wbt@cbnews.ATT.COM (William B. Thacker) (11/29/88)
Well, I broke down and bought Bard's Tale II. So far, after one evening's play, the game looks fine. Like the original, of course, it's slower than molasses in January, from constantly loading up all those little pictures (oops, forgot, er, "graphics" 8-) Soooo,... tonight I'll start experimenting with ways to speed it up. I'd also appreciate any help anyone out there may care to offer. My system is an Amiga 2000 with 2 megs of expansion RAM. I'm operating under 1.2 (out here in the sticks (! ? ) most of us are *still* waiting in line as 1.3 trickles in... another reason to hate California), and have FaccII. Happily, the game disk is not copy protected (wow !, thanks, EA !). My first guess would be to copy the entire game disk to RAM: and assign "Bard's Tale 2 Game disk" (or whatever the disk's name is) to RAM: Naturally, the character disk must be left as is, so you can save your game. Has anyone tried this ? Mi tio es infermo, pero la carratera es verde ! ------------------------------ valuable coupon ------------------------------- Bill Thacker att!cbnews!wbt "C" combines the power of assembly language with the flexibility of assembly language. Disclaimer: Farg 'em if they can't take a joke ! ------------------------------- clip and save --------------------------------
giao@infmx.UUCP (Giao TienVu) (11/29/88)
In article <2357@cbnews.ATT.COM>, wbt@cbnews.ATT.COM (William B. Thacker) writes: > > Soooo,... tonight I'll start experimenting with ways to speed it up. > I'd also appreciate any help anyone out there may care to offer. > What I did was putting 2 lines in Startup-Sequence to allocate about 1024 blocks for Bard's Tale II (sorry, I don't remember exact commands; my machine is at home) and almost no more long wait for the images of the ugly monsters to appear. By the way, maybe it's just me but do you notice the monsters don't look as nice as those in the original Bard's Tale (the number of colors seems limited)? I wonder if they try to use the same artworks for the lowly Apple II gs :-> :->. Pretty good game though. G. T. Vu {pyramid,uunet}!infmx!giao or vu!Polya.Stanford.EDU
chas@gtss.UUCP (Charles Cleveland) (11/30/88)
In article <2357@cbnews.ATT.COM> wbt@cbnews.ATT.COM (William B. Thacker) writes:
)
)
)Well, I broke down and bought Bard's Tale II. So far, after one
)evening's play, the game looks fine. Like the original, of course,
)it's slower than molasses in January, from constantly loading up
)all those little pictures (oops, forgot, er, "graphics" 8-)
)
)Soooo,... tonight I'll start experimenting with ways to speed it up.
)I'd also appreciate any help anyone out there may care to offer.
)
)My system is an Amiga 2000 with 2 megs of expansion RAM. I'm operating
)under 1.2 (out here in the sticks (! ? ) most of us are *still* waiting
)in line as 1.3 trickles in... another reason to hate California), and
)have FaccII. Happily, the game disk is not copy protected (wow !,
)thanks, EA !).
)
)My first guess would be to copy the entire game disk to RAM: and assign
)"Bard's Tale 2 Game disk" (or whatever the disk's name is) to RAM:
)Naturally, the character disk must be left as is, so you can save your
)game. Has anyone tried this ?
Not without first trying something else that uses less memory. I've got
1.5 Megs total, so I have to be a hell :-) of a lot more conservative than
slobs like you with two Megs or more.
So I use the following startup-sequence to copy some, but not quite all,
of the Bard's Tale II disk to ram:. Perhaps I would do better to copy more,
or even less, but what the hell, it works for me.
#--- humble and imperfect startup-sequence exemplifing alternative follows:
"DESTINY KNIGHT CHARACTER DISK:c/path" add "DESTINY KNIGHT CHARACTER DISK:c"
RTClock ;yes I have an Insider board
assign l: "DESTINY KNIGHT CHARACTER DISK:l"
copy bs.anm ram:
makedir ram:bards_data
copy bards_data ram:bards_data all
copy bard ram:
copy title ram:
makedir ram:fonts
copy fonts ram:fonts all
makedir ram:libs
copy libs ram:libs all
cd ram:
assign BARDSDK: ram:
assign fonts: ram:fonts
assign libs: ram:libs
;bard ;remove ';' to be automatically thrown into game
--
- It is better for civilization to be going down the drain than to be -
- coming up it. -- Henry Allen -
Charles Cleveland Georgia Tech School of Physics Atlanta, GA 30332-0430
UUCP: ...!gatech!gtss!chas INTERNET: chas@ss.physics.gatech.edujlockhar@ssibbs.UUCP (John Lockhart) (11/30/88)
In article <2357@cbnews.ATT.COM>, wbt@cbnews.ATT.COM (William B. Thacker) writes: >[stuff deleted] > Soooo,... tonight I'll start experimenting with ways to speed it up. > I'd also appreciate any help anyone out there may care to offer. > > My system is an Amiga 2000 with 2 megs of expansion RAM. I'm operating > under 1.2 (out here in the sticks (! ? ) most of us are *still* waiting [more deletions] > Naturally, the character disk must be left as is, so you can save your > game. Has anyone tried this ? > Bill Thacker att!cbnews!wbt I use a combination of hard drive, RAM:, and messy bug workaround to get it to work reasonably well. I believe I had to alter the binary to get rid of some hard-coded paths and replace 'em with logical names, preserving the original string length. I did this only after I had problems doing it the obvious way (copying it to a directory on the hard drive, doing ASSIGNs, and trying to run it unsuccessfully, as below). Not nice, but it works - kind of. First, my system is an A2000 with Micron/ASDG 2M RAM, A2090, ST251 hard drive, flickerFixer, internal floppy, and external floppy, running under 1.3 AmigaDOS. Usual things I run are: FF, WShell, MachII, WorkBench, ARexx, ConMan, RAD:, and various ARP commands (basically rm, cp, mv-type stuff; some ARP stuff breaks with 1.3). Bard's Tale II does not work properly. After booting normally, I do the necessary ASSIGNs ("bardsdk:" to ff1:games/bt and "Destiny Knight Character Disk:" to ff1:games/bt/chars, where ff1: is the FFS partition on the hard drive). I then CD to ff1:games/bt and type "bard". Guru!! *However,* Bard's Tale works perfectly well if you do *nothing* else before starting it up [I found this out before altering the binary]. So I've created a special "Bard's Boot" disk for which the startup-sequence copies necessary executables to RAM: and starts the program with a RUN command, and then goes about the business of setting up the hard drive, etc. I still keep much of the picture data and all of the character data safely on the hard drive -- it does the ASSIGNs before BT2 gives up looking. I called EA and they said, "We're looking into it." Sounds like a line to me, especially after the demise of Archon for lack of support. But who knows, at least it isn't copy-protected (hooray). Does anyone have a better solution than this workaround? -- --- John Lockhart ___________________________________________________________________ ...{mit-eddie,pyramid,datacube}!mirror!ssi3b1!ssibbs!jlockhar jlockhar@ssibbs.UUCP or jwl@feanor.stanford.edu
wbt@cbnews.ATT.COM (William B. Thacker) (12/01/88)
In article <285@gtss.UUCP> chas@gtss.UUCP (Charles Cleveland) writes: >In article <2357@cbnews.ATT.COM> wbt@cbnews.ATT.COM (William B. Thacker) writes: >)Soooo,... tonight I'll start experimenting with ways to speed it up. >)I'd also appreciate any help anyone out there may care to offer. >) >)My system is an Amiga 2000 with 2 megs of expansion RAM. I'm operating >)under 1.2 (out here in the sticks (! ? ) most of us are *still* waiting >)in line as 1.3 trickles in... another reason to hate California), and >)have FaccII. Happily, the game disk is not copy protected (wow !, >)thanks, EA !). >) >)My first guess would be to copy the entire game disk to RAM: and assign >)"Bard's Tale 2 Game disk" (or whatever the disk's name is) to RAM: > >So I use the following startup-sequence to copy some, but not quite all, >of the Bard's Tale II disk to ram:. Perhaps I would do better to copy more, >or even less, but what the hell, it works for me. > >#--- humble and imperfect startup-sequence exemplifing alternative follows: Unfortunately, Charles omitted a few crucial steps (as an excercise for the reader, no doubt 8-) 1) You must create the directory "DESTINY KNIGHT CHARACTER DISK:c" and copy the commands "path", "copy", "assign", "cd", and , "makedir" into it from "Workbench 1.2:c". (Score one for me, I realized this before I read the post). 2) The directory "DESTINY KNIGHT CHARACTER DISK:l" must contain the files "Disk-Validator" and "Ram-Handler" from "Workbench 1.2:l" (add half a point for me, I copied in disk-validator. Got a failed book then figured out that "copy to RAM:" won't work without ram-handler 8-> 3) You must relabel your game disk. If you leave it labeled "BARDSDK". the system will be unable to assign that name to RAM: while the disk is mounted. Below are the changes I used to Mr. Cleveland's s/startup-sequence. >"DESTINY KNIGHT CHARACTER DISK:c/path" add "DESTINY KNIGHT CHARACTER DISK:c" >assign l: "DESTINY KNIGHT CHARACTER DISK:l" >copy DF0: to RAM: all >cd ram: >assign BARDSDK: ram: >assign fonts: ram:fonts >assign libs: ram:libs assign devs: ram:devs ; the added assigns are probably pointless. At assign sys: ram: ; 9:00 I started getting frustrated. 8-) bard I know this is gross overkill; I don't need to copy all of the game disk (e.g., s/*) into RAM: But I've got enough memory that that's easier than farging with it. Now, here's the killer: it works, but doesn't. The game goes into RAM: fine, starts up, nice and quiet, no disk access. But everytime there would have been a pause playing it off disk (i.e., for loading graphics, sounds, etc), there's still a pause, and it doesn't seem any shorter to me. You also get the "busy" signal (the cartoon-balloon snore). I realize that there's still bound to be some lag as the information from RAM: is decoded and used; but I'd expected a full second or more saved on each access. Is this all there is, or have I done something wrong ? ------------------------------ valuable coupon ------------------------------- Bill Thacker att!cbnews!wbt "C" combines the power of assembly language with the flexibility of assembly language. Disclaimer: Farg 'em if they can't take a joke ! ------------------------------- clip and save --------------------------------
hpchang@ziebmef.uucp (Hsi P. Chang) (12/02/88)
In article <2357@cbnews.ATT.COM> wbt@cbnews.ATT.COM (William B. Thacker) writes: >My first guess would be to copy the entire game disk to RAM: and assign >"Bard's Tale 2 Game disk" (or whatever the disk's name is) to RAM: >Naturally, the character disk must be left as is, so you can save your >game. Has anyone tried this ? Must be nice to have that much ram. I still want more than .5 Meg for my 1000. On the side note, can anyone recommend of expansion of, say, 1 meg or so ?? =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Hsi P. Chang uunet!utgpu!{ontmoh!moore,ncrcan}!ziebmef!hpchang U of Waterloo co-op student or hpchang@ziebmef.UUCP 3A Computer Science Presently on work term at Control Data Canada, Computer Development Division
thad@cup.portal.com (Thad P Floryan) (12/05/88)
Re: Hsi P. Chang's question about RAM expansion for the A1000 ... Considering you're in Canada (Univ of Waterloo), get the ComSpec AX2000. I still maintain that's the *BEST*, bar none, RAM expansion for the A1000. I've had mine for over 2-1/2 years now, and it's the ONLY expansion product for the A1000 that seems to work on EVERY A1000 (even those I've hacked up with 68010, 68020, CSA and Ronin Hurricane products, etc.). It ALSO uses the least amount of current from the Amiga (important if you're hanging a lot of peripherals on the system). Thad Floryan [thad@cup.portal.com (OR) ...!sun!portal!cup.portal.com!thad]