exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Some early dither tests, I think this is going to be an improvement with a bit more work.
Dither thresholds is going to need some trial and error tweaking per game. Day of the Tentacle looks much better with a very high threshold (or off completely) while Monkey1 looks better with a low threshold for dithering.

Now that I am looking at the pictures again I think they may need a bit higher threshold before dithering, but still, I think something along these lines are going to be an improvement, even though I'm usually not very fond of dithering

Out of interest, does it support (or could it support) the Blitter? Progress has been amazing! I am tempted to try this myself - I just need to sort out another SD card as my card is full lol.

EDIT: Just been playing it - wow, it's awesome!!! General Midi works perfectly, as does YM samples. Samples are pretty crackly but I guess that was always going to be the issue. I did get a crash after the start at the point it says "Wo ist Fritz?". Using 4MB STFM, with PP HDD driver. I was running at 16MHz using the original mod by Exxos. Will test at 8Mhz to see if that solves it. TOS 1.04

I loaded it again and skipped past that part that crashed earlier and its fine! Managed to save and load too etc. This is incredible work!!!

GadgetUK164 wrote: ↑Sat Jul 04, 2020 2:27 pm I loaded it again and skipped past that part that crashed earlier and its fine! Managed to save and load too etc. This is incredible work!!!

Thank you!
There was an issue before on another machine that ran the PP driver and I made a best-guess workaround for it.
Maybe there are other issues still, or maybe it's not related to the driver. Thanks for reporting it though! I'll give it a go with TOS1.04 here as well in case it's that.

It doesn't use of the Blitter currently but it was something I was almost certain I would explore at some point.
Perhaps some kind of cache where x number of most-recently used non-scaling sprites could end up for faster blitting.
It would be quite a bit of work and the games run pretty decent at the moment so I've pushed that idea far down the priority list.

I think I've found a dithering scheme I like.
For my taste I think it's an improvement even though I'm usually not fond of dithering!
It's really simple but I don't want to increase that already long install time too much so simple is good

Wow, that's looking great dithered! Re Blitter, yeah that makes sense! No point in trying to squeeze in use of it where it creates more work and provides little benefit. I was thinking of some of the more complex scenes that were cut if not 030 CPU etc.

GadgetUK164 wrote: ↑Sat Jul 04, 2020 10:12 pm Wow, that's looking great dithered! Re Blitter, yeah that makes sense! No point in trying to squeeze in use of it where it creates more work and provides little benefit. I was thinking of some of the more complex scenes that were cut if not 030 CPU etc.

Yeah I really like it! And I usually hate dithering ever since I was exposed to Sierras EGA dithering in my youth

This is pretty excellent work! Never thought I'd ever see Monkey Island 2 running on an ST with speech!

The new dithering does look really good.

agranlund wrote: ↑Sat Jul 04, 2020 9:51 pm I think I've found a dithering scheme I like.
For my taste I think it's an improvement even though I'm usually not fond of dithering!
It's really simple but I don't want to increase that already long install time too much so simple is good

Very nice, this actually looks better than the official Atari ST conversion!

nemo wrote: ↑Sun Jul 05, 2020 11:16 am

agranlund wrote: ↑Sat Jul 04, 2020 9:51 pm I think I've found a dithering scheme I like.
For my taste I think it's an improvement even though I'm usually not fond of dithering!
It's really simple but I don't want to increase that already long install time too much so simple is good

Very nice, this actually looks better than the official Atari ST conversion!

Yeah, I thought that too about the original MI game! Being able to play MI2 and Fate of Atlantis is just icing on the cake! I wonder what other SCUMM games might be possible in the distant future (Zak McKracken maybe?)