Issues with pp hdd driver, exacerbated by ScummST

[Cwiiis]

I'm writing this more in case anyone else comes up against this - I got an ACSI2STM from masteries on AtariAge forums. Great little device and can't argue with that price... I doubt I could make one myself any cheaper unless I already had a bunch of the parts (which I don't). I bought the pp game collections along with the driver because that seemed to be what people do. Mostly worked without issue, though every now and again something would bomb out. Rarely enough that I didn't really think much of it.

I assumed this instability was caused by some other part of my system - it's a pretty beaten up STE; though I've done a lot of work to prolong it (recap, new PSU, new HC CPU, bus resistor change, DMA changer, dual ROM, HD floppy board, new RAM...), I wouldn't be surprised if there were undiagnosed issues left (and who knows, that may still be the case). I decided to try out ScummST and though it seemed to work fine (with full voice and MIDI soundtrack!), reasonably frequently it would bomb out when switching scenes in Monkey Island (either when going to new areas or during close-ups in conversations).

The consistency of when this was happening made me wonder if there was something up with the ACSI2STM rather than just general system instability and made me curious enough to try out different SD cards, different power supplies (no difference for either) and then ICD Pro. Setting up was a bit of a pain given you can't easily write to the drive outside of an Atari (Steem to the rescue), but now I'm back to where I was except there hasn't been a single crash since. I played on ScummST for an hour or two with no issues (previously it would have almost certainly crashed in that time). I needed to configure the driver to use less RAM than its default configuration for many games to work, but that's been it.

There's a chance that this may still just be coincidence, and if I find that to be the case I'll report back... But I suppose the TL;DR: If you're having odd stability issues with an ACSI2STM and you're using the ppdriver, consider giving ICD Pro a go instead. I'd be interested if anyone else using the ppdriver could try out ScummST and see if they have similar issues.

[russellnash]

I haven't got ScummST, but I use the same type Of ACSI2STM sometimes with the same PP images I use for the Ultrasatan. It bombs occasionally and tends not to boot properly when pressing the reset button. It is also massively slower than the Ultrasatan, about five times slower doing a simple count in my head.

[agranlund]

I'd be interested if anyone else using the ppdriver could try out ScummST and see if they have similar issues.

I recall issues with ScummST when using that driver and adding some workarounds in ScummST to try and combat those.
Unfortunately can't remember the exact details but I believe that as a compromise I broke up large disk reads into several smaller ones and that made it more stable with the pp driver - at the cost of a tiny bit of a performance hit for all other drivers.
Though it sounds like there are still issues, maybe it would need to do even smaller chunks. Or maybe do the back-to-back access slower?

Perhaps the pp driver is specially optimised for typical ST games and doesn't handle larger size data all that well?
There's always the possibility that my file code in ScummST is shoddy too :)

Cheers,
--Anders

[Dlfrsilver]

Hello Anders, how can i contact you about scummST supporting the french versions of the SCUMM games ?

Can i help you regarding this ?

Thank you.

[agranlund]

Hello Anders, how can i contact you about scummST supporting the french versions of the SCUMM games ?

Can i help you regarding this ?

Thank you.

Do they not already work?
I’ve seen someone playing the Spanish versions at least.

—Anders

[Dlfrsilver]

Hello Anders, how can i contact you about scummST supporting the french versions of the SCUMM games ?

Can i help you regarding this ?

Thank you.

Do they not already work?
I’ve seen someone playing the Spanish versions at least.

—Anders

I tried the french versions of Lucas games, and it doesn't work on my computers. It just crash.