Speeding up games

bbagnall · Posted: Sat Mar 23, 2002 11:46 pm Post subject: Speeding up games

I just tried playing Driller and Mercenery at 1000% speed under ccs64. Mercenery looks perhaps playable but the messages scroll by too quickly.

Driller is definitely not, because the time limit becomes a factor.

Does anyone know of any games that can be speeded up WITHOUT causing poor playability?

I think this all depends on how the programmers created the game. Not many programmers programmed for different CPU speeds the way IBM PC programmers had to.

XTRO · Posted: Sun Mar 24, 2002 5:07 pm Post subject:

I would say all Text adventures.. Like:
The Pawn, Gremlins, Castle of Terror .. and so on...
but if you want Joystick controlled games.... then I have no idea.
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stuartt · Posted: Tue Mar 26, 2002 3:36 pm Post subject: Game speed issues...

What you are experiencing is complexities involving:

1. Emulator timing issues (very sticky).
2. Graphical re-fresh rates (cannot be 100%, due to monitor/TV differences).

You can always try to speed-up the emulator itself by a small amount, but you won't be able to over-come the above fundamental problems yourself.
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Stuart Toomer.

bbagnall · Posted: Tue Mar 26, 2002 5:06 pm Post subject:

Does the c64 have an internal timer by chance? If it does, this would mean programmers might sometimes use that for timing game speed. That would also mean the people who made emulators could speed up CPU speed but leave the clock speed constant.

MorGor · Groupie Joined: 30 Dec 2001 Posts: 234 Location: España

bbagnall wrote:

Does the c64 have an internal timer by chance? If it does, this would mean programmers might sometimes use that for timing game speed. That would also mean the people who made emulators could speed up CPU speed but leave the clock speed constant.

There are at least two hardware time-givers:

(a) The VICs raster counter, which is used in almost every game that includes joystick control, scrolling, music, and the like. People use the raster counter for interrupts -- sort of simulated multi-tasking. People do many tricks with the VIC that are extremely sensitive to timing issues.
If you leave the VIC constant but speed up the CPU by 1000%, this may have unpredictable effects in such games. For example, if a routine that is supposed to need 10 rasterlines actually finishes after 0.1 raster line, everything is messed up.

(b) The CIAs time-of-day clock, which is used infrequently.

bbagnall · Posted: Wed Mar 27, 2002 5:14 pm Post subject:

Dang! It's too bad programming practices weren't more focused on the possibility of a faster CPU coming along. Thanks for the information.