OHRRPGCE 20 Year Anniversary!

Make games! Discuss those games here.

Moderators: Bob the Hamster, marionline, SDHawk

User avatar
Nathan Karr
Liquid Metal Slime
Posts: 1215
Joined: Fri Jan 25, 2008 3:51 am
Contact:

Post by Nathan Karr »

I remember the hero of the game was named Leonard Shaw, and his suit of armor basically looked like he was a giant can with limbs and a head. I don't remember the name of the game itself off the top of my head. I wondered why the text strings were replaced with random unimplemented status effects in an otherwise non-comedic game!
Remeber: God made you special and he loves you very much. Bye!
User avatar
Pepsi Ranger
Liquid Metal Slime
Posts: 1457
Joined: Thu Nov 22, 2007 6:25 am
Location: South Florida

Post by Pepsi Ranger »

I remember the hero of the game was named Leonard Shaw, and his suit of armor basically looked like he was a giant can with limbs and a head. I don't remember the name of the game itself off the top of my head. I wondered why the text strings were replaced with random unimplemented status effects in an otherwise non-comedic game!
You're thinking of Memoria by Royal. It's one of the classic early OHR games.
Place Obligatory Signature Here
User avatar
FyreWulff
Slime Knight
Posts: 107
Joined: Wed Mar 13, 2013 9:16 pm
Location: The Internet
Contact:

Post by FyreWulff »

TMC wrote:Really? It seems that all those extra global text strings (which eventually became experience, etc) were removed totally, not just repurposed, in the earliest existing OHR games. I guess that means that the game you were playing was even earlier than those.
If you remember, Jade started getting weird text garbage too at some points.

I remember at some point, OHR games would have random deleted data from your hard drive in them because the fields in the lump were not initialized. Or am I misremembering?
TMC
Metal King Slime
Posts: 4308
Joined: Sun Apr 10, 2011 9:19 am

Post by TMC »

Ah yes, Memoria does contain those global text strings. That seems to prove that it was either originally created even before FUABMXv1, or it was copied from some ancient version of Wandering Hamster.

The garbage text in SoJ is somewhat different, that's due to uninitialised data inside existing records (maybe due to an upgrade bug?), whereas the global text strings lump originally contained extra stuff like Pumped, Paralysis, Medium, while later games had a smaller .stt lump, and later ones again added more fields to the .stt lump.
Turns out, if you type something into a global text string and then delete it, it still remains there. I see stuff like "Lightess", "Shadowss" (both originally Darkness), "Airth" (Earth) and "Accu^cyaaa"
User avatar
Nathan Karr
Liquid Metal Slime
Posts: 1215
Joined: Fri Jan 25, 2008 3:51 am
Contact:

Post by Nathan Karr »

TMC wrote:Turns out, if you type something into a global text string and then delete it, it still remains there. I see stuff like "Lightess", "Shadowss" (both originally Darkness), "Airth" (Earth) and "Accu^cyaaa"
I've had old spell list names from characters whose spell lists I'd renamed later in development pop up in weird places on me, but that was back in like Wolfwood or so.
Remeber: God made you special and he loves you very much. Bye!
User avatar
Bob the Hamster
Lord of the Slimes
Posts: 7658
Joined: Tue Oct 16, 2007 2:34 pm
Location: Hamster Republic (Ontario Enclave)
Contact:

Post by Bob the Hamster »

I do remember some very ancient versions would actually leave pieces of old deleted files in uninitialized file data.

I think maybe it only worked on a real DOS computer, and it was probably only files written with the assembly language setpicstuff/storeset code, or some such thing as that.

If you want to see an example, download my old unfinished Nesha's Claw Battle Engine Demo https://hamsterrepublic.com/dl/nesha.zip

It uses most of the same assembly allmodex code that the ohrrpgce used to use.

If you view the contents of nesha.dat, which I think is character data, you can see a bunch of chunks of ASM source code, some intermediate tasm compiler files, some chunks of data from https://hamsterrepublic.com/dl/rpg.zip and a few other scraps of data and directory listings that were laying around on my 80 megabyte hard drive back in 1994
TMC
Metal King Slime
Posts: 4308
Joined: Sun Apr 10, 2011 9:19 am

Post by TMC »

Wow, there's an awful lot of data sucked into NESHA.DAT, even your calendar! Is your birthday in mid-February? And hobgoblin day is Jan 18th???

I was just scanning some .rpg files, and found that there's a lot of garbage in the tile animation patterns in old games, including 13 of the animation patterns in SoJ (eg tilesets 87-90). None of them in SoJ are in use, and none of them look like harddisk data :P This explains why the tile animation pattern editor has over-the-top bounds checking!
User avatar
Bob the Hamster
Lord of the Slimes
Posts: 7658
Joined: Tue Oct 16, 2007 2:34 pm
Location: Hamster Republic (Ontario Enclave)
Contact:

Post by Bob the Hamster »

Haha! Hobgoblin Day! January 18th is an important federal holiday in the Hamster Republic :)
User avatar
FyreWulff
Slime Knight
Posts: 107
Joined: Wed Mar 13, 2013 9:16 pm
Location: The Internet
Contact:

Post by FyreWulff »

Bob the Hamster wrote:I do remember some very ancient versions would actually leave pieces of old deleted files in uninitialized file data.

