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#1

P

NC100, NC200, PCW, PDA600 - the rest of the Family! / Re: Disk drives on the PC2086

Last post by PortoManc - Today at 03:43

Thanks, JohnEliott, for your reply. I had thought an expansion card in the 'back end' of the machine would have been the way to go with the Amstrad, but unfortunately I neither have access to my actual Amstrad (which is back home at my mum's 'in the loft'), and it's also a 'Dead on arrival' anyway so I couldn't try out a physical attempt at multiple drives, even if I had additional physical floppy drives available. The version of MS-DOS installed on my virtual Amstrad (running in 86Box) is indeed MS-DOS 3.30. I was able to download images of the Amstrad setup disks a while back (I think either from WinWorldPC.com or archive.org (both of which are a source of 'abandonware' and earlier versions of software). Using my original manuals I had still kept from my 2086, I was able to set up a 50Mb hard drive, partitioned into two drive partitions, C: and D:, as well as creating the 'virtual' A: and B: drive (3.5" 1.44M and 5.25" 360kb respectively), but was curious as to whether I could create a third (or more) floppy drive(s), since 86Box allows me to add ATAPI and SCSI peripheral devices, although only shows two 'floppy drive' icons in the status bar of the bottom of the 86Box window.
I was also curious as to what drive letters those extra floppy drives were given. I remember years and years ago, my dad had a two volume technical manual and user guide to MS-DOS 3.30, which gave information about (as far as I remember), various interupts and machine code program-ettes. Unfortunately I have not been able to track those books down and think he must have returned them at sometime when he returned his work IBM PC clone computer to his office, during the mid-'90s!   

#2

Games / Re: Turrican (128K)

Last post by Xyphoe - Today at 02:38

Just popping in to say, I prefer the original palette. (No offence to MacDeath - that is nice too, but it's just personal preference)  

#3

Games / Re: Alien Escape

Last post by XeNoMoRPH - Today at 01:08

Sorry to say, that it does not detect presence of 128k
is RSF3 is connected. (CPC6128)
Says "64k blubbablub no graphics".
If I disconnect RSF3, it works as expected.

Stefan

Memory bug is fixed, on the last DSK versión.

#4

NC100, NC200, PCW, PDA600 - the rest of the Family! / Re: Disk drives on the PC2086

Last post by JohnElliott - Yesterday at 23:29

In general: On MSDOS 3.3 and prior, floppy drives get letters allocated before hard drives. So a three-floppy machine would have floppies A: B: and C: with the hard drive as D:. On later versions the first two floppies would get letters, then hard drives, then any other floppies. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_letter_assignment

Specifically on the 2086, the built-in BIOS doesn't support more than two floppy drives. Any further floppy drives would need an expansion card with its own BIOS, or a driver loaded in CONFIG.SYS. 

[Dot Box]

#5

Games / 4 TMTNet multiplayer network g...

Last post by Prodatron - Yesterday at 23:27

@TMTLOGIC has released four different multiplayer games for SymbOS, which are using the TMTNet network backbone.

All these games are implementations of famous classical card-board, board and pencil-and-paper games.

They all have been developed by @TMTLOGIC using the Quigs IDE, a Visual Studio like IDE for SymbOS developed by Rob Buckley ( @Trebmint ).

If you own a TMTNet compatible device (SF3, RSF3, RSF3 lite) for your CPC, MSX or Enterprise (and PCW soon as well) you will be able to join the TMTNet network in SymbOS and play your favourit game against other participants.


Dot Box

http://www.symbos.org/appinfo.htm?00074

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Dot Box is a "Dots and boxes" implementation. The game starts with an empty grid of dots, and the two players take turns adding a single horizontal or vertical line between two unjoined adjacent dots. A player who completes the fourth side of a 1×1 box earns one point and takes another turn. The game ends when no more lines can be placed. The winner is the player with the most points.



Ludo

http://www.symbos.org/appinfo.htm?00075

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Ludo is a strategy-based board game for two to four players, in which the players race their four tokens from start to finish according to the rolls of a single die.



Tic Tac Toe

http://www.symbos.org/appinfo.htm?00076

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Tic Tac Toe is a paper-and-pencil game for two players who take turns marking the spaces in a three-by-three grid, one with Xs and the other with Os. A player wins when they mark all three spaces of a row, column, or diagonal of the grid



One Left

http://www.symbos.org/appinfo.htm?00077

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One-Left is an implementaton of the card deck game "Uno". The aim is to be the first player to score 500 points, achieved (usually over several rounds of play) by being the first to play all of one's own cards and scoring points for the cards still held by the other players.

