I just remembered I did not have an FPU on my 40mhz/030/128mb - does yours? I am not exaggerating when I say it took several minutes for the program, upon startup, to load and decrunch all the sounds.
You know that in order to play any game it must be decrunched first right?
You know that LHA does not crunch sounds nearly as well as the dedicated soundcruncher that Total Chaos uses, right?
You know that if you play the game 1000 times, the decrunch only happens
once, the very first time, right?
You know that the 030 was released in 1987 and is
VERY old and slow by Amiga standards, right?
You know that the 030 has a pathetically puny amount of L1 cache, right? It has only 000000000.25K of Data cache and the same tiny amount of Instruction cache. A cache that small is 97% useless for the audio compressor. You need an L1 cache that is large enough to hold the main loop. An 040 has 16x larger caches and is a much better choice.
I did not write the audio cruncher/decruncher so the FPU version is massively faster than the integer version. I hired x303 to make me a faster version, just for you.
I could release an uncrunched version but then Aminet would complain that it was "too big".
I could release an uncrunched version but then people who live in communist countries, who are forced by their government to pay $$$ for every single minute that they use dialup, complain at me
very loudly that the game is "too big".
I wanna say it took at least 10 minutes, maybe 15.
We added a lot of new music, speech and soundfx to the newest game in the Total Chaos series (Total Chaos 7). It will take a lot longer than that to decrunch on a slow old 030. An 040 goes around 9x faster at decrunching and an 060 goes around 18x faster.
A highly fragemented hard drive slows it down also.
Refusing to use TLSFmem slows things down a lot too.
And then, when it finally did load up, was prone to crashing my system :-(
Using my psychic powers
I will predict that you are running the game on an SFS partition. That is the only way I know of to reliably crash the game on an Amiga Real Machine.
Could you please describe the crash? Could you make it happen? Or was it just random?
If there is any sort of bug in the game that is my fault then I will happily fix it for you.