I think maybe it only worked on a real DOS computer, and it was probably only files written with the assembly language setpicstuff/storeset code, or some such thing as that.

If you want to see an example, download my old unfinished Nesha's Claw Battle Engine Demo https://hamsterrepublic.com/dl/nesha.zip

It uses most of the same assembly allmodex code that the ohrrpgce used to use.

If you view the contents of nesha.dat, which I think is character data, you can see a bunch of chunks of ASM source code, some intermediate tasm compiler files, some chunks of data from https://hamsterrepublic.com/dl/rpg.zip and a few other scraps of data and directory listings that were laying around on my 80 megabyte hard drive back in 1994
Hmm, when I remembered that happening I was still on Windows 95. I didn't upgrade to XP until 2004!
Last edited by FyreWulff on Fri Dec 01, 2017 2:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
Nathan Karr
Liquid Metal Slime
Posts: 1215
Joined: Fri Jan 25, 2008 3:51 am
Contact:

Post by Nathan Karr »

FyreWulff wrote:
Bob the Hamster wrote:I do remember some very ancient versions would actually leave pieces of old deleted files in uninitialized file data.

I think maybe it only worked on a real DOS computer, and it was probably only files written with the assembly language setpicstuff/storeset code, or some such thing as that.

If you want to see an example, download my old unfinished Nesha's Claw Battle Engine Demo https://hamsterrepublic.com/dl/nesha.zip

It uses most of the same assembly allmodex code that the ohrrpgce used to use.

If you view the contents of nesha.dat, which I think is character data, you can see a bunch of chunks of ASM source code, some intermediate tasm compiler files, some chunks of data from https://hamsterrepublic.com/dl/rpg.zip and a few other scraps of data and directory listings that were laying around on my 80 megabyte hard drive back in 1994
Hmm, when I remembered that happening I was still on Windows 95. I didn't upgrade to XP until 2004!
I was still using Windows 98 and maintaining a 98 PC for use with the OHR engine until like 2008...I still miss the way BAM used to sound.
Remeber: God made you special and he loves you very much. Bye!
TMC
Metal King Slime
Posts: 4308
Joined: Sun Apr 10, 2011 9:19 am

Post by TMC »

I miss authentic BAM playback too, but adding a proper OPL synthesizer rather than translating to MIDI instead of doing other stuff is going to be hard to justify.
I think I would rather work on a DOS port of the engine, and that might actually be easier :)
User avatar
Bob the Hamster
Lord of the Slimes
Posts: 7658
Joined: Tue Oct 16, 2007 2:34 pm
Location: Hamster Republic (Ontario Enclave)
Contact:

Post by Bob the Hamster »

Does anybody happen to know of an OPL emulator that sounds as good as the real thing and that can write wav/ogg ?

I have wanted to replace Wandering Hamster's midi files with oggs for a while now, and at least for some of them that seems like the best way to do it.
User avatar
MorpheusKitami
Slime Knight
Posts: 218
Joined: Wed Nov 30, 2016 8:23 pm
Location: Somewhere in America

Post by MorpheusKitami »

I don't think it's exactly what you want, but SynthFont could do that, assuming you have the right .sf2 file for the sound you want. Might be restricted to the commercial version though, I could never get it to work. Or it could just be a problem with WINE.
Other suggestion is to use a tracker like OpenMPT, but that's far more time-consuming and less user-friendly. Still requires the right sound files, just no longer needs to be in .sf2 format.
TMC
Metal King Slime
Posts: 4308
Joined: Sun Apr 10, 2011 9:19 am

Post by TMC »

Why do you want to use an OPL emulator to convert MIDI to OGG? You want it to sound similar to the original BAMs?

There are a number of different OPL2/3 emulators out there, but it seems most of them got forked from a different project.
This page lists several of them: https://zdoom.org/wiki/OPL_synth_emulation#OPL_cores
I'm impressed that ZDoom has not one but four different OPL emulators to choose from! I'm consistently impressed with the amount of effort that's gone into the Doom projects.
Also, DOSBOX used to use the MAME emulator, then replaced it with their own.
This is less relevant to converting MIDI to OGG, and more relevant to picking an emulator to embed in the OHR.

Also, I learnt (here) that "Usually the OPL3 emulator is requested to output samples at sampling rate native to current sound cards instead of native sampling rate for the OPL3 chip, so that will alter at least how the feedback sounds. So if [the MAME emulator] sounds wrong then the emulator is used wrong." So for accurate emulation, you should get output from the emulator at 49716Hz and then (probably) resample to standard.
Last edited by TMC on Sat Dec 02, 2017 9:16 am, edited 3 times in total.
User avatar
Bob the Hamster
Lord of the Slimes
Posts: 7658
Joined: Tue Oct 16, 2007 2:34 pm
Location: Hamster Republic (Ontario Enclave)
Contact:

Post by Bob the Hamster »

Most of the midi would be converted to ogg using timidity plus the best .sf2 soundfont I could get my hands on, but there were a couple songs that sounded better in the original bam format (I am thinking especially of Broaste's theme)
Post Reply