User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Sun Feb 13, 2022 11:44 am

All this time none of my machines have had WHDLoad on them. There are several reasons for this but the most obvious being most of my machines are period-correct artifacts running OS 1.3.

When I wanted to try and install and load a floppy-based game off a hard drive, oftentimes simply copying the disk over and making some assigns would do the trick. Or, the disks themselves would have hard drive installers. Frankly there simply hasn't been a need.

As a last resort there is also always JST, which is a shell-based OS 1.3 version of what WHDLoad eventually became. And I've used that program thanks to the brilliance of folks like Crispy, who converted the NTSC version of Pinball Dreams to launch with JST off our hard drives back in January of 2021. That was super cool.

There are only a few games in my large collection that were disk-only. And honestly it never really bothered me enough to go install what my friend would call an extra layer “shim” to get games on my machines. I just never really saw the point.

Now, obviously a lot of folks like to convert their Amigas into cornucopia-filled game consoles with hundreds if not thousands of games at the ready. For me, those setups often cause analysis paralysis. I actually like to stay focused on a game one at a time. I think if I had thousands of games loaded on my computer, at the first serious challenge I’d be far too inclined to simply close the game and fire up a different one.

Honestly during the pandemic I’ve had that lack of focus ADHD problem already. I would tell myself that adding WHDLoad to the mix would have only made my attention problems worse.

However, I’ve always wanted one game to play well on my Amigas: Dungeon Master 2.
dm2-cover.jpg
I just love this game so much.


I played that fantastic game all the way to the very end on an accelerated Amiga 2000 with 2mb chip the first time around. The problem is whenever there are multiple enemies on the screen at the same time (e.g. the Axe Men), the frame rates come to a screeching halt. I was still able to get through that game all the way to the final boss. But you have to run around on a cloud while dodging droids and fireballs while also attacking. And in my case, I had to try and do this at 1-3 frames per second. It was impossible.
dragoth.jpg
Dragoth is blue because apparently were battling it out under water.


That failure scarred me, and I could never let it go.

I later played the game on my Macintosh Quadra 700 at 40Mhz, and even then I wound up transferring my files from that machine over to my 500Mhz Powerbook to beat the final boss. Which I did (it was great!).

Meanwhile, I’ve since installed the game to my Amiga 3000 @16Mhz and knew right off the bat it wasn’t worth the effort. No way in hell.

Fast-forward to when I put the zz9000 in the machine. I was testing that machine with various applications and quickly learned RTG cards often break a lot of software programs. At the time, I thought, “I guess this will have to just be a dedicated machine with very little gaming on it.”

Some would load fine, others would lock up.

Dungeon Master 2 would load, but within 1-2 minutes in the first underground cave where you select your characters from their steampunk cryo-chambers (yep), the game would lock up. Every single time.

But then I somehow snagged a CyberStorm MK2 @50Mhz accelerator this year and finally, I thought, this might give my Amiga enough juice.

It’s easy to determine because after picking your characters, you go upstairs to find a few objects then head outside. Once you leave the building there is a very strong rain. This rain is actually pretty hard on Amiga hardware to produce smoothly. I can get through it, but when I have to battle creatures out in the animated rain it’s noticeably slower. On the Powerbook I can glide right through everything - it’s absolutely fantastic. The downside is the Amiga's NPC character and monster graphics are so much better. The Mac is based off of the PC art, which is cartoony and not as cool. The Amiga - visually - is the way to go.

But, the game still crashed.

So! I finally decided to sit down and install WHDLoad on this particular Amiga 3000. My long-shot hope was the folks at WHDLoad made this program play nice with late-90s Amiga advancements. I didn’t go the 4GB ridiculous all-in-one console route. I merely installed the base program, a needed archive extractor (xadmaster.library) and the Dungeon Master 2 installer.

That installer actually uses my original disks then “patches” them to try and be more compatible - in theory. It's actually a very nice approach.

Note: The original game shipped in a box stating on the side:
“Requires Amiga 1200, 2000, 2500, 3000, 4000.
Workbench 1.2
3meg total memory
Hard disk required
Mouse supported.” 


What a fascinating list! No 500? No 600? Probably due to an assumed lack of chip RAM. And lets talk about the goofy usage of those commas, hm?
IMG_6940.jpg

Inside the box there is a paper insert stating the game requires an Amiga 1200. This is because this game supports AGA 256 color mode - very cool indeed! But not something I was caring about, obviously. Plus, I already knew the game worked on my other machines, just slowly.

My hope was WHDLoad would magically just make things work. I installed the correct kickstart (the 1200’s) and launched the program.
IMG_6941.JPG
What is this?! NOooooo...


The folks at WHDLoad made the game work ONLY on A1200/4000 AGA hardware! They stripped the game's ability to play on all hardware as originally designed!

It was actually worse than before as now I couldn’t even open the program.

For what it is worth, years ago I used to own an A1200 and installed DM2 on it, too. It was a stock 020 @ 16Mhz with 8MB of RAM and a hard drive. Skullkeep didn’t look any different at first blush (I didn’t do detailed side-by-side comparisons) but it did feel as fast as my 2000 in the dungeons. I ran out into the thicket and ran the ultimate test: The Axemen during rain.
Same damned thing: sluggish as hell!

So WHDLoad locked the game down to only work on machines that would still have to be accelerated to even play without frame-rate issues. Arg!!

After spending time this weekend getting WHDLoad installed only to run into this (and with no warnings in the README file that they’d changed the requirements to AGA-only) I was utterly and totally defeated.

Out of all the games I wanted to try, there was only one other I could think of at the time to try. Thankfully, that one works.
IMG_6946.jpg
IMG_6947.jpg
Nice to see it full-screen even if it makes the graphics a bit blurry. It's a compromise but whatever.