(Please don't be confused, all screenshots are captured from a CPC using the V9990 graphic card in SymbOS. Of course they run in the normal native CPC screen mode as well, but I will have to add these screenshorts here later as well)

When starting a game you will choose your opponents over the network and then reach the gameplay itself. You always have a little chat functionality, so you can talk to the other players while challenging the game. That's a very nice feature, which has been introduced by @Edoz already in 2015 for SymbOS, the first CPC internet game ever called "Battleship".

#6

S

Games / Re: Alien Escape

Last post by St-BeidE(DE/GB) - Yesterday at 21:34

Sorry to say, that it does not detect presence of 128k
is RSF3 is connected. (CPC6128)
Says "64k blubbablub no graphics".
If I disconnect RSF3, it works as expected. 

Stefan 

#7

Games / Re: Turrican (128K)

Last post by lightforce6128 - Yesterday at 20:36

Until now I did not find the code location where this position is stored. It surely needs to be altered.

I found the decoding routine at B000h, and the BC register seems to contains the size of the compressed data. I guess I'll have to modify it since the size is a bit larger with the new shuffled data.

But not only the size. The location is important as well. The starting point is not the begin of the data (what stays the same), but its end, because processing is done backwards. The end of the compressed data is definitely no longer where it was before.

#8

Games / Re: Turrican (128K)

Last post by Jean-Marie - Yesterday at 20:06

I'm progressing : I have located a part of the code which caused some troubles, at 1B39h.
It moved the tiles of the spikes & flames to a buffer used for the display. This was messing up with the shuffled data obviously. Actually, this part of the code can be safely removed because I use no buffer for drawing the spikes & flames.
Only the end of the procedure remains mysterious to me (after the palette setting).

Code Select Expand

org &1B39
ld bc,&002c
ld de,&d7cc
ld hl,&d7cb
ld (hl),&0004
ldir
;;ld bc,&0030
;;ld de,&6dc0
;;ld hl,&6930       ;;move spikes tiles to buffer
;;ldir
;;ld bc,&0040
;;ld de,&6d40
;;ld hl,&6cb0         ;;move flames tiles to buffer
;;ldir
ld hl,&1b1f
call &d600             ;;set palette
ld b,&0006
ld ix,&243e
ld de,&0006
ld hl,&24fe
l1b6e:
ld c,&0010
l1b70:
ld (ix+&0000),l
ld (ix+&0001),h
inc ix
inc ix
l1b7a:
ld a,(hl)
inc hl
cp &00d3
jp z,l1b85
add hl,de
jp l1b7a
l1b85:
dec c
jp nz,l1b70
djnz l1b6e
ret

Until now I did not find the code location where this position is stored. It surely needs to be altered.

I found the decoding routine at B000h, and the BC register seems to contains the size of the compressed data. I guess I'll have to modify it since the size is a bit larger with the new shuffled data.

Code Select Expand

org #b000
ld hl,(#b05b)      ;;hl=1BB0
ld de,(#b05d)      ;;de=1AFF
ld bc,(#b05f)      ;;bc=481A (data size?)
inc bc
ldir
ld ix,(#b063)      ;;ix=7FFF
ld hl,(#b065)      ;;hl=6319
ld de,(#b059)      ;;de=A5CC (escape code)
ld bc,(#b05d)      ;;bc=1AFF
lb01d:
ld a,(hl)
cp e
jr z,#b03f
ld (ix+#00),a
dec hl
dec ix
push af
ld a,h
cp b
jr nz,lb030
ld a,l
cp c
jr z,lb033
lb030:
pop af
jr lb01d
lb033:
pop af
ld a,(#b067)
or a
nop
nop
ret

#9

Games / Re: Turrican (128K)

Last post by lightforce6128 - Yesterday at 18:54

The problem stems from writing the new file on the disc, as Daren used some intricated code to uncompress the Data. But hopefully, I'll find a solution. I just need to have a serious look at the decoding routine.

Because I already spent some time on this: Can you describe a situation where it does not work?

As far as I remember, there is one access to tile 0 that cleans it after loading, for whatever reason.
Also some other tiles are used to transport other data (e.g. font data) and are reused afterwards for animation purposes.

What is also important for decoding is not the process itself, but where the compressed data is placed before decompression starts. Because you applied several changes, this position will be different from before. Until now I did not find the code location where this position is stored. It surely needs to be altered.

#10

Applications (CPC and CPC-related) / Re: SymbOS progress

Last post by HAL6128 - Yesterday at 18:49

...and it also looks great (pixel-style)!

So many applications in the meanwhile for SymbOS. Have you thought about something like an "appstore" as a download-application for SymbOS?