Great to get some releases out again after weeks of development.  Big hat tip to Klaz for the work with Goldrunner.

Just to point out that save states on F1GP are *not* machine transferable, but should work between identical steem configurations.

There wasn't room on the news page to list what was done to F1GP, so here I go!

Firstly (obviously) it was made HD installable and F30 fixed (It also works on the TT btw! yay 32mhz!)

If you have 4mb+ then it will create a RamDisk of all the files so loading is much quicker. However, it should run from floppy (or even HD if you lower your cache sizes) with 1mb of RAM.

The save game was a bit of an arse. F1 used its own disk format to save games onto. It also had a file selector to pick your load/save games.... hrm..... and worse still, it marked bytes in the directory track for what type of file it was saving (car/lap/game/names). This was solved by grabbing the menu number you selected from the load/save menu, and based on that forcing a file extender of the right type into the filename.  Therefor you can now only have 8 character filenames, instead of the 11 in the original.

On top of that, you can now use the SaveState/SaveLoad keys (f7/f8) to snapshot the game to your HD for later play (Note: ONLY runs from HD!)

If you happen to make a spectacular crash, grab it for posterity with F9 (save screen as PI1 - again HD only)

And when it's time to stop playing, bash that F10 key to get back to the desktop!

As noted on the news screen, the passwords for Eng, Fr and Gr are "cars" "il" and "auf".

We will be back with more releases very shortly ;-)
All of us at D-Bug wish you all a lot of fun with these patches.

Glad you have made the passwords known it, seems i was a little to hasty when i downloaded yesterday.....with no password  :)a bit of head scratching ensued  :'()

The features you have added to uls are jaw dropping....will have another play tonight, drool,drool :)
 

Hehe, yeah sorry about that - after 4 weeks of testing on various machines I was just typing "cars" automatically without thinking LOL.  F1GP has been tested on over 30+ different configurations.  Every time *anything* in the ULS core was modified, testing began again.  The other release titles will also get the same testing process, at least for a while anyway.

ULS is ongoing, there is more to come - but we had to draw a line in the sand somewhere and get back to what we do - FIX GAMES!

I'd just like to point out that Klaz is currently using his own implementation of ULS - and that is all fine and dandy with us - as he wishes to support 512k floppy users as well - something we don't have to do as there is always our menu version :)

The tricks we both learn and the problems we both hit only help to strengthen and improve each other's code.  His save-state management is currently a *tad* more user friendly that the one in the ULS core ;-)  [Read that as: We like it!]

CJ wrote on 29.10.08 at 21:29:05:

His save-state management is currently a *tad* more user friendly that the one in the ULS core ;-)

Well, I just noticed that this is soon gonna change. ;-)

Ooops - isn't it always the case!

Just after we release something I go and find a bug in the ULS core!  Well, it's non critical and it doesn't seem to affect F1GP but never the less we will shortly update the archive with a new loader.

The only thing affected is savestates, but as I've been prodding away at ULS all day today I gave that feature an upgrade while I was fixing it... so we'll also have a new ULS sourcefile on the download page as well.

Whats new?

10 savestates (a-la-klaz!) but with the option of adding a line of text to each with a description of whats in the statefile, and a menu to select them from.

Hi all,have been trying out f1 tonight which is a classy game to introduce uls 3.Everything going fine but had some mixed results with the save/load feature.It bombed a few times when loading saved position.Other times loaded with slight screen corruption in the form of a single grey horizontal line and always changes the sound of the cars to a higher pitch.At other times loaded fine but with higher sound pitch

Using tos 1.62 on a 4 meg ste running from satandisk
Hope the info is of some use :)

Hi there!

Yes, thats the bug I found yesterday. Basically theres a chunk of about 100 bytes at the "join point" between the low memory copy and the main memory dump in the statefile (read that as: it doesnt save all RAM, it skips some bytes sometimes)

Thats all fixed in the new build we will upload shortl :)

In regards to the sound, there isnt anything we can do about it as its not possible to snapshot the state of the PSG sound registers 100% and this will happen in all games that dont "reset" the PSG again during soundplay.

Memory Snapshot menu...

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ZOMG teh coder colours!!!!!!!111

Can someone with some any sense of good palette choosing give us 2 other colours? :)

I'd suggest using white against black for simplicity.  It might be boring, but it is only supposed to be a save menu!

Yellow on blue - CPC style  :D
Could be worse ;)