In the 0.8 release I made a mistake in an optimization that caused the buttons to behave incorrectly, I'm pretty sure that the fix made the game a little bit slower. Anyway the loss in performance is less than 1%, so it shouldn't be much noticeable.

I see, thank you for the precious clarification, I thought to go ahead and keep using the v0.8 but since you said so I will use the latest version.

If you don't mind I will do some further tests comparing the speed from v0.8.1 to 0.8.7

ViTi95 wrote on 2021-08-25, 20:40:

The LUT idea works very well for dithering the B&W modes, since it avoids lot's of branches, so I guess it's also a good idea fo […]
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leileilol wrote on 2021-08-24, 22:34:

...

The LUT idea works very well for dithering the B&W modes, since it avoids lot's of branches, so I guess it's also a good idea for 4-color and 16-color modes. For now I won't be doing anything very specific for CGA/EGA modes, since most of the 8-bit ISA cards aren't able to sustain good framerate with the 320x200 resolution. I guess it's possible to implement a dithered version for the 640x200 EGA resolution, since the loss of resolution won't be as noticeable, but again it will be slow as hell (EGA cards are insanely slow).

For now the roadmap is this one:

• Add support for new sound cards (AC97, Game Blaster, Tandy 3-voice, OPL2LPT, IBM PS/1 DAC, ... ?)
• Re-enable hardware mixing on Gravis Ultrasound cards (disabled 7/24/95 on the Apogee Sound System), original code is missing
• Add support for some obscure video cards (IBM PGC, IBM 8514, TIGA, ... ?)
• Fix CGA 320x200x4 mode (ugly as f***)
• Speed-up new video modes (CGA, EGA, Hercules,...) since they are updating the whole screen every frame (use partial update as in 13h and VBE2 modes).
• Fix FreeDoom 2 MAP15
• Add SIGIL support

Also the development process will slow down a little bit, my girlfriend broke up with me some weeks ago and I'll spend some time on getting better.

16 bit mixing would be nice, the ASS might already do that for SB16 like in Build engine games, but Windows Sound System or AudioDrive support would be cool. Does the fact that you're using ASS also mean the game hangs on SB16 when using MIDI output with high sample rates?

Also best wishes with your personal situation...

I did the test just with Amd 5x86

Apparently the v0.8.4 is the fastest, but the difference is minimal at best.

Nemo1985 wrote on 2021-08-30, 21:20:

I did the test just with Amd 5x86
photo_2021-08-30_23-18-35.jpg
Apparently the v0.8.4 is the fastest, but the difference is minimal at best.

I guess the performance differences are in the margin of error. Sometimes the OpenWatcom compiler generates different executables even with minimal changes (and by minimal I mean reordering code or adding new code for a new video mode), and those executables have differences in performance. I've been trying to avoid this problem but haven't found any solution to make it more "stable".

Oetker wrote on 2021-08-30, 20:44:

16 bit mixing would be nice, the ASS might already do that for SB16 like in Build engine games, but Windows Sound System or AudioDrive support would be cool. Does the fact that you're using ASS also mean the game hangs on SB16 when using MIDI output with high sample rates?

Also best wishes with your personal situation...

By default i'm using 16-bit audio mixing, using the command line "-8bitsound" you can force the library to use 8-bit audio mixing (like the original). I guess the game shouldn't crash with the SB16+MIDI combination since the audio rate is fixed at 11KHz (8KHz with the "-lowsound" parameter).

BTW I'm still learning how to program sound cards, it's much much harder than any other aspect in DOS game development. I expect to add support for more sound cards, but it's going to take some time. Now I understand why did id Software / Paul Radek had so many problems with the sound code.

Any chance of a high res mode for FastDoom? You could call it SlowDoom 😀

720x348 😀

ViTi95 wrote on 2021-08-30, 22:08:

Oetker wrote on 2021-08-30, 20:44:

16 bit mixing would be nice, the ASS might already do that for SB16 like in Build engine games, but Windows Sound System or AudioDrive support would be cool. Does the fact that you're using ASS also mean the game hangs on SB16 when using MIDI output with high sample rates?

Also best wishes with your personal situation...

By default i'm using 16-bit audio mixing, using the command line "-8bitsound" you can force the library to use 8-bit audio mixing (like the original). I guess the game shouldn't crash with the SB16+MIDI combination since the audio rate is fixed at 11KHz (8KHz with the "-lowsound" parameter).

BTW I'm still learning how to program sound cards, it's much much harder than any other aspect in DOS game development. I expect to add support for more sound cards, but it's going to take some time. Now I understand why did id Software / Paul Radek had so many problems with the sound code.

The issues with SB16 + MIDI only happens when the same card does both stuff. There's a workaround for crashing problems that happens on certain SB16 revisions and it's called SBMPU401 which all that is does is just disable the SB16 MPU-401 interrupt (both SB16 MPU-401 and SB IRQ are shared). The "Wave Blaster" driver found on ASS has also this workaround implemented. Unfortunately this won't solve the stuttering issues with high sample rates.