It looks better on my other CRT-based machines, but it’s nice to have it working. And, it moved over my scores from my disk! That was a nice bonus. I should re-install it later today with the disk I used that has the one instance where I beat the game. I used the original EPYX disk with WHDLoad.

I do like how this shim creates this little hard drive buffer by using original disks. Kind of cool, and a lot easier for me to wrap my head around than

……..

My next experiment is to try and create a software switch to disable P96 and use the Amiga’s video built-in video modes to try and run my original (non-WHDLoad) installation with the CyberStorm. I’d love to see how the game plays on that card without locking up.

When I’m in the cave, before things crash, I can tell the movements are pretty smooth and silky. If I could just get outside to the rain...

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Sun Feb 13, 2022 2:03 pm

Update:
I've submitted a report to the person who created the original WHDLoad installer way back in 2003! Who knows if my report will even still get to the right guy anymore? Worth a shot, though.

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Sun Feb 13, 2022 2:14 pm

Second thought:
I have been told that there is a way to create a script that will disable P96, then soft-reboot the machine into native video outputs. Perhaps then I could run the original hard drive installation via the Cyberstorm, and bypass both the ZZ9000 and WHDLoad road blocks.

User avatar
McTrinsic

Posted Sun Feb 13, 2022 2:31 pm

I admire your dedication.

One question: do you need to „disable“ P96 or do you just open prefs and take a native screenmode?

OK, more:
Did you install the MMULibs already and try to run the game from harddisk with your wonderful accelerator?

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Sun Feb 13, 2022 3:58 pm

Update:
Completely disabled P96 drivers - I moved them from Devs/Monitors over to Storage. Simply changing the screen mode in Prefs didn't work as it would still crash the game.

Now I’m running the A3K with the Cyberstorm @50Mhz by manually removing the monitors drivers. It’s a kludge but it works and early tests seem VERY promising with the a3k + cyberStorm and no fancy graphics card (and no WHDLoad)!

It will take me a while to get to the axe men for the ultimate test but I’m gonna go for it - I think this might be the trick! Moral of the story: Don't use WHDLoad with this game! (And, at least to one of my friends with an 030 A4000, the game seems faster to him using the normal installer and not WHDLoad, too.)

I'll know for sure when I make it to the Axe Men area. If it comes to a grinding halt I'll stop playing. But if it merely slows down a little bit and I can get through it without too much annoyance? That'll give me hope that this game can indeed be played - and finished - on an Amiga!

User avatar
McTrinsic

Posted Mon Feb 14, 2022 7:14 am

Sound promising!

So, do you have latest MMULibs installed?

Which P96 version? Latest commercial version, i.e. 3.2.3 from iComp or the ages-old version from
Aminet ?

Other than that I would like to ask you to run SnoopDOS with P96 active and write to disk or serial, with tools such as sashimi.

Would be interesting for the active (!) developer to see what it is that crashes P96/the system.

Might even be something trivial like ChipMEM.

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Mon Feb 14, 2022 9:56 am

Which P96 version? Latest commercial version, i.e. 3.2.3
Yes, when I bought the zz9000 I purchased the iComp package for P96, too.
MMULibs
In terms of MMULibs I've been on the fence on which ones to install. I was going to do these because they are modern and very well entrenched with a long history of development and bug fixes. I just want something I don't have to think about later; I don't need the most bleeding edge.

A friend of mine has said there's a bit of debate that "the Thor libs are too conservative and the p5 libs let the system run faster." I don't even know if the ones I plan on installing are part of that debate or not. But they look very well supported and that seems worth trying. I'm not going to design a rocket ship with this Amiga. I just want it to work and not bother me with issues. :ghost:

User avatar
McTrinsic

Posted Mon Feb 14, 2022 12:37 pm

Hi,
just take the latest ones from Aminet. Thor still supports them and actively works on them.

You can still file error reports in case something goes wrong and he will probably fix it if you work with him on narrowing down the issue.

I doubt that the speed difference will be noticeable. Thor usually puts stability over the last bit of speed optimization.

Similar with P96, Thor is the developer. He might request to file an error report at iComp, though.

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Mon Feb 14, 2022 1:12 pm

I remember logging this bug back in 2020.

Turns out I even mentioned the original report dating back to as early as 2002.

Jens actually talked to me (and to Thor) about the Deluxe Paint issues back then.

Here's what he said:
Just talked to Thomas Richter, and he told me that a) this won't ever work, as DPaint is not using the OS for all it's operations. Namely, it modifies bitplane pointers in it's own code, and it launches the blitter by directly talking to the hardware, not going through any library. As a result, he believes that CGX has the same problems.

The bitplane pointers have a totally different meaning for P96, and the Blitter will of course never work for GFX card memory.

One thing might work within limits: Launch DPaint with a planar RTG mode. This will put the bit planes into chip ram, where the blitter can really work on them. P96 will then just copy from chip ram to the RTG card's mem. However, Thor's further suggestion was to use PPaint instead of DPaint, as that should work much smoother.
I don't know if I ever saw that last note about Thor saying it could never be fixed. Oh well!

What's interesting about this is my friend Christian mentioned to me back then that he had a RTG card of some sort that used CGX drivers and DP actually worked with his setup. I told myself back then that if I ever wanted to use DP on that machine, I'd have to manually remove P96 - like I have with Dungeon Master 2 - in order to use it. Instead I just used a different machine at the time.

User avatar
McTrinsic

Posted Mon Feb 14, 2022 1:59 pm

Well as Thor indicated, CGX may have used a planar bitmap back then. Plus, it might have been a different version of DPaint.

I mean, you got direct feedback from the developer of what’s possible and what not. Can’t ask for more 😉🙂.





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