Shapeshifter on MiSTer

[Caldor]

I have begun having some interest in Mac Plus because I have found that many games were great on the Amiga up till around 1992, and the same games then had worse audio and graphics in their DOS version. But that changed and later on the Amiga versions of games were the ones lacking graphics and / or audio quality.

Which is where Mac Plus becomes interesting, because it often ended up having the best version of these games both before and after the shift from Commodore to PC. In some cases the Mac version was even better. I tried Abuse on it and the Mac version has speech during the intro, which I do not think the DOS version had and I do not think it was ever officially released on the Amiga.

So I tried out the Mac Plus core for the MiSTer, but it is still quite limited. Not even sure it supports hard disks with more than 20mb space, and when I last tried it I was unable to get it to boot at all using floppies or anything.

So ShapeShifter seems the way to go. There is already a great image made for the Coffin image which is made for Vampire powered Amigas. It has MacOS 7.55 and MacOS 8.1 setup for Shapeshifter. A lot of the Coffin image can be run on the MiSTer Minimig core, you mainly need to update to the MiSTer RTG driver. Also you need DH1 to be loaded onto its own HDF which has caused me quite a bit of a problem. I have copied it to the "shared" folder for the Minimig, but apparantly the shared folder does not handle special characters very well and often it seems to end up looping directories.

Still I did expect it to work. So I will probably have to do a more manual setup. What is other peoples experience with using Shapeshifter on the MiSTer Minimig core? I think the problem with the Coffin version of it is that it does some FPU emulation as well, and that might rely on the Vampire FPU implementation.

[akeley]

@meauxdal has explored this quite in-depth, and made a working image. There is a lot of info in this thread, plus also in the big Mac thread. I seem to recall the image itself is on archive.org.

I'm not sure there are many games which really would be the "best version" played this way though.

[Caldor]

@meauxdal has explored this quite in-depth, and made a working image. There is a lot of info in this thread, plus also in the big Mac thread. I seem to recall the image itself is on archive.org.

I'm not sure there are many games which really would be the "best version" played this way though.

I am also not sure yet whether it might really be the "best version", but Prince of Persia seems a good example, it has some quite nice graphics in the Mac version. Not that I really mind the graphics on the Amiga though, its an awesome game either way, and with a game like this it is very important that the speed is consistent and that we do not suddenly have lag or something.

The games I am most interested in trying is the Gold Box games though, because that is where it really becomes interesting to have one system that supports the best version of each game. The early games were... not great looking on DOS. But then in f.ex. Dark Queen of Krynn DOS had VGA graphics, and the Amiga was left with a crummy conversion. Mac though, had the good graphics in both versions though. 256 colors in Dark Queen of Krynn and... 32 or whatever number of colors in the earlier games. Same with the Pool of Radiance series, where the last one or two games ended up being much better for DOS than it was on the Amiga and the early games were much better on the Amiga since the DOS version had... 8 or 16 colors?

So it seems like something worth looking into. First off I just hope to compare DOS, Amiga and MacOS versions of these games. I will probably make a video about it.

I will try looking into the threads you mentioned. Thanks

[bbond007]

I'm not sure there are many games which really would be the "best version" played this way though.

Sim City 2000 definitely is one game (the only one I can think of) that runs better under Shapeshifter MAC than on the Amiga.

I think this is due to the fact that the game was probably written targeting a higher spec machine on the Macintosh.

This is pretty much the exception and not the norm as Macs were never known for their vast gaming library.

[Malor]

One problem there is that Minimig can only do a 68020, and Macs started to expect faster processors than that. Between that and the necessarily slower video, Mac versions might still run better than Amiga versions, but probably wouldn't run as well as they did on real Macs.

I recently looked into doing this with MESS, but after downloading MAME and looking, they say that their audio emulation is inaccurate, so I didn't bother actually running anything.

Macs are fundamentally pretty simple computers (edit: well, they had weirdly complex I/O buses), so I'm not sure why emulating them tends to be difficult.

[limi]

One problem there is that Minimig can only do a 68020, and Macs started to expect faster processors than that.

Mac running under Shapeshifter on Minimig (like the image that I initially wrote a script to create based MegaAGS on Minimig that Meauxdal took over) is equivalent to 68030 at 50MHz. Quite a bit faster than most classic Macs at the time, and with the RTG support, it runs graphics very efficiently too. Only a Mac Quadra would theoretically be faster, but probably not on the graphics front. And cycle accuracy isn’t really a thing on the Mac, which is why the Minimig core running Shapeshifter is the best/fastest Mac on MiSTer. :)

[Malor]

Huh, I'll have to play around with that. Thanks for the tip!

I assume something like RTG 1024x768 would work best?

[limi]

I usually run in 640x480, but it depends on your monitor. It does work in higher resolutions too, just make sure you use the RTG modes. Running SimCity in HD resolutions is a trip.

The absolutely critical part is to make sure the color bit depth is set to 8 bits (256 colors), since that’s the only one that triggers the fast “chunky pixel” mode that makes everything fast and responsive. Do not use less or more colors, or it will feel like molasses.

[vanfanel]

@meauxdal has explored this quite in-depth, and made a working image. There is a lot of info in this thread, plus also in the big Mac thread. I seem to recall the image itself is on archive.org.

I'm not sure there are many games which really would be the "best version" played this way though.

What should I search for on archive.org?
Tried various combinations with shapeshifter, fpga, MiSTer, etc.. and no luck.

[akeley]

What should I search for on archive.org?
Tried various combinations with shapeshifter, fpga, MiSTer, etc.. and no luck.

