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Stunning update on Nuance:

I just finished my first level of T3K on my not-so-awesome/mid-range laptop, with non-stuttery sound and reasonable framerate.. :)

 

Old bad news:

There are STILL some bugs in the emulator hiding somewhere that make most games hang at some point, and in T3K one also first needs to visit the vector test to prevent this hang from directly happening on level select..

 

Also lots of other bugs fixed and (at least) Ballistic and Merlin Racing now display fully correctly.

  • Like 2
2 hours ago, toxie said:

Stunning update on Nuance:

I just finished my first level of T3K on my not-so-awesome/mid-range laptop, with non-stuttery sound and reasonable framerate.. :)

 

Old bad news:

There are STILL some bugs in the emulator hiding somewhere that make most games hang at some point, and in T3K one also first needs to visit the vector test to prevent this hang from directly happening on level select..

 

Also lots of other bugs fixed and (at least) Ballistic and Merlin Racing now display fully correctly.

Stunning news!!!  With a decent enough emulator, I'd like to go back and finish my old code I haven't touched in almost 20 years :)  I got tired of odd shit like moving one line of code dropping my framerate from 60fps to 30fps, and really got tired of burning to CD-RW to debug code, with NO way to debug code other than onscreen variables.  Yeah - really good when your code crashed and 1/60th of a second later, black screen.  I would have killed for a legit dev kit back in the day.

  • Like 1

I will announce a new release version here as soon as i think that i fixed (and did not break anything new ;)) enough.. I still have the hope to find some more fishy code and hopefully get rid of the hangs.. ?

 

The thing that bugs me with T3K gameplay so far are the missiles vs the spikes.. That's tricky for sure..

  • Like 1

Thanks! In the meantime i made some progress, i think i finally understood where the majority of hangs come from, the question is just how to fix it 'properly'.

With a not-so-whacky fix i could play through complete shareware Doom, so yay! Unfortunately, f.e. Merlin Racing and T3K react more 'chaotic', so while they hang less often, they still hang from time to time.  ?

  • Like 2
1 hour ago, toxie said:

Thanks! In the meantime i made some progress, i think i finally understood where the majority of hangs come from, the question is just how to fix it 'properly'.

With a not-so-whacky fix i could play through complete shareware Doom, so yay! Unfortunately, f.e. Merlin Racing and T3K react more 'chaotic', so while they hang less often, they still hang from time to time.  ?

How the hell can you take someone else's code as complex as a Nuon emulator, and understand it enough to make fixes?

Fortunately, he was a really really good coder, also a lot of the code was already 'complete'. There were just some bugs that one could 'spot' by staring at things ;) and some timing/multi-threading based issues he did not notice back then, as simply computers were too slow, so it 'mostly' worked anyway without crashing/hanging most of the time.

 

It's still not perfect by now, but enough that i also finally could start a game of T3K from level 1 and play for quite a while! (although still involves a bit of 'luck' to be able to select level 1, or a rather fast desktop PC :))

If i can manage i'll try to record a video soon. For those brave enough, the updated code is all in the svn mentioned in the first post. Later-on, as said, i'll package up a new release, but first want to finish up my todos.

  • Like 2

Wow nice work toxie!  :D

 

(Wanna take a crack at the Atari 800 emulator for the Nuon next?   Controls aren't quite working right or we would have a slow game of Return of Heracles going now).

On 12/24/2019 at 6:20 AM, SparkTR said:

They've been uploaded to the Internet Archive for preservation.

That is amazing news.  Speaking of which, wish the prototype for Amazing would show up.

Yeh the Atari800 for Nuon you can paste in disk images into the binary and play various games, but at like 20% the speed.   Electronic Arts turn based games like MULE (the original one demoed) and Return of Heracles are not "terrible" in those situations, but something is up with the fire button, like it is stuck?  Luckily the source for this one is available too.

 

Would be cool if at least the controls worked better, but again nice work on Nuance.   Till now, at least with Mac and Wine, I was only able to get the screen to display a crashed opening screen, but was still helpful in testing the boot up on the Nuon disc images I created.   Need to see if things work any better on the Mac running it with what you added.

  • 4 weeks later...
4 hours ago, toxie said:

Just a small update: Project still alive  ;)  but want to sort out the random hang in T3K first before going for a release.

Alright!!  :D   Looking forward to it.

  • 1 month later...

Just got the vmlabs SDK release 2 installed on a windows 7 laptop.

"gmake"'ed the sample Hello-World program and it runs in Nuance 0.51.

 

Haven't tried to make any "NUON.CD" file CD-R's yet and haven't looked at my Samsung N501 since it got stuck on the "loading..." problem.

 

Tried to use my Logitech NUON pad with my Toshiba NUON player and use it to play the Dragon's Lair DVD but can't get the Logitech to control the DVD. In the instructions for the Logitech NUON pad it says that it can be used for DVD transport controls but no luck with me on the Toshiba. Maybe it works with the Samsung units???!

The Nuon was a fascinating concept and one that was squashed by the PS2 along with other devices (ex. Dreamcast).  It would have been nice to see what it could have done if the format could have had a lot more initial development and standardization.  Still, it just wasn't meant to be unfortunately.

  • 1 month later...

As i pretty much hit a brick wall with these weird hangs/crashes on Merlin Racing and Tempest 3000, here the current status/release:  :)

 

https://sourceforge.net/projects/nuance-nuon-emulator/files/Nuance_060.zip/download

 

Please read the Demo/GameCompatibility.txt (especially for the workarounds for Tempest 3000 to make it work a bit more reliably) and the readme.txt for the keyboard mappings.

 

And of course, this is all done in honour of the original author of Nuance, Mike Perry!

I mainly continued all of this to not let this great piece of technology of him bitrot even more.

  • Like 3
2 hours ago, toxie said:

As i pretty much hit a brick wall with these weird hangs/crashes on Merlin Racing and Tempest 3000, here the current status/release:  :)

 

https://sourceforge.net/projects/nuance-nuon-emulator/files/Nuance_060.zip/download

 

Please read the Demo/GameCompatibility.txt (especially for the workarounds for Tempest 3000 to make it work a bit more reliably) and the readme.txt for the keyboard mappings.

 

And of course, this is all done in honour of the original author of Nuance, Mike Perry!

I mainly continued all of this to not let this great piece of technology of him bitrot even more.

Awesome!  I'll try to check this out this evening.

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