Author Archives: toni

About toni

Just a regular Mac programmer...

5 year anniversary! And happy new year 2023

It feels crazy to think that today it’s been a whopping 5 years since the project got rebooted to its current iteration! Sorry again for slow progress between late summer and the Christmas holidays, a lot of things going on so we have had to juggle between different things and try to prioritise them. But past couple months have been again quite productive, and we have some nice updates to share:

File system improvements

One important feature that was added to NativeFS has been ability to create directories using DirCreate, something that not only installer applications, but also some apps generally depend on. It’s still not perfect (for example extracting the THINK Pascal installer archives made with SmallerInstaller causes the directories to get a bit haywire), but basic use cases such as creating Desktop & Trash folders seems to work.

Also, some groundwork has been laid to support deletion of files, as the AVL tree routines for node deletion were added – but actual deletion of file system items is still a work-in-progress task, which needs to be done carefully and is not to be rushed considering errors and bugs in this code might cause a bit headache to the end-users.

And also, when doing test runs on some Installer VISE installers, we found out that the NativeFS DRVR’s Control handler had used incorrect csCodes for the logical/physical drive icons (we were using 0x16 and 0x17, while correct ones were 0x15 and 0x16), this tiny mistake caused the whole installer to crash…oops! Another quite important bug fix was adding missing IODone call to the NativeFS DRVR’s Status handler, as that caused basically the entire Device Manager to hang…

List Manager multi-select

Not really a tough feature to implement, but one that has been a TODO for long time, list manager multi-selection has been finally implemented. A very good test case for this has been ResEdit, as it supports multi-selection both in the 2-dimensional icon grid, and in the 1-dimensional list view

SeedCFill & CalcCMask

Also as part of filling some missing traps, SeedCFill and CalcCMask were implemented. Like the aforementioned list multi-selection, ResEdit again was a wonderful test case for this, as the color editor PACK 1 in it uses these for the color flood-fill tool:

Technically, the SeedCFill and CalcCMask actually call SeedFill and CalcMask, and to do that, they first map the color pixmap passed to the routine to a 1-bit image by using a custom color search proc to a temporary bitmap, which replaces matching colors with 0 and non-matching with 1 (i.e. doing floodfill on certain color gets flooded only to exactly matching pixels, while being bound by any other colors)

Application zone teardown updates & fixes

A bunch of fixes and missing features were added to the InitApplZone & SetApplBase, which makes doing transfer/shell launch to other apps way more reliable:

Font caches are flushed in SetApplBase and InitApplZone. Sometimes recently used font might be left cached in the application zone, and doing Launch/Chain to new app might accidentally use the cached (but not obliterated from memory) font, causing random crashes.
All color grafports, palettes, and VBL tasks located in application zone are disposed/closed

These are quite important fixes, as the aim is to provide soon the much-promised “generic” MACE runtime, which would contain an application shell (i.e. Finder replacement) to reliably run applications from

Communications Toolbox foundation

Weirdly, the Comm Toolbox has a bunch of very non-related routines included, which some applications seem to depend on. The first one we encountered was some Installer VISE installers using the CountDITL selector to get number of items in dialog item list, which the designers of the toolbox interestingly put as part of the Communications Toolbox. Also, the dispatcher mechanism they use is a very non-standard one (they basically pass parameter block pointer in A0 register, which contains the actual arguments of the routine – which might vary in size and number depending on the API call – and expecting result in D0 register). Although there’s just this one call implemented, the foundation for Comm Toolbox was done so that other routines can be added as needed later.

SoftFPU support

Even though Pekka is working hard on the 6888x FPU support, we did interesting experiment to see how well the SoftFPU control panel would work on MACE. Basically, that utility hooks as the F-line exception handler, using SANE calls to the actual math, and passing those results as emulated FPU instruction results. So, emulation inside emulation, kind of. Getting this done was actually quite easy, as the SANE emulation already covers so many calls, so we just had to hook up the F-line exceptions, and implement two missing SANE FP68K selectors (FNEXTX and alternate FX2X), and we were able to run a test app written in THINK Pascal with native 68881/68882 code generation with correct results:

In the above test application, the Compile Options dialog shows that 68881/68882 codegen is active, the code contains math for 9 / 2, and the Text window shows the result of 4.5 (in scientific formatting, as the Dec2Str routine still has some unfinished features)

Some updates to get Civilization 2 to work…almost

One cool game we also have been wanting to play for a long time is legendary Civilization 2, and we took a small steps in getting closer to being able to play that game someday soon:

Time Manager’s “hidden” microseconds trap (A093). This one was a bit hard to find documentation for, but we were able to produce close-enough results to keep Civilization 2 happy, which uses it for some reason. Basically the call returns 64-bit microseconds counter, with low 32 bits in D0, and high 32 bits in A0 register.
Added DriverGestalt (43) status call to NativeFS, and dgDeviceType (‘devt’) to it, which Civilization 2 seems to use to detect the media type of volume it was launched from (to see if it was started from the CD-ROM or Hard Disk)
CopyPalette trap handler (only partial implementation, but seems to be enough for Civ2 startup)
Added some more fake process manager data to GetProcessInformation results, in this case basically faked the processAppSpec by using HGetVol to get active directory, and CurApName from low mem…really dirty, but luckily enough again for Civ2. When process manager is someday added, this hack will be replaced by a proper implementation

With these done, we did get the game to progress quite far already:

There are still some big issues in the game, such as missing for some reason the entire backdrop images from the start-up menus, fonts looking ugly because truetype is not implemented (bitmap fonts have the pixelation on non-exact sizes), and color picture recording has still missing features causing city screens to crash.

