troubles with my A8 remakes for PC (dos)

[matosimi]

hi all. I know this is not that much atari related, but maybe you can help me.

 

i created some games when i was at highschool. they could be downloaded from my old website, but that web is deleted now and i was considering republishing of these games (and some other stuff) on my blog.

 

problem is that they are written in turbo pascal 7, which is 16bit, so they cannot be executed on current windows OS. (i remember that XP was able to handle them).

 

i tried dosbox, but it is very slow (probably caused by inline asm routines). also my biggest game of that time called Rock suffers from incorrectly drawn level.

 

This game is based on Atari game Rockman by Adrian Galinski (1995), looks like this:

 

as you can see, level is incorrectly drawn.

This is binary, so you can try it on your own:

RockGame.zip

 

I have also 2 more atari "clones" that has similar issues.

 

Do you have any idea how to make it work as it should?

 

Regards,

Martin

 

[Sub(Function(:))]

Have you tried virtualBox? This a full emulation solution so you would need a DOS or old version of windows

[+JAC!]

How about re-compiling using FPC - http://www.freepascal.org/ ?

 

Free Pascal (aka FPK Pascal) is a 32 and 64 bit professional Pascal compiler. It can target multiple processor architectures: Intel x86, AMD64/x86-64, PowerPC, PowerPC64, SPARC, and ARM. Supported operating systems include Linux, FreeBSD, Haiku, Mac OS X/iOS/Darwin, DOS, Win32, Win64, WinCE, OS/2, MorphOS, Nintendo GBA, Nintendo DS, and Nintendo Wii. Additionally, JVM, MIPS (big and little endian variants) and Motorola 68k architecture targets are available in the development versions.

Edited September 15, 2013 by JAC!

[matosimi]

Sub,

I'm sure virtualbox would solve this, but i would like to run and share these games like portable apps, not as VMX images.

 

JAC!,

My games use inline assembler that cannot be simply recompiled, but it has to be completely rewritten.

I'm also using unit XVGA which is 100% inline asm + unit for keyboard (reading 7 buttons simultaneously).

[baktra]

Hi,

 

Is your DOSBox properly configured? The screenshots indicate that it emulates only 3500 cycles - this is too slow. Did you try to set cycles=auto in your dosbox.conf file?

 

If you have trouble with graphics, did you try to set different machine= values in the dosbox.conf file? Your graphics problems can also indicate flaws in the drawing library that don't surface on a real machine.

 

 

 

 

 

[matosimi]

Hi,

 

Is your DOSBox properly configured? The screenshots indicate that it emulates only 3500 cycles - this is too slow. Did you try to set cycles=auto in your dosbox.conf file?

 

If you have trouble with graphics, did you try to set different machine= values in the dosbox.conf file? Your graphics problems can also indicate flaws in the drawing library that don't surface on a real machine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

i'm not very familiar with dosbox, but i managed to run those games in proper speed.

i found some GUI for dosbox and set cycles mode to max. (auto was not good)

 

anyway, ROCK still have scrambled levels.. i will try to check it in code, maybe there is something pretty stupid that is responsible for such behavior.

 

Thanks

[Tickled_Pink]

Wow! RLE files. Haven't seen those since ....

 

Anyway, it's been YEARS since I did any PASCAL. And yes, it was Turbo Pascal.

 

The only thing I can think of is that virtualbox hasn't been designed to work with 16 bits. Some digging around shows that it isn't that stable with running 16-bit operating systems.

 

I doubt that any of the current virtualisation systems are going to be that good at running a 16-bit OS. Although the original 16-bit instructions are there on a 64-bit processor, the CPU has to execute them in one of its legacy modes. I'm just wondering whether it's able to do that on the fly because of other internal changes that take place in the way the CPU handles its registers and memory. I would imagine so but perhaps it expects a 16-bit OS from the outset and once it's been asked to run a 32-bit or 64-bit OS then switching back and forth to a 16-bit OS is asking too much of it.

 

So I think the only way is going to be a rewrite, I'm afraid.

 

Unless ... can you zip up your sources and put them on here for us to take a look at?

Edited September 16, 2013 by Tickled_Pink

[popmilo]

i'm not very familiar with dosbox, but i managed to run those games in proper speed.

i found some GUI for dosbox and set cycles mode to max. (auto was not good)

 

anyway, ROCK still have scrambled levels.. i will try to check it in code, maybe there is something pretty stupid that is responsible for such behavior.

