CaSTaway/PSP 003 released!

[skeezix]

(How to post to news?)

Alright, this is the hot and spicey one!

http://www.codejedi.com/shadowplan/castaway.html

Tonnes of additions.. its really pulling together, and most anything you'd want is now present. Just need to fill in a few more little things, maybe flesh out the menu navigation options a bit, and add some config files.. but all the main goods like savestates and loadstates are all present now!

Alpha 003
---------
NEW: While emulation is running, hit [START] to bring up runtime options
o Disk Management -- lets you eject and insert a different floppy(s)
o Reset menu works -- lets you exit the emulator entirely, or do a
warm reset on the ST (ie: Try inserting some disks, then hitting
reset, and voila.. no need to exit emulator to swap disks.)
CHG: Turned brightness up a notch (shifted colour palette decoding)
o Med res and low res both
CHG: On-screen keyboard
o The 'selection' is alpha blended to darken the key; nicer than blacking
it out
o The keyboard itself will fade in and out rather than just toggling on
and off when you hit the [select] button
NEW: In addition to .ST disks, .MSA format disks are all supported; further,
either kind of disk can be in a .zip file and work fine. (As long as thats
the only file in the .zip) -- some .ST's will compress from 800k to 200k
in a zip file, so it could be worth it.
NEW: Added simple intro-screen so you know what version is coming up
NEW: Disk picker changes
o When you hit () to pick a disk, it'll ask you if you'd like to insert
it into drive A, or B, look it up in the database, or delete it.
o Insert into A, B, and delete now work
o Disk picker now allows you to have many disks -- it'll scroll; no more
than about a thousand disks for now (It shows .ST, .MSA, .ZIP and
.SS files)
o If no disk is chosen (like you hit X to many times), it'll warn you so
you know why nothing really exciting is going on
FIX: The mouse should work nicely; in 001/002 it might sometimes just not
work at all, but I've tried it in no-disks, and Dungeon Master and others
FIX: The key release and press mechanism has been fixed up a bit; when you
use the on-screen keyboard to press a key, it should get held down for
1/6th second and then released. If this is not sufficient, let me know
and I can increase its duration.. but that should be plenty.
NEW: Savestates/loadstates - you can now save a snapshot to SD card and
load it up later; far more useful than in-game-saving, and faster.
o Build a crude keyboard based interface to typing in a filename for SD card
o Savestate
- you name a filen "aaaa" and the emu compresses the system RAM (etc)
into a zipped file "aaaa.ss" (.ss denotes savestate)
o Loadstate (from the normal disk picker menu)
- pick a .ss file in the disk picker (as if it was any other disk); a
"load now" or "delete" menu will appear, so you can fire up the state
or just delete it
o Seems to work; I saved out a xenon2 savestate and loaded her back up;
use this to circumvent multi-disk or long loadtimes (Civilization and
Dungeon Master, I'm looking at you!)
NEW: Check for existance of TOS.ROM; if missing, show warning.
NEW: Games database
o When you pick a .msa, .st or .zip, it'll offer to insert it into the
drives; another option is to "look it up in the database", which calculates
a CRC on the disk and looks it up in a special database the GP32 users
helped create. If the CRC is found, a listing of games on that known
disk is shown.. otherwise, an error shows that its not in the database.

I hope you dig it!

Let me know what you think

jeff

[parabolee]

WOW WOW WOW WOW!!!!

this is the release I was waiting for!!!!

WOW

Best PSP EMU EVER!!!!!!!!!!!

WOW

I only wish the Amiga EMU was as good as this. I can't wait for updates already! It looks amazing and runs great! So many awesome games to play! I'm so happy!

I donation is heading your way real soon! WOW~~~!!!!! :)

[parabolee]

Sound doesn't work in all games, is that right?

I had it working in some of the start up intro's

[skeezix]

Theres one goofup; going into and out of menus will disable sound :/

I'll post an update in a bit with a few more additions and no sound-losing.

jeff

[skeezix]

I've added another download .. versoin 003c! Not heavily tested, but it should remov the bug where audio gets killed by menus opening/closing. Further, it adds a control mode so you can use PSP analog to control joystick if you want.

http://www.codejedi.com/shadowplan/castaway.html

jeff

[skeezix]

If you're looking for screenshots of piles of ST games, heres some shots from the Palm OS version of the emu.. piles of screenies to look at.

http://www.codejedi.com/shadowplan/castscreens.html

jeff

[parabolee]

Awesome work!!!!!!

[parabolee]

I made a REALLY quick EBOOT for 1.50 PSP's with an Atari logo and Atari ST background image.

Will do a better one tomorrow if I get the time. i'll include credits and other stuff.