Implementing WSS for ASS shouldn't be a big deal except for the initialization code. A notable thing for WSS is that no high DMA is used for 16-bit mixing.

Hope that your current situation gets better...

I've implemented ordered dithering (2x2) for the EGA 640x200 16 color mode. Still needs refinement, but I guess the result isn't that bad. This is a video running under DosBox-X, this weekend i'll test it on real hardware 😁

Edit: I did a mistake tonight (very late), here's the good one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEex1QkJuU8

Previous video was the EGA 320x200 version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9l0D3wWra0

Edit 2: For simple comparison, here is the intro screen of Doom II

Really nice port, ViTi95. Covox support made my day.
Is there a chance to add Sound Blaster direct mode (no DMA) support? In particuar this could be useful for PCMCIA sound cards that lack DMA.
Here is what SB hardware programming guide has to say about it

Bondi wrote on 2021-09-03, 05:56:

Really nice port, ViTi95. Covox support made my day. Is there a chance to add Sound Blaster direct mode (no DMA) support? In par […]
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Really nice port, ViTi95. Covox support made my day.
Is there a chance to add Sound Blaster direct mode (no DMA) support? In particuar this could be useful for PCMCIA sound cards that lack DMA.
Here is what SB hardware programming guide has to say about it
direct mode.png

I guess it's easy to implement, works very similar to Covox. Will add it to the todo list 😁

1  010h       Direct DAC, 8-bit                                       SB
2     COMMAND->SAMPLEBYTE
3
4     DESCRIPTION
5      Outputs single sample.
6
7     PROCEDURE
8       a) Send Direct DAC, 8-bit command (010h) and sample
9       b) Wait for correct timing
10
11     NOTES
12      ю Direct mode maximum sample rate is 23KHz.
13
14     SEE ALSO
15      020h   Direct ADC, 8-bit

ViTi95 wrote on 2021-09-03, 09:08:

I guess it's easy to implement, works very similar to Covox. Will add it to the todo list :D […]
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Bondi wrote on 2021-09-03, 05:56:

Really nice port, ViTi95. Covox support made my day. Is there a chance to add Sound Blaster direct mode (no DMA) support? In par […]
Show full quote

Really nice port, ViTi95. Covox support made my day.
Is there a chance to add Sound Blaster direct mode (no DMA) support? In particuar this could be useful for PCMCIA sound cards that lack DMA.
Here is what SB hardware programming guide has to say about it
direct mode.png

I guess it's easy to implement, works very similar to Covox. Will add it to the todo list 😁

Copy code to clipboard

1  010h       Direct DAC, 8-bit                                       SB
2     COMMAND->SAMPLEBYTE
3
4     DESCRIPTION
5      Outputs single sample.
6
7     PROCEDURE
8       a) Send Direct DAC, 8-bit command (010h) and sample
9       b) Wait for correct timing
10
11     NOTES
12      ю Direct mode maximum sample rate is 23KHz.
13
14     SEE ALSO
15      020h   Direct ADC, 8-bit

Cool! 😁

Well I wasn't wrong when I said the EGA video cards are slow. This is on a Trident ISA 8-bit VGA card (my MCE2VGA has stopped working so I cannot use an EGA card, this is the closest one)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uO0NSsDEqC8

Another update, I've checked that is possible to extend the CGA 160x100 16 color mode on VGA cards to 160x200 or even 160x400. I've never seen this before, but I think it's a pretty good mode. On a Trident ISA 8-bit VGA card is possible to update the whole sceen at more than 40 fps (with a fast cpu at 160x200), and doesn't have the problem of being planar.

It should be possible to do the same with EGA cards, but the final resolution whould be 160x175 or 160x350.

https://youtu.be/XfxqMl9hmYc

Edit: just discovered that the 160x400 mode is not usable, since it requires 64Kb of vram and the text buffer goes from 0xB8000 to 0xBFFFF (32Kb), so only half of the screen is filled 🙁

Small update, just a video of FastDoom running on a real CGA card in 160x100 mode (16 colors). Since this card also includes a parallel port, I decided to test if the card was able to play at decent framerates with COVOX sound enabled.

https://youtu.be/_6Jft32G3ls

I wonder whether a script, perhaps with the help of ImageMagick, could convert the textures to a scheme that conforms to the above CGA mode.

If you want to get the all the textures in a reduced color format, the easy way is to extract them with SLADE and then palettize those textures with GIMP. It allows you to define custom color tables, so it's possible to reduce the color to whatever palette you want. But if you wan't something scripted to convert whatever WAD you want, there is a python library (omgifol) that allows extracting the information from the WAD, and then you can postprocess the textures with something like PIL or another image processing library.

Thanks for the helpful instructions. A custom map set with less detail, like WolfenDoom, may also compress well to the lower resolution mode.

Hi,

When i run FDoom (or FDoon13H or any of the other modes) the game launches, will play the opening demo and then automatically quite back to DOS with a timedemo result. This is happening now even if I havent started the game with the timedemo command... any ideas why this might be happening? There's nothing obvious I can see in fdoom.cfg

What release version are you using? Check if the WADs you're using are the 1.9 version, previous ones aren't currently supported.