Trying to contact RunIt author(s)

Prophet (2436)

12-03-2015, 23:43

Hi all,

I'm trying to contact NearDark about their great RunIt tool. The snow prevent me to see them at Nijmegen, and I sent a PM with no success so far.

I want to use RunIt as a disk-launcher for the next version of SofaRun, and I'd like to know if they would be OK for me to distribute it along with SofaRun (inside the same .zip package). That would make things simpler for users, and ensure that the RunIt version matches the one that SofaRun expects.

Also, I have a fix for the "read-back" bug using RunIt with 512KB-expanded MegaFlashROM SCC+ SD.

RunIt remains my favorite option for disk-launching in SofaRun, because:
- It's platform-independent
- It works quite well with lots of games
- It uses a single "concatenated" disk-image for multi-disks games.
- It has external "user" disk file support
- It does not need reset to launch a game, which might be of great interest to launch games with JoyMega or PSG to SCC patches (the process would be almost the same as the one I use for ROMs).

ログイン/登録して投稿

By giuseve

Paladin (761)

13-03-2015, 07:13

I have the read-back fix on my MFRSCC 512K
I hope that the fixed version of runit would works anyway.

By meits

Scribe (6533)

13-03-2015, 07:37

The guy maintaining the tool has his MSX moments once in a while. It's very likely he hasn't visited this site for several years.
He wasn't in Nijmegen because we didn't go because of the snow either.

You're allowed to distribute runit as long as you keep it in its original shape. If there's something you want to change, contact me and I'll debate with the author.

By Louthrax

Prophet (2436)

13-03-2015, 07:54

Thanks Meits !

The only change I've experimented so far is replacing "in a,(0FCh..0FFh)" occurences by hard-coded "ld a,n" values (the standard mapper-values: 1 for port 0FEh, 2 for 0FDh, etc...), as the "in a,(0FCh-0FFh)" instruction does not work with some memory expansions, like the MFR SCC+ SD 512KB.

This works fine with disk images that do not use the memory-mapper, which should be the case of most commercial disks. Games using the mapper directly would probably crash the MSX-DOS-2 interface anyway.

It would be cleaner to replace the "standard mapper-values" mentionned above by calls to the MSX-DOS 2 mapper routines, but I'm a bit lazy to manually patch complex assembler stuff

By Louthrax

Prophet (2436)

13-03-2015, 08:05

I also had these questions in mind:
- I've seen that RunIt has a beta MSX-DOS1 file emulation (used by the Micro-Cabin games). How hard would it be to complete that for a full MSXDOS 1 support ?
- Is the MSX-BASIC disks support definitively impossible or is there something that could be tried ?

In fact I started to code my own disk-launcher a while ago (based on start.com), but then realized the complexity of the task !

By Jupp3

Resident (41)

13-03-2015, 14:17

Few more ideas for sofarun:
-Possibility to use psg => scc redirection (using the recently released "generic" program, or sccpsg with playsoniq)
-Possibility to launch SMS games with playsoniq

As for sccpsg and similar options, perhaps such features could be configurable, like define option name and command line in some text file, f.ex.
"Redirect PSG => SCC" "sccpsg.com"

And user would get [ ]Redirect PSG => SCC selection in launcher, and checking it would cause sccpsg.com be ran before game is launched (Yes, I have NMS 8255, and the PSG sound is horrible, it's often better to use SCC instead)

Also, in addition to pictures, would be nice to have some additional text information, such as full name, publisher, year, MSX target system, and maybe some description. Perhaps those could be extracted from some database manually.

Anyway, great program, but feels like it still can't quite replace loadrom with my CF IDE + Playsoniq configuration (looks like it's definitely aimed at megaflashrom)

By Louthrax

Prophet (2436)

13-03-2015, 15:41

Thanks for the feedback Jupp3 !

Jupp3 wrote:

Few more ideas for sofarun:
-Possibility to use psg => scc redirection (using the recently released "generic" program, or sccpsg with playsoniq)

Here's a little teaser on how it works in SofaRun 2.0:

The sound settings are like the other settings (palette, cpu, joymega), and are saved for each game.

I can't give too much freedom on external programs that are patching ROMs, because that interfere with SofaRun own patches (for JoyMega, GameMasters...), so this has to be re-coded specifically.

Jupp3 wrote:

I was thinking about a simple feature in a first step: allowing to display the long file names instead of 8.3. They are stored if you are using a SD-Card, maybe that's something that could be added to Nextor (not a real long file name support for MSXDOS2, but just the ability to retrieve the long file name from a file descriptor...). The TOSEC databases already have quite good-named ROMs sets !

Jupp3 wrote:

Anyway, great program, but feels like it still can't quite replace loadrom with my CF IDE + Playsoniq configuration (looks like it's definitely aimed at megaflashrom)

It started with MegaFlashROMs because it's the most versatile flasher. You adapt the flash-device to the ROM. For other flash devices, you have to adapt the ROM to the flash device, which is harder to do realiably. That will be the next big step in SofaRun (in version 3.0). Not sure about how the Playsoniq works !

By Louthrax

Prophet (2436)

13-03-2015, 15:51

About the Playsoniq PSG / SCC support : what are the specific ports used by Playsoniq ? How does it work / what does it support related to sounds ?

I have eveything needed to redirect the PSG to another port or to SCC (see the above screenshots), so it could be easy to add some tweaks for the Playsoniq (maybe that could be in v2.0, I'm planning to release it this week-end).

By Grauw

Ascended (10706)

13-03-2015, 18:22

Re. PlaySoniq, the manual is on the supersoniqs website.

By Jupp3

Resident (41)

14-03-2015, 00:10

Regarding Playsoniq, afaik it's basically "all ram" (4 megs per slot, although last subslot usually used for everything else), probably more or less the same as the old ram+scc carts. Just more memory as standard, and additional features.

As for sound, I think it emulates only SCC, but has also SID and Sega Master System AV chips.

Regarding SMS games, the Playsoniq software archive comes with sega.bas for loading SMS games. there are also commands for loading & saving saved games from memory.

As for more technical info, see Supersoniqs website (I'm not very "MSX technical", I know more about C64, but try to learn more about MSX too)

If you're looking after more ideas, here's one I somewhat like on many CD32 game collections: (random) menu background music. Obviously, should be possible to turn it off aswell :)