I'll try and make it nice enough so you want to use it as the official one :)

But here it is for all who would like it -

EDIT - Just uploaded to my own PSP and LOL it is a little crappy (text covered by time and a line on the right of screen). But it's nicer than none and I'll do a real nice one for tomorrow I promise. How would you like to be credited Skeezix? Real name, nick name?

Thanks again.

[skeezix]

"skeezix" I suppose (lowercase)

Send the artwork to me ([email protected]) so I can include it in the future if I like it :)

jeff

[SmashinGit]

In your next release it would be nice if the Atari_st folder could be in the same folder as castaway, saves having a corrupted icon displayed. :<

[ultros]

absolutely great!
will have to test it right now.

thx, skeezix!

[skeezix]

yeah, I'll likely do it; just haven't sweated it :) (So many corrupted icons, I hadn't noticed..)

jeff

[laxer3a]

Hi,

I would like to know how far is the accuracy of CaSTaway compare to emu like SainT... :D

I know that Saint is doing cycle accurate emulation of the whole chipset and even emulate the "bad" behaviour that allowed stuff like overscan and such.
So it is able to run quite a few demo.

Anyway, its going to be fun playing millenium on my PSP then :-)

Regards,
Laxer3A

[Shannon]

Sound problem fixed, but now it doesn't "stop" when going in the menu's which can be a little grating on the ears.

[parabolee]

Ok here's my much improved caSTaway icon and image EBOOT. Just put this in your caSTway% folder and copy it over the current EBOOT (for 1.50). Combine it with the second 1.50 EBOOT to create a 1.00 EBOOT.

I am emailing you the images for future use skeezix. Fantastic work! I was playing this all night. Looking forward to the database being incorporated with the disk selection as I have the whole PP collection and having to check each disk when looking for a specific game can be a real pain :)

I am so blown away by how good this EMU is. Here are the few small bugs I have found so far -

* Mouse doesn't work on some games -

This is a strange bug because sometimes I can see the cursor but can't move it out of a small area. Main game of note Populous 2.

* Wierd graphic "warp" when screen moves fast -

Not really a bug but it hurts the eyes. main game of note Kick Off 2.

That's it so far. Amazing for a third release!

------------------------------------------------

Here are a few request for future versions (if I may be so cheeky) -

* Ability to fast scroll through games.

Pushing left/right on the d-pad to go a full page down would be handy. Right now it takes ages to get top disk 100 :)

* Option for graphics smoothing off.

I am one of the few people that prefer sharpness over smoothness in my EMU's.

* Ability to map keys/joystick directions to left/right trigger and Circle button.

Many platform games were designed to use up to jump, while great on a joystick, it would be much better to use the circle button to jump.

* Ability to create a blank disk.

I know the save state should remove the need for this for the most part but it can still be handy. For instance it is required in order to play Player Manager.

* Transparancy option for software keyboard.

The keyboard looks awesome but sometimes I can't see what I'm typing, an ability to turn it partially transparent would fix that.

That's all I can think of. I am really amazed at the quality of this EMU, the framerate appears to be perfect and the load times are lightning fast.

After playing the Amiga EMU at a frameskip of 8, I didn't think the Atari ST could be emulated so perfectly. I would have bought a PSP for this EMU alone :)

[Mr.Modem]

Yeah this emu is worth the price of the PSP. To be able to play so much classics is wonderful. Here's my suggestion list (apart from things already suggested):

*Speed fix. Some games run too fast especially in the menus. The music often runs way to fast.

*Ability to swap the mouse from the analog to the d-pad without going into the menus. Other Shortcuts would be nice, like shortcut to diskselector.

*The disk selector window should use the whole screen. My TOSEC (naming convention for emulator roms, disk and tape images) disks have to long names that doesn't fit in the window.

*There is another mouse bug. In some games (Lemmings 2 - the Tribes,Hero Quest) the mouse pointer necomes invisible. You can move it and press the mouse buttons but you can't see the cursor

As you see my suggestions isn't so important for the emu but would be nice to have anyway. And parabolee, I prefer a sharp picture over a scaled blurry picture. The last thing I have to say is; Thank you skeezix!!! I don't have any money to donate but I maybe send some artwork.

[skeezix]

My to do list is growing, thought it would be shrinking ;)

I've already done some tuning in the joystick area, to be more precise while its on analog.

Better and faster scrolling around the menus for sure, and more integration with the database for sure. ie: If you've scanned a disk to find out what it is once, it'll remember and always show the game names beside the disk name (like the GP32 version.)

Throttling to slow the emu down, and some frameskip options to speed it up.

Some disk access indicators so you know when its hitting the disks.

