Limited port to Atari ST, 8Mhz

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agranlund
Posts: 2
Joined: Sun Jul 05, 2020 7:22 am

Limited port to Atari ST, 8Mhz

Post by agranlund »

Hey guys,

I've been working on an unofficial port for standard unaccelerated Atari ST/STE/TT/Falcon.
The goal is not to reinvent any wheels or try to port the fully featured ScummVM to these machines but rather to make a few of the games which never came to the ST playable today on low-end unaccelerated machines. I think this is the only realistic way to go about it given the target hardware.

It's a work in progress and it's quite early on so there are bugs here and there, but it does run Monkey Island 1&2, Fate of Atlantis, and Day of the Tentacle quite well.

An 8Mhz ST/STE runs Monkey Island 1&2 + Fate of Atlantis at playable speed with music and speech.
The 16Mhz Mega STE or better gets you playable speed in Day of the Tentacle (16Mhz Falcon for proper framerate in that intro)
It does require 2MB RAM and a HDD which I admit wasn't very common in the 90's, but it's not a big deal today so I'm ok with that compromise.

The code is obviously no longer portable, clean, or very generic given the CPU and memory restriction, and it's (mostly) based on a much older 0.6.0 version so I doubt any of it is interesting for going into the official Atari port.
It's "Atarified" at the core and operates in the Atari 4-bitplane mode internally. Some of these other cpu & memory optimisations and general compromises are really not suitable in a clean and portable codebase either :)

Still, I thought you guys would appreciate hearing this thing can be convinced to run on extremely limited hardware :)


The interpreter and most of the higher level stuff is pretty much stock and runs efficiently even on an old 8Mhz 68k machine - props to the ScummVM team!

Sam'n'Max is on the todo list of course. It has some additional features over DOTT which I haven't reworked yet.
I have been toying with the idea of giving the SCI1 engine the same treatment to bring these games to the ST as well, it stopped with SCI0 on the ST back in the day.

http://www.happydaze.se/scummvm-lite-atari/

Most of my Youtube videos are of older builds but this one of MI2 Ultimate Talkie on 8Mhz STE is quite recent:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VejCEGoinP4

This one is older but demonstrates music from the internal YM chip if real midi is not available:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66Em_Uhdzfg&t=27s

Cheers,
--Anders
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sev
ScummVM Lead
Posts: 2272
Joined: Wed Sep 21, 2005 1:06 pm
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Re: Limited port to Atari ST, 8Mhz

Post by sev »

Hi Anders,

That is great to hear from you. I tried to contact you in the past, so I am glad you're here now, so I have your e-mail.

I would love to give you a helping hand with modifying out build infrastructure, so you could build straight from our source code and we could make your port official.

Thoughts? Please, drop me a line to sev@scummvm.org


Eugene
agranlund
Posts: 2
Joined: Sun Jul 05, 2020 7:22 am

Re: Limited port to Atari ST, 8Mhz

Post by agranlund »

Hi Eugene,
That sounds fantastic! I'll fire off an email :)

Cheers,
--Anders
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