Dread Doom Clone on MiSTer

[toastboy]

Dread (doom clone for OCS-and-above amigas) has reached public release, and the demo level is available as ADF on the youtube link below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxhO1ZCOZ-M

The game is designed to work well on A500 spec hardware, and the fact that this was achieved on a 7.14Mhz 68000 (plus agnus, denise etc) is jaw-droppingly incredible.

Full credit to the coders, graphics and sound people who worked on this. Take a look at the list of contributors in the description of the youtube video, not least developer KK/Altair and his patreon account.

The demo runs flawlessly on MiSTer with A500 config (OCS/ECS, 68000, 1mb chip, 1mb fast, Kick 3.2).

On A1200 spec, it's meant to give higher framerates, but that's where my MiSTer setup is doing less well. (AGA, 68020, 2MB chip, 8MB Fast, Kick 3.2).

In A1200 mode, MiSTer is weirdly corrupting the colour palette during gameplay. Blacks will turn orange, then green, then white, then recover, then fail back to another colour. At times the textures are smeared around during movement, and later recover to their proper positions.

This is not a huge problem for this particular game, A500 mode works great after all, but it might point to some edge case in the A1200/AGA implementation that differs from the real hardware.

I'd like to know what other people experience when playing the demo in A500/A1200 setups. Perhaps I've screwed up some config?

Either way, grab the demo and give it a spin, then spend a few minutes wondering what might have happened to the Amiga if this had been released back in 1992

[Thedad]

Just downloaded and run on my MiSTer - works really well on the A1200 AGA config. A few very minor graphical glitches and some key "sticking", but a great achievement for the hardware.

Congrats!

[kolla]

I haven't tried on MiSTer, but on MiST it plays just fine with "A1200" type config, I played it through a few times last night and didn't notice any more bugs or glitches on MiST than on the A600 I used earler yesterday.

[virtuali]

Works fine here, and the fps seems higher than a real A1200 ( my frame time is about 1.4, better than the A1200 in the YouTube video ).

The only setting I had to change compared to my usual "A1200" config, is turning off d-cache, to prevent some video glitches. That seems to be reasonable, considering the real 68020 doesn't have a d-cache.

[NegSol]

I haven't tried on MiSTer, but on MiST it plays just fine with "A1200" type config, I played it through a few times last night and didn't notice any no more bugs or glitches on MiST than on the A600 I used earler yesterday.

Yes, i can also confirm that the A1200 on my MiST worked flawlessly. I did not yet try it on my MiSTer.

[toastboy]

D-cache! That was the problem with my A1200 config. Thankyou.

I do also get key-sticking a bit during gameplay.
Again not the end of the world, I'm still amazed to see this old machine throw pixels around at this rate.

[zorrobandito]

I played this on the MISTer last night. Considering how clunky FPS attempts were on the Amiga back in the day, this is nothing short of incredible to see running on an Amiga.

The technical skill required to pull this off is remarkable and if this had come out at the time, perhaps things might have gone differently for the Amiga, but it didn't and they didn't.

I'm conflicted. It's great that it's available, it's great that the MISTer and Minimig make it so easy for me to fire it up and play but it's more of a curio than anything else, there are much better FPS' available on other formats.

[Caldor]

I think I had the same issue on my real Amiga 1200... I will try to see if maybe I can disable d-cache on it and whether that helps there as well

[Caldor]

Yeah, there are several posts about it now in the Amiga group on Facebook. Any kind of CPU cache will cause graphical problems with this game, and crashes.

[Chris23235]

Yeah, there are several posts about it now in the Amiga group on Facebook. Any kind of CPU cache will cause graphical problems with this game, and crashes.

That's interesting, on the MegaSTE the Atari version of Dread works with 16 MHz and cache on the 68000. It seems only to be a problem with the 68020 cache.

[Caldor]

Yeah, there are several posts about it now in the Amiga group on Facebook. Any kind of CPU cache will cause graphical problems with this game, and crashes.

