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Author Topic: Demo THE CURE (Was: Dot-matrix engine for AGA)  (Read 10523 times)

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Offline saimoTopic starter

Re: Demo THE CURE (Was: Dot-matrix engine for AGA)
« Reply #14 from previous page: June 02, 2021, 06:03:58 PM »
Such words are much appreciated. Thanks for the lovely feedback!
RETREAM - retro dreams for Amiga, Commodore 64 and PC
 

Offline saimoTopic starter

Re: Demo THE CURE (Was: Dot-matrix engine for AGA)
« Reply #15 on: August 04, 2021, 09:07:30 PM »
Just released a slightly revised version.

v1.2 (04.08.2021)
* Made startup and cleanup code more robust.
* Made a few tiny optimizations.

https://www.retream.com/THE_CURE
RETREAM - retro dreams for Amiga, Commodore 64 and PC
 

Offline saimoTopic starter

Re: Demo THE CURE (Was: Dot-matrix engine for AGA)
« Reply #16 on: August 19, 2021, 02:05:07 PM »
While working on the SkillGrid update, backporting to it all the improvements I recently made to my other projects, I realized that those improvements came with a couple of new bugs. THE CURE was affected by them, so here's a new bugfixed version.

https://www.retream.com/THE_CURE

v1.3 (19.08.2021)
* Fixed recently-introduced memory leak in startup code.
* Replaced unreliable CIA-access-based delay code at startup with machine-agnostic code.
* Made a couple of minor internal changes.
RETREAM - retro dreams for Amiga, Commodore 64 and PC
 

Offline saimoTopic starter

Re: Demo THE CURE (Was: Dot-matrix engine for AGA)
« Reply #17 on: April 29, 2022, 09:05:35 PM »
This update was not planned, but, still, it happened - and makes the demo even better. In short: it improves the music, it improves the audio-to-video sychronization, it adds a few more palette effects and brings other little improvements (for the details, check out the changelog below).

Get THE CURE v1.4 from https://retream.itch.io/the-cure and enjoy!

v1.4 (29.04.2022)
* Improved music: improved S/N ratio by eliminating a peak (caused by the "str" of "street" in the spoken part) and re-normalizing the waveform; amplified initial part a little bit; reduced greatly the noise that affected the coda (due to the 8-bit quantization) by amplifying that part of the waveform to the maximum and balancing that with a real-time volume change; increased sampling frequency to 29073 Hz (side effects: channels 2 and 3 can no longer be used, so the output volume is lower; music decoding takes a little longer as there is more data to decode each frame; the CHIP bus time taken by audio DMA is almost halved, which makes the demo less demanding).
* Added switch-off of filter to ensure music sounds as it is supposed to.
* Fixed audio-to-video synchronization: fixed drifting caused by the difference between the actual and theoretical rates (~49.92 VS 50 Hz) of the video refresh (that, by the end of the demo, caused an asynchronism of ~0.5 s); fixed 60 ms asynchronism caused by the fact that the first three frames required for music setup/buffering were ignored; fixed a few timing marks in the script (an off-by-one mark which caused a peak of operations in the specified frame; a mark that caused the following effect to execute 4 frames too late; a few marks that were off by a frame).
* Fixed a bad routine pointer (caused by a wrong letter in a label in the source code; it is quite incredible that this did not produce disastrous results).
* Added some palette effects.
* Optimized music decoding by unpacking and undeltaing data at the same time (why it was not like this right from the beginning is a mistery).
* Made some other small optimizations.
* Made startup and cleanup code more robust by shielding some critical operations from NMIs and by dealing with audio playback performed with direct hardware access by other programs concurrently.
* Added version string.
* Improved/extended README.
« Last Edit: May 01, 2022, 10:17:55 AM by saimo »
RETREAM - retro dreams for Amiga, Commodore 64 and PC
 

Offline saimoTopic starter

Re: Demo THE CURE (Was: Dot-matrix engine for AGA)
« Reply #18 on: January 02, 2024, 12:59:01 PM »
Just released a little update. This should cure (heh) the stuttering I've seen on some boards that are more than capable of running the demo at full speed.

https://retream.itch.io/the-cure

v1.5 (2.1.2024)
* Improved CPU data cache handling on 68040 and 68060.
* Ensured the system MMU setup does not affect performance.
* Ensured the 68060 susperscalar dispatch is enabled.
* Made some small optimizations.
* Made startup and cleanup code more robust.
« Last Edit: January 02, 2024, 01:03:31 PM by saimo »
RETREAM - retro dreams for Amiga, Commodore 64 and PC