From nobody Sat Jul 13 07:37:21 2002 Newsgroups: comp.emulators.cbm Subject: Re: Is it possible to run Elite on CCS64/VICE? References: Date: 13 Jul 2002 07:37:21 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Lines: 17 "mike" writes: > Can't seem to get it to work. A couple of seconds after the game > starts, it freezes. I've played it quite a bit on VICE 1.8(Linux). I think I had to turn on true drive emulation so the fast-loader could work. I don't use the klunky save feature in the game, since saving a snapshot now and then is easier. I've used the image from arnold.c64.org, and also the 128-designed version (runs in 64 mode) that has some nice extra features. -- Aaron From nobody Sat Jul 13 14:20:23 2002 Newsgroups: comp.emulators.cbm Subject: Re: Is it possible to run Elite on CCS64/VICE? References: Date: 13 Jul 2002 14:20:21 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Lines: 18 Christian Link writes: > It would. But there's one thing: "Freezing" (I mean, real freezing, no > corrupt graphics or whatever!) rather sounds like the pause function > to me. I can't remember off-hand, how it was activated, but probably > via backspace or one of the arrow (not cursor!) keys, i.e. arrow left > or arrow up. One of these is "simulated" if you use the wrong > joystick... In the versions I've played, Backspace paused the game, while Home/Del un-paused it. While paused, there were keys you could press to toggle the docking music on/off, toggle the way the planets are displayed, etc. -- Aaron From nobody Mon Jul 22 06:23:31 2002 Newsgroups: comp.emulators.cbm Subject: Re: VICE 1.8/1.9 reSID sound buffer repeatedly draining References: Date: 22 Jul 2002 06:23:28 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Lines: 29 "Matthew W. Miller" writes: > Although VICE keeps getting better and better overall (especially > VDC video!), I find I'm having trouble with SID sound in versions > 1.8 and 1.9. More specifically, in x64 and x128 I have been getting > repeated messages "Sound: Warning - Buffer drained", with momentary > pauses in audio. With "Use ReSID Emulation" enabled, they come > about once every seven seconds; without, they come less frequently > but never go away entirely, darn it. > I am using VICE 1.9, self-compiled with gcc 3.1, under Red Hat Linux > 6.2 and XFree86 3.3.6, on a Pentium-MMX 200MHz. Output of `uname > -a` is: I'm also using a P200, and I get the same warnings with VICE 1.8. I assume it's just my slow machine, as it gets worse if I've got something going on in another window. I didn't notice it hurting anything, but I've just been playing Pool of Radiance, which doesn't really have any significant sound. It should help to shut down as many other programs as possible. If you're using a resource-hogging window manager like gnome's enlightenment or kde's, try switching to something lighter like windowmaker or sawfish. -- Aaron From nobody Tue Jul 30 21:43:53 2002 Newsgroups: comp.emulators.cbm Subject: Re: Compiling VICE? References: Date: 30 Jul 2002 21:43:53 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Lines: 14 Todd Elliott writes: > What I did was to call 'configure' and then 'make'. Both programs > went through a lot of code text and seeming gibberish. The make > failed with a 'recursive' error and the VICE programs are not > created. If you show us the last several lines of your 'make,' we may be able to help. -- Aaron From nobody Sat Aug 3 06:15:43 2002 Newsgroups: comp.emulators.cbm Subject: Re: Compiling VICE? References: Date: 03 Aug 2002 06:15:43 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Lines: 13 Todd Elliott writes: > Thanks for the last tip, 'make install' did the trick for me! Now, I > gotta figure out VICE for LINUX as the 40 column screen seems to be > tad small for my liking. Look for the option to double screen size, somewhere in the video options. -- Aaron From nobody Tue Aug 27 17:14:31 2002 Newsgroups: comp.emulators.cbm Subject: Re: Hi. New to the group. GEOS? References: <55qhmu4bemv4ft7h4suro37h83qp3ajqfm@4ax.com> Date: 27 Aug 2002 17:14:31 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Lines: 13 Christian Link writes: > Other devices had a battery backed up clock you had to set once. I > think this CMD (?) 3-button-mouse had, as an additional feature, but > I may be wrong about that. I believe mine got the time from a real-time clock in my CMD trackball. -- Aaron From nobody Thu Oct 24 22:16:26 2002 Newsgroups: comp.emulators.cbm Subject: Re: Arnold losing life support. References: Date: 24 Oct 2002 22:16:26 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Lines: 17 butter@arnold.c64.org writes: > Also, if anyone has the means of hosting a software archive of old > c64 software that is around 920MB in size and draws about 150GB / > month of transfer, please let me know fairly soon....before this > weekend is best. Feel free to use the address hackrat at mtrap dot > org to contact me. I'm making a mirror of it right now, but I don't know if I have a place to host that kind of bandwidth. 