The summer is soon over, so we are getting a bit more time to work again on MACE. There’s not much to report at this point, but here’s a short breakdown of the most important news

Side Projects

During August, Toni got did the first side project, which in this case was creating a hack to fix the graphics corruption issue in Vette! in color mode. More information about that is available on the new side projects page here:

mace.software/side-projects

The side projects will eventually also include other interesting tools, we will write more information about this when we have something more to show

Full extension addressing mode fixes

In this past weekend, we took a moment of time to refine and fix the 68020 full extension addressing mode support, which had some bugs in it. With these fixes, a number of games are now working better:

• Loony Labyrinth now survives through first-time decompression & startup, but still fails after first two intro screens in some data validation
• Escape Velocity no longer crashes in the main menu, and can actually enter the gameplay screen. There are however other issues that still need to be investigated and fixed (for example, the star-field appears distorted, and opening map crashes the game)
• Prince of Persia 2 no longer crashes during startup, BUT because MakeFSSpec is not completely finished, it fails to resolve pathname to the data folder, causing the load to fail at the moment
• F117A no longer crashes during intro, but plays all the FLVC animations nicely, and has (almost) completely functional menus. The in-game does not yet work, though, as the game uses ADB Manager calls to (most likely) interface joysticks and/or other input devices. It should be pretty trivial to add some placeholder trap handlers in the near future.

Other applications may also be positively affected, but those were the most notable ones we were able to briefly test during the weekend. Here are also some screenshots of the progress:

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New video (Continuum)

We also took a moment to create a video of Continuum gameplay, which was long due since we got the game already working literally almost one year ago. The video also attempts to show the experimental “CRT simulation” rendering, which however is a bit butchered by the Youtube compression & video playback scaling (for best results, use either HD resolution in fullscreen, or SD with scaled-down player):

This new rendering mode is not yet available in the downloadable applications, but will be added later as optional feature that can be activated by user preference.