terrible Fire! :fire:

This is how it currently runs on my ST:
It struggles when the guys are going back in time, but otherwise very respectable for a 68030!

[exxos]

Seriously good stuff! :2k2: :bravo:

[agranlund]

New stuff:
scumm_st_alpha.zip

* Decoupled music and sound buffer updates from main loop.
Makes it a lot more resilient to stutter or slowdown even when graphics framerate is low, or when a single frame takes a long time as they do when switching scenes.

* Improved YM music

* Added experimental support for Covox Speech Thing (and similar parallel port DACs)
* Added experimental support for B.A.T. MV-16 sound cartridge

* Fixed a couple of general sound+music bugs, including some bad writes to YM registers.
(stephen_usher, I don't know if these will fix the music issue on your TT but if you have time and interest to check it out then please do tell if it does :))

* Oh, and cleaned up the Monkey2 intro using dirty haxx. Not perfect, but much better now that it doesn't leave garbage on the screen!

In general it's a little bit faster overall, but feels much smoother because the audio is behaving better.