Border Zone Team - Metal Bar II intro

[stormbringer]

and here it is: Borderzone Dezign Team's Metal Bar II

The first Win32 Remake of the famous C64 intro that uses Jim's TinySID Library... Great job Jim!

[Clyde]

Excellent work dude

[Rbz]

Congrats for being the first one using that nice SID sound library

[benny!]

Strange. I do not hear any sound ? No error mesasage though - the scroller
runs smoothly - just no sound Any ideas

[stormbringer]

seems to by the TinySID lib... it manages everything that has to do with sound and output is done through DirectX sound system. Maybe it has to do with that. Unfortunately I have no control on the sound... so I expect Jim to have a look at this one and give me some hints.

@Jim: some other functions would be nice... ability to render the audio samples in a buffer to use a different sound output mechanism (like WaveOut, which is much safer on Win32 than DirectX Sound...)

[benny!]

@stormbringer:
That's strange indeed. I have no problems will all other tinysid stuff. All other examples
using tinysid.lib runs well.

[Rbz]

@benny!: I've a lil notebook at work and it takes around 7 seconds to start playing sound, try to see if this happen for you too ::
Notebook P4 1.7Ghz - Shit gfx card - 512MB

@stormbringer: seems that you still have problems with your timer/delta time, coz this pc at work your scroller run a bit faster and the color effect on letters are faster too.


Btw, at home it works fine - P4 2.8Ghz - Geforce 6600GT - 512MB

[va!n]

the music starts some seconds after the intro has started.... i can hear music but the scroller runs very very low here... i dont know the original sound but seems sometimes the sound is not correct... like looping a buffer again and again before continue... this doesn't happend to the examples of the tinySID lib.

[stormbringer]

as I said before, I do not have much control on the audio as everything is managed by TinySID and DirectX. I'd love to have some new functions in the lib so I can provide my own sound output code. Also I should probably download the latest DirectX SDK and try again. But I'd prefere not to use DirectX and use WaveOut instead (which is much safer and more compatible with all the Windoes variations).

The intro is based on the VBL ... so for those of you having problems with the scroll speed, it' may be an issue with the VBL and driver settings. Please check some other threads on this forum for this. I do not use delta timers as they do not give good results, especially for scrolling. This intro is supposed to by on sync with a screen refresh @ 60Hz... using the VBL for that....

[Shockwave]

Worked nice here. Well done on using the SID lib first.

The first time I ran it there was no sound, the second time the sound worked fine.

[Maxx]

Very nice well done worked fisttime no problems here 

[benny!]

Strange. Tried both versions (windowed/fullscreen) and loaded them several
times and waited some seconds. No music playing. Very strange

[WidowMaker [retired]]

Music worked here but no point in converting intro with just picture and scroller. There are some real excellent 64 intros that should be done before this one. Nice only as a nostalgic thing.

[Jim]

Windowed version has a delay on the music starting up.  This is probably due to using the desktop window as the hwnd in the call to SetCooperativeLevel.  That can be fixed.  I prefer DirectX to WaveOut.  It shouldn't make any difference to compatibility - these routines are tried and tested over the last 8 or 9 years!
->stormbringer - next week, I'm on holiday right now, PM me with the enhancements you would like and I'll see what I can do.  One thing I want to avoid is making the lib bigger just to add bells and whistles, but I'll consider anything   Maybe I could do an alternate waveout version.

Jim

[stormbringer]

ok.. I spent on this one only 2 hours (most of the time in ripping the original text)... no big deal here. The main purpose was to have an old C64 remake... and this one is 21 years old, hence the simplicity (picture and scroller).

@Jim: concerning the SID lib, I would like to have the audio output externally to the lib. Which means that I would prefer the TinySID lib to have a function that "renders" the sound into a user-supplied buffer. Then I could redirect the samples to any audio output mechanism I want, the way I want. I could add fade in/out, volume, etc elsewhere than through the SID lib. IMHO, the lib should focus only on SID audio emulation and sample rendering.. also I had some music looping problems... since the lib for C is provided as a static lib, I have no idea on how to control the looping of the music (should I time the music and restart the player? but that sounds silly and will not work properly for any tune)

..but I must say that your lib is a great piece of code! congratulations!!!!

[Jim]

Thing is, sounds that looped on a real C64 loop in the player.  If they didn't originally loop, they just end.  I think it should be relatively easy to detect that and have an option to loop.  I see what you're getting at about the 'render to user buffer', it's not a bad idea at all.  The interesting question is how to present that to an average FB user.
I'm very pleased you're using the lib

Jim

[stormbringer]

Jim, if you can add a function to set auto-looping mode, that would be great! I have about 20 zillions of C64 intros to remake

rendering samples for the FB users... well... to be honnest I did not really care about FB users as I only write code in C and assembler ... so if the C version can have it, I would be more than happy!

[gooner]

Oh yes i love this one excellant music

[Shockwave]

Maybe this can be changed to use the newer sid library and added to Retro Remakes?

[stormbringer]

good point Shockwave! will be done this week-end