Video_Sync in Amiga?

[Shane_R_Monroe]

Several games I'm testing appear to have inconsistent frame rates ... but not slower - too fast.

Footman starts running EXTREMELY fast then eventually slows down to its regular speed.

Jungle Strike simply runs too fast the whole time.

Seems like a vsync thing to me. Can we put vsync in the uae.config for the game? Does this NOT sound like Vsync? If not, anything else I can try?

Thanks.

I'd love to be able to share my configs and settings (no one wants to wait around for normal speed drives when we can use 16x )

[fcatrin]

Hi!

Vsync is already activated but yes, I noticed this as well, it's like the CPU is running faster than the real Amiga.
There are plans to replace the Amiga emulator for a newer one that supports CD32 as well, I would wait for that before doing more changes.

As for settings like drive speed, do you mean having a global config for that? Currently you can set that for each game, in the game details screen, but I didn't want to apply the change globally because some games crash if you set the drive speed too high.

[Shane_R_Monroe]

No I mean since I'm doing all the research to set maximum drive speeds for games, I wish I could easily share those settings with others within the UI somehow.

For example, BagitMan won't run unless you use A1200 settings (despite it being an ECS game) and you can use 16x drive speed safely.

What would be super cool is if I could SUBMIT that to your database - you take an MD5 checksum of my ADF of BagitMan and store my settings with it on your end - so the next guy that tries it doesn't have to experiment to get good results.

[fcatrin]

There is no GUI method to do it now, but you can send me a list and I can fill the data in the server for those games.

[Shane_R_Monroe]

Email? PM?

What fingerprinting are you using for the ADF? MD5?

What about box/screens? Format? Size?

If I'm going to contribute, I'll do it right.

[fcatrin]

You can email me to fcatrin at gmail dot com.

For game matching I use only the name, because I cannot do hashing with remote files without retrieving the whole file, that would be too slow.

This is the matching algorithm:

http://retrox.tv/names

Covers for Amiga are around 360x480. The size doesn't need to be exact. Screenshots are in the original Amiga resolution, which may vary depending on the game.

Here you can find the list of currently supported arwork (1700+ covers, 2200+ shots)

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/b53083640iuh ... syrXa?dl=0

[Shane_R_Monroe]

I'm not sure I'm clear.

When you do the local scan of the files, you simply obtain the MD5 hashes at that point and transmit just the MD5 value over for matching. No file transmission would be required.

Filename matching isn't reliable since any given Amiga game could have multiple versions; different packing methods, different number of disks, etc. If I provide you with a config that matches a hashed MD5 value, you can be sure the config file belongs to that particular crack/rip/version.

The C64 will need this too ...

I'll start providing what I have.

[fcatrin]

I see.

The problem with hashing the name is that you need a lot of entries for one game, because they will all give a different hash. What I do is first to normalize the name, so it doesn't care the version details for most cases. Using that method I can have one entry for each game, regardless the version.

The number of disks doesn't matter either, that part of the name is removed as well.

[Shane_R_Monroe]

The name itself doesn't matter at all. In fact, if you used MD5 hashing, you could probably increase the accuracy of the game matching. If the name match fails, the MD5 match would be 100% definitive.

My vision would be that the MD5 hooks up as a many to one relationship with a game, its assets, its keymap and its UAE config.

This is just for example... ONE game name, THREE versions that all need SOMETHING different:

The Killing Game Show
-- Perfect Copy (MD5: abc123.......)
---- Two disks, two disk drives in config
---- Disk Speed = Normal (any faster messes with Psygnosis' disk loader)
---- No special keys required to "play the game" without a keyboard - Amiga default keymap is fine.
-- Crunched Crack #1 (MD5: xyz656.......)
---- Two disks, two disk drives in config
---- Disk Speed = 4x Works (nothing faster though)
---- Crack screen requires F10 to continue (no questions, please) - so we need the keymap hooked up
-- UnCrunched Crack #2 with Trainer (MD5: yye387.......)
---- Three disks - only two drives work though - the game won't detect of use DF2:, two disk drives in config
---- Disk Speed = 16x Works (Not using it and the game actually loads slower than the original)
---- The game doesn't boot for some reason if you don't have <insert oddball UAE setting change here>, so that needs a change
---- Crack screen requires F7 to continue (no questions, please) - so we need the keymap hooked up
---- Trainer screen requires H and T (high score or trainer), Y/N for SKIP INTRO, probably something else too - so we need more keymap entries
---- Oh, and we need S mapped to a key too, so we can skip levels during play if the trainer is on.

So while you can reuse assets and a base name? You need individual keymaps and config files for each MD5 fingerprinted possible version in the wild.

[fcatrin]

I see. The problem with that approach is that artwork, metadata and common configurations would be needed for each hash. The idea of applying normalization to a game name is that no matter which variant RetroX find, the game will be recognized as one, which for most purposes and most cases will be right.

Now, take in account the following:
* Number of disk is autodetected from the source files, you don't need to config that
* Disk speed, may be it would be handy to be able to change it in-game
* Key -> Button mapping is planned to be doable via GUI, at any moment.

Yes, it would be great to have a full database for all the Amiga games and their variations, but that is a really really big task. I would focus in the main versions of each game first, and in the most popular games as well.

I can grasp that, because I made the presets for around 120 games with a help of a friend and it was a lot of work. Complete collections of Amiga games plus variants is 10x that work at minimum.