Avoiding massive key repeat in 'cursor' mode, so that cusor mode controls Dungeon Master better :)

etc etc.

[parabolee]

Did you see the Icon and background image I made yet skeezix? hope you like it.

[Mr.Modem]

I know you have a lot to do already but I have found another bug: A couple of my games doen't work. I insert the floppy but instead of loading the game, Gem is loaded. I double click on the disk icon and it says that the disk is empty. I'm sure that there's nothing wrong with my disks, I have tested them with Steem in Windows. I've tried both zipped and unzipped versions of the games. I get the same result. Is anyone else getting the same problem?

[Criswell]

Yup... same problem exactly for me. Seems most simpler platformers work fabulously but many others I've tried show an empty disk drive. File format i.e .msa or.st seems to not be a factor. Otherwise, wonderful work!! Also, it might be nice to have a faster method of scrolling thru the game roms (those multiple disks sure get in the way!). Perhaps the use of the shoulder buttons like the Amiga Emu?? Perhaps I'm missing something here...

[parabolee]

I have that problem with games that the names are too long. I made the name smaller and it worked.

I have another wierd problem. sometime games load into GEM and I can see the folder with the GAME.PRG in it but I can't move the mouse?!?!?

EDIT - I think that it may be the name of the game INSIDE the ZIP is causing this with some of the games.

I had none of these problems with the Pompey Pirates games ?????

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do a quick update that allows faster scrolling through the games!!! Takes me forever to get the new games! It automatically put's the newest games at the bottom of the list!!!! ARRRGGHHH!!! I even tried setting the date back on my PC and changing them but it didn't work??

[Criswell]

Shorter names, you say? Hmmm... thanx, Parabolee! Will look into it tonight and report back later. How short is short, I wonder? I'll test it out anyway.

[parabolee]

Well the ones I was using were well over 40 characters because it had the year and the game company and name of group that cracked it. So I got rid of all that stuff so it was about 10-20 characters and they worked. Seems that I only had to rename the ZIP folder too, but some the games stil didn't work. although I have a feeling that if I rename the game INSIDE the folder to a shorter name it might work.

[qaopjlll]

I have tried about 10 games so far, the only one that's actually worked is King's Quest. I am encountering a variety of errors; some games I can't move the mouse, some games I get stuck at the cracked game screen, some games boot the OS but I either can't move the mouse or the disk drive is empty, and in Dungeon Master the game started but I couldn't do anything after I started the game.

[skeezix]

Still only a week old ;) I'll be adding shoulders and let/right to go page up/down I think, as well as 'hold to scroll' so you needn't press-press-press-press.

The CaSTaway emu is itself only about 80% compatible.. the desktop PC emus are superior (and closed source); I'll also likely be bringing over Hatari emu under the same GUI, so that you can have your choice of which ST emu engine to run, which should keep compatbiliy high. (Hatari is a little slower, but mor compatible.)

jeff

Oh, didn't have a chance to look at artwork.. wife is keeping me busy with chores ;)

[Criswell]

I'm still checking, but renaming the files INSIDE the zip to around 10 characters seems to be helping a lot... so far so VERY good! Finally got a selection of games that run well. Phew! Good tip, Parabolee. Many thanx!!

[skeezix]

Dungeon Master works very well, but it has to be an original disk rip and not one of the cracked ones, if memory serves; I've actually got a copy of DM on the website (sent a letter to the authors and everything :P).

Many many games work, but not all.. but most.

jeff

[parabolee]

Well I have tried close to 100 games so far and I am getting about a 90% compatability. Which is very very cool. And luckily for me the ones that don't work are games I'm not that bothered about playing.

qaopjlll - I found that I had some problems with games like you describe but after I turned the PSP off and restarted caSTaway they worked again. Especially with the booting but mouse not working at GEM.

Also almost all crack screens are by passed by pressing the SPACE bar on the keyboard, try hitting it a few times if it isn't working.

I do have one BIG bug to report (well big to me) -

After trying about 7 different copies of Sensible Soccer NONE of them work!!!!! Is this game not compatible with the PC version of caSTaway? Every versions loads just fine but once you get to the actual game it will lock up as soon as you press the fire button or ANY direction on the joystick. This SUCKS big time because I love SENSI SOCCER.

Also one minor bug -

In some games I found that if I hold the fire button down the joystick no longer works. Main game of note 1942. This is strange as it's fine in most games.

Was Eye the Beholder out on the Atari ST? I always liked that more than Dungeon Master.

Skeezix I would be more than happy to do ANY graphics you need for the program, I am a big fan and would love to help in any way I can. Anything that gives you more time to polish this awesome EMU.