That's interesting, on the MegaSTE the Atari version of Dread works with 16 MHz and cache on the 68000. It seems only to be a problem with the 68020 cache.

That is strange. Well... I guess it might also work on the Amiga with cache, if its the 68000. But I guess it might also instead be about the Amiga. But I think I have seen threads about this problem happening with 030,040 and 060 expanded Amigas.

Also I do not think it happens on all Amiga 1200s. F.ex. if you have an ACA1221 it should run fine. I have not tested that yet.

[Chris23235]

Yeah, there are several posts about it now in the Amiga group on Facebook. Any kind of CPU cache will cause graphical problems with this game, and crashes.

That's interesting, on the MegaSTE the Atari version of Dread works with 16 MHz and cache on the 68000. It seems only to be a problem with the 68020 cache.

That is strange. Well... I guess it might also work on the Amiga with cache, if its the 68000. But I guess it might also instead be about the Amiga. But I think I have seen threads about this problem happening with 030,040 and 060 expanded Amigas.

Also I do not think it happens on all Amiga 1200s. F.ex. if you have an ACA1221 it should run fine. I have not tested that yet.

The only way to let the Atari version run on a 68020 is with MiST in the 68020 mode but I think this is without cache. It is possible to use the STEroids mode. KK says the ST version is a little bit slower in general. I would like to know how much the 68020 STEroids mode of the Mystery core can make this disadvantage up. In this mode I get 2.16 displayed in the upper left corner at the very start of the game on my Mega STE in 16 MHz and Cache I get 3.56 . Can you tell me what you get on a real Amiga 1200 at the beginning of the game?

[Caldor]

That's interesting, on the MegaSTE the Atari version of Dread works with 16 MHz and cache on the 68000. It seems only to be a problem with the 68020 cache.

That is strange. Well... I guess it might also work on the Amiga with cache, if its the 68000. But I guess it might also instead be about the Amiga. But I think I have seen threads about this problem happening with 030,040 and 060 expanded Amigas.

Also I do not think it happens on all Amiga 1200s. F.ex. if you have an ACA1221 it should run fine. I have not tested that yet.

The only way to let the Atari version run on a 68020 is with MiST in the 68020 mode but I think this is without cache. It is possible to use the STEroids mode. KK says the ST version is a little bit slower in general. I would like to know how much the 68020 STEroids mode of the Mystery core can make this disadvantage up. In this mode I get 2.16 displayed in the upper left corner at the very start of the game on my Mega STE in 16 MHz and Cache I get 3.56 . Can you tell me what you get on a real Amiga 1200 at the beginning of the game?

I have only been trying with my Apollo 1260, and it gets 1.26 in the upper left corner. Not sure what it means, but I know on an Amiga 500 it gets 3 and something. So it must be smoother the lower it is.

I got the game running on my Amiga 1200 when disabling the cache. I also tried it on the MiSTer yesterday, and it also helped disabling D-Cache, then it would run. I had some strange input problems though, often it would keep running in some direction, as if the keypress stayed pressed after I stopped pressing it, and it helped tapping it. Not sure if it was specific to this game, might also be an issue with the keyboard I am using with it. I have not been using it long, and I also updated the MiSTer to the newest version and my Blisster hub. So I will experiment some more.

But I kept having no audio, which is strange. On my real Amiga 1200 that is, with the Apollo 1260. Today I plan on trying my ACA1221 and see if I get audio with this. I also got a custom 3.2 ROM I want to test and I suspect MAPRom on the ACA 1221 will help.

[virtuali]

I have only been trying with my Apollo 1260, and it gets 1.26 in the upper left corner. Not sure what it means, but I know on an Amiga 500 it gets 3 and something. So it must be smoother the lower it is.

Yes, your fps is 50 divided that number ( I guess the game is PAL ) so, for example:

50 / 1.26 = 39.6 fps

An Amiga 1200 will show 3 on average, so it's about 16 fps and a stock A500 will show 5, at about 10 fps. On MiSTer I have about 1.5, that is 35 fps.