Old-style FONTs (and Harrier Strike Mission II)

Today we tried running Harrier Strike Mission II for the first time. The game appears stable, but runs way too fast, and the 3D drawing has some minor glitches causing some polygons to go to wrong place.

However, the most interesting part of this game was how it’s drawing its user interface. On the first run, this is the weirdness that we got:

Main menu, before old-style FONT support

In-game UI, before old-style FONT support

As you can see, there was a lot of text all over the place, as we didn’t have yet old-style FONT loading in place (up to this point only FOND & FONT/NFNT combination, which most of previously tested apps/games used). So, after implementing some “TODO” parts in our Font Manager implementation, we ended up with this:

Main menu after implementing old-style “FONT” loading support

In-game view after implementing old-style “FONT” loading support

It’s rather interesting to see fonts used in such way. As a nice bonus of this, we also got the tool palette icons to appear in MacPaint, which are also implemented as a custom old-style FONT:

The tool palette of MacPaint is now visible too!

Civilization – first run

Today we finally got for the first time Civilization to launch successfully. The major issues that were fixed were the preservation of unaffected 68k registers during native toolbox calls (especially D0 which memory manager uses for returning the result code), and fixing a invalid character in ADF filename.

There were some improvements (implementing some missing traps) and bug fixes to Dialog and Control managers needed to pass through the new game setup dialogs. Also, TextEdit is not yet completely implemented (and has some issues such as losing first character as seen in certain names in next screenshots), but works enough to allow passing through dialogs requiring text input.

The game appears to be playable and stable, although there’s some minor issues, such as main window appearing initially too large, status window missing, no scrollbars yet, and various other minor quirks.

Map view/movement, units, construction, technology and combat all seem to work ok. We were able to play this particular game all the way until first autosave, which would have required Standard File Package which we haven’t yet implemented.

Some progress on Test Drive II: The Duel

After some work on adding missing SANE (Pack4/Pack5) routines, loading of Test Drive II: The Duel is working. Also, there were some (due) improvements needed to OpenWD, which now handles also adding partial/full pathnames to the calls.

The intro and menus appear to work with music

Sadly, the in-game has still issues that may be CPU emulation-related. The in-car interiour and basic scenery is drawn ok, but the road is missing and all “3D” sprites are literally all over the place.

In-game screenshot with missing road and wacky sprites

Another weird-looking screenshot, just before crashing the game

Also after for driving some time, the game crashes – still some work to do here.

In the other news, various parts of toolbox and 68k emulation have been improved. Window highlighting bug was finally fixed, growing/zooming of windows works now (with the widgets on window title bars also visible), and literally half of Continuum’s graphics issues were fixed in 68k cpu emulation, so it’s also almost working now.

Battle Chess

Today Pukka was busy fixing some CPU bugs, and thanks to that effort, we have a bunch of games working more or less better than previously. One of them is Battle Chess, which appears to be pretty stable with gameplay – and sound – working.

Some of the dialog boxes don’t quite work yet because of unfinished TextEdit stuff, but otherwise it looks good. Other games which saw some degree of process were Prince of Persia, Dark Castle, Beyond Dark Castle, Continuum, and Lemmings. They don’t yet work quite, and we’ve updated the status page to reflect their current situation.

To celebrate this, we recorded one complete Mac. vs Mac. match of Battle Chess below on our YouTube channel, enjoy!

Battle Chess (with sound) running on MACE

MacDraw & basic shapes

After some effort, we now have basic shape drawing working in MacDraw. One fun part of this was implementing FixDiv, which uses the binary long division algorithm like the original one on Mac. MacDraw uses this routine excessively to handle document grid sizing and coordination of all shapes drawn on the canvas.

“Hello” from the MACE team (with MacDraw’s custom MDEFs usable). No scrollbars visible yet though, have to get on finishing the CDEF 1 soon…

There was also a minor bug in MenuSelect causing zero item selections in MacDraw’s custom menus, but after a quick fix we can now also use them.

Contrary to many other applications, MacDraw uses a different approach to implementing custom menus – instead of providing a MDEF and assigning it to the menu using the menu definition proc ID in resource, it has its MDEF code as part of the program, and creates a fake handle which it assigns to the menu manually. Because of this, we had to tweak the memory manager handle operations to silently fail on such handles, and instead return the proper memAZErr (-113) in D0/MemErr.

