minimal requeriments...

yokmismo · Post by **yokmismo** » Wed Aug 15, 2007 6:52 pm

Hi

what are the minimun requeriments to port scumm to a machine?

mem, cpu, graphical capabilities?

i ask for the minimum minimun minimun requeriments

regards

PsYcO · Post by **PsYcO** » Wed Aug 15, 2007 7:35 pm

mind if i ask why?

yokmismo · Post by **yokmismo** » Wed Aug 15, 2007 8:04 pm

i ask for a scumm interpreter, i don't mind if it has to be coded on asm.

the target machine is an upgraded z80 processor based (not joking)
the specs are:

cpu: z80 4mhz (the weak part, for this reason the asm thing)
mem: upgraded to 512k's
storage: hardisk at 130KByte/s.
graphics: 160x200 at 16colors or 320x200 at 4colors (not hardware sprites)
os: simpletask like dos or multitasking like windoze

i know that this is crazy, but i know early scumm versions were ported to C64 and NES machines. this z80-upgraded is far superior right now...
and for example the s60 machines seems to have a little resolution and they have a port.
obviusly i ask for run games like monkey island 1 & 2 and I.J. fate of atlantis.

what do you think?

kosuan · Post by **kosuan** » Wed Aug 15, 2007 8:34 pm

.
i think - well 4 Mhz isn't so bad, -but to be honest and truthfull
i would suggest not to hope for much performance

I've tried it once on an 233 Mhz P1, without any graphic filters
perhaps still usefull, but an even slower PC would not be so good .....

Why don't you try games like Zorkquest 1&2 on it ?? these should work pretty well i think.

greez, ko

Arantor · Post by **Arantor** » Wed Aug 15, 2007 9:05 pm

Well, all of the games up to Indy 4 (so, Maniac Mansion, Zak, Monkey 1, Monkey 2, Indy 3, Indy 4, in no particular order) all ran on an Amiga 500 - which only has a 7.14MHz processor, although it's a Motorola 68000 (16 bit processor)

I'd speculate even if you had a dedicated Scumm processor running in good ASM for a Z80, you aren't going to do too well... especially if you don't have H/W sprites.

Maybe I'm wrong, of course, but I just think it's not going to work out all that well...

yokmismo · Post by **yokmismo** » Wed Aug 15, 2007 9:37 pm

thanks for the reply

on games like maniac mansion 1 & monkey island 1 (cga/ega grafics 4/16 colors), pure 2d low resolution, hardware sprites are so important? even a fast cpu? actually this z80 machine (an amstrad cpc) has hardisk capabilities that can load the graphic data more quickly than an amiga 500 was capable (the amiga was a pain with games loading soooo slowly from floppy).

perhaps i'm missing something important with this games? seems only 2d static graphics with 1 or 2 guys on the screen at the same time...

ssdsa · Post by **ssdsa** » Thu Aug 16, 2007 6:00 am

yokmismo wrote:on games like maniac mansion 1 & monkey island 1 (cga/ega grafics 4/16 colors), pure 2d low resolution, hardware sprites are so important? [...]
perhaps i'm missing something important with this games? seems only 2d static graphics with 1 or 2 guys on the screen at the same time...

The C64 version of Maniac Mansion uses hardware sprites for all "guys" on screen. To the best of my C64 knowledge, without hardware sprites Maniac Mansion is impossible to code on a C64 because it would be way too slow to redraw the "guys" every time they move. You would also get lots of color clashes because of the 8x8 multicolor charset graphics used on the C64.

Does your hardware have 160x200 graphics with true 16 colors? Or are there color restrictions within any 8x8 block?

If you have 160x200 graphics with 16 colors and you are really using a bitmap display (no character block graphics), do you think the scrolling will be fast enough?

Kaminari · Post by **Kaminari** » Thu Aug 16, 2007 8:56 pm

My Spectrum 128 is better than your Frankenstein CPC.

Seriously, the SDL library alone would eat more than half of your RAM. Even with an extremely optimized backend with support for hardware sprites and sound virtualization (YM3812 to YM2149 wrapper), I don't give a chance to the Z80.

ScummVM for AmigaOS 3 is not particularly fast and requires a 68060 at 50 MHz to run decently.

Still, good luck! :)

ssdsa · Post by **ssdsa** » Thu Aug 16, 2007 9:53 pm

Kaminari wrote:the SDL library alone would eat more than half of your RAM. Even with an extremely optimized backend with support for hardware sprites and sound virtualization (YM3812 to YM2149 wrapper), I don't give a chance to the Z80.

ScummVM for AmigaOS 3 is not particularly fast and requires a 68060 at 50 MHz to run decently.

Well, he didn't say anything about using SDL on his hardware platform. In fact, he talked about writting his own Scumm interpreter in assembly language.

I think the big difference is if you want to write a Scumm interpreter for that platform or if you want to port (some subset of) ScummVM to that platform. The latter is not feasible in my opinion. The former might be possible.

Regarding the Amiga: Some Scumm games were released for Amiga, and Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken even for the C64. Don't forget that these releases included graphics and sound data especially tailored to these target platforms. The original Amiga releases (using a native Amiga Scumm interpreter especially built for that platform) run fine on a standard Amiga at 7 Mhz. On the other hand, just like you said, ScummVM ported to Amiga needs a lot more resources.

So if you want to run some self-made Scumm interpreter on that z80 platform, I suppose you have to transform the graphics and sound data from the games you want to run into some platform-specific optimized format.