Fixing the Oric Giga Demo
Posted: Sun Apr 06, 2014 11:19 am
The original discussion is on pouet.net: http://www.pouet.net/topic.php?which=9855
The idea is to fix the Oric Giga Demo, which suffered from a number of issues:
- Our loader was not mature at the time, so it was crashing a lot, we had to use a hacked Sedoric loader instead, resulting in a first a very slow loading time in some parts, and second the fact we could not use the overlay memory means the demo has no music at all
- The floppy builder was not very mature either, and as a result there are some bugs on the disk, like the message "Lifeiis short", the double "ii" is a bug caused by the tool writing datas incorrectly to the disk.
- Some other glitches, like the 60hz switch during the rotozoom, which causes some screens to go berzerk
- The overly visible red line on the scrolling picture (because at the time we did not have any conversion tool that could handle pictures taller than the screen)
- The broken rotating thingies which were supposed to be a 3D Studio animation, but it got broken during the packing
- The end logo which was brutally converted and looks like crap
- EDIT: Apparently it does not run on ORIC1 either, it calls Oric Atmos ROM functions such as HIRES
The idea is to fix the demo, at a minimum that would involve repackaging all of it using the new loader, which would in turn leave the overlay memory free, which would allow me to put a music.
If I can find ways to fix the rest without spending the rest of my life on it (hint: I do not have the source codes...), I will try to fix some of the most glaring bugs.
And since it looks like the various development diaries seem to interest people, I will document the progress in this thread.
Don't expect fast progress though, I will probably spend an hour here, an hour there, so it may take months
The idea is to fix the Oric Giga Demo, which suffered from a number of issues:
- Our loader was not mature at the time, so it was crashing a lot, we had to use a hacked Sedoric loader instead, resulting in a first a very slow loading time in some parts, and second the fact we could not use the overlay memory means the demo has no music at all
- The floppy builder was not very mature either, and as a result there are some bugs on the disk, like the message "Lifeiis short", the double "ii" is a bug caused by the tool writing datas incorrectly to the disk.
- Some other glitches, like the 60hz switch during the rotozoom, which causes some screens to go berzerk
- The overly visible red line on the scrolling picture (because at the time we did not have any conversion tool that could handle pictures taller than the screen)
- The broken rotating thingies which were supposed to be a 3D Studio animation, but it got broken during the packing
- The end logo which was brutally converted and looks like crap
- EDIT: Apparently it does not run on ORIC1 either, it calls Oric Atmos ROM functions such as HIRES
The idea is to fix the demo, at a minimum that would involve repackaging all of it using the new loader, which would in turn leave the overlay memory free, which would allow me to put a music.
If I can find ways to fix the rest without spending the rest of my life on it (hint: I do not have the source codes...), I will try to fix some of the most glaring bugs.
And since it looks like the various development diaries seem to interest people, I will document the progress in this thread.
Don't expect fast progress though, I will probably spend an hour here, an hour there, so it may take months