What could possibly be better way celebrate the holidays, than implementing SecondsToDate trap in time to get the Dark Castle Christmas day easter egg visible? 🙂
Merry Christmas from MACE team!
Category Archives: Games
In the land of odd bugs
These few weeks have been mostly bug fixing, and improving things to get the test applications to run further. This includes fixing the OR masking bug in Dark Castle, adding keyboard controls so we can actually move the character, and trying out different things. A lot has improved, but there’s still work to be done. At this point it might be appropriate to document some of the most strange bugs we had so far:
Most of Dark Castle levels load, but Fireball 1 crashes because of a buggy bird sprite.
There’s something wrong in the 68K code Stunt Copter uses to translate mouse movement to copter speed, causing trails to be left on screen after exceeding movement speed. Another issue with Stunt Copter is that it runs way too fast, but after experimentation we formulated a toolbox patch which would allow throttling the speed to make game actually playable.
And although Dark Castle starts to get playable, we still have issue of boulders teleporting around, and character falling through the floor 🙂
Control Manager, Icon Quest and Dark Castle main menu
One critical part of UI was still missing at this point, the Control Manager. Luckily implementing it was quite simple, as like with Window Manager, a lot of the core functionality depends on QuickDraw to do the difficult things.
With support for Controls, we could now use buttons, like one in the above IconQuest introduction dialog, and the buttons below in Dark Castle main menu using ModalDialog:
The buttons still need titles, checkbox implementation is not complete, and TrackControl is implemented as a immediate return, but that is enough to allow entering The Great Hall in Dark Castle:
With this test case, Pukka identified a bunch of CPU bugs, including lack of BCD (Binary Coded Decimal) support which Dark Castle uses to display the values at bottom of the screen, which will be fixed next.
Update Events
When attempting to run 1000 miles, we soon noticed that it *could* draw to its windows, but it didn’t because we didn’t send update events to the application. As Window Manager implementation had already added foundation for posting the update events, we added support for it in the EventAvail/GetNextEvent, and stuff started happening.
After adding BeginUpdate, EndUpdate, and a bunch of other traps 1000 miles needed, such as PlotIcon and Pack7 (DecStr68K) package (for NumToString through LBin2Dec), we got nice looking interface of the game visible:
Title screen of Tetris (+ScrollRect)
After the recent changes, we decided to try out another classic game, Tetris:
The sound was not yet working correctly, but at least the title screen appeared correctly. As the game wanted to use ScrollRect to scroll text in the small box at bottom, this gave us a good excuse to go on and implement it:
The first Dialog
Now with Window Manager traps starting to get implemented, we could start work on the Dialog Manager. Technically, dialogs depend a lot on the Window Manager, as every dialog is a window, which contains extra information to track dialog items in it. After adding support for static text dialog items, we were able to display the intro dialog of one of our favourite games:
Dark Castle title screen
As one of the main goals is to actually run our favorite games in this emulator, we started now converting some of them into the AppleDouble format, and one of the was the legandary Dark Castle by Silicon Beach Software. It almost worked:
After fixing a bunch of bugs, and adding another bunch of new traps, it actually didn’t take long to get the title screen to appear. However, GetNextEvent was unimplemented at this point, so couldn’t yet proceed past it, and also the animation timing appears to still a bit off. It was nice though to see that the alternate video page switching code appears to work nicely, including also for the first time having 68K code running in VBL service thread! The video below shows this running:
M.A.C.E. 
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