Outcast Beta Released For Caanoo!


skeezix

skeezix

Internal Development
Joined
Mar 11, 2003
Messages
8,070
Website
www.codejedi.com
This is a direct port of the last Wiz build of OutcaST, with some very minor improvements. (A couple more menus have better 'selection speed', so the selection isn't zooming around as much.. notably in the Control Mode menu.)

Hopefully it performs better than when run as a Wiz binary under Ginge; sound is probably still nasty as I was never really good at working out the ST sound hardware, but hopefully better than under Ginge again ;)

Get the emu here for now:
http://www.codejedi.com/caanoo/outcast-caanoo-104.zip

Unpack into your /game directory on your ST (ie: /game/outcast.ini and /game/outcast/random-stuff should exist.)

You'll want to read the README.txt, but in general..
Create /roms
Create /roms/atari-st
Stick your TOS.ROM Atari ST OS file into /roms/atari-st (it must be TOS.ROM, not ToS.RoM or TOS.IMG or anything other than TOS.ROM, case sensitive.)
Stick .ST or .MSA or .zip disk images into /roms/atari-st as well.

It should run nicely from your Caanoo menu, and the run-script will attempt to run the Caanoo menu on exit or crash. (You can edit this to be gmenu if you like, if you've not just replaced your Caanoo menuw ith gmenu :)

Please let me know how it goes, and..

Enjoy!

jeff

Xenon 2: Megablast:
xenon_2_megablast_5.gif
 
thanks  skeezix ;)
i will try it soo
EDIT: tried now, very good! run nicely and speedy, but if you can add the touchscreen support ;)
i have to test it more, but it looks very good jet
 
skeezix, how about update for pandora? [still like outcast / castaway more than hatari..]
Click to expand...
why you talk in CAANOO forum about the pandora things??
 
Re: Touchscreen -- touchscreen is always a big problem for Atari ST and Amiga emulators (but usually okay for DOS); even the big ticket ST/Amiga emus with years of dev work on a desktop commonly have issues. (ie: A _mouse_ can be simulated by a d-pad, since these old systems used a 'I'm moving left' type system, with no 'driver' separation to the OS; the mouse said its moving left 'right now' when the OS checks, and thats that. If the mouse 'teleports around' liek with a touchscreen, its difficult to get right -- you tap in bottom right, you tap in top left, how do we tell the OS to move 320 pixels over .. it _cannot_; it can 'mvoe left' at a certain speed for awhile, until we 'think' the OS has gotten it there. ie: each vertical blank, move over another pixel, 320 vertical blanks. But games do a lto of tricks.. changing resolution or screen paramaters every scanline. Look at the Magnetic Scrolls games, which are medium rez on the top half and low rez on the bottom. Dungeon Master plays with colours a lot, so it can have different top-inch versus the main display. So while the OS is switchign specs mid-scanline or jumping around ignoring the vertical blank (overscan etc), we're trying to 'guess' when tio push the mouse.

In DOS, you have a driver, so you can implement a virtualized driver that has a better idea, but even then.. it depends on a few things; usually works okay.

But Amiga and ST.. its a right pita, so touchscreen .. best avoided. Even Hatari has issues pulling it off .. you almost always get a 'drift' (tap, and the emulation thinkgs its an inch over).

--

Pandora -- if folks like OutcaST, then sure, I can build up a port for it. The code is nasty (descended from work I did like 10 years ago and never did a nice job with ;) , but since the Wiz its ported to SDL; the Caanoo port is leveraging the Wiz port plus overrides. I could likewise do a Pandora build .. its mostly overriding how the control inputs are taken, where to loko for files, etc.

So yeah, a Pandora port woudl probabyl only take a couple hours to put together.

Hatari has feature kill over OutcaST by far and is a much better emulation, so I'm surprised you prfer OutcaST (but yay, makes me happy ;) -- I imagine you maybe just prefer the onscreen keyboard or the menu that is controllable with dpad isntead of touchscreen.