I think he only uploaded "MacPack" there, with the normal MacPlus vhd + floppies. I sent you a PM.

[Caldor]

I found the MacPack for the MiSTer and then a link to some HDF disks with Shapeshifter setup on them. Audio does not seem to be working very well.

I think I need to play around with it some more and find a way to set it up myself. But it did make it possible for me to test the AD&D games. Seems some versions of the early games were black and white. Which is interested and seems artful... but not sure I would want to play through a full game this way. I have seen a color version of Champions of Krynn so I guess I just have to see if maybe there are color versions of the other games as well.

[akeley]

Goldbox is my favourite CRPG series of all time. Not long ago I was deliberating which platform to replay it on, with initially Amiga being my first choice because of the overall superior fx/gfx (when you compare all the titles), and because that was the platform I played them on originally, but eventually settled on PC. Main reason being was I had an ongoing save there, but also ultimately these games are not that much about visual delights, not even VGA in the later ones can help with that. You'll mostly be staring at a small dungeon window, a lot of stats and the rather basic tactical combat maps, so...

Seems getting them to work on Mac is a bit of hassle, plus it is an emu within an FPGA core too, so I personally wouldn't bother. Would probably worry too much my save (which I want to transfer across all the games) might get corrupted or something. Though learning how to handle Shapeshifter this way might be a bonus.

[Caldor]

Goldbox is my favourite CRPG series of all time. Not long ago I was deliberating which platform to replay it on, with initially Amiga being my first choice because of the overall superior fx/gfx (when you compare all the titles), and because that was the platform I played them on originally, but eventually settled on PC. Main reason being was I had an ongoing save there, but also ultimately these games are not that much about visual delights, not even VGA in the later ones can help with that. You'll mostly be staring at a small dungeon window, a lot of stats and the rather basic tactical combat maps, so...

Seems getting them to work on Mac is a bit of hassle, plus it is an emu within an FPGA core too, so I personally wouldn't bother. Would probably worry too much my save (which I want to transfer across all the games) might get corrupted or something. Though learning how to handle Shapeshifter this way might be a bonus.

True... I have had a whole project going where I made it possible to convert Dark Queen of Krynn save games on the Amiga to DOS save games. Took a while and it is pretty tedious. I began doing the same for Death Knights of Krynn, but its just so many different stats that needs to be converted.

Another idea I have is to try to convert all 3 games to Dark Queen of Krynn. All the files for each game are well described, so it should be possible to actually make a Unlimited Adventures kind of editor for any of the games. But doing it for Dark Queen of Krynn would have the advantage of having VGA graphics, and then it would be a matter of converting the Amiga graphics to the graphics format DQK uses. Another advantage is that Unlimited Adventures lacks support for certain Krynn classes and such that is not a thing in Forgotten Realms.

Several of the Forgotten Realms games have already been remade in Unlimited Adventures. It is beginning to seem like while there might be high quality versions of each game for Mac, they might also have even lower quality versions and... often they do not seem to be in full screen.

I still think I will play around with Mac Plus some more. There are some interesting versions of other games as well I think.

[Malor]

I got Shapeshifter up and running, and while it's better than the Mac Plus core, it's still pretty bad. I got it running in 256-color mode via the Picasso96 drivers, and it's pretty snappy at the desktop, but two of the three games I tried didn't run. MOO1 works, but Civilization 2 just bombs out and forces an OS restart. Chaos Overlords says that the screen isn't compatible; perhaps it needs a higher color mode, but those are far too sluggish to be usable.

BasiliskII on Windows is much more compatible, but it's gone unstable on me in its most recent builds. I don't think it's getting very much testing on newer hardware. (I have a 5800X/3070 system.) I can play Civ2 for awhile, but the whole emulator inevitably locks up within a half-hour or so.

I tried an old version of BasiliskII on the Amiga, but it just Gurus on Mister. I might try it on WinUAE to see if it's different there.

Overall, I gotta say, I'm really not very impressed with the quality of computer emulation on the Mister. The consoles are generally outstanding, but the computer cores I've tested have been poor. (Amiga, ST, and AO486.) Minimig is the best of the three, but at least the framebuffer part isn't all that great.

[bbond007]

Overall, I gotta say, I'm really not very impressed with the quality of computer emulation on the Mister. The consoles are generally outstanding, but the computer cores I've tested have been poor. (Amiga, ST, and AO486.) Minimig is the best of the three, but at least the framebuffer part isn't all that great.

Both ao486 and Minimig continually get substantial improvements incrementally. I'm less familiar with the ST.

Sorry you are so dissatisfied with the current state. It is all WIP...

BasiliskII on Windows is much more compatible, but it's gone unstable on me in its most recent builds. I don't think it's getting very much testing on newer hardware. (I have a 5800X/3070 system.) I can play Civ2 for awhile, but the whole emulator inevitably locks up within a half-hour or so.

I tried an old version of BasiliskII on the Amiga, but it just Gurus on Mister. I might try it on WinUAE to see if it's different there.

You can also try BasiliskII on MiSTer it works well enough for me (until there is a proper MAC II core).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1sd9KeK1vQ

[Malor]

I already tried BasiliskII on the Minimig. It just gurus out for me.

[bbond007]

I already tried on the Minimig. It just gurus out for me.

this is BasiliskII on MiSTer HPS Arm CPU. You said above "BasiliskII on Windows is much more compatible"

I wonder why nobody ever runs BasiliskII an Amiga, but stick with ShapeShifter?

[Malor]

I tried BasiliskII 0.9 Amiga flavor on Minimig. It just gurus out.