Castaway/gp 15.3 Released

[EvilDragon]

Wow! Really impressed, skeezix!
Wonderboy in Monsterland now playing beautifully with the new sound

And if you want a good laugh, try Turrican II and listen to the title song... it's completely made up of samples and sounds like a 20 year old cassette tape which has been lying far to long in the sun

But really great to see some updates on castaway again

 

[skeezix]

Evil -- yeah, I only did changes every 3mo or so for awhile, which was too little; missed my little GP32.. but so little time Still, I need to beat Time Bandits sometime

look -- from the versions, did it slow down from 14/15.x to 15.3?

I can speed up the sample caching a touch, but wanted to get it working first.

With sound off, you're turning it off via the CaSTaway menu after it begins? I imagine it onl crashes with sound off for sample playing games? Just running a YM demo with no audio shouldn't crash, correct?

I think next update is to add multiple savestates per disk rather than a global 8; ie: instead of diskname.raw, maybe diskname.1 thru diskname.8 or the like, where diskname is the disk in drive A when the ST was "turned on" (ie: For multi-disk games, it'd go by first disk used)

jeff

 

[look]

I'd say 14 was faster but it didnt render graphics properly.

15 is more solid in every sense. If you can get more speed out of it now then it would rock.

I did turn the sound off from the menu when the game was loaded.

Its the options I'd really like to be able to save. The same way DrMD does it.
It would make castaway more of a pickup and play emu.

 

[BobBorakovitz]

wow! I must say, I'm impressed! I never tried the ST before, now I've just dedicated a whole 128M card to Castaway! There's so many good games like civilization (OMG, I've been playing that for 2 days straight) Thanx for this, I can't believe I passed it up before, I thought it was gonna be like the spectrum (drab colors, etc) but it's more like the genesis/mega drive.

A couple of suggestions I've thought of that would make Castaway much more user-friendly, and hopefully not too much of a pain to code:

- A swap disks function, I've been playing Civilization (2 disks) and it requires you to swap disks, sometimes a lot... what would be cool is if I could load one disk in drive a:, and one disk in drive b:, then just hit the swap disks option. It'd save a bunch of steps when swapping, and make it much more handy.

- Save options, like clock speed, Blu+, etc. Maybe not for each game, but a global one would be really nice.

(Don't give up on fixing the sound core, it sounds like you've been working hard on it!)

Thanx so much for this wonderful emulator, I'm just now learning all the little tricks to the ST, but I'm enjoying it a lot so far! Keep up the great work!

-BobBorakovitz

 

[skeezix]

A swap of A and B doesn't sound really generic; I've thought about something another emu I saw did..

ie: Say you named the disks something.ST1 and something.ST2, and then you hit "next disk" it'd go from .ST1 to .ST2 and then to .ST3 etc, and cycle when no more were found.

(So if it was 2 disks, they'd toggle.)

I've thought about it, but at the same time, not sure how often that'd be used and can't make everything too easy on you

jeff

The ST is a 16/32 bit machine, so its defaintely a generation or two later than the speccy..

 

[look]

If you have HD support then maybe disk swapping wouldnt be needed you could just have both disk images in a dir

 

[skeezix]

HDD wouldn't help with disk swapping; ie: Games that expect a swpa would still need to swap.

However, some (very few) games could run on HDD, though I don't recall if Civ was one of them.. I think it was though. But very few games ran well off HD

jeff

 

[DaveC]

HDD wouldn't help with disk swapping; ie: Games that expect a swpa would still need to swap.

However, some (very few) games could run on HDD, though I don't recall if Civ was one of them.. I think it was though. But very few games ran well off HD

jeff

​

How about the one parted games like the ones found on Automation disks? Those seem to run on my PC ST emu with HDD.

Also how about the new Cyclone core that Reesy has patched up a bit, do you think that will run with CaSTaway? I can only imagine wow fast this emu would run with it. Seing how good it is now with the C core, with cyclone it would probably run full speed FS0 at 133 or 144 with it.

 

[Reesy]

SuperFast!!!!!

 

[look]

bring it on

 

[stickofjoy]

Nice to see this is still moving, Jeff.

Any news on a patch to make Senisble Software games playable?

Thanks!
matt