Doom?

[tricky]

I out at the moment, but do you think it is worth trying leaving every other line blank (2x frame rate) or duplicating every other line (~1.4x frame rate)?

[mr-macrisc]

I'd say let Rob add frame rate and try his other tweaks and see where we get it to before we look at ways to improve it.

I imagine frame skip could help especially the turning movements which seem to slow up but sure it would be better to see how performance stands first.. IMHO anyway.

[RobC]

I out at the moment, but do you think it is worth trying leaving every other line blank (2x frame rate) or duplicating every other line (~1.4x frame rate)?

I'd say let Rob add frame rate and try his other tweaks and see where we get it to before we look at ways to improve it.

So I put in the code to only send differences for the status bar and this has raised the rate from 12.5 to 14.5 fps. There's probably some scope for increasing things a bit by doing some more unrolling of the transfer loop.

I really like the idea of giving the option of decreasing the vertical resolution by duplicating every other line - don't know whether any other Beeb game did something like this? The code change would be really straightforward but having both options available would mean less room for unrolling the loops in ROM. It would make decent dithering harder on a standard Beeb too I guess.

I *think* this would mean reducing the cycle count for each pair of bytes to from 18 to 14 so an increase of 1.3x on the Tube transfer. I think we'd probably need to keep the full resolution for the status bar.

Not much other progress to report - going backwards now works and I've sorted out the doomrc file so you can redefine the keys etc.

[mr-macrisc]

So saw some screenshots of doom on a master at Wakefield....

Did you manage any of you tweaks before the show? If ya did how well did they work?

[trixster]

Speed is much improved, levels are cached so there’s no stuttering from disk access, 8 colour looks pretty good for non-videonula machine but needs a couple more tweaks, the Nula version from the screenshots looks amazing. Keyboard is setup in the standard wsad format, there’s an amazing mode 1 4 colour dithered version which looks excellent. It works on machines other than a Master too with a slightly smaller viewport.

Rob’s working on sound.

All in all, it’s brilliant.

[marcusjambler]

I sat and had a quick play at Wakefield... Smooth and playable
Really looking forward to the release....

Marcus

[RobC]

Thanks to Marcus and Andy for giving an update.

Just to add that the B/B+ version is using vertical rupture to give double buffering for the play area and a single buffered, full width status bar.
The four colour/mode 1 dithering is pretty simple but you can choose the four colours out of the Beeb's standard palette.

The 8 colour/mode 2 palette needs a bit of work as my simple algorithm picks black too often. We tried dithering with 8 colours but the resolution isn't really up to it. We also stumbled across a mode 8 version by mistake but it didn't look very good

Unfortunately, my laptop hard drive seems to be on the way out as it's sometimes failing to boot. This has slowed up my progress this week but all the sound code is now written (although not quite working yet!).

Hope to get the laptop sorted and get a release out soon.

[trixster]

Ha, yes, I forgot about that low res mode 8 version!

[mr-macrisc]

Nice,

Nice nice nice...

Must get on and figure out master keyboard issues and get Nula fitted, beeb scsi and my internal full fat pi fitted.

Really looking forward to it...

Actually here is a laugh.... Anyone got PI hooked to their electron? That would be a hell of a headline if could get it to run on electron or electron master ram.

[tricky]

Did I already ask about the four palette X four colours at 240x256 nula option? If not, what do you think?

[simonm]

This is all so ace. I'm amused at the idea of the various rendering options being similar to PC games config menus where you set your anti aliasing or trilinear texture mapping etc, except the beeb version is mode 1, mode 2 or mode 8 with the various colour and res tradeoffs instead!

[dominicbeesley]

Following with great interest!

[SimonSideburns]

Can't wait to see more videos of the various screen modes, dithering, etc. versions, as I don't have the necessary hardware to give it a play until I save some £££s for the necessary upgrades (namely PiTube and nULA).

[soviet]

super cool

[RobC]

Did I already ask about the four palette X four colours at 240x256 nula option? If not, what do you think?

I think you did but I must admit that I'd forgotten about it and I always struggle to come up with decent algorithms when thinking about how best to use the attribute modes. Any advice/suggestions would be welcome

On the 80x200 (mode 8 ) version, it came about completely by accident and so isn't in the current version. I'd mistakenly left some of the NuLA setup code in the non-NuLA version and it just happened to put the standard ULA into mode 8!

[SpaceFlightOrange]

Bit Late to the party (as usual)

I got to have a good play at Wakefield (Thanks Rob)

Really, really good! was smooth, and easily playable. Hard to believe it was running on a master.

Excellent work! really looking forward to the release, in fact I managed to pick up a copy of doom for the pc on CD at a car boot sale the other day, so I have a full version wad file ready and waiting It's actually the ultimate doom wad file, so hopefully it will work

[CraigsBar]

Oh my! After the recent epic master games (PoP and SCR) this is a whole new level of awesome! I have a pi zero Co pro emulator in my master, that should be enough right?

[marcusjambler]

pi zero Co pro emulator in my master

I think that set-up plus videoNula graphics processor is the main focus.
There is also mention of a version for the standard ULA and Pi Copro.

I too am a big DOOM fan

Marcus

[RobC]

Oh my! After the recent epic master games (PoP and SCR) this is a whole new level of awesome! I have a pi zero Co pro emulator in my master, that should be enough right?

As the files are massive, you'll need some sort of hard drive too (e.g. DC, BeebSCSI, GoSDC or Dominic's 1MHz bus->Pi interface).

As Marcus says, it'll run without a VideoNuLA and you can choose between 8 colours in mode 2 or 4 colours in mode 1 (with dithering).