--

I keep thinking it'd be cool to either integrate Hatari into OutcaST (I'd meant to with the gp2x and Wiz) or jsut write a minimal UI for Hatari .. use the Hatari core, but with a UI that fits on 320x240 and doesn't need a mouse/touchscreen; that'd rock. But its work, and these days, I've no time to just throw around too much .. I can slip in, do the quick job and out again :/

--

jeff

Does it run better than the gp2x or Wiz versions unger Ginge?

I should bring back my ST-like UI for the disk picker; I think I had that on the gp2x build.. the green background with white window with the ST font and such :)
 
Hatari can do stuff like that; I forget what MIDI I have in here.. more to point, doing _high res_ (Notator and Cubase and most MIDI apps were high res monochrome) is pretty much out -- we have 320x200 to play with for low rez, so a nice 1:1 display more or less. ST Medium is double the horizontal -- 640x200, so I just drop every other column to get it to display.. works passibly. But ST high rez is 640x400 .. dropping 75% of your pixels makes it almost totally unusable.

jeff
 
skeezix said:
Pandora -- if folks like OutcaST, then sure, I can build up a port for it. The code is nasty (descended from work I did like 10 years ago and never did a nice job with ;) , but since the Wiz its ported to SDL; the Caanoo port is leveraging the Wiz port plus overrides. I could likewise do a Pandora build .. its mostly overriding how the control inputs are taken, where to loko for files, etc.

So yeah, a Pandora port woudl probabyl only take a couple hours to put together.
Click to expand...

Of course i like :D


skeezix said:
Hatari has feature kill over OutcaST by far and is a much better emulation, so I'm surprised you prfer OutcaST (but yay, makes me happy ;) -- I imagine you maybe just prefer the onscreen keyboard or the menu that is controllable with dpad isntead of touchscreen.
Click to expand...

Yes, You're right, i prefer onscreen kbd, for example: in a bus. I hate to use touchscreen when im going somewhere by bus :p. .. and outcast is easier to use [only few clicks to start a game] than hatari..
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Thanx Skeezix !

Tried Vroom and Dungeon Master on the two versions, it's a bit smoother on the new version. And the emu menu is faster.

Sound is quite the same I think.
 
Hello Jeff !!

Thanks again for the port on the caanoo

Here's my first report :

very very good speed !

a problem with the numpad : ex some ST compilations ask an input number (1=Rick dangerous, 2=some other game, etc) and in fact if I put "1" it doesn't launch rick dangerous but the game after. To launch The game mapped to "1" key I have to click on the square to the left of the "1" touch on the numpad of the virtual keyboard. I'm with caanoo firmware 1.5.0

the main issue probably deals with sound : ie the Wahahahaaaa sound in Rick Dangerous is quite weird. And for instance no "motor" sound in Vroom (we have already spoke of that, it's a problem with long samples) .

You said outcast was first designed to run at 150mghz so it explains the optimizations for the sound, but with a caanoo that runs at 520-750 mghz wouldn't it be possible to use this power to enhance sound ?

Thanks again for this release !
 
These days I have very limited time, so theres not much I can do to improve the emulation (including audio) quality; I can do little UI tweaks and such, but I don't have hours/weeks to blow away on feature improvements I'm afraid :(

(As someone who generally has a large number of projects and new development on the go its hard for me to step back, but have to this year .. keeping a couple projects open and on the slow burn, but mostly I'm going to have 6mo or more of 'totally wiped out' :)

choca -- I tend to use the numbers on the top (scroll up to find them if needed), never use the right-side keypad; its shifted by one? *Doh* :)

jeff
 
I found it OK through Ginge except one thing, when I tried to put all my roms it would crash, so I had to limit the amount of roms in the list. Has this been fixed?
 
Thanks! The emulator works fine... it should be just a little implementation in emulation speed and an improvement in the sound playback...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

skeezix
Outcast Alpha 001 For Wiz
Replies
12
Views
2K
DaveC
D
S
Having Trouble With Outcast
Replies
6
Views
2K
skaboy
S
H
Stoopid Q About Outcast
Replies
2
Views
1K
hopalong0_3
H
skeezix
Outcast Alpha 004
Replies
13
Views
4K
Eclipse
Eclipse
daclassicgamingmaster
Help Using Outcast
Replies
2
Views
842
daclassicgamingmaster
daclassicgamingmaster
Back
Top