The Pawn Demo

[cignale]

I tried as you stated, with all on a folder or directly in the root. Unfortunately the result is anyway
a corrupted text area and a quasi all black screen, a bit pixel garbled. Please refer to FB thread for an image.
Thanks for the Avatar...

[Stefan123]

I saw your post on Facebook before I saw this post so I replied there instead.

[NML32]

@Stefan123, I recorded some gameplay to help show the video issues on the ZX Spectrum Next hardware. I hope it helps with troubleshooting the problem.
https://youtu.be/Jn78KEm8VQU

[chernandezba]

Stephen: I'm only aware of two Next emulators: CSpect and ZEsarUX. CSpect is Windows-only and can be run on macOS using Windows emulation software. I've read on this forum that it should run fine in Wine. ZEsarUX is available for macOS but unfortunately has problems with showing the Timex hi-res mode simultaneously with the layer 2 mode.

I will try it on ZEsarUX. It should run fine

[chernandezba]

Hi
Having tried the demo on ZEsarUX emulator and talked with Stefan:
-The demo doesn't currently run on a real TBBlue board. It loads the layer2 data using esxdos/divmmc but layer2 (map in rom) and divmmc are incompatible, when you map layer2 in rom you can't use divmmc
-It runs on cspect because this emulator doesn't emulate divmmc. It traps the esxdos calls (like the esxdos handler on ZEsarUX, but ZEsarUX can emulate full divmmc too)
-It runs on ZEsarUX but:
*You can test it on ZEsarUX 6.0 stable
*Using ZEsarUX 6.1, you must compile it from sources (sorry, the beta version on last Friday has a bug with layer2 defaults, but it could be fixed setting manually the tbblue register 18 to 8)
On both ZEsarUX versions, you must set esxdos hanlder to the root of the esxdos folder used on tbblue, and uncompress there the pawn data on this root folder, so you will have subfolders gfx, sound, etc...

To see the two video modes at the same time on ZEsarUX (layer2 and timex) you must go to settings->display->timex real 512x192: No.
There's a limitation on ZEsarUX code: if you have real 512x192 timex mode (full width) you can't use scanlines effects. This is why you can't see timex mode perfect and layer2 at the same time.
If you disable timex real 512x192, you will see both modes at the same time but timex resolution is re-escaled to 256x192, this is why the text looks a bit odd. This limitation is difficult to explain here, and I don't know if I will be able to fix it on ZEsarUX 6.1

I have suggested Stefan the following:
-Have a bit wider font size. It will improve reading on ZEsarUX
-Change its layer2 loading routine. He is using layer2 mapping in rom to load layer2 data , which is incompatible with divmmc. It's better to use the mmu registers to map layer2 pages to load the images. So it could be used with divmmc and there will no need to use esxdos handler

Cheers

[Kitty]

Fantastic work! thank you

[Stefan123]

The demo of The Pawn now runs on the Next board A big thank you to Antonio Ruggiero and Juan Carlos González Amestoy for testing on their boards!

However, Antonio had problems displaying the demo on his VGA monitor. The Timex hi-res text was slightly distorted and some characters flickered. It looked like some pixel columns were simply missing. On Juan Carlos HDMI monitor everything looked fine. Is it a known problem with using Timex hi-res mode on a VGA monitor or does it require some special settings to work properly?

The latest version of the demo is available here:
https://github.com/stefanbylund/zxnext_ ... n_demo.zip

Instructions on how to run the demo on the Next board is available here:
https://github.com/stefanbylund/zxnext_ ... /README.md

[SamusDrake]

Not familar with the game, but it looks amazing. Quite surprised the C64 was able to provide full images for each location, although I guess it had a bit more memory than the 48K Spectrum...

[Stefan123]

SamusDrake, yes the C64 conversion was one of the best ones, very good looking indeed!

I don't think the amount of RAM was the reason for not having graphics in the Spectrum 128/+3 versions; it would have taken a lot of time replanning all the graphcis to fit the Spectrum attribute system (unless they would simply have used monochrome graphics for the Spectrum version).

IMHO, not that many adventure games had good looking graphics on the Spectrum except for some of the games from Adventure International like Gremlins and Robin of Sherwood, which had really nice graphics

[SevenFFF]

The demo looks great Stefan!

You're not doing anything wrong, that's how VGA looks on the Next. It's just a lot more noticeable in Hi-Res mode, but standard mode has the problem too.

HDMI is even worse, as it's horizontally off-center and has a magenta line down the left hand side.