Outcast Updated To Ver. 009

[skeezix]

All right, while life is tieing me up quite handily I decided it was better to get a smaller release together then to keep fiddling around forever.

The update here has been done for aggggges, but I was fiddling with putting some good old ST .mod's and YM music in the menus and working on over-clocking settings and things, but I'v just not had time to finish up any of that business. So for now you get the little things..

Please work it over and let me know if I broke it
[CUT]
I've sent it up to the gp32x file repository but I think it awaits approval, so you can get it from my site as well:
http://www.codejedi.com/outcast

009
---
NEW: Aesthetics
o ripped Atari TOS font
o disk picker menu now uses a "GEM" theme so looks more authentic
o disk picker menu and options menu now use TOS font
o 'unpack demo' on load uses TOS font
o 'FIRING UP..' is now using TOS font
NEW: Mouse hack is always active; if a problem (let me know!) I
will make it a config file or menu controllable setting to enable/disable
o makes a few games more playable (hard drivin' for instance, among others)

Hope you like it; much more to come

jeff

yesyes, sound still stinks Now that I've been away from it a couple weeks while being on vacatoin and such, its more noticable [/CUT]

 

[DaveC]

Thanks for the update. I will test it.

 

[icurafu]

Thanks alot. I'll try this out soon aswell.

 

[baalim]

ahh great news !
one of my favorites emulators finally gets an update !

thank you skeezix (as an old atari fan, i'm more than thrilled to be able to play my old games on the gp2x )

 

[bja]

Great news! Will try it as soon as I get home. Thanks!

 

[halo9]

Thanks skeezix! bit of llamatron on the bus? yep...

 

[geise69]

Thanks skeezix! bit of llamatron on the bus? yep...

Ahhh...llamatron. Yak outdid himself on that game. It's definitly the best version ST, even more so than the amiga and dos versions. Thanks for the update skeezix. I will let you know of any bugs I find. Thanks again!

 

[skeezix]

Theres lots on my todo list for outcast:

This is most of the 'unordered' recorded requests:

Known issue: CPU clock speed not yet settable
Known issue: Occasional shimmer display - Time Bandits player in dual joy mode
o only occurs in dual joy+mouse mode, go to joy-mode to solve

squidge mmu -- no effect, but sometimes screws things up?
fps display option
mouse hack option - to enable/disable mouse-hack-mode
random st mod in menu background music?
random st pic in startup?
overclock setting?
config file with binding options, among others
button (?) to toggle between mouse/joy mode to avoid menu? bindable only?
disk menu option -- load and reset and return to emu, one shbang
list games by-game as option (like in gp32 version)
config file, path option to rom dir
joy mode that neuters up, but Y is up (until bindable options in)
cache the disk list to file, with refresh option? or only refresh on load
and savestate make?
improve sound emulation
fps toggle
figure out the input-crash where after a few resets, joy/mouse/keys don't work
deal gracefully with long filenames? (no spaces or weird chars in filenames)
format floppy menu option?
Fix: -save-save -- is this stll occuring?
ToDo: reset fix, so controls don't stop; _controls_.. which vars?
- could just 'exec' the application again, with argument to skip the
intro and cut right into disk picker? lame though..
ToDo: default filename in savestate

jeff

 

[DaveC]

I hope the "improve sound emulation" Part is high up on the list. That is kind of a big one to me.
Glad to see that you are still planning some work on it.

 

[Tobriand]

I'd still be interested in seeing what effect an "overclock 68k core" option would have, despite possible compatibility issues. 2D games look lovely as ever, but some 3D games simply are too juttery to play (and were on the original hardware); overclocking the core might introduce some other issues, but it might also be a worthwhile experiment if it's relatively trivial an option to introduce.

Course if it's less trivial, then perhaps not so worth trying out, but hey...

 

[DBH]

Has anyone tried to play ciscoheat with this or with UAE ?? I can't for the love of me get past the bloody welcome screen its really annoying.

 

[slaanesh]

I'd still be interested in seeing what effect an "overclock 68k core" option would have, despite possible compatibility issues. 2D games look lovely as ever, but some 3D games simply are too juttery to play

I was thinking this... I'd love to play Frontier again at a decent speed.