Still no text drawing though, and there’s minor tweaking required for line drawing, but it’s looking promising at the moment.

A new host for the blog

Until this day we’ve been keeping this project blog private, but we were told that there might be other people who might be interested in reading about the news and progression of our little project.

For this purpose, we’ve now moved to this new public domain, and also uploaded the private videos on YouTube for public viewing

If there’s anybody who’s interested following this project, please let us know by following this blog and/or the YouTube channel. This way we will know if we should post news about our progress in the future too.

YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd8BnEle9CLaulwk83koX1g

This blog:

https://mace.software/news/

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

Although we could make Indy launch already a while ago, for some reason we did not get any graphics to display. However, after Pukka fixed some more CPU bugs (including ror.l instruction), we suddenly got everything appear on the screen:

Interestingly, the game uses Sound Driver to play intro music, *but* after intro completes, it switches to Sound Manager. As we don’t have yet Sound Manager implementation, we added some empty stubs that just return error for the caller, and it seems Indy is happy with that as we can now proceed in the game all the way until getting stuck on quests 🙂

At this point we also noticed that we had accidentally handled the Style parameter of TextFace as 8-bit value instead of 16-bits as we should have, so the style calls had not been working until now that we fixed it. Indy uses these styles to adjust appearance of text on the UI buttons:

Here’s also a short video of the intro (with audio), and few first minutes of the gameplay:

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade running on MACE, intro with music and few first minutes of gameplay

MenuSelect

As a lot of the test games were already showing menu bars, we decided to finally implement the menu selection support at this point. In Toolbox, this is done by the “MenuSelect” call, which handles everything needed for selecting the menu item, including:

Using MBDF to save/restore menu background, highlighting titles, and drawing menu frame
Using MDEF to draw menu items and choose items
Returning the selected menu/item to calling application

After a some coding, we got this:

At this point, we have only the basic menu selection support (no support for hierarchical menus yet, scrolling long menus vertically, or popup menus), but it’s enough to handle most of the basic cases.

List Manager basics

With track and station building working, we could now also attempt adding trains to run on those tracks. Although we already had one List Manager dummy routine for the Train Roster window, the train creation screen needed a lot of more routines to make it work. This included implementing the following:

LAddRow (and LAddColumn for future use on the side)
LAddToCell
LCellSize
LClick
LDispose
LDoDraw
LDraw
LGetSelect
LNew
LRect
LScroll
LSetCell
LSetSelect
LUpdate

It took some time, but we were now able to successfully select and add cars from the car list to the train. Please mind the missing scrollbar, CDEF 1 is still unfinished 🙂

These List Manager routines will also be useful in the future, not only for the Train Roster window in Railroad Tycoon, but also for the Standard File Dialogs which will also make use of them in the file list.

Arcs and Masks

Time for some QuickDraw updates! Perhaps surprisingly, we already had at this point two cases which required Arc drawing: Dark Castle help screen (the “jump” arcs), and Railroad Tycoon signal circles. As the arc drawing is closely related to circle drawing, we had to just handle the arc begin/end angles and using them to control circle scanline rasterization, we had those cases working:

Another set of features in QuickDraw which we needed to implement at this point were the CalcMask and CopyMask routines. It appears that Glider 2 uses those to draw sprites:

The paper airplane in glider is now visible

…and Railroad Tycoon also uses those to calculate masks and draw everything dynamic on the map (tracks, stations, bridges, and lighthouses). A nice side feature of CalcMask is that it shares basic algorithm with SeedFill call, so with just adjusting a few values we could add support for that trap too. Hopefully we can soon run MacPaint or SuperPaint to test it…

Interestingly, the documentation on CopyMask has conflicting information between Inside Macintosh editions: The later books (IM: Imaging With QuickDraw) indicate that CopyMask scales image to destination rectangle, similar to CopyBits, but older IM:IV describes the correct “Classic” QuickDraw behaviour that it does *not* scale the image.

M.A.C.E.

M*c Application Compatibility Environment