Graham is starting to piss people off now.

CJ wrote on 08.01.10 at 12:18:54:


Haha, no but its getting beyond a joke now, so a message is going to be sent to Admin to get it sorted out.

Its not on for someone to cause problems, write a load of guff and then deny people the right to respond, its just not on.

In answer to your question on saving, WHDLoad was ammended several years ago (on my request).

If you have the memory to preload everything, then it will save any save games or hiscores to ram, and then when you quit back to dos, then it will save the relevant data.

So obviously in game, if you save lots of times, the saves will still be done properly.

If you have a low mem system, it will OS swap and save at the time, not after the game has quit, and this is also how it used to work even if you had enough memory, but OS swapping looks daft on a machine with enough memory, so it was changed.

It doesn't take long to save, its merely a second, depending on the size of file to save (Championship Manager 2 is 2x 1meg save files!!!), but obviously as its doing the OS swap, the screen is switched off, and any music is stopped from playing as it restores all the interrupts back to their original OS settings, does the save, and then swaps back again.

Phill wrote on 08.01.10 at 12:26:27:


You could use a screen buffer in OS mem and copy the game screen content to keep the screen at least, couldn't you? That's the way we ULSer are doing it anyway. 

CJ wrote on 08.01.10 at 12:35:20:


In theory it is possible, because Action Replay cartridge can do a save state, though it is worth mentioning it doesn't work 100% on all games.

Its a hell of a lot of work to get an accurate save state, for one because of all the read only custom registers, not everyone has an MMU.  Secondly, because of the amount of co-processors, you would need to be able to capture them  in the same state, which if the blitter is part way through a blit is going to cause problems, because of course the blitter can be used to do many things other than moving data, it can also be used to decode the trackbuffer when reading disks.

Its a lot of work when you consider that most Amiga games had saves in them, so its always been easier to just cater for those.

I know Wepl the author of WHDLoad has thought about doing it, but its a hell of a lot of work.

Phill wrote on 08.01.10 at 15:53:39:


From the start of the ULS core....

.blitwait
	btst.b #7,$ffff8a3c.w		; wait if blitter is busy
	bne.s .blitwait
 

At this point all interupts are off and ULS is in complete control of the system. I'd assume there has to be a point in the WHD code where something similar can be done.

See, it's not complicated

heheh you guys are always playing catchup

CJ wrote on 09.01.10 at 00:55:53:


Irrelevant.  You need to know the blitter has finished, so that when you restore the game after saving it, everything is where it should be.

Lack of blitwaits in Amiga games is not an unusual case.

And as far as I can remember, halting the interrupts doesn't halt the blitter, once the blitsize is moved into $dff058, only the blitter finishing its blit will stop it.

CJ wrote on 09.01.10 at 04:50:52:


Like I said, thats all moot as writing back to read only custom registers is the problem.  Not every Amiga had an MMU, and not all processor cards have an MMU, so save state is a lot of effort for not many people.

Sure, its a nifty feature, but as most Amiga games have a save feature anyway, its really not worth the effort.

I'm certainly not interested in having to do additional fixes just to ensure a certain game will save state properly.

Quote:


LOL.

Yes I just loaded WHDload into GenST and hit "assemble" - it was *that* easy.

There's no "supporting software" because unlike his shite, we don't need any!

We dont need a GUI you prat. Its all click and play. Unlike your bodgy click and prey system

Quote:


Doesn't that contradict itself?  It's also (again) inaccurate. We hate him because he's a talentless cunt. A bit like the Jeremy Beadle of the ST world

Shall I start a "Hurl a random insult at the talentless cunt troll fvucking moron codestealing weasel mental nutjob idiot" thread?

I think we can even put Amenos in there as well.

We have to (grudgingly) give him bonus credit for picking on MugUK tho

But neither of them will be big enough to come and post here, where they know their lies and stupidity will take a soul crushing battering

Right.. I am pretty confident pperror must have an account. We couldn't possibly have found and delete all of them.

i guess Anemos and pperror is the same person. same english writtning errors:)

Shame on you D-Bug!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7EBQuCEeIs

This guy can never stop trolling...

Right, that was his STE though, that who knows what he's done to it.