150GB/month seems like an awful lot, considering most of the games are less than 100K. Must be a heck of a lot of transfers. -- Aaron From nobody Tue Nov 5 17:33:36 2002 Newsgroups: comp.emulators.cbm Subject: Re: Where are you from and which are your top 5 C64 titles ? References: <48506de4.0211051246.bb87565@posting.google.com> Date: 05 Nov 2002 17:33:36 -0600 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Lines: 36 marcelito@spamhole.com (Marcelito) writes: > Yes, this is a trick to revive the newsgroup, but it=B4s a nice way to > do it. > I=B4m from Montevideo, Uruguay. Illinois, USA. > My top 5 is: These are games I put in lots of hours playing on my C128, and I've played most of them on emulators since. Ultima IV and V Pool of Radiance Elite MULE Autoduel I'm probably forgetting something there, but those were the biggies. A few games that get honorable mention for great concept, although I didn't play them as much as the ones above: Logical (good action/puzzle available nowadays for X/Unix) Sentinel (I think that was the name; you were a robot on this 3D environment, absorbing trees and other robots to move higher) Wizball (unique two-player game, where one player controlled the big wizball and the other player controlled the 'cat'. Lots of fun for two.) --=20 Aaron From nobody Thu Nov 7 15:46:15 2002 Newsgroups: comp.emulators.cbm Subject: Re: Where are you from and which are your top 5 C64 titles ? References: <48506de4.0211051246.bb87565@posting.google.com> Date: 07 Nov 2002 15:46:15 -0600 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Lines: 13 Etienne von Wettingfeld writes: > I also love the AD&D games! Al lot of games where a lot of fun, > but I think these are the 5 I spend most of my time on. I managed > to complete Ultima V, Wizball [snip] Wow, I didn't even know Wizball had an end. I just figured it kept replicating levels indefinitely. Guess I didn't play it enough. -- Aaron From nobody Tue Nov 12 05:41:50 2002 Newsgroups: comp.emulators.cbm Subject: Re: Find a memory address? References: <%uWz9.14$VF7.4052086@newssvr11.news.prodigy.com> <0qh0tugdpgepq6phvhl0osh1hud5tbufft@4ax.com> Date: 12 Nov 2002 05:41:49 -0600 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Lines: 34 J. Robertson writes: > Yep, that about precisely how that's done. You find all addresses in > your range that have a value of 18. Then you lose a bit of hit > point, say to 17, then look at your range of addresses eliminating > all locations that don't contain 17. Then you lose more hit points > and go back and eliminate and so on. Process of elimination. You'll > evantually find the correct location. How long you'll be doing this > for, well, that depends ;-) Here's how I did it recently to find the character stats for Pool of Radiance. Running Vice on Unix, I saved a snapshot of the game (a.vsf). Then I'd change some little thing -- cast a spell, drop a gold piece, buy an arrow, etc. Save a second snapshot with a different name (b.vsf). Then I'd run both snapshots through a hexdump program and diff them: hd a.vsf >a.hd hd b.vsf >b.hd diff a.hd b.hd >a-b.diff Now 'a-b.diff' shows all the differences between the two snapshots. I found that quite a few places in the snapshots would change, because more things in the emulator image are changing than just the one thing I changed, but you can pretty quickly narrow it down. For example, if you just healed a character from 10 HP to 16, you look for a line that changed from 0A to 10. (Assuming it's saving in hex. If it saves in BCD or floating point, you'll have to figure out those values and look for those.) -- Aaron From nobody Tue Nov 12 18:23:09 2002 Newsgroups: comp.emulators.cbm Subject: Re: Find a memory address? Date: 12 Nov 2002 18:23:08 -0600 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Lines: 20 "meteormaze" writes: > That sounds like a good idea, and much easier than going block by > block like I've been doing. Thanks for the advice, I'll look into > getting a hexdump program to try this method out. The last few Unix/Linux systems I've used have had a hexdump program in the default install, called 'hd'. I used to use Craig Bruce's 'hd' program, which you can find here and compile for yourself. I have no idea whether it would compile under Win/DOS. Every Unix system I've ever used has has 'od', an octal dump program, but after years of using Di-Sector, I'm much better with hex than octal, personally. -- Aaron From nobody Wed Nov 13 19:01:22 2002 Newsgroups: comp.emulators.cbm Subject: Re: Find a memory address? Date: 13 Nov 2002 19:01:22 -0600 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Lines: 20 Anders Carlsson writes: > Umm.. it works the same way on Solaris. I should've written what you > just wrote to explain how to get it bytewise. Another of my > favourites of course is hexl-mode within Emacs, which allows (some) > editing into the hexadecimal dump. Too bad I haven't found a way to > *insert* bytes into the dump, only how to modify what's already in > it. Thanks; I didn't know about hexl-mode. Always looking for ways to increase my Emacs usage. :-) I tried it, and it has commands like hexl-insert-hex-char, which seems like it's supposed to insert instead of overwriting, but it overwrites when I try it. Maybe it's broken? -- Aaron From nobody Tue Nov 19 05:55:53 2002 Newsgroups: comp.emulators.cbm Subject: Re: Vice snapshot system References: Date: 19 Nov 2002 05:55:52 -0600 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Lines: 52 "Brian Bagnall" writes: > I love Vice, but one thing that needs refining is the save game > state system. Everythie it does a quick snapshot it adds another > file to the directory. Not for me. When I do a quick snapshot in x64 (Unix version, F11, I think), it saves the snapshot in ~/.vice/C64.vsf. Any subsequent quick snapshots overwrite that file. In long-term games like RPGs, I'll do a manual snapshot save (Alt-S) every so often when I'm in a 'safe' spot in the game, giving the snapshot a name I'll recognize later. While playing, I'll use the quick snapshot regularly, knowing that if something goes wrong (can't fight my way back out of a situation) I can always go back to my last Alt-S snapshot. > A better system would be like the way SNES9x and Visualboy Advance > works. It saves (and overwrites) the game state under the same name > as the game file, so when you come back to a game you are playing > you can just load the state and off you go. Makes it way better if > you come back to lots of games from time to time. It also has > multiple slots for each game, which helps too. I accomplish much the same thing by having each game's files in its own directory, and saving the snapshots for that game there. So if I want to play elite from my latest save, I cd into my games/e/elite directory, and type "x64 latest.vsf". Vice starts up from the snapshot right where I left off. If I always save each game with that name when I quit, it's easy to remember to just type that to restart. Since there's only one quick snapshot, regardless of what game you're playing, just use it for 'in-game' saves, and make sure to do a specific save for a game before you quit. To use Elite as an example again, every time I land safely at a planet and am happy with the situation, I save a snapshot called "latest.vsf". If I'm flying around killing pirates, and I've killed a dozen, but am still a long way from safety, I'll do a quick snapshot. That way if I get killed, I can go back to my quick save and try different tactics, or go all the way back to my latest 'safe' situation. I never use the save-game functions of the games themselves anymore. After all, most of them were very slow, required disk swapping, and couldn't be saved just anywhere. Take Autoduel -- you could only save when quitting the game. One exception would be Pool of Radiance, which requires a save disk while creating characters (and much disk swapping). Once you've created your party and started adventuring, though, you can forget the save disk unless you need to add/remove characters. -- Aaron From nobody Fri May 16 06:28:30 2003 Newsgroups: comp.emulators.cbm Subject: Re: Elvira mistress of the darkness.... References: Organization: ESC Date: 16 May 2003 06:28:30 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Lines: 30 "Acid_Rain" writes: > Elvira mistress of the darkness.... this game when came out > advertised everywhere and I am still wondering how this game > actually is? > Is anyone of you played this game is it any better graphics than > other c64 games thats what they claimed it when they launched this > game I never could afford it that time ... The graphics were pretty good for a C64 game, but there were a lot of long disk-loading waits to get them. I soon got tired of waiting and didn't get very far into the game. It might be worth checking out again on an emulator. I think in the category of painfully long in-game disk-loads, the worst game I ever played was Grave Yardage. There was an excruciatingly *long* wait between every play (it's a football game with monsters). Which was a shame, because it was a pretty cool game. B.A.T. was about as bad. I didn't mind games like Autoduel that took a long time to load initially, because I could go get a drink or something, but games that did a lot of slow in-game disk work tended to get ignored until I got Jiffy-Dos. -- Aaron