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Author Topic: ATTN All Programmers - Help improve Daphne (Dragon's Lair, Space Ace)  (Read 17899 times)

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benll64

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Re: ATTN All Programmers - Help improve Daphne (Dragon's Lair, Space Ace)
« Reply #40 on: November 04, 2013, 11:57:53 am »
This is a big step in the right direction - nice work! The quick succession of the various startup screens looks very much like a boot with the Daphne -fastboot switch enabled.

I'm having the following issues with it:

1) As you mentioned, the intro video is skipped. To be precise, it plays the first 2 seconds then skips it and goes to the "insert coins" screen. For me, this is a problem, because I really like the intro video to play - makes it feel more like the real deal. Running the regular rom with -fastboot does play the whole intro normally. Maybe something with tweaking the emulation timing of how the virtual laserdisc player does seeks?

2) When I enter coins and press start, instead of beginning the game with the opening shot of the castle, I get a frozen screen from what appears to be the Dirk coming back to life from a skeleton scene, with the castle in the background. The game stays stuck here and I can't do anything but hit "esc" and close the emulation.

3) Have you tried this with the Space Ace enhanced rom? I imagine the process would be very similar?

4) Not sure if this matters much, but the file version of Daphne that you have made is 1.0.7; mine is 1.0.12 - although I'm not sure how I got this, because I re-downloaded from the official Daphne page and got, I think, 1.0.10. I did notice that all three of these versions have different files in the main /Daphne folder - most of them seem to be related to the Ogg Vorbis sound support. Confused...

Thanks for keeping at this.

degenatrons

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Re: ATTN All Programmers - Help improve Daphne (Dragon's Lair, Space Ace)
« Reply #41 on: November 05, 2013, 11:47:35 am »
This is a big step in the right direction - nice work! The quick succession of the various startup screens looks very much like a boot with the Daphne -fastboot switch enabled.

 :cheers:

1) As you mentioned, the intro video is skipped. To be precise, it plays the first 2 seconds then skips it and goes to the "insert coins" screen. For me, this is a problem, because I really like the intro video to play - makes it feel more like the real deal. Running the regular rom with -fastboot does play the whole intro normally. Maybe something with tweaking the emulation timing of how the virtual laserdisc player does seeks?

I'll take another look at reverting speed back to normal before the intro sequence kicks in.

2) When I enter coins and press start, instead of beginning the game with the opening shot of the castle, I get a frozen screen from what appears to be the Dirk coming back to life from a skeleton scene, with the castle in the background. The game stays stuck here and I can't do anything but hit "esc" and close the emulation.

It seems to work fine for me every time.   Load the game, enter coins and press start.   I made a video to show you how I have it running.



3) Have you tried this with the Space Ace enhanced rom? I imagine the process would be very similar?

Not yet tried, but yes, it should be very similar solution for the Space Ace Enhancement.

4) Not sure if this matters much, but the file version of Daphne that you have made is 1.0.7; mine is 1.0.12 - although I'm not sure how I got this, because I re-downloaded from the official Daphne page and got, I think, 1.0.10. I did notice that all three of these versions have different files in the main /Daphne folder - most of them seem to be related to the Ogg Vorbis sound support. Confused...

If you run with my files then you should see similar results to my above video.  Did you extract all my files or just the Daphne executable?  I suppose I can try compiling under the latest Daphne version. 
I didn't bother compiling all of the dependant libraries for Daphne (including Ogg Vorbis).  I dropped DLL's into the Daphne folder instead.  You can delete them if you already have DLL's installed into your system folder. 




benll64

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Re: ATTN All Programmers - Help improve Daphne (Dragon's Lair, Space Ace)
« Reply #42 on: November 05, 2013, 02:51:56 pm »
Quote
I'll take another look at reverting speed back to normal before the intro sequence kicks in.

That would be awesome; I'm thinking your method must be the same as the Daphne author's, so should be able to get the intro to play normally.

2) When I enter coins and press start, instead of beginning the game with the opening shot of the castle, I get a frozen screen from what appears to be the Dirk coming back to life from a skeleton scene, with the castle in the background. The game stays stuck here and I can't do anything but hit "esc" and close the emulation.