[Mr.Modem]

Can you fix the long file name bug and release a new version with this fix only? I really like the TOSEC renaming convention and don't want to rename all my disks.

[ultros]

there seems to be a mouse-bug in the game "bolo" (similar to oxyd, which plays great with the analog stick :) ).
when a level starts, the bar is smashed to the right screen-boarder, like someone is moving the mouse fast to the right. this error occurs often in the game.

(and the mouse directions are somehow switched, i don't know, if the game in real hardware had these probs, but i remember to turn the mouse by 180°. for the GP32 i had a config-file which did that, but with a d-pad it's more or less unplayable....)

[laxer3a]

Hi Skeezix,

I hope you will be able to find the time to continue this emu :).
Having a powerfull ST emu would be really really cool.

After your comment I went on the web and try to look on various source code of ST Emu.

It is true that really a few have their source code published...
What a waste. Looking at the castaway original pages,
it is said that emulator is a 68000 with just a basic support of the graphics chip.
No sound emulator and so on...

What is your job based on ? Have you written other part on this emu ?
Can you describe what you changed to the core of the emu ? :D
I know that Arnaud Carree (one of the SainT author) spent a lot of time to have very good sound emulation (his YM player from WinAmp is incredible I think)
He released recently his code for it. (source in LGPL license)
http://leonard.oxg.free.fr/

There is also this page I found looking for YM 2149
:http://sc68.atari.org/apidoc/group__io68__ym__devel.html

When I look at the different site and saw that the ST was roughly emulated with a 100/133 Mhz PC, I believe that a 222Mhz + Graphics accelerator + Media Engine of the PSP could bring the atari to really powerfull limits :)
(= more accurate emulation and keep a 1x speed)

Still, probably very accurate cycle emulation would be difficult to do at roughly 8 Mhz. (it is done in Snes9x but the cpu are running at 1/2 or 1/3 of the ST Mhz speed).

Actually on the Snes, there is many games trying to wait for "result" of the Audio chip... Looking at the YM doc, it seems that the YM has no possibility to do a WRITE BACK to the ram or something...
So you could put the whole YM emulation as a process running on the ME as a sound generator and have your emu sending data to the register like a real YM chipset. :)

Anyway, may be the technical detail here are boring a lot of people...
Feel free to contact me to discuss more detail ! I am very interested in your emu on the technical side, and I hope we can discuss technical detail together.

Laxer3A

[Mr.Modem]

You're certanly not making me bored. I don't know very much about the technical aspects of emulators but I find it very intresting.

[parabolee]

Are you thinking of helping out on this EMU a little bit Laxer?

I hope so because Snes TYL is incredible.

[skeezix]

Hi Skeezix,

I hope you will be able to find the time to continue this emu :).
Having a powerfull ST emu would be really really cool.

After your comment I went on the web and try to look on various source code of ST Emu.

It is true that really a few have their source code published...
What a waste. Looking at the castaway original pages,
it is said that emulator is a 68000 with just a basic support of the graphics chip.
No sound emulator and so on...


Yeah, open source-wise theres mostly CaSTaway, STonX, Hatari, with Hatari the only one slightly in development; CaSTaway was only in development for a short while years ago, and STonX stopped also years ago. CaSTaway is good because its fast, though lacking a lot of features (the 80/20 rule... the last 20% is 80% more work :) STonX is pretty good, but east RAM like mad.. though it does have some very cool features in it, such as mapping GEM GUI calls to native (X11) GUI calls for speed.. very interesting stuff. (Also has HDD support mapping to native filesystem.)

STeem, SainT etc are all very good, but closed source; they seem like all good fellas and once in awhile I chat with various folks but they're all hesitant to open up (not sure why.. their apps need to survive, as the best of breed.)

I wrote my own very basic ST emu as well, but its not very complete ("TOSemu"); it does only BIOS calls and such, but redirects to various systems like telnet. ie: Hence, my telnet ST BBS :) No video displays or the like, just basic stuff.. but good enough for running a BBS in. I'm working on bundling it up, a 'bbs in a box' so that folks can run an old ST BBS just by tar/recompile, but not a lot of interest in the project from anyone :P




What is your job based on ? Have you written other part on this emu ?
Can you describe what you changed to the core of the emu ? :D



My contribution for this project has mostly been the many ports, and pulling the various CaSTaways together. The Pocket PC guys did some really great work, so I bug them once in awhile to get updates.. the lad got very busy recently when he had a new baby introduced, so its proably a dead project as well.. but he really helped the cycle counting get more accurate, and the FDC timings and such (floppy disk controller). I've not had enormous time to wrestle with the emu core (since I run my own business, I'm already working 70+ hours a week :), but I've fixed up the display code, the YM code, the timing code, IKBD somewhat, added the ST disk database system, etc etc.




