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jcompton
Registered: Feb 2006
Posts: 70 |
Release id #187773 : Alternate Reality - The City +11D
With a dramatically improved saver and a trainer, it is now much much easier to live long enough to stumble into the original game's bugs!
Notably:
- Certain potion effects (Potions of Protection +1/+2) modify the wrong area of memory and may not actually provide any benefit whatsoever.
- These potion-related memory trashes can affect playfield graphics like door labels and mountain backdrops.
- Too many potion effects will crash the game!
- Banks may exhibit erratic behavior at times.
- Upon transitioning from a building back to the game map, the game sometimes "forgets" whether you are outdoors or in an "enclosed area."
- The game mostly hides the mirroring of door labels, but forgets to do so in certain types of Enclosed Areas, so words like "SHOP" and "TAVERN" will appear reversed on the bottom of the door.
- In silent interiors there's a horrible buzzing sound when the SID should probably just be turned off. |
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Bacchus
Registered: Jan 2002
Posts: 156 |
@rastlin
Bigfoots entry was super impressive. Taking all the texts and making a dictionary, replacing the words in the actual texts with references to the dictionary. This is literally a cross file sequence crunch, which proved super efficient.
And it's also interesting to see that the "inferior" SD2IEC support "SEEK".
/Bacchus |
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Krill
Registered: Apr 2002
Posts: 2969 |
Quoting BacchusWith the SD2IEC seek, you must port the scan table back to the computer. The loader would seek to fixed static offsets within the IFFL file, so what you would do is call the loader with 6-bit file index (non-SD2IEC case) and 18-bit seek position (SD2IEC case) in A, X, Y - hardcoded into the game.
Quoting BacchusI think the part where Krill gets it a bit wrong is that you rarely have any memory to play with. Squeezing in loader, depacker and the buffers they both need is normally quite a challenge. Adding a cache (scantable of just a cached scan result) is not really feasible. A reasonably fast (IRQ optional) loader takes about $80 bytes after installation. ChristopherJam's tinycrunch (pack-ratio quite reasonable) adds another $80-ish bytes.
No extra buffers are required (depacking is fully in-place), so that's a page on the C-64 side.
On the drive-side, when throwing out things like directory parsing and buffering, interleave detection and out-of-order/speculative loading (but still keeping full on-the-fly block reading+GCR-decoding+checksumming, trackstep and transfer routines), my loader's current 1541 drive-code side leaves about $0300 bytes free to use.
That's 256 IFFL track/sector/offset entries (scanned on install).
How little space on the C-64 side or how many IFFL files are we talking about? |
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Bacchus
Registered: Jan 2002
Posts: 156 |
There is never a fixed amount of memory available. Basically, the less memory you have available, the more functionality you must be ready sacrifice.
You want limieted use of zeropage, small files, reasonably fast loader, compatibility with a variety of drives, REU support, compatible save and so on. The more the merrier, but if all won't fit you start scaling down the requirements.
I have come to enjoy Cadaver + Exomizer 3. It's a super robust combination and all the times it failed on me, it was as *I* had done something wrong.
I can link files to so that they become subfiles (the first generation of IFFL), I can just turn off the fastloader flag and then all of kernal is available - including save. It's fast, it's compatible and the files on disk pack really well.
So all in all the benefits outperform any option I have seen. The only key drawback is that, for EVERY release, Hedning feel an unstoppable urge to ask why I don't do IFFL as I "have N0SD0S". :-P
/Bacchus |
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Krill
Registered: Apr 2002
Posts: 2969 |
Okay, so which part about available memory did i "get a bit wrong", then? |
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Bacchus
Registered: Jan 2002
Posts: 156 |
Memory available for directory caching. It becomes relevant only after you have a number of pages of files, and by that time the memory needed just isn't available.
/Bacchus |
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Krill
Registered: Apr 2002
Posts: 2969 |
Quoting BacchusMemory available for directory caching. It becomes relevant only after you have a number of pages of files, and by that time the memory needed just isn't available.
/Bacchus The directory is buffered in the drive, of course. Then a file entry takes:
- 2 bytes if loading by index
- 3 bytes if loading with a 1-char filename
- 4 bytes if loading with a full filename (stored as a 2-byte hash value).
So a directory buffer may take less memory than an IFFL T/S/O table, the same, or more, depending on what your requirements for the filenames are.
Edit: Oh, and it's still just a cache. There may always be more files on the disk than the cache can hold. Going to the dir track once in a while (but by far not for every loaded file) is okay, i guess. |
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Frantic
Registered: Mar 2003
Posts: 1646 |
Quote:The only key drawback is that, for EVERY release, Hedning feel an unstoppable urge to ask why I don't do IFFL as I "have N0SD0S". :-P
I find this very funny in all sorts of ways. :D |
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jcompton
Registered: Feb 2006
Posts: 70 |
Quote: Crack Competition 2020:-
Alternate Reality - The City
Just putting this out there... it might stop all the arguing ;-p
If I get a vote, I'm calling for Wasteland 101%.
Single volume. Integrate the paragraphs. |
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hedning
Registered: Mar 2009
Posts: 4723 |
Quote: Quote:The only key drawback is that, for EVERY release, Hedning feel an unstoppable urge to ask why I don't do IFFL as I "have N0SD0S". :-P
I find this very funny in all sorts of ways. :D
Because Bacchus never answers I have to keep asking. :D He just rambles about how bad BBS’s are and so on. |
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Bacchus
Registered: Jan 2002
Posts: 156 |
@hedning So now you can stop asking. I have said the same before and can repeat it but in my view IFFL is obsoleted - and BBS and first release only is a key part of the reason. I would use it in a competition, but if first is the only thing that counts - then really no.
Again;
http://bergatrollet.se/blog/2020/02/the-obsolescence-of-iffl/
And;
If not even your group is doing it, then you are in no position to ask it from someone else. (Supplying and have someone else do the cracking doesn't count).
/Bacchus
PS: And this BBS thing is just plain shit. Lame boring shit. |
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