CaSTaway GP feedback

[stickofjoy]

Stickofjoy,

on Joes ftp, wheres the best set of disks

I notice under ST hes got all the different sets that came out, whats the best ones to grab?

having only a 56k modem, its a pain searching through them all.

Cheers

Uncompressed, but still cracked, are best - they seem to be most commonly found in the "Atari Pirate Gold" directory. But I was always most fond of the Pompey Pirates menu discs. hence my site: http://www.ewtoo.org/~matt/pp/

What I have done is downloaded the _Directories folder
which contains the contents of the FTP site in text files tso you can search for any game you like, making an informed choice about which disc release to go for.

 

[Retroid]

Hey stickofjoy, that's a useful looking site you have there; there are so many disks with several gameson each it's hard to keep track of what's on which ~_~

(I'll have to get the CD of PP & Automation disks I burnt back off a friend so I can test this when I get my GP32)

skeezix;

Unbelievable work! This emu and Frodo are what makes my purchase of a GP32 certain. C64, Spectrum & Atari ST emulation is a must-have for sitting in a cold bathroom; better than a newspaper any day ^_^ Now if only someone would port an Amstrad CPC & (more unlikely, given it's architecture) Amiga emu, my handheld life would be complete!

Anyhow...

Just a quick suggestion about the mouse co-ords problem; perhaps a menu option to 'reset' the position if the X&Y get confused about their boundries?

...and a quick question, do raster-based games like Lotus Turbo Challenge work 100%? I think I read that CastawayGP renders per-scanline, but not the palette, I'm wondering how this would effects games like this one...

::Retroid can't wait to be able to play Paradroid '90 as well as Paradroid on the same handheld, even if the 16bit version only scrolls vertaically while the C64 original has 8-way scrolling - it's still fantastic::

 

[Retroid]

Oh, and an astoundingly important question;

How playable is Virus with the mouse emulation?

That's one of my all-time favourite games of all time ^_^

::Retroid giggles at memories of his friends flipping the ship upside down & slamming it into the ground in their vain attempts to play it::

 

[stickofjoy]

Just a quick suggestion about the mouse co-ords problem; perhaps a menu option to 'reset' the position if the X&Y get confused about their boundries?

I read somewhere that sheezix moves the mouse relative to it's current position so he never actually knows high level where the mouse is. Although the emu core does it's hard to extract that info. <_<

 

[stickofjoy]

Oh at and an astoundingly important question;

How playable is Virus with the mouse emulation?

a more apt question might be "is Virus fast enough to be playable?" as most 3D games currently run super-slow as the math emulation really makes the GP32 hardware crawl.

 

[Retroid]

Bugger. I thought it was mostly unpacking etc. which choked the emu ~_~

(I mean, I know 3D is intensive, obviously, but unpacking does nothing else but hammer the CPU)

So, how do wireframe & polygon games perform in general? There's not an awful lot of 3D games on the 16bit formats, but there are some favourites there:

Virus
Conquerer
Simulcra
Rotox

... just off the top of my head.

::Retroid wonders if Castaway gets its speed from skipping redundant CPU cycles::

 

[stickofjoy]

Bugger. I thought it was mostly unpacking etc. which choked the emu ~_~

(I mean, I know 3D is intensive, obviously, but unpacking does nothing else but hammer the CPU)

So, how do wireframe & polygon games perform in general? There's not an awful lot of 3D games on the 16bit formats, but there are some favourites there:

Virus
Conquerer
Simulcra
Rotox

... just off the top of my head.

::Retroid wonders if Castaway gets it's speed from skipping redendant CPU cycles::

I love Conqueror, so I hope it does play well.

The GP32 doesn't have a Floting Point processor, so all maths that is to be done fast has to be done through integer maths routines. Not sure how the emu could be changed to make this so. Most 3D uses floating point maths and lots of ASM shifting etc, I guess decrunching does too.

One 3D game i tried (Robocop III, PP108a/b ) played at about 2 frames per second. But Stunt Car Racer works a treat so I guess it varies - I wish I could test it and let you know...

/me patiently awaits the return of my GP32.

 

[skeezix]

FYI.. math is what kills our speed, for sure. Floating point type ops in the ST really chug us down :/ Unpacking and vector math are the two main slowdown culprits, but also disk loading and unpoacking. ie: Dungeon Master.. its not cracker-packed, but its packed in their own way..so DM takes for freakin' ever to load, due to it reading a sector, unpacking it, reading another, etc.

As to mouse.. the emu core sort of knows the mouse location, but its the ST OS which knows it most.

ie: We tell the core "here we are!". So we have our idea of where the mouse is, and when the d-pad changes, we adjust that coord pair. Then we feed ti to the core, which compares it to its idea of the mouse, and figures out a diff. ie: If we say its at 200,y, and the core things its at 199,y, it knows to send a +1x to the ST when asked. The ST does whatever it wants with that info.. we have no idea in RAM where that is, since its allocated at boot time and coudl be anywhere. (Thoguh I bet its always the same memory addres,s os I just need ot find it!)

So the ST knows where it truly is.

Fine and dandy, we all 3 know where it is... until soemthign *moves* it :/

Try changing to medium res; the ST resets the mouse to center, but we don't know that. So suddenly we think its at 200, when really its at 320, say.. oops! Problem. Hence moving off the right and holding will stop at the edge (the ST won't let it go too far), but it'll reset our concept of the mouse.

Sure, we can check for reoslution reset and reset our idea to 320x100....

But games move the mouse around, and no way for us to know :/

I'm working on it.

jeff

 

[Retroid]

The GP32 doesn't have a floating point processor, true, but then neither did the base ST or Amiga. An additional maths co-pro could be bought for that, but they were buggers to install.