Newer Technology GURU: “GUide to Ram Upgrades”

One other nice application that we were also experimenting is NewerTech’s GURU, which not only at the time was nice tool for checking out what RAM/VRAM upgrade options you had for Macs, but also doubles as nice mini-encyclopdia of various Macs, clones – and even printers – with their specs and nice color icons included.

To get GURU running, there were a couple things needed:

We had again to temporarily tweak the GetProcessInformation’s processSignature (which sadly also WarCraft 2 uses, so both this app and that game need a proper implementation for this
Interestingly, the tiny and very harmless-looking popup menu triangles (seen in the screenshot on right-hand side) were actually 16-bit RLE-compressed pixmap images, so we had to implement both the 16-bit pixel translator, and the RLE decompressor in the Color QD Picture bits opcode handler
Also, the About Box in GURU used TESetText for styled textfield, which was previously a TODO, so that had to be implemented (it basically just replaces existing styles with a single style run)

MacWrite (finally) works now!

We also took some time to dig into other long-time known issues, one of which the MacWrite crashing on newline issue. Interestingly, two separate bugs did surface:

The biggest issue was that doing post/pre-increment of registers in middle of execution was not handled properly, in MacWrite’s case the offending instruction was ADDA.W (A0)+,A0, where value from memory pointed was read, A0 was supposed to be incremented by the word size (2 bytes), and the result added to A0 register. The bug caused the increment to get missed before adding the value to A0, causing it to be 2 bytes too low. This caused a bunch of havok in MacWrite, as the app used its own data structures to keep style data for rows, and this made – among memory corruption – the font size to go to a whopping 255 pixels when adding a new line on keyboard
The “justify” text alignment was one of rare cases where spExtra of GrafPorts was used to do sub-pixel (fixed-point) spacing of text, so we didn’t notice before Font Manager was missing a byteswap in handling of spExtra, which caused the cached spExtra to get totally crazy values
A rare case of resource map not being initialized properly surfaced on document saving, which was fixed
And also, document saving in MacWrite seems to depend on IUSetIntl trap (to apparently write localization data to the document), that trap had to be implemented

With these fixes, MacWrite finally works:

Strategic Conquest

Although most of the features we had tested in Strategic Conquest were working, the map drawing had glitches: polygon lines were missing. We did some investigation about this, and found out that MapPoly trap only mapped the polygon points, but totally forgot to do the mapping for polyBBox. This in turn caused the polygon drawing to assume points were out of range, and fail to render anything in most of cases. With this fixed, the map seems to work fine now (at least in the B&W version):

Arkanoid has sound!!!

One issue that was also mysterious for long time was why Arkanoid had no audio, while (almost) every single other black & white game/application had sound. After some researching, we found out that being super smart (and bizarre), instead of the standard VLB queue item (like 99.9% of games), or the not-so-common Lvl1DTVIACA1 interrupt handler (which Fokker Triplane does), Arkanoid actually hooks directly to the AutoInt1 vector on the 68K exception vector list, which normally would be handled by the Mac OS to invoke the VBL interrupts. After adding a level of indirection to the AutoInt1 vector (and adding possibility to later add other interrupt handlers to this level), Arkanoid sounds works perfectly! Sadly we did not have time to get a nice video capture of this for this update 😦

THINK Pascal zone check fixed

Another long-time issue that had been bothering us was that THINK Pascal kept saying in debug mode all the time that all zones were damaged, so we finally took time to dig into the THINK Pascal code and look for their zone check code and see what it was doing. Luckily, the only part that was failing was the trailer check, which checked that the bkLim block was supposed to be always 12 bytes in 24-bit mode, was getting triggered because when GrowZone was adjusting the zone trailer, it accidentally wrote 0 (zero) as trailer size, instead of the expected 12 (ironically InitZone did set it up properly). Although this bug had no functional effects to anything else but the zone check, the THINK Pascal was way more happier now, and looks like the LightsBug debugger is working perfectly, zone browser now included!

LightsBug working nicely after zone checks pass

Other bug fixes

There were a couple bugs/missing features that were fixed, with varying effects:

Fixed mask overflow in 32-bit pixel data stretching blitter, and implemented TODOs for some 32-bit pixel data colorization variables – These caused black buttons in some F/A Hornet 2.0 dialogs
ScrollRect passed wrong offsetPt to ShieldCursor – this caused some cursor artifacts (this bug did not manifest itself until after the actual software cursor code was added recently)
The WDEF 0 (standard window defproc) did not offset the grow box drawing correctly when a window grafport was offset to a non-zero origin (like in PhotoShop) – this caused the bottom-right growbox to get drawn in wrong position on the desktop)
1-bit cursor data saving was missing from SetCCursor – This caused the cursor update to not get triggered if doing InitCursor or SetCursor after doing SetCCursor
Fixed issue in RestoreBits, where the menu bar was invalidated in RestoreBits even though it was restored, which in turn caused recursive call to DrawMenuBar when had a menu highlighted (the kMBDFMessageHilite message in MBDF code called RestoreBits which in turn did InvalMenuBar call, which caused the DrawMenuBar to get triggered from the second HiliteMenu call inside the DrawMenuBar) – Fixes the issue of MenuBarPattern code getting stuck in infinite recursion in Civilization, as it tried to double-patch itself from the recursed DrawMenuBar call
Added missing call to SystