cjp@vax135.UUCP (04/10/87)
Has anyone succeeded in modifying the game, Balance of Power, to run from RAM rather than disk? It has the potential of being a great game, but due to its heavy use of program overlays, it's UNBEARABLY slow. Every time you change screens: GRIND, GRIND, GRIND for about 20 seconds. After a few "years" of this, you WANT to "press the button". I've tried some things but they don't quite work. To start with, one uses Marauder II "decode" to deprotect the thing. One could then presumably copy the entire disk to a RAM directory, and ASSIGN bop: to that directory. Unfortunately the d**n game refuses to run in the presence of FAST memory, and there isn't enough CHIP memory to both run the game and have the disk copy in RAM. Yeah, it changes screens real fast now but the screens are filled with garbage. I'm pretty sure I tried doing the copy to FAST RAM, then running "fastmem" to hide the rest of FAST ram before running BOP. Don't remember why this didn't work. I tried to treat the BOP executable with "fixhunk" from some Fish disk, to force loading into CHIP mem, but it said 'sorry but this version can't treat overlay files'. Is there perhaps a newer version around that does overlays? And if so, is this likely to fix things up? FYI: I run a stock Amiga 1000 with 512K + 512K Alegra. Any help on this will be much appreciated. Charles Poirier (ucbvax, decvax, ihnp4, attmail!ho95b)!vax135!cjp
gator@rpiacm.UUCP (04/13/87)
In article <1830@vax135.UUCP>, cjp@vax135.UUCP writes: > Has anyone succeeded in modifying the game, Balance of Power, to run > from RAM rather than disk? Haven't tried this myself (will try it as soon as I get offline) bumt if you look at the BOP disc there's a dir called `cbm' which seems to contain most of the country info. You could probably manage to copy this dir into RAMdisk, bumt making BOP look for it there is something else (it probably looks for BOP:cbm/). You might try assigning BOP: to VD0: (or whatever you use), but make sure you remove the BOP disc. There's probably a way to hack it in with NewZap, maybe later tonite if I *really* don't want to write my German paper I'll give it a shot ;-). > I tried to treat the BOP executable with "fixhunk" from some Fish disk, to > force loading into CHIP mem, but it said 'sorry but this version can't treat > overlay files'. Is there perhaps a newer version around that does overlays? > And if so, is this likely to fix things up? FixHunk 2.0 is out, and speaking from experience it does work with BOP. I have the internal hack and was rather annoyed when BOP booted up in my 1 Meg system - with no pointer. However I have gotten it to work with FH2.0. No extensive testing however since I haven't been that much into game playing this semester. I know 2.0 is on Plink, dunno if it's been posted here or if Fred Fish has it in his latest discs. -Ed -- <.> <.> Eduardo UUCP: ..!seismo!rpics!rpiacm!gator / ___ \ Santiago ARPA: SANTIAGO@DEC | \ / | Munoz VOX: 518-274-9124 | V | |\ /| Generic Disclaimer Number twenty-seven-B-stroke-six: \\ o o // The above was generated by an overly precocious Amiga running \\___// an AI environment written in FORTRAN, under my supervision. \^^^/ It bears no relation whatsoever to the views of Rensseltute.