Dungeon Master Forum

I am truly amazed that somebody has undertaken this project
AND ACTUALLY GOT IT TO WORK...

I take my hat off to you!

I remember seeing another post about portability and basically
the guy said that the sound/graphics/input routines should
all be in seperate .cpp files as this would make porting the
game to different platforms really easy...

Unfortunately because there is no central database for the
code if somebody undertook this then every time a change
or bug fix is made then this would screw up the portability...

If this is ever going to be made portable then these routines
need to be seperated by the author...

On another note... how the hell do you save a game?

Well done, and keep up the good work!

Paul.

OK...

I would really like to see this code portable... I don't know about
anybody else but I really loved this game when I played it all those
years ago and it would be great to be able to make this available on many different platforms...

Now I have blown the cobwebs out of my head (and also recovered
from my terrible hangover) and actually had a half decent look through the code, I have come to the conclusion that the graphics functions are exactly the same as they are on the Atari and screen.c is just converting the screen to PC format at the very last minute... This has the downside of being quite processor intensive and this is why Paul has the machine code in there (so it runs at a half decent speed on his old PC)

Anybody trying to port this has to code some new versions of the
routines that convert the screen... simple eh? ;-)

As to speeding all this up... well thats just a big can of worms innit?

;-)

Paul.

Actually, it can be speeded up quite a bit.

Just to see what is possible, check out the version

UAF.sourceforge.net/pstevens CSBrel.zip

It is a release version with about a day's worth
of thought put into making it faster. It is playable
on my laptop pentium slowed to about 35 MHz.

The release version should probably not be used in
general because it does not die gracefully when
things go wrong. And things do go wrong yet.

There is another 10 or 20 percent that can be accomplished
at the expense of quite a bit of work. I don't plan that
unless there is a great need.

Your question "How the Hell do you save a game?" What
do you mean? How do you as a player save the game? Select
the disk icon on the inventory page. How did I as a
programmer save the game? I copied the Atari code. The save
game can be played on an Atari.

matti nikki <muzzy@pp.inet.fi> is thinking of porting to Unix.
I am working on making the thing easier to port. Matti says
that if he is successful then it will easily port to Macintosh.


PAul