Outcast Alpha 001 For Wiz

[skeezix]

Not 'news'; lets beat this up and let me iron out bugs, then we can call it news when I make a 'official' release shall we?

Atari ST emu for those who don't know

This is very similar to the gp2x version; I've also got Hatari to come out for Wiz, which is a superior emu overall, but many of you will be (hopefully) fond of my many years old cross platform emu, and it still runs nice as ever. (In theory, once I tune it up, we should be able to downclock and run this in battery saving mode since it was designed for lean little machines like gp32!)

I've not included instructiuons, sorry, in a mega rush.

In essence, you need to put it somewhere, and then drop a TOS.rom file in /roms/atari-st (sorry for the hardcoded path, I'll do something about that later.) TOS.rom is the OS firmware for the ST, so you need one. PReferably TOS 1.02 US, since thats the one I test with, and the others freak it out more often

You'll also want some disk images to fire up, also stuck into /roms/atari-st

"X" bails out of most menus without doing anything, while "B" activates a menu item.
SELECT toggles keyboard onscreen and when up, X hits a key. (you can scroll around the keyboard, since it doesn't fit onscreen.)
START brings up the main menu to pick disks, reset, and myriad other things.

Timing is all a mess -- it will run too fast often, and the timing between keys is buggered so it'll scroll too fast in menus and such.. I know, no need to tell me Audio is off for now too. Too many disks shown in the picker. And joystick diagonals don't work.

I'll fix those things soon.. but let me know of anything else you find out about.

I hope you enjoy it, and with your help I can tune it back up to the snuff it had on the gp2x or more

http://www.codejedi.com/outcast/binaries/outcast-wiz-001.zip

jeff

 

[vEGA-rJ]

Great news, in download! ;D

 

[DaveC]

Thanks Jeff, will test now. It is good to see the old ST on the Wiz. Now maybe someone will port an Amiga emu so we can have old ST vs Amiga wars again

 

[ninjawiz2x]

*ahem* Dave who are you kidding here? Atari FTW .

 

[DaveC]

*ahem* Dave who are you kidding here? Atari FTW .

The Amiga was far better hardware than the ST, more colors, much better sound. Amiga rulez, ST droolz :lol:

But on the Wiz the ST is best because there is no Amiga emu.


I found a bug, anytime I load a game it works for a few seconds then dumps out to the Wiz GUI. Maybe I am just lucky or the emu is erroring out.

 

[ninjawiz2x]

Wait..whats that great sound coming from my low frequency mono speaker ? Oh yeah that right we ruled at midi my friend , and we dint cry for a year to get dungeon master . Don't bother mapping out the dungeon Dave , you can borrow my graph book with a year worth of mapped out dungeons and spells combination :lol:

 

[vampire8bit]

Skeezix, do you have any plans to update the ST emu for GP2X or port Hatari to it?

 

[skeezix]

DaveC -- which games (and on which crack-group disk)? I saw a couple do that, but the great majority of the ones I tried worked fine.

Theres a bunch of oddities for me to track down due to changes from 2x to Wiz, but once cleaned up it should be as solid as the 2x version, and much cleaned up. (I'm dropping out a lot of 'tricks' and gubk that wer ein the gp32 and early 2x versions.. its fast enough that I'd rather have clean code that messy with tricks.)

You can see some of the goofyness .. when you fire up the emu, the bottom part of the display under the ST screen isn't cleared; could be botching somethin up instead, say. I'll sort through it all (same codebase for Pandora too of course), just time is tighter than it once was

And yeah, need to get sound working. I mean _damn_, stinks without it.

And Hatari .. goofy menu, but a much higher quality emulation, and it supports hard drive mounts .. so could mount the SD as drive C: on the ST, and do lots of crazyness.

jeff

 

[skeezix]

Ah, some helpful elf uploaded BJ and OutcaST to the archive; hopefully I can still update those myself to put the next versions in there

jeff

As to gp2x .. I don't recall if the gp2x has the resources for Hatari or a trimmed down one, offhand. As to outcast, it should still build relatively easily for gp2x as I always try to keep my stuff cross platform (builds currently for gp2x, psp, wiz, pandora, palm, SDL for pc/mac/linux/etc), but we'll see if I have free time to actively update it much. ie: The work right now is to bring the Wiz one to the sameness of the gp2x one.. I'll worry about what happens after that, when I get there Theres a few usability changes I'd like to do, and some game picker changes to make it easier to use for large volumes of games, and allow multiple rom paths etc. At the time back in 2006/2007 I hadn't worried about 16GB SDHC cards with the entire ST game collection on them

 

[skeezix]

For that matter, whoebver uploaded OutcaST to the archive put it in the Shooter category, not in the Emu -> Computer category. Is category somethign that can be editted?

jeff

 

[carlgeorge]

Thanks, appreciated.

 

[skeezix]

I had a few moments, so fixed sound to work, cleaned up a few display issues and so on. One thing that annoys the heck out of me is as soon as I turn on compiler optimizations, the emu stops working. (gcc-4.1.1 in this case, I should build a newer one but thats a big pita compiler optims in my case due to insane macro use and such really crank out a lot of benefit .. probably a 20% speedup etc, so I really really want to have them working. I'll sort it out, but *shucks* it doesn't "just work"

I'll post another build in a couple days that should be much improved.

jeff

 

[DaveC]

Wait..whats that great sound coming from my low frequency mono speaker ? Oh yeah that right we ruled at midi my friend , and we dint cry for a year to get dungeon master . Don't bother mapping out the dungeon Dave , you can borrow my graph book with a year worth of mapped out dungeons and spells combination :lol:

Oh yeah that is right MIDI I forgot about that. Maybe it was easy to forget because almost no games supported it. I just remember the "great" sound comming from those surplus Speccy sound chips they bought in bulk at auction and put in the ST. I forgot that you had to go out and buy a MIDI synthesiser that cost more than the computer itself just to get decent sound for 2 games Then we need to remember that you had to wait more than a year to get an ST with a blitter chip kludge, even though it couldn't be used in parallel with the CPU like it could on the Amiga. See all of those old talking points come back easily.

(See Skeezix, now we can start the ST-Amiga wars again! just like the old days. Thanks for porting this :lol: And of course you realize that I am joking here )