Frantic (2600)

[+SpiceWare]

 

[+SpiceWare]

On 9/29/2023 at 1:35 PM, JetSetIlly said:

MacOS Sonoma was released a couple of days ago. Have you had a chance to test Gopher2600 with it yet? There's a very remote possibility that the issue has been solved with the update.

 

I've not forgotten about this. After doing the Frantic PRGE build I went on a 2 week vacation with my folks.  Since I wasn't going to be home I used the delayed blog posting feature to post the ROM after PRGE wrapped up (the 7pm is Houston time):

 

 

For our vacation we drove to Yellowstone in my folks' Model Y (convenient charging was in West Yellowstone):

 

 

 

 

 

 

and then onto Tacoma, Washington to visit family.We arrived in Tacoma on Friday the 13th.  It was about 2.5 hours away from Portland, so I'd hoped to be able to make an appearance at PRGE; but on Saturday I was overtired from Yellowstone (the elevation took a bit to get used to, we're only 50 ft above sea level in Houston) and all the driving, and on Sunday we had a full day scheduled with family. My cousins' kids had fun in the Tesla:

 

 

 

On our drive back we went thru Monarch Pass (elevation 11,312 ft). It was an interesting experience to watch the Model Y gain 18 miles of range as we made our way from the top of the pass to our next charging stop in Poncha Springs (elevation 7,464 ft).

 

Anyway I will hopefully get Sonoma installed this weekend, or the next, and then build the latest version of Gopher2600.

 

 

[+SpiceWare]

On 9/29/2023 at 1:35 PM, JetSetIlly said:

MacOS Sonoma was released a couple of days ago. Have you had a chance to test Gopher2600 with it yet? There's a very remote possibility that the issue has been solved with the update.

 

Updated to Sonoma, updated brew and all the packages (SDL is now ver 2.28.4, was 2.28.3 before), got latest source for Gopher2600 and rebuilt it.

 

Tried the different Swap Interval options without any luck, lots of frames get skipped when the CRT view is all by itself, yet no (or minimal) frames are skipped if the full debugger environment is shown.

 

[JetSetIlly]

7 hours ago, SpiceWare said:

 

Updated to Sonoma, updated brew and all the packages (SDL is now ver 2.28.4, was 2.28.3 before), got latest source for Gopher2600 and rebuilt it.

 

Tried the different Swap Interval options without any luck, lots of frames get skipped when the CRT view is all by itself, yet no (or minimal) frames are skipped if the full debugger environment is shown.

I've asked the other MacOS user I know who uses Gopher2600 and they're not having the same issue, so I think we can discard the VSYNC theory for now.

 

I remember adding the "frame queue length" option for you (to improve the accuracy of paddle input). Do you still have the frame queue set to 1? That would

affect the screen drawing.

 

 

If that's not it, could you send a video of what you're seeing. Include the FPS window (F7) in the video please.

 

 

[+SpiceWare]

9 hours ago, JetSetIlly said:

I remember adding the "frame queue length" option for you (to improve the accuracy of paddle input). Do you still have the frame queue set to 1? That would affect the screen drawing.

 

Changing that from 1 to 5 appears to have fixed it, thanks!

 

 

[AtariLeaf]

Any updates on the status of Frantic Darryl?

[+SpiceWare]

Sorry, haven't been inspired to work on Atari projects for a while.  Last month in an attempt to rekindle my interested I started work on a PAL60 version of Gas Hog. It's mostly done:

 

 

But then dad ended up in the hospital for a week and Atari projects were pushed to the back burner again.  

 

Dad's doing much better and I hope to get back to Gas Hog soon.

 

After that I need to look at CDFJ+ again.  There's an issue where when a game is loaded via the Harmony menu it runs at 70 Hz but when flashed to a Melody board (or Harmony) it runs at 60 Hz which can cause the screen to jitter and/or roll due to game code taking longer to run.  Frantic's using CDFJ+, and already has jitter/roll issues at higher levels when run at 70 Hz, so this needs to be figured out.