With a VideoNuLA you can also use 16 colours in mode 2 and you get a better palette.

[trixster]

Latest VideoNula Doom on the bbc b. 16 colours, RPi0, Datacentre for adfs

https://youtu.be/ihlE6rEGvj8

[soviet]

wow super amazing , now i will have to purchase a video nula.
from where the game files can be run ?, you need a datacentre to run it or they can be in the mini sd interface also.

[RobC]

wow super amazing , now i will have to purchase a video nula.
from where the game files can be run ?, you need a datacentre to run it or they can be in the mini sd interface also.

Thanks. I haven't released it yet as I've still got to fix a few bugs and get sound working. Unfortunately, real life has got in the way a bit but I'll put it up here when it's ready.

You do need some form of ADFS hard drive (at least 8MB) as the game and WAD files are so large. I've tested it with GoSDC, DC, BeebSCSI and the 1MHZ->Pi adapter and it works fine.

Although I know it's been talked about in the past, I can't remember whether there's a filing system that provides large ADFS partitions for user port MMC/SD card adapters. If there is one, I can test it out.

[sydney]

I think this thread has details of the SD/MMC hard disk:
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=10519&start=240&hilit=Mmc+adfs

Page 9 has a link to hoglets GitHub though I'm not certain this is the final version. 11 pages is a lot to read on my phone when I'm supposed to be working!

[SpaceFlightOrange]

wow super amazing , now i will have to purchase a video nula.
from where the game files can be run ?, you need a datacentre to run it or they can be in the mini sd interface also.

Thanks. I haven't released it yet as I've still got to fix a few bugs and get sound working. Unfortunately, real life has got in the way a bit but I'll put it up here when it's ready.

You do need some form of ADFS hard drive (at least 8MB) as the game and WAD files are so large. I've tested it with GoSDC, DC, BeebSCSI and the 1MHZ->Pi adapter and it works fine.

Although I know it's been talked about in the past, I can't remember whether there's a filing system that provides large ADFS partitions for user port MMC/SD card adapters. If there is one, I can test it out.

Do you reckon it will work with Tom's Beeblink via Chris's TubeSerial adapter? I've booted Elite through that off a Pi Zero. started up really quickly. I know there's no 31 file limit but not sure about capacity.

[tricky]

Is there a technical reason that it can't be 40 floppy images and a loop with *din in it?
I assume that the copro is using the fs and that there is no opportunity to swap discs to continue.

[RobC]

Do you reckon it will work with Tom's Beeblink via Chris's TubeSerial adapter? I've booted Elite through that off a Pi Zero. started up really quickly. I know there's no 31 file limit but not sure about capacity.

Unfotunately, I've no idea as I've never used one. The filing system needs to be able to store the whole WAD and give random access to it during gameplay.

Is there a technical reason that it can't be 40 floppy images and a loop with *din in it?
I assume that the copro is using the fs and that there is no opportunity to swap discs to continue.

You could do something like this to *load the executable in chunks but the WAD file is accessed during gameplay and is expected to be a single, contiguous file.

[tom_seddon]

Doom should work with BeebLink, I'd hope - there's a somewhat arbitrary 16 MByte file size, mainly so *INFO output can print the size in 6 digits, but I think the Doom WADs are smaller than that.

If Doom uses OSBGET to read the WAD files, performance will be extremely poor, but performance with OSGBPB should be good, especially if transferring multiples of 256 bytes.

External coprocessor recommended for use with a Master, as the internal/external Tube switch eats into the throughput a bit if you're using the internal coprocessor.

--Tom

[alex_farlie]

Do you reckon it will work with Tom's Beeblink via Chris's TubeSerial adapter? I've booted Elite through that off a Pi Zero. started up really quickly. I know there's no 31 file limit but not sure about capacity.

Unfotunately, I've no idea as I've never used one. The filing system needs to be able to store the whole WAD and give random access to it during gameplay.

WAD is a chunk based format, someone made a WADFS for RISC OS once, but I can't recall where I saw it...

[RobC]

Doom should work with BeebLink, I'd hope - there's a somewhat arbitrary 16 MByte file size, mainly so *INFO output can print the size in 6 digits, but I think the Doom WADs are smaller than that.

That sounds good - the WADs I've been using for testing are about 4MB.

If Doom uses OSBGET to read the WAD files, performance will be extremely poor, but performance with OSGBPB should be good, especially if transferring multiples of 256 bytes.

It is using OSGBPB for file reads and writes so that's good too.

WAD is a chunk based format, someone made a WADFS for RISC OS once, but I can't recall where I saw it...

Indeed but, unfortunately, the code I've ported treats the WADs as single files so it currently needs a filing system that can support large files. I'll try to find out more about WADFS and see how much work it would be to support chunk lookups across multiple disk images. However, I want to get the sound code working so I can at least (last?!) release something.

[CraigsBar]

Oh my! After the recent epic master games (PoP and SCR) this is a whole new level of awesome! I have a pi zero Co pro emulator in my master, that should be enough right?

As the files are massive, you'll need some sort of hard drive too (e.g. DC, BeebSCSI, GoSDC or Dominic's 1MHz bus->Pi interface).

As Marcus says, it'll run without a VideoNuLA and you can choose between 8 colours in mode 2 or 4 colours in mode 1 (with dithering).

With a VideoNuLA you can also use 16 colours in mode 2 and you get a better palette.

Yeah, I have a datacentre fitted already. Will be ordering a VideoNuLA on payday! Then doom on a beeb, yay!