I know that Arnaud Carree (one of the SainT author) spent a lot of time to have very good sound emulation (his YM player from WinAmp is incredible I think)
He released recently his code for it. (source in LGPL license)
http://leonard.oxg.free.fr/

There is also this page I found looking for YM 2149
:http://sc68.atari.org/apidoc/group__io68__ym__devel.html

When I look at the different site and saw that the ST was roughly emulated with a 100/133 Mhz PC, I believe that a 222Mhz + Graphics accelerator + Media Engine of the PSP could bring the atari to really powerfull limits :)
(= more accurate emulation and keep a 1x speed)

Still, probably very accurate cycle emulation would be difficult to do at roughly 8 Mhz. (it is done in Snes9x but the cpu are running at 1/2 or 1/3 of the ST Mhz speed).



A very good ST emu needs some horsepower, but not an enormous amount (much less than an Amiga emulator.) I only wish I cudl get at some of those other projects to port 'em over :)

The SNES is mostly speed hit from the graphcis rendering, no?




Actually on the Snes, there is many games trying to wait for "result" of the Audio chip... Looking at the YM doc, it seems that the YM has no possibility to do a WRITE BACK to the ram or something...
So you could put the whole YM emulation as a process running on the ME as a sound generator and have your emu sending data to the register like a real YM chipset. :)

Anyway, may be the technical detail here are boring a lot of people...
Feel free to contact me to discuss more detail ! I am very interested in your emu on the technical side, and I hope we can discuss technical detail together.

Laxer3A

Sure, anytime. Life is busy, but never too busy for a good chat!

jeff

[laxer3a]

Hi,

Helping... hum I dont know :)
First I would like to see how far Skeezix want to go.

The computer I spent most of my time learning about computers was an ST
and I really felt in love with that machine.

Many people were saying that Amiga was better bla bla bla...
Yes it was definitely technically better (=hardware wise) BUT look at the demo, technically at the beginning of the scene, the demo on ST were technically superior to the Amiga one. Coder on amiga just relyed on the Copper and hardware sprite to do everything and didnt stretch their technical skills for quite a while.

When the ST died, the Amiga released pretty good demo reaching the level of tuning that the guys did on ST with their own hardware. But it was too late for me to watch.

I dont know if I am going to help on this emu... Actually I have another project after TYL (hardware this time) and I work 50/60 hours a week.
And yes I need a social life too :)

[parabolee]

LOL Ah the old Amiga/ST war. Bring's back fond memories. Well at that time In was a little too young to care about coding or demo's but I had both an Atari ST and an Amiga and there was never any question that ames on the Amiga just looked and sounded nicer. The ST was a great machine and had great versions of most of the best games, and in some cases the games were virtually identical. But even then the Amiga had the slight edge. But right now the Atari St emulator is far superior and faster than the Amiga one, so I can play all those classic games almost as good as the Amiga versions at an awesome speed.

It still bugs me that the goal in Kick Off hass no net and the field is so bland, but hey the games plays the same and just as good. I just need to find a blank disk so I can save my Player Manager game.

Does saving to a blank disk work yet? Because I think in order to start a game you need to save to a disk. I could always use the PC version of caSTaway to set up my game I suppose.

I would love it if you helped out JUST a little on caSTaway, if that is if skeezix would like your help. 'm sure your busy, as am I. But if you took a look at the code maybe you woul have at least a few idea's on how to improve it?

Right now I think it mainly needs options added to the GUI, a increase in compatibility would be nice too (I'm looking at you Sensible Soccer) but not as important since it seems close to 90% of game work great. Maybe higher, I have only found a few games that don't work out of the close to 150 games I have tried. I havn't kept count but it hasn't seemed like many of them didn't work.

Quick question for skeezix...

Are the save states compatible with the PC version of caSTaway and vice versa?

[skeezix]

The GUI and such is all a snap, I juts need a bit of time; compatability is 'the work', since its not hard to do, but its hard to know what to do ;) ie: Takes a lot of time to work through whats going on at the hardware level and emulate it. (Remember, the whole project for PSP is only a week old so far, though it does leverage quite a bit from my other versions :)

(I'd say half the Amiga games were ports from the ST; the ST for awhile was more popular as a game platform I think, so thats why so many Amiga games are just direct ports; they often even ran a touch slower, since the ST was a touch faster. Sometimes they used the superior audio system, and sometimes they did whole new ports and those were better on the Amiga.. but anyway :)

The current version has broken writing in the FDC; if you try to write to a floppy it'll get confused in the timing and just error out in the ST after a bit (as if the drive went bad.) I'm either gong to fix that, or roll back a version of the FDC code where read/write still work, and then you can format disks and all that sort. (ie: Format a disk, save the disk out to a .ST file, then load it up as oyu need it, etc.)

