Path: utzoo!yunexus!xrtll!mark
From: mark@xrtll.UUCP (Mark Vange)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Games That Multitask (Was piracy for some reason)
Message-ID: <230@xrtll.UUCP>
Date: 21 Dec 88 19:12:32 GMT
Article-I.D.: xrtll.230
References: <1044@hub.ucsb.edu>
Reply-To: mark@xrtll.UUCP (PUT YOUR NAME HERE)
Organization: Mindless Blundering
Lines: 36

In article <1044@hub.ucsb.edu> hbo@sbphy.ucsb.edu (Howard B. Owen) writes:
>In article <12449@cup.portal.com>, Sullivan@cup.portal.com (kevin lee smathers) writes...
>
>   In the latest AC, there is an article by Randy Linden on the porting
>of Dragon's Lair to the Amiga. In it he mentions the developers considered
>adding hard disk support to the game, but rejected the idea because they
>would have had to write new driver code for each brand of controller! These
>guys used the WCS on A1000's for their own code; so much for running on
>an A3000! The point is, fitting Dragon's Lair onto 6 floppies was quite
>a trick. I have mixed feelings about the bypassing of the operating system
>in this case. On the one hand, it sure would be nice to load a game like
>that on my HD, on the other hand the game MAY not have been possible with
>that feature. 

While it is true that the WCS is used on the A1000's, that is only done to
allow a greater cross section of the Amiga community to use the software.
In reality, the game works with any auto-config memory, and will not use
any special memory it doesn't specifically need to execute properly.
Because of this, the game should run just fine on an A3000 or any other
Amiga-type machine.

The by-passign of the operating system was also necessary to achieve the
framing rate which allowed to synchronize the audio with the video.  While
the game is being played, more data is being loaded all the time, as well as
on the fly decompression of both audio and video.  The code is already so
tight, that if the game is played in High Resolution mode (a 320 by 240
picture centered on a high res, interlace screen) there are not enough
cycles to play the audio track.  Any system overhead would have made the
game unplayable.

I realize that the take-over of systems might offend some of the Amiga
purists out there, but I am certain that we are not alone with our
difficulties in co-existing with the system.

Mark Vange
Visionary Design Technologies