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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   3079 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 4, 2022

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My adlib tracker is in a pretty good state. Wrapping it up. However...

This week I was trying to play Might & Magic 1 on that NuXT board I ordered. And god damnit, I just couldn't seem to add characters to my party correctly.

If you've played Might & Magic, you might know how cumbersome it is. You press CTRL-A through CTRL-Z to add characters to your party, but just A-Z to view them. CTRL A through CTRL-Z mostly worked fine, but CTRL-B refused to work! Kept acting like CTRL-F. This isn't going to be very workable if I can never add the second character in a list to my party.

Now, this is just the copy of Might & Magic off GOG. I've played it in DOSBOX, on a K6-2 system, on a P233, never had this problem before. So I start investigating. I bust out a keychecker program, and discover that the ASCII codes returned by CTRL-A through CTRL-Z are generally 1-26 for the letter. Except for V and B, which are both stuck at 0x06, which is the code for CTRL-F. Well that's odd.

Luckily the source code for the NuXT BIOS is open source. Combing through it's keyboard functions, then the scancode translation table, I see some erroneous entries. So I fixed them. Reflashed the BIOS and everything is peachy. Computers are fun!

I uh... still haven't gotten around to actually playing Might & Magic though. I was made aware that someone else discovered a way to modify the memory bus wait states of the chipset on the NuXT. So I had to write a small assembly program to let me do that too. Yielded some marginal VGA and HDD speed improvements. Also if I cranked it too far it totally corrupted the video display. But backing off a little game me some good gains.

Then I got horribly side tracked with another combination of bugs. The VGA chip is so old, it has trouble with modern monitors. Sometimes the data coming down the ID pins makes it think the monitor is monochrome. I found some utilities which fix it, but this chains into a second problem. The NuXT BIOS kirks out kind of badly when the VGA card is in monochrome mode. So now I'm deeply curious about why this might be. I may or may not try to fix it, if I feel like I've developed a strong understanding of the mechanisms at play.

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