 

[Vanamonde]

One 3D game i tried (Robocop III, PP108a/b ) played at about 2 frames per second. But Stunt Car Racer works a treat so I guess it varies - I wish I could test it and let you know...

I would add:

Carrier Command - Appears to work fine and at a decent speed, sent one of the Manta's over the first Island and everything appears to move fine. The music on the title screen slows down when frameskip is set to 0

Starglider 2 - Slow and jerky and almost uncontrollable.

Star Wars - A bit slow but all the vectors display fine, the lasr SFX lag and the samples don't playback properply.

Virus - Speed seems fine and SFX playback properply. Very hard to control tho, kept crashing when using the mouse emulation option in the emulator.

 

[A600]

Has anyone tried Amberstar? I'm using Geepee emulator (I'm still waiting my GP32) and runs well but when I change the disc Castaway resets

Hard drive support would be great for those big RPGs/Adventures because disk swapping kills all the fun

 

[Vanamonde]

Hard drive support would be great for those big RPGs/Adventures because disk swapping kills all the fun

How many actually worked from HD tho? When I had an ST many multidisk games didn't even support the second floppy drive, you still had to put the second disk in drive A.

 

[sloth]

Has anyone tried Amberstar? I'm using Geepee emulator (I'm still waiting my GP32) and runs well but when I change the disc Castaway resets

Yeah, same thing happens to me with a real GP32. Im using the pirate gold images i think ...

 

[Shrike]

the .MSA cracked files i've tried just take me to the OS thingy ma bob, but one was intriguing it proceeded to tell me who it was cracked by in a very stupid manner, then the GP32 BIOS Monitor from the Multi Firmware came up....strange indeed

 

[RobertG]

Just tried the v7 out, niiiice I have one suggestion though,

with the keyboard input could you make it so you have to keep tapping the joypad to move the cursor, or just make it a little less sensitive? Sometimes it's hard to get the key you want because it's so sensitive and the cursor just zooms along

 

[stickofjoy]

Any chance of emulating the bottom border, so we can see scores and lives in Pang?

 

[Mark1970]

I got my webcam pointed it at my gp32 running castaway 0.6 which was decrunching xenon2. With realproducer I made this little movie which shows xenon2 running at 1 frameskip, full sound and me playing it. I sent this file to this old mate I know since highschool, who used to own an atariST next to a spectrum (we always had this speccy - cbm64 discussion going, but were always very peacefull on Atari ST & Amiga matters) and I got an instant reply from him that he was going to buy the FLU gp32! And I didn´t even show him the spectrum emulators that are out there.

So there you have it castaway is a factor that is not to be taken lightly when it comes to increasing the number of Dutch gp32 users in my little n=1 study over here. The effect of a playable xenon2 on this particular handheld on my friends decision to get a gp32 is there but the sheer possibility of using atariST software on a gp32 with help of castaway was the decisive factor. So there you have it!

Keep up the good work. Awesome work.

p.s. indeed I have similar problems with the virtual keyboard that at times it is too sluggish (pressed keys sometimes seem not to get pressed) and sometimes to smooth (the red letter cursor just zaps to quickly or you loose sight of it all together)

 

[Axeman]

Isn;t it amazing that we've got to the point already where most of the requests are, really, just little modifications.

Well done Skeezix!

Cheers!

 

[Bonks]

Skeezix,

Few suggestions, some things that have been annoying me

While in keyboard more i noticed that the R & L dont do anything. Would it be possible to make it that pressing R takes you to mouse and pressing L takes you to Joystick control... and a similar type of control switching in other modes?

I noticed R in mouse mode takes you to cursor mode, ive never needed this myself so im guessing its there for a specific game??

Reason i think this would be good is there are quite a few games that require mouse and keyboard, or joystick and keyboard, so being able to switch quickly between the 3 would be very very helpfull. For those that need cursor mode in there... hmmmm, maybe a switch to change joystick with cursor and vice versa??

 

[skeezix]

I got my webcam pointed it at my gp32 running castaway 0.6 which was decrunching xenon2. With realproducer I made this little movie which shows xenon2 running at 1 frameskip, full sound and me playing it. I sent this file to this old mate I know since highschool, who used to own an atariST next to a spectrum (we always had this speccy - cbm64 discussion going, but were always very peacefull on Atari ST & Amiga matters) and I got an instant reply from him that he was going to buy the FLU gp32! And I didn´t even show him the spectrum emulators that are out there.

So there you have it castaway is a factor that is not to be taken lightly when it comes to increasing the number of Dutch gp32 users in my little n=1 study over here. The effect of a playable xenon2 on this particular handheld on my friends decision to get a gp32 is there but the sheer possibility of using atariST software on a gp32 with help of castaway was the decisive factor. So there you have it!

Keep up the good work. Awesome work.

p.s. indeed I have similar problems with the virtual keyboard that at times it is too sluggish (pressed keys sometimes seem not to get pressed) and sometimes to smooth (the red letter cursor just zaps to quickly or you loose sight of it all together)

Okay, okay.. wheres the movie file?

I'd love to see it

How did the screen turnout? I'd like to get a nice screenshot of Xenon2 and Dungeon Master running on the GP32, to put on the website.. (somehow, screenshots from the emu aren't as cool . If you've got anythign, post or email me (skeezix@skeleton.org)

The speed of the keyboard movement corresponds directly with busy-ness of the emulated ST. IF we poll for input all the time, it slows the emu down. So we poll for input when the ST thinks its a good idea (sort of), and if the machine is "really busy", it slows dowen the poll requests, so you get a sluggish keyboard. I might fiddle with it, but I like that iots zero-speed-hit right now

As of 007, you can open the virtual keyboard, and theres no slowdown at all!

jeff