 

Thanks

Also works in DosBox for me. No special settings needed.

 

Levels do look scrambled ?

[matosimi]

Also works in DosBox for me. No special settings needed.

 

Levels do look scrambled ?

yes, they are scrambled. see picture of level 0 in first post.

there are two simple "for" cycles which are drawing sprites (leveldata) onto screenbuffer. it looks like there is kind of overflow when reading level data so it reads 1less or 1more byte each line.

 

that level should be quite ... orthogonal, not diagonal.

Edited September 17, 2013 by matosimi

[Justin Payne]

Has anyone tried it in the virtualize image of XP provided in Windows 7?

[matosimi]

even xpmode trough virtualPC cannot run it.

i'll try to run tp70 trough dosbox and recompile game, maybe there is some n00by mistake in code that somehow (pretty unbelievably) cause troubles in dosbox and works fine on realHW.

 

- sounds similar to my occasional atari issues , but situation there is always opposite

[matosimi]

wow, pretty insane sh*t.

it works fine when I compile and run the game through TP7 from dosbox.

so i took that new exe, replaced old one, then ran game without tp7 and scrambled levels remained!@#!

 

then i tried to run it separately using newly compiled exe which was placed together with assets from tp7 directory... results same.

 

i don't get it!

[popmilo]

wow, pretty insane sh*t.

it works fine when I compile and run the game through TP7 from dosbox.

so i took that new exe, replaced old one, then ran game without tp7 and scrambled levels remained!@#!

 

then i tried to run it separately using newly compiled exe which was placed together with assets from tp7 directory... results same.

 

i don't get it!

Don't know why but I kinda 'like' problems like these

 

As someone else pointed out, I recommend recompiling it in something like free pascal...

 

There is support for inline assembly in freepascal... Maybe it works with your code ?

 

And all those calls to xvga lib could be changed with some modern library call...

 

Only problem is it takes a lot of time...

[baktra]

I'd suspect some kind of uninitialized storage problem - storage used, but not zeroed before or something like that.

Try running also under Norton Commander or similar DOS Shell. By the way, how does the correctly drawn level look like?

[matosimi]

problem solved.

 

http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/LOADFIX

 

I have to run:

loadfix -64

then game runs as it should:

 

 

btw. i really like definition of loadfix, its ridiculous, but apparently true:

 

 

LOADFIX is a program to reduce the amount of available conventional memory.

It's useful for old programs which don't expect much memory to be free.

Edited September 18, 2013 by matosimi

[+CharlieChaplin]

Well,

 

believe it or not, but I have a 2 GHZ PC with 2GB RAM and a BIOS that supports both 5,25" and 3,5" floppy drives - and I installed MS-DOS 6.22 (via 3,5" diskettes) on it. I also installed Windows 3.11, Winword 6 and Excel 5 (all three from CD-ROM) on this PC. This is my DOS-PC and I am using it with SIO2PC and Ataridsk+WriteATR (via 5,25" HD drive which directly reads+writes Atari 8bit disks with 180k/360k/720k). How long does your Windows take to boot ? Mine is there in less than a second

 

Today I have "installed" (created a folder, copied+unzipped the ZIP file) your game ROCK and it works ! The strange thing is, it works almost in slow-motion on a 2GHZ PC ?!? I have not installed a "brake" and still it works very slow. The main figure is moving slower than on the A8. Nevertheless, the game is playable and the levels are not scrambled...

 

-Andreas Koch.

[matosimi]

Andreas, try this exe... it has no wait for vertical retrace during gameplay, but i believe gamespeed will be variable now.

Rock_no_vret.zip

 

 

[matosimi]

So, finally all stuff is released:

 

http://matosimi.websupport.sk/atari/2013/11/soft-oldies/lang/en/

[+JAC!]

The Rockman version is pretty nice. Pitty it has no sound it all.

[greblus]

The Rockman version is pretty nice. Pitty it has no sound it all.

 

Really cool games. And thanks to this thread I've tried also the original Atari Rockman. What a great game from the dark time after I sold my first Atari! (following Atarimania links led me to another discovery: Humanoid, again from the time I missed, and I was really impressed as well).