Posted: 10/23/2011 5:35 PM
(Edited: 6/4/2022 4:56 PM)
Post subject: Sound emulation problem, tassing God of Thunder in JPC-rr
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Svimmer
Joined: 9/27/2011
Posts: 207
Location: Finland
First a kindly hello to everyone reading this thread! I am planning a TAS on God of Thunder for the DOS and I'm still sort of trying just to see how much work it's going to be and what major problems I'm going to have to solve if this is ever to end up becoming a submission. I managed to tweak the assembly settings for JPC-rr to make the emulation sufficiently fast (mostly by setting CPU freq divider to the maximum value at 256), and dumping also seems to work. So the next issue (out of many) I guess I should try to resolve before starting serious work on the TAS relates to sound emulation. The situation is like this: I have successfully played the game in the emulator without sounds. I only now realised that there was no sound emulation taking place, because I didn't include org.jpc.modules.SoundCard in the assembly and because of that, the game interprets that as there being no sound card at all. When I do include that module in the assembly, the game thinks there’s a SoundBlaster (as it probably should). However, this means that I first have to run the sound setup executive. But here’s the snag. The sound setup requires a restart to be effective! Am I correct in thinking that, in effect, there’s no way to get the SoundBlaster sounds to work in the game without modifying the image file first so that the sounds are already set up? Because I can’t emulate a restart of the OS, or can I? And for the purpose of making TAS-es you’re not supposed to modify the default game files? And what I’m considering “default” in this case is “gotfree.zip” or another version (not decided yet) hosted on RGB Classic Games at http://www.classicdosgames.com/game/God_of_Thunder.html. Or if I do modify those files and provide TASvideos with a copy of the image file I end up using, does my TAS qualify for acceptance in this case? Is there another workaround for this problem? If we want sound and music to be emulated in all TAS-videos, I have to come up with a solution for this, right? I hope I’ve made my problem easy to understand.
Posted: 10/23/2011 6:39 PM
(Edited: 6/4/2022 4:56 PM)
Post subject: Re: Sound emulation problem, tassing God of Thunder in JPC-rr
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Ilari
Emulator Coder, Skilled player (1113)
Joined: 5/1/2010
Posts: 1217
Rookie of 2010 New systems TASer of 2010 New systems TAS of 2010
Svimmer wrote:
When I do include that module in the assembly, the game thinks there’s a SoundBlaster (as it probably should). However, this means that I first have to run the sound setup executive. But here’s the snag. The sound setup requires a restart to be effective!
Nope, setblast is not needed. That tool just edits autoexec.bat, but the command it stuffs there can just be executed manually. On DOS prompt before starting the game, issue command: "SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 T6" before running the got.exe. No restart needed (even if the emulator is capable of recording system restart, system -> reset). I experimented with the game a bit, and it seems that it depends on phase of the moon if it detects the sound card or not. Be careful and check that the game really detects the sound card (trying to set sounds to digitized could be useful check). Using / not using I/O delay is useful for perturbing stuff here. Edit: I actually modified the emulator to print the I/O traffic with the sound card. The game seems to use nonstandard method for detecting Soundblaster. Instead of resetting the card and checking like it should, it tries to detect the OPL chip on card, and that is notoriously hit-or-miss when I/O delay isn't emulated.
Posted: 10/24/2011 1:22 PM
(Edited: 6/4/2022 4:56 PM)
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Svimmer
Joined: 9/27/2011
Posts: 207
Location: Finland
Ok, thanks Ilari. I'll try using that command instead of running setblast and experiment with getting the game to recognize the soundcard.