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I still remember the day when I purchased AFTER THE WAR for the MSX. It was a game made by Dynamic (I suppose... BTW I remember that it was made in Spain ^___^). Boy, the Amiga version was fantastic and similar to FIST OF THE NORTH STAR, that was (and still is) a very popular Anime in Italy. Unfortunately the MSX version sucked. A lot.

I enjoyed that game. The graphics are monochrome -but good imho- and there's no music but the game is plenty of action. Big Hercules-like endbosses at the end of the first stages (side A of the tape)

How can monochrome graphics be good on a colourful computer as the MSX? Or were we too spoilt with Konam games, which are never monochrome?

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I still remember the day when I purchased AFTER THE WAR for the MSX. It was a game made by Dynamic (I suppose... BTW I remember that it was made in Spain ^___^). Boy, the Amiga version was fantastic and similar to FIST OF THE NORTH STAR, that was (and still is) a very popular Anime in Italy. Unfortunately the MSX version sucked. A lot.

the msx version of dynamic games is usually the speccy one with a more or less slow refresh rate.

So i think that if a zx version is excellent the msx one cannot be soooo inferior....
In those games we talk about msx port or convertion, but should instead talk about a msx1 emulating zx ...
(Of course slowest, considering == the mhz !)

Groan! chase HQ msx version control the sound via the kb click the sw developer does not know that msx almost does have psg? We asked to much to change the orrible keyclick sound to a more realistic one-channel psg sound ranging from low to high frequency?

Chase HQ was converted from the 48 KB version. The 128 KB version has full PSG musics.

while converting those games,
why not adding an auto r800 switch in case of TR?

To give people a choice, of playing the game in "normal" mode or in "turbo" mode

in the case of my latest release (you know where to go right? ) this is even more true: the game is almost at the same speed as on Spectrum, but with turbo, you get one hell of a smooth (and faster) game... so, it's up to the player to choose how he wants the game to be

Btw, the latest release I did... it's Gilbert Space from Drill

Good game! I didn't new it, but now I enjoy it

http://www.icongames.com.br/msxfiles/gilbert/index.htm

YOu mean: Escape from Drill?

By the way, you talked about a bug that prevented it from running on openMSX and blueMSX. Can you tell us more about it? If the emulators are right, it should also not have run on real MSX. If it did, there must be an emulation flaw.

Heh, yeah, Escape from Drill... I was sleepy when I posted that

As for the bug I was using some HALTs to time the ICON Games logo - that worked fine on BrMSX and on my A1ST, but on blueMSX and OpenMSX (emulating the same A1ST) it was freezing the emulation... don't ask me why. Changing the HALTs with a counter fixed it on the emulators.

@SlotMan: the game will be excellent if for the main char. a sprite is used.!

Can you please send me a version that uses the HALTs? So that we can debug our emulators...

Thanks!

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30fps? i think a bit too much for the z80. a z80 ldir command can transfer about 170kb/sec It's a bit too much even for a 7mhz msx system...

You are correct. I stated that since the game runs really smooth on 7MHz, but it is not "smooth scroll", so there is no need of 30FPS. 15 FPS should be sufficient, and I believe this is the standard FPS for Speccy games.
Is there any simple way to test real FPS?

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I debugged the vram I/O transfer and i've realized the same crappy thing: ram-vram ->I/O transfers are done with this code: ld a, (HL) out (0x98),a nop inc h ld a,(HL)...... (...) game speed could improve a lot if they adapted the zx speccy sw gfx routines to match the msx vram layout. in this way the ram->vram could be done with a OTIR, a lot faster than the above. as usual, to take advantage of a specific hw the sw should be adapted.

Well, I am not so sure... And I will tell you why.
MSX VDP is very slow; TMS 9128 is even slower than V9938/58. If you speed up things on Z80 side, there will be garbage on MSX1 screen. When running on MSX2, I noticed (on Shinobi) that exchanging sequences like above by OUTIs (the game works with a framebuffer that can be output this way), there was only a marginal gain. I was not able to determine why, but it is like if VDP 9938/58 slowed down the computer (specially true for turbo R). Anyway, the use of multiple OUTIs is faster than one (or multiple) OTIR, at least in theory.

But I believe the small speed improvement on Shinobi is not a final proof, since each games' engines work in a very different fashion.

Also, I would like to point that Altered Beast works with somewhat converted game data. The structure is still linear bitmap the game colors were pre-converted (this was the first time I have ever seen this!). Why the conversion was done this way, I really don't know... but I believe it was done to speed things up. The same can be done to rearrange bitmap data, I believe.

Since I had not statically modified a single byte of Altered Beast, be my guest to try improving its display graphical routine. If you don't move everything around, my loader will work ok.

Regards!

@Fudeba:
remember only on thing, the main bottleneck is the process of converting 'linear' display format to msx one. the vdp is not the *only* thing that slow down things. Plus on msx2 standard machines the I/O speed does not slow the z80 because the vdp can (hardly, but can, keep up the z80 at max speed). The problem is the MSX1 game. While i'm not so sure, i think that even an OTIR could be reliable on msx1 machines. Comparing the time of the speccy->msx blit routine we see that is very slow with respect to a plain OTIR.

Why we need the speccy format on a non-speccy machine? Because programmers are simply too lazy to implement a sw sprite routine that can work on the z80 ram in the SAME FORMAT as VRAM VDP. they work in the backbuffer in speccy-alike mode then they convert while blitting in vram to msx mode. THIS IS THE MAIN CAUSE OF SLOWNESS.

For games that also manipulate colors there is also twice almost the amount of data to be processed. this explain why a z80 @ 7mhz is needed to get similar speccy performances.


A thing that could be done will be to convert some sw sprites (where possible) into hw ones, thus minimizing the amount of work that the z80 must do

Another release, this time from Amusement Factory... Karateka!