Real life is fighting me back, but I'll get another version out early next week .. I likely won't be near a comp for a couple of days, to end my vacation on the road :) ie: Getting faster menu scrolling and such is only a few mins work, but I need to get those few mins ;)

jeff

[parabolee]

Awesome, eagerly looking forward to that update.

Some good news (for me anyway) I used the blank disk included in the GP version of caSTaway and put it in the Virtual drive when Player Manager asked for it. It came up with a bunch of ascii text on screen as if it was going corrupt and then BING the game came on! WOOT! So I just saved the state and I'm away playing Player Manager! which is probably the second best football game ever made IMHO (after Sensible World of Soccer which he ST sadly didn't have).

Can't say i ever remember any games runnign faster on the ST, in my experience (which is over 10 years ago I admit) either the games were identical on both systems (in some cases) or the Amiga one was slightly better (in most cases) or the Amiga version was vaslty better (a few but very notible cases).

I remember the ST was much better for creating and playing with music but that the Amiga always had much better sounds and music in games. Which i always found wierd.

I loved both though and do remember that time at the beginning when the ST got all the best games first and then the Amiga catching up becoming the dominant home computer in europe. I always stayed out of the Amiga Vs St debates for the most part because I loved them both, but it was always obvious to me that the Amiga had superior hardware power.

Good days and great games. Those who grew up with only the games consoles games of Nintendo and Master System, or even the Super Nintendo and Magedrive didn't know what they were missing, far superior games on the ST and Amiga 500. Remeber Kick Off on the Master System? Man it was awefull. And Sensible Soccer on both SNES and GENESIS was only any good if you never played the ST or Amiga versions. Why use four buttons when one does the job better?

[Mr.Modem]

(I'd say half the Amiga games were ports from the ST; the ST for awhile was more popular as a game platform I think, so thats why so many Amiga games are just direct ports; they often even ran a touch slower, since the ST was a touch faster. Sometimes they used the superior audio system, and sometimes they did whole new ports and those were better on the Amiga.. but anyway :)


As you say many Amiga games were ST ports but just in the first years. Around 1990 Amgia most games were developed directly on the Amiga. In the beginning developers didn't make use of the Amiga's special chips and therefor Atari ST games were faster because of the slightly faster cpu. But when developers knew how to use the hardware, the Amiga games became faster. Just look at Lotus Turbo Challange II. The Amiga version is running much smoother than the ST version.

[parabolee]

As you say many Amiga games were ST ports but just in the first years. Around 1990 Amgia most games were developed directly on the Amiga. In the beginning developers didn't make use of the Amiga's special chips and therefor Atari ST games were faster because of the slightly faster cpu. But when developers knew how to use the hardware, the Amiga games became faster. Just look at Lotus Turbo Challange II. The Amiga version is running much smoother than the ST version.

LOL is this debate still alive after all these years? :D

[Mr.Modem]

It's not a debate, I'm not one of those Atari haters. The Amiga was a more advanced computer than the ST. End of discussion.

[wraggster]

i never owned an atari st but i did own an amiga and i have to say it was the worst buy of probaly all i had.

But anyway this is a great port to out beloved PSP :)

[laxer3a]

Ahahaha... Did I started a war again ? :-P

So. to calm down everybody, I would like to close the discussion. Hope this will close the subject. :)

No I have no doubt about the Amiga superiority against the ST.
As I said, it was a technically superior machine.

1/ Hardware blit where in standard (it was put in the STE but was too late to compete with Amiga on the game market)
2/ Copper was a simple but really helping coprocessor !!!
3/ Agnes (if my memory is correct the name of the graphic chip) was simply super powerfull, 32 color, 64 half color is special mode, ability to change the rendering mode between scanline, hardware scroll were possible..etc...etc...
4/ Audio chip allowed 4 channel up to 22khz if I am correct.
5/ The OS of the amiga IS A REAL OS : multithreading, ability to create driver, plug and play... ST was a childplay stupid OS compare to the Amiga.

Now on the ST side, the standard ST machine where really poor on the graphic side, hardware scroll were possible only every 8 lines.
The only benefit is that the cpu was running a +0.5 Mhz compare to the Amiga. Which was giving roughly about a 10% increase in performance I believe (talking about cpu power here)
ST was very used in music, because it has MIDI port in standard, so it became very popular in the music world as a cheap machine compare to the Apple Macintosh.

Amiga had nice video output (and ability to synchronize with a Genlock) and because of its open architecture, was actually a choice for a cheap video processing/editing station.

As I said before, I was just talking about the demo scene...
When you look at the stuff like TEX did in their "big demo" like beeing able to play AUDIO SAMPLE without digital channel, able to tweak the graphic chip to remove the low border... In 1988 if I am correct !!!

The demo scene on ST was able to "create" the hardware scroll by tweaking again the graphic chip, able to do overscan, play amiga mod file using a merely 10% of the cpu. I mean... Technically these coders were gods !
To find that level of tuning of the hardware on amiga... It took until the 1200 was released. Basically, when the ST died, the amiga demo scene was doing really great productions ! And the Amiga demo scene is still alive while the ST is not.

So basically I am not saying : my ST was better than my Amiga (yes I had both !). I am saying that the programmers on ST stretched their mind for a while until it happened on the Amiga.

I must agree also that game company where probably quite stupid to devellop directly Amiga game from ST port. But probably cost saving and market issue where limiting the development of games. (especially it was all made in assembly)

[Mr.Modem]

Well said laxer3a, you covered almost everything! Correction: The graphics chip was called Denise not Agnes. You're talking about wonderful demos on the ST and since I'm not so familiar with the ST scene, I would like to see some of the best ST demos. Any suggestions?

[laxer3a]

http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?page=1&platform=Atari%20ST&order=views

Try Saint as an ST emu. It tries to be the most accurate emu.
(the author is an ex-demomaker on ST)

Look at the production dates, it is important because new techniques and trick were found each year by coders. They learn how to "trash" the graphic chipset video counter by switching from 50 / 60 / 70 Hz for a given number of cycle to **** up the internal register.

My favorites are (not in order):
cuddly demos
virtual escape
ooh crickey wot a scorcher
the union-demo
eat my bollocks
syntax terror
the b.i.g demo
sowatt demo

Dont forget : no hardware sprite, no digital audio chipset, no copper, no hardware scroll were officially available. :-)

Cant resist now... I am going to watch some.

[parabolee]

i never owned an atari st but i did own an amiga and i have to say it was the worst buy of probaly all i had.

But anyway this is a great port to out beloved PSP :)

I'm sorry to hear that wraggster as my Amiga was probably my best buy ever. I loved that machine more than any machine after. I got more gaming out of it and more years (played it as my number one machine for about 8 years). It is the home of at least 5 of my all time favorite games to this day. There has never been a year passed since it's release that I havn't played It Came from The Desert, Sensible World of Soccer, Kick Off 2/Player Manager not to mention all the great adventures that I come back to refinish from time to time.

Sure now a days I play those classic LucasArts games (Monkey Island 2 being another of my all time favorite games) on SCUMM (and now the PSP version) but all those were first experienced on the Amiga 500. That machine will always be the sole reason I am a big fan of video games today and thew reason I got into IT as a career (I a web designer and animator/artist).

I have owned ever single games machine that came out since the Spectrum (my first games machine) with a few exceptions (NeoGeo, Jaguar, PC Engine) and not one of them besides the ill fated Dreamcast came close to the love I felt for the Amiga 500. The Atari ST was always a close second to the Amiga and that is why I love this Emu so much. I would rather have a Amiga Emu runnign as well as this but beggers can't be choosers and the Atrai St is much easier to emulate and only slightly inferior.

Amiga 4 life yo! :D

[Mr.Modem]

If have to say my Amiga was my best by ever too (allthough it was my dad that bought it :D). It started my interest for computers and I still dust it off sometimes to play some old classics, although I play most games using WinUAE. I remeber the first I played Turrican 2. The smooth animation and music by Chris Hülsbeck was just amazing. So I recommend you to dust of your old Amiga (you haven't sold it have you?) load some nice games like SWOS, Silkworm, Turrican, Rodland, Lotus Turbo Challange 2, Supercars etc. or a nice demo like Enigma, Desert Dreams or Hardwired and then maybe you don't regret you bought one.

[laxer3a]

The only regret I had with my Amiga, is that you need a floopy to have the workbench !!! :)
You also needed to be fluent like a Unix user to start to write boot script.
That was really a pain.
Atari ST was just plain stupid, but at least on that side, it was easier.
I had to ask to friends to make my "programming disk" on Amiga.

Also, I never felt comfortable on using GFA Basic on Amiga... And it was my favorite programming language at that time.

Well, most of the people I knew, they were just sticking their floppy and wait for the game to boot. No real difference between a ST or an Amiga.
At this point, I believe that the Amiga has been a better machine for gamers, but Atari came sooner into the market... As these little babies were pretty expensive for youngster like us. The Amiga / ST war for me was just about demomaker, I never got into my machine was better than... etc...etc...

