Need Some Good Testers For Castaway Soon :)

[Antiriad]

count me in for testing jeff...

but cmon man have another go with Cyclone will ya?

 

[skeezix]

Cyclone hasn't changed in months, so no point for now; if fdave comes back and updates it, mebbe; I suppose Reesyhas been at it. *Shrug* I'm still pretty tied up, so doing what I can

We'll have to fiddle and see.. if it becomes less compatible or less stable, I can just rollback.. I've got a snapshot of CaSTaway/GP 14.1 backed up of course

I'm working on 15.0 right now with some hacks from PoPC all over it; its compiling now, but theres some crashers I need to fix first and we'll see; some new FDC and CPU fixes should be helpful though I'm using my old sound engine and other parts since I think audio was pretty good overall already..

jeff

 

[DaveC]

Cyclone hasn't changed in months, so no point for now; if fdave comes back and updates it, mebbe; I suppose Reesyhas been at it. *Shrug*  I'm still pretty tied up, so doing what I can

We'll have to fiddle and see.. if it becomes less compatible or less stable, I can just rollback.. I've got a snapshot of CaSTaway/GP 14.1 backed up of course

I'm working on 15.0 right now with some hacks from PoPC all over it; its compiling now, but theres some crashers I need to fix first and we'll see; some new FDC and CPU fixes should be helpful though I'm using my old sound engine and other parts since I think audio was pretty good overall already..

jeff

​

Actually it HAS changed in months. It has had like 3 or 4 cyclone bugs fixed by Reesy about a week or so ago in one of the newer betas of DrMD. These bugs may have been keeping cyclone from working in CaSTaway.

 

[skeezix]

Slick, Iv'e got Xenon 1 running in Geepee32 emu right now, so think I'm back in business and using a bunch of new code.

Will have to source out some .STT images (real .STT images, not .ST renamed to .STT) .. they have more info in them, which allows the emu to emulate disk protection better.

I'll have to try Sensi Soccer

jeff

 

[DaveC]

Cool, how is the speed compared to the old version ? faster, slower?

Any chance of single file game loading without the need for the .st disk images?

 

[skeezix]

I'm still running on emu right now as I'm on call for some work, so no chance to send to my real GP So I can't judge speeds or the like with the updated code; I shoudl think it'd be the same speed.. same CPU core (with some fixes), same render code, same audio code; its improved timing and FDC and some other stuff, so shouldnt' direclty impact speed.

There is no direct app loading on an ST.. it always comes from a disk, or a hard drive, since thats all the machine had of course. So right now there is no hard drive support, which is what you want (to load .prg's from SMC), so you have to fiddle with disk images.

HD support is screwy but not too hard I shoudl think, but it'll be a little while before I get some time free'd up for attacking that, but its on my list

Right now I'm just hoping to get some better timing and maybe pick up a few more games that didn't work before.

Sensi Soccer on one disk image I just tried doesn't work any better *shucks), but I've still got some more patches to put in.

jeff

 

[DaveC]

Is there some other ST emu that you could nick the HDD code from? That would make this emu rock. I could never put games back to disk images easily. It required so much futzing around that I just gave up altogether. This is kind of a bummer as the SMC space is so limited. So with having compilation disk images on the SMC it means having a big part of the space being taken up by dodgy games that I don't like or games that don't work.

Maybe if there was a good utility that was made for manipulating these images on a PC, it would be practical to make and rearrange floppy images. Doing this through an ST emu on the PC is a very slow and tedious process. Is there any good PC based non-emulator way to manage files on ST images out there?

 

[skeezix]

There used to be a Windows Explorer plugin to let it work on .sT images; I only vageuly rememebr it as it was buggy at the time and in French; perhaps its come along over the years.

Hatari has some HDD support I think, though not sure how stable it is; its not so easy as just plopping it in though../ some tight integration and timing.

jeff

 

[skeezix]

Sensi has improved a touch, but still broken (can't enter it).. but some artwork shows up that didn't before

jeff

 

[skeezix]

OKay, someone give this a try..

I've not tried it on a real device yet, as I've been in a conf call the last few hours But it works well in the emu anyway, and given its solid foundation I have high hopes

Let me know..

1) If its faster or slower
2) If its more or less compatible
3) If theres anything missing.. (ie:for awhile in my dev build, the disk icons weren't flickering and took me a sec to notice..)

So in essence.. is this 15.0 a better version that the previous builds?

http://www.codejedi.com/castaway/binaries/castgp150.zip

Please let me know

jeff

 

[skeezix]

[01:59:08] <ratx> skeezix: castaway 15.0 not loading anything for me, crashing
on all my old disk images

So maybe this one is broken; if so, I'll look into it

jeff

Still on the phone.. ugh

 

[look]

What tos version should is everyone using

just tried with 1.02 and 1.04 and this version reboots my FLU which usually overclock to 144Mhz

This is evenloading the DISKA.STT image that came included


EDIT...

also

As DaveC mentioned Reesy has squashed some very big bugs in the cyclone core.

You ca see this right away looking through the beta's and comparing it with older Genesis emus.

There must be a big improvement in its chances of working with castaway.

EDIT AGAIN:

skeezix Have you looked at http://steem.atari.st/index.htm

they have put lots of stuff on there about ST HW emulation perhaps something that may help with hardisk emulation

 

[Tobriand]

Tobr -- not going to be around the GP for 7 months? Good lord, whats going on?

jeff

​

Off to Nepal for 7 months, and I'm not taking the GP32 simply because I imagine I either wouldn't come back with it, and because it might be a little tactless to be waving around a very high-tech gadget in the 3rd poorest country in the world, especially considering I'm going to be in just about the most rural area of it. I should have net access at weekends with a bit of luck (so I'll still be around on the boards I hope), but no GP for a while...

Anyways, time to give 15.0 a test or few and see how it handles .

 

[Iorgy77]

15.0 also reseting my gp32 after selecting an .ST image and pressing start.

 

[look]

If you get hard disk support will you be able to make zip files open onto the harddisk.

So you could have a compressed directory structure of games in folders in a zip.

This way you wouldnt need to worry about disk images if you just have .prg's and .tos files.

This is how steem works(sorry to harp on)

 

[skeezix]

I should have time to work on this today/tomorrow, so I'll see about geting a 15.1 that runs on the real device, now that it at least runs in the emu. (Having to work 8 hours on a weekend evenign was a big drag

I'll work on HDD support and such of course, but relax.. its a lot of work, and I already work 60-80 hours a week so it takes time

jeff

 

[look]

60-80 hours a week

Luxury!