Quote
It seems to work fine for me every time.   Load the game, enter coins and press start.   I made a video to show you how I have it running.



Hmm..yep, that looks great (except for the intro video skip).

3) Have you tried this with the Space Ace enhanced rom? I imagine the process would be very similar?

Quote
Not yet tried, but yes, it should be very similar solution for the Space Ace Enhancement.

Cool - that will be great.


4) Not sure if this matters much, but the file version of Daphne that you have made is 1.0.7; mine is 1.0.12 - although I'm not sure how I got this, because I re-downloaded from the official Daphne page and got, I think, 1.0.10. I did notice that all three of these versions have different files in the main /Daphne folder - most of them seem to be related to the Ogg Vorbis sound support. Confused...

Quote
If you run with my files then you should see similar results to my above video.  Did you extract all my files or just the Daphne executable?  I suppose I can try compiling under the latest Daphne version. 
I didn't bother compiling all of the dependant libraries for Daphne (including Ogg Vorbis).  I dropped DLL's into the Daphne folder instead.  You can delete them if you already have DLL's installed into your system folder. 

I'll mess around with this some more - I'm sure it has something to do with those DLLs or something. If it's not too much trouble, a recompile based on the latest Daphne would be appreciated.

degenatrons

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Re: ATTN All Programmers - Help improve Daphne (Dragon's Lair, Space Ace)
« Reply #43 on: November 07, 2013, 11:17:17 am »
Quote
I'll take another look at reverting speed back to normal before the intro sequence kicks in.

That would be awesome; I'm thinking your method must be the same as the Daphne author's, so should be able to get the intro to play normally.

This is different to the Daphne author's method.  I'm actually speeding up the emulation in Daphne, as apposed to instructing the rom to perform a fast boot.

I can get the game to show the full intro if I force emulation speed back to normal after 4 seconds into boot.  Problem I'm having now though is that input is disabled until the intro sequence plays through one time.  So have to wait until sequence finishes to enter coins and start game. Maybe this is acceptable though.

I will build this with the latest Daphne version and post here when I get chance.


ark_ader

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Re: ATTN All Programmers - Help improve Daphne (Dragon's Lair, Space Ace)
« Reply #44 on: November 19, 2013, 02:56:07 am »
Great so this will speed up my LDP boot time?  :lol
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benll64

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Re: ATTN All Programmers - Help improve Daphne (Dragon's Lair, Space Ace)
« Reply #45 on: January 02, 2014, 03:49:05 pm »
Hey degenatrons,

Any luck with recompiling this, with getting the controls to work before the intro has played through, or with applying the same method to Space Ace enhanced rom?

Thanks!

benll64

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Re: ATTN All Programmers - Help improve Daphne (Dragon's Lair, Space Ace)
« Reply #46 on: March 06, 2019, 01:25:52 pm »
Degenatrons -

It's been 5 years since the last thread on this post - I'd almost forgotten that I made it!

By any chance, did you ever take any further steps with this? You came closer to solving this than any other efforts that I know of...

Thanks, man!

DirtBagXon

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Re: ATTN All Programmers - Help improve Daphne (Dragon's Lair, Space Ace)
« Reply #47 on: March 07, 2023, 03:23:08 am »
Hi guys,

I have made some progress on this topic.

I have managed to get boot time for the enhanced roms, using -fastboot, to about half the default period.

  sae: 42s to 25s
  dle: 32s to 15s


The user is able to observe boot progress far sooner, with no prolonged black screens.

sae seems to behave fairly correctly, but dle21 has an attract mode issue that doesn't resolve itself until first play.... but as you're fastbooting I assume you will want to play,.

As it's a direct rom memory patch, as per the other fastboots, I need some gameplay testing to ensure this hasn't introduced some weird bugs.

Keep an eye on the hypseus-singe repo commits, or hop onto the Discord I'd like to put out a test exe.

Update: Some video here showing new boot times:


« Last Edit: March 19, 2023, 01:09:29 pm by DirtBagXon »