and wouldn't it be possible to somehow compress the video to reduce the transfer from the CD drive. The Microcosm game works on the same principle and works great on a CD32. I would gladly buy such a version that works on a real CD32.
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Hi,
It is not a questin of money. The game already used delta compression in a way that (in theory!) every amiga with a hdd (+chip ram) can play. Delta compression stores/displays only that part of the screen that has changes compared to the previous frame.
- As i see Microcosm uses amiga mod for the music. It is small in size and played directly from from ram/memory. Our choice of music is streamed with the video from the HDD. It is larger in size but it allmost has no ram consumption and has the advantege of basicly play any kind of music (by not limited to play music with sound-samples).
-Microcosm (i'm just guessing here) possibly using HW mpeg compression. Our game do not use any special HW .
-Microcosm uses a lot of repetative sequence where you basicaly see the same few frame again and again where you can be stucked for minutes. With that you do not need to load/stream the background video constantly. In our game we don't use any frame of the video twice.
- Ican't really measure the framerate of the fmv's in Microcosm but there is a very visible drop in it (mostly in the cutscenes). Somevhere around 10-15fps. We tryed to display 25frames per second (depending on the HDD speed).
-The playground of the screen in Microcosm (not the HUD) is only half of the whole screensize. In SDW-DC we have full screen FMV.
-We can't use any runtime compression like in modern machines. (Under "We", I mean Us, the developers) :D
That means that is (following the Microcosm's specs) we get rid of the music (i mean our streamed one), reduce the displayed frames from 25 to 15 and the resolution is cut in half it could be much faster and lighter (could fit in a CD), but i am sure it would have looked much worst.
Beside all that we also want to see more games like that (for CD32 too if possible). I am sure there is a lot of things that can be done better or faster or simply use other techniques (or language) we used. That is why we allways attaching the source code to all of our games as well. It is free! If anyone can add something to it or just make something with it we encourage you all, please do so!
Firstly, I think you're doing a great job. I'm not a programmer myself, although I managed to modify the nonvolatile library to support 2kB instead of 1kB of EEPROM memory, but I wouldn't be able to do anything with such a game, and I think it would be great if it was even of lower quality, but could be run on a regular CD32, maybe someday you'll have the time and desire to do it, I'd be grateful. I think there are many users like me who don't want to expand their CD32 to resemble the A1200, the only thing I did was to construct a simple 8MB Fast RAM module for my CD32. As for the ISO size, I found discs on which this game fits, but the transfer from the CD reader, which in CD32 has only x2 speed, is actually too low and the game stutters, even when I increased such parameters as Data Cache, File Lock, File Handle during ISO compilation, of course it helped only for a very short time. Best regards and I secretly hope that one day you will make a version of this game for a plain CD32 :)