djh@neuromancer.metaphor.com (Dallas J. Hodgson) (03/05/91)
Here's one for Psygnosis and all those other gamewriters who justify monopolizing the machine for the every last ounce of CPU power, try this: 1) Install Bob Dinnerman's "FA/18 Flight Interceptor" on your hard disk. 2) newcli aux: 3) Changetaskpri the aux cli to 10. 4) Run FA/18 from a different CLI. What do you know, the thing RUNS and RUNS WELL. The game doesn't run too fast, crash on the A-3000's high memory or lock up. In fact, most CLI commands make little impact on the performance of the game. Amazing! A tip of the hat to Robert Dinnerman, for an amazingly high-performance and fine game that runs on the A-3000 before the A-3000 was even available. Playing by the rules DOES work, after all. If you NewZAP the df0: references in FA/18 you can restrict its disk loading to files off your hard disk. I spent a couple evenings removing the manual keyword copyprotection also; I wouldn't have wasted my time unless the game was THAT good! (and cheap, to boot!) -- +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Dallas J. Hodgson | "These days, you have to be pretty | | Metaphor Computer Systems | technical before you can even | | Mountain View, Ca. | aspire to crudeness." | | USENET : djh@metaphor.com | - William Gibson | +============================================================================+ | "The views I express are my own, and not necessarily those of my employer" | +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
swarren@convex.com (Steve Warren) (03/05/91)
In article <521@cronos.metaphor.com> djh@neuromancer.metaphor.com (Dallas J. Hodgson) writes: [...description of how to multitask while playing FA/18 deleted...] >A tip of the hat to Robert Dinnerman, for an amazingly high-performance and >fine game that runs on the A-3000 before the A-3000 was even available. >Playing by the rules DOES work, after all. [...] OK, now there is just one thing left to fix, before I make it a practice to run FA-18 in the background. ;^) How do you exit gracefully without rebooting? If someone came up with a nice binary patch that added the ability to quit out of FA-18 (of course releasing all allocated system resources in the process), I would be really happy. -- _. --Steve ._||__ DISCLAIMER: All opinions are my own. Warren v\ *| ---------------------------------------------- V {uunet,sun}!convex!swarren; swarren@convex.com
sschaem@starnet.uucp (Stephan Schaem) (03/06/91)
I heard alot about people complaining about game not multitasking
not being HD instalable or else...
For F-18 I haven't seen any thing that would make it not multitasking.
Sometime its hard to share things with intuition...
Sprites for example, you might need them all and need copper control.
So if you open a screen for your display you need a better way
handle the copper list than with the OS.It would be possible, but slow
, REALLY slow.
Also if you are involve in game programing you will see that there is
alot of display methode.F18 for example use 2 page, other for other
need only have one page.So blitter timming is crytical would really
mess things up on the display.
The memory issue is also here, since developers need the all market
available especially when they offer amiga only product.
If everybody Had 1meg you will have games that can alway come back to
the OS, not all multitasking but not 'destroying' it...
In fact their is hundreds of reason why ACTION GAME act that way.
I program in both world of 'system' and 'hardware', system programer
are not smarter or do things better or the other way.
This is really 2 complete diferent things, and most cant swap field
just like that (depand on level).
I done 3 games on the amiga ("OVERDRIVE" is the latest) and profesional
duplicator driver/software, 400 function libraryes (intuition,gfx
extension), gfx display (IRIS MOSTLY) etc... Curently doing a
multitasking game at 60 frame second using only one page (take cpu
during scroll).
The fact is: all game can be HD installable, can come back to system
AND NOT all game multitasking.
HD instalabel is for protection and development time.
Back to system is to deal with ALL amiga owners.
Multitasking is not a choice at start.
It's easy to know if a game could have been the above, just look
for special indication....chem194@csc.canterbury.ac.nz (John Davis) (03/06/91)
In article <521@cronos.metaphor.com>, djh@neuromancer.metaphor.com (Dallas J. Hodgson) writes: > 1) Install Bob Dinnerman's "FA/18 Flight Interceptor" on your hard disk. > 2) newcli aux: > 3) Changetaskpri the aux cli to 10. > 4) Run FA/18 from a different CLI. > > What do you know, the thing RUNS and RUNS WELL. The game doesn't run too > fast, crash on the A-3000's high memory or lock up. In fact, most CLI > commands make little impact on the performance of the game. Amazing! Actually, there's a 'debugging option' in Falcon Mission 2 (from spectrum holobyte) that lets you do the same thing - I can only presume it was left in as SH used it whilst ironing the bugs out of the game. With the debug option enabled, you can merrily multi-task on and 030 machine (it's too slow to be useful on a 68000 though) - a really good way to freak people out. ----------------------------------------------------------- | o John Davis - CHEM194@canterbury.ac.nz o | | o (Depart)mental Programmer,Chemistry Department o | | o University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand o | | o o | | o co-sysop AmigaINFO BBS,1200/2400 baud CCITT, o | | o 24 hours a day, ph NZ +3-3371-531 o |