Pity there is no source to Frontier - though I think it's all 68K ASM anyway.

 

[Tobriand]

Weeeeelll.... there sort of is for FFE, in the illegal sense. Or at least, in that if you download the source for JJFFE, there's what appears to be a fully decompiled ffe.exe split into different lumps of x86 ASM.

However, it's probably not a great deal of help to port from...

 

[Yono]

Weeeeelll.... there sort of is for FFE, in the illegal sense. Or at least, in that if you download the source for JJFFE, there's what appears to be a fully decompiled ffe.exe split into different lumps of x86 ASM.

However, it's probably not a great deal of help to port from...

The source page is here: http://jaj22.org.uk/jjffe/srcjjffe.html

It supposedly compiles for linux. I found the page difficult to understand, as it mentioned SDL, OpenGL, Directx5 and Allegro. So I'm not exactly sure if it will run or not, maybe someone can have a look at it and give a conclusive answer.

 

[Tobriand]

Well, it'll run on linux on an x86 machine.

What it in all liklihood *won't* do is port over to the 2x. As I say, if you take even a cursory glance, you'll notice that there's ~700kb of x86 ASM code in there, which is, so far as I can tell, the result of decompiling the original.

It's a possible port, yes, but it is very very unlikley indeed. Anyway, back on topic...

 

[skeezix]

So lots of people downloaded, but no one commented

Does anyone like or hate the new ST-like menu I slipped in there? Should I convert all the menus to that sort of nostalgia menu, or stick with the good old reliable menus I've always used?

jeff

 

[halo9]

Hi skeezix. I think the TOS Style disk selector is great! I guess whether you convert them all depends how much work it is. I'd definitely like to see this, but wouldn't like to push you. Maybe the 'outcaST classic/TOS Style' descision could be a user configurable value if you get round to setting an external config file.
Still a bit of trouble with longer game titles overlapping in the menu. Along with DrMD this is definitely my most watched app for GP2x as a former ST/Genesis sider in the ST/Amiga and SNES/MD playground arguments...

Cheers mate

 

[skeezix]

Its "mostly" just a setting I pass into my zotlib menu handler.. which 'theme' to use, though due to how I've built that saystem I have to change the code around. ie: My 'theme' thing tells it how to draw the menus, but the actual font choice is left for each menu element (selection, body text, title text, caption text); so its easy to jkust change them all to have a 'st theme' flag, but then I also have to change them all to use the TOS-like font, and colouring, and sizing...

So not hard to do, coudl do it in a couple hours likely.

For the ST theme too I made it work well for full size, but I forget if it works well for smaller sizes and for window cover-overs and such. I hacked that together pretty fast

Its tempting, but I worry it might make it overly bland .. havine black-on-white menus for the whole thing is ST-like, but also very.. pained

Of course, I suppose I could extend the ST-theme to allow non-white backgrounds, but then it would not be so accurate.. hmm

jeff

 

[halo9]

hmm.. You might be right about the TOS style looking too 'plain', it'd be great for the ST fan but might put off the newcomer or idle browser. I thought you'd mentioned somewhere else an idea of making a ST demo-style menu, it'd look suitably retro without being black and white.

 

[bja]

Hey, the new release is great! I really like the new TOS/GEM-styled file selector. Although, I don't think it is ideal for all the menus in outcast (since it does look like a file selector and not a menu). It should be dedicated for file selection tasks only, imo. For the rest of the ui, I know GEM-style drop down menus are probably not worth the effort, but those could go well with the new file selector.

Here are some minor observations on this version:

- When you start the emulator your are dropped into the disk manager. Pressing 'start' here does not show the main menu, but rather starts the GEM desktop.

- I find the main menu is a little bit hard to navigate. Maybe the speed could be made into a config option? Not a big deal, though.

- Perhaps the intro / copyright screen could be prettier. Definately some nice graphics. Maybe an Atari logo somewhere?

- Semantics of B and X are not always consistent.

- No background music playing in the menus ;-)

I think you nailed it with the "cracked by skeezix..." splash screen. All operating systems should show progress using flickering colored lines


Thank you for this incredible emulator! It's the only software which has NAND status on my GP2X

A_167.zip!