da saimo » sab giu 22, 2019 12:06 pm
Leggo altrove delle considerazioni generali circa i giochi che usano l'hardware direttamente (non specificamente rivolte a SkillGrid, dunque) secondo le quali:
* nessuno sviluppatore fa lo sforzo di aggiungere la funzione di ritorno all'OS;
* non ci si può aspettare che il gioco funzioni bene su sistemi che non siano quelli base.
La cosa mi ha infastidito un po' perché, invece, io mi sono sbattuto non poco in tal senso e, ancor di più, perché invece SkillGrid merita di essere apprezzato anche da questo altro punto di vista. Vi incollo qui quello che ho detto sui forum internazionali (e scusatemi se non traduco in italiano, ma ora proprio non ce la faccio).
In a thread on a public forum, I've read that no developer does the effort to allow his hardware-hitting game to quit and return to the OS: well, I'd like to let you know that I did include such function in SkillGrid - all that's needed is pressing [ESC] from the title screen. I did my best to take over the machine at startup and release the resources when quitting in the cleanest and most compatible way.
Also, in the same thread, it's said that hardware-hitting games shouldn't really be expected to run flawlessly on all the Amiga setups, given the huge variety of configurations. While it's true that it's impossible to have the game tested on all the configurations out there, I did a big effort to have the game running perfectly and in exactly the same way on a wide range of very different machines.
These are the systems (running a variety of AmigaOS versions from 3.1 to 3.9) that SkillGrid has been tested on:
* A1200
* A1200 + M-Tec Viper T1230
* A1200 + Blizzard 1230 MK IV
* A1200 + Blizzard 603e 68060
* A4000/040 + Cybervision + Prisma Megamix
* A4000 + Cyberstorm MK III 68060 + VA2000 + VA2000CX + Buddha IDE + SCSI2SD + network card
* Amiga CD³²
* several A4000 68040/68060 UAE configurations
(Many thanks to James Monkman, John Scolieri, Tony Aksnes, and Trevor Dickinson for testing the games on their machines.)
It's worth noting that the release was delayed by a couple of months due to the game crashing randomly and shortly after launch on the second A4000 listed above. I simply refused to release a product that seemed to suffer from such an issue. After a difficult investigation and countless tests (the machine and I were 6 time zones apart), it became clear that the problem was AmigaOS being unstable: in fact, a complete reinstallation of AmigaOS solved the problem.
Of course, I can't guarantee that SkillGrid will work on each and every exotic Amiga system out there, but I did strive to make the game as much compatible as possible, so it's safe to say that SkillGrid will run fine on any stable AGA Amiga system.