I remember having paid like 1000 euro for my first ST. (including the monitor)
It was a lot of money for a 13/14 years old kid. With the increase in life cost, it would be like paying 1500 euro now for this.

When I think about this, and that kid now can buy a PC for 1/3 of this price, have huge cpu power, graphic chipset... And they dont code ! :)
The demo scene on PC is huge, but one of my friend is saying that it is slightly dying... You don't have anymore kiddy of 14 or 15 years old trying to make demos. So anyway, younger people should enjoy that "older" guy like me (I am 31) are still coding and working on emus and should be gratefull that we were demomakers... else those emus would not run that damn fast !

Anyway, Skeezix keep up the good work !!! :)

[skeezix]

Sensi Soccor was ob the sT; SWOS .. not sure if thats different or not? SS isn't working in CaSTaway yet though, but we'll see.

/me just got back from a short trip, brain off :)

jeff

[skeezix]

Oh man, catching up a bit.. I almost need to get heavy into this ST/Amiga war, but I will resist, since I'm about to run out the door again ;)

It was simple.. as an ST lover a tthe time, even I knew the ST hardware was inferior; but hardware isn't relevent half the time.. the ST software fo awhile was The Stuff.. but of course the ST started to die out in what, 1990-1991 or so, and the Akmiga managed to keep going a little while longer while the PC cleaned up. Course, it was more divided earlier.. with the Amiga owning the graphcis department (genlock, video toaster, nice full colour raster editors) while the ST owned the networking (midi :P), music (midi :P), and graphics-arts zones (desktop publishing). Game-wise, the ST was better earlier, but the Amiga rather cleaned its clock later (better versions after a few years of the same games, and then lots of original games later.)

To sum -- they were important both, for eing different and competitive.. ST was cheapre by far, Amiga beefoier and pricier.. both fighting for the same target audience. Competition drove both to exciting levels.

Nowadays, we don't have so much competition, but at least we have competition within the platform due to the interchangable components market..

Laxer is very right about the ST limit sin hardware.. the lack of hardware scrolling used to drive me nuts, but theres a few DM coders who destroyed our minds with the tricks they pulled. There was a demo that turne dinto a game.. Enchanted ...something... that just destroyed what was previously possible, with some new overscan colour effects and such.. ahh, those were the days.

I wasn't able to keep up with the real demo coders back then, but I tried a few times :P

jeff

[parabolee]

I agree 100% with what you just said Skeezix!

SWOS = Sensible World of Soccer. it was far better than the regular Sensi Soccer as it had EVERY single team in the WORLD! and EVERY SINGLE player! it also had a career mode that allowed you to take managment control of ANY team in the world and play in all the cups and league's they play in. You could buy and sell and customise tactics. The career mode in SWOS has surpassed every single career mode in any football game (outside managment games) since it came out. It is the main reason I still play it to this day.

If you ever played Player Manager then SWOS is just like that except you control the whole team and it has real teams/players, Player Manager had no where near as many teams in it either. Player Manager had a slightly more in depth managment mode but SWOS was more fun less anal on statistics and a much more vast feel to the whole world of soccer, you could look up the best goal scorers in any league in the world and see the current league tables for any league in the world. i don't know how they managed to get the Amiga to remember all this stuff and keep track of it all for every match while having such an in depth managment mode.

Simply the BEST football game ever made.

Does the ST version of Sensible Soccer work on the PC version of caSTaway?

[skeezix]

The PC version of CaSTaway isn't very good; the Pocket PC, GP32, Palm OS and PSP versions are the best of the CaSTaway line.

jeff

[laxer3a]

skeezix, the game you are talking about is probably
"Enchanted Land" from Thalion Software.
Which in fact were member of TEX (The Exception - Big demo, Union demo...)
and probably some other guys from the scene.

All their games were just incredible, super zik, lot of raster, always to the VBL.

Just for info (completly offtopic), I am actually making my own graphic chipset in FPGA. It will be close to the ST chipset ability but less constraint... Then stick a cpu to it and enjoy making some demo on my homemade computer :-P

See you.

[parabolee]

Does sensible soccer work on any version of caSTaway?

[skeezix]

SensiSoc doesn't yet work on CaSTaway but maybe in a bit. They do somethign annoying in their startup routine, for all their games, that break CaSTaway :P

I'll see about getting a slightly updated new version out soon; I spent a bunch of time on and off over the last few days making a font importer and some cleaning up of the menu appearance a touch, so it is much more readable and attractive.. but I still need to make the menu control buttons smarter and faster scrolling and such. (Made a new little dynamic kerning routine and such.. works pretty well :)

jeff