ADFFS future feature testing

[Vanfanel]

@Jon: Simon works now again.
I also did a separate list for games that don't exit clearly.

EDIT: Added HeroQuest to the list of games that don't exit clearly. It *seems* to exit clearly, but running James Pond after running HeroQuest hangs James Pond on a black screen. So there's something HeroQuest doesn't clean on exit.

[JonAbbott]

BlowPipe - can't exit shop

The RISCOS 5 issue has now been resolved (in the 27-10-16 build), if you update, make sure you modify your CONFIG.TXT (needs two new entries) and save your CMOS by following the details on this thread.

Having confirmed the OS bug was fixed, it highlighted a bug in ADFFS' emulation of errors from a 1772. I've fixed that in today's Modules, however that then highlighted missing protection sectors on Disc 2 - so I'll get it reimaged and will let you know once the new disc images are up.

EDIT: Updated floppy images are now on the dev site. I've confirmed the shop now works.

[Vanfanel]

@Jon: The shop in Blowpipe does not work well here, with updated modules, obey and RISC OS rom. Clicking con some icons doesn't activate them, and I have to click outside the screen, unde the EXIT sing, to eventually exit.
There's something wrong with mouse coordinates or something like that...

[JonAbbott]

Clicking con some icons doesn't activate them, and I have to click outside the screen, unde the EXIT sing, to eventually exit.
There's something wrong with mouse coordinates or something like that...

You have to click on the tab below the icons and at the bottom of the screen below the exit icon. I tested on an A310 and its exactly the same - in fact it's worse, as there's a bounding box on the mouse cursor which prevents it from going off-screen to get to the exit icon.

[Vanfanel]

@Jon: I see what you mean... still, the tabs under buy and sell buttons seem to fail most of the clicks also. What a bad interface this shop has! No wander Amazon took over!

[JonAbbott]

@Jon: I see what you mean... still, the tabs under buy and sell buttons seem to fail most of the clicks also. What a bad interface this shop has! No wander Amazon took over!

I did a complete playthrough the other day, to test it. I didn't have any problems with the tabs - but they are rather thin, I was amazed at how short the game was, 4 levels, each repeated twice and took around 10-15 mins to complete. I didn't even manage to buy half the stuff in the shop, as collecting the money is near on impossible half the time.

The game is essentially a carbon copy of Xenon 2: Megablast, but in Portrait.


On a separate note, I've been looking at SWIV and Blitz's source this week, trying to figure out why they both hang with PLL VSync. Both are running the main game under an IRQ, which is not recommended in the PRM and certainly not good practice. They should be setting the CallBack flag in R12 and exit immediately, leaving RISCOS to call them back outside of an IRQ, or set a semaphore which the main waits for before continuing.

There's a couple of possible reasons for the hangs, either an essential IRQ isn't being serviced on time, due to IRQ's being off for too long or they're calling SWI's which can't be called under an IRQ handler.

The programmers in both cases possibly falsely believed that switching from IRQ to SVC is sufficient - this isn't the case however, as IRQsema will be set from the IRQ being entered. Any disc access for example would trigger a "FileCore in use" error and there's probably other SWI's that would either hang or not work with IRQsema set.

How to fix them is the question.

[JonAbbott]

Updated obey.zip and DTT tracker mod (copy it to the !ADFFS.trackers directory) which gets The Exotic Adventures of Sylvia Layne working. I've briefly tested on Pi3 - it sometimes fails to detect disc changes, which needs further investigation.

There's a few games that have issues when swapping discs, particularly the installers in The Fourth Dimension titles, which rely on the previous floppy remaining cached (it's essentially a bug in their code, as it should pre-load the script file into memory before requesting a disc change). Sylvia Layne's issue looks related as it sometimes prompts for the previous floppy, indicating it's relying on caching.

[JonAbbott]

Updated Modules on the dev site, which hopefully fix the disc swap problems with The Fourth Dimension installers and The Exotic Adventures of Sylvia Lane.

There's an issue with the sound effects playback rate in Sylvia Layne I need to look into, it appears to be okay otherwise. There's also possibly another Page Zero access bug to fix, but I've not managed to reliably reproduce it.

EDIT: This update may also fix the disc swap issue in Quark, if you'd like to test

[Vanfanel]

@Jon: Sylvia Lane works good on the Pi, with most sound effects missing (I guess).
Quark seems to load fine (disk swap etc) but I don't know what the keys are to actually start the game.

[JonAbbott]

@Jon: Sylvia Lane works good on the Pi, with most sound effects missing (I guess).

They're there, just the wrong sample rate.

Quark seems to load fine (disk swap etc) but I don't know what the keys are to actually start the game.

F8 - Quick start
F12 - Ship Selector

Player 1 keys are:
G - Up
V - Down
Z - Left
X - Right
H - Fire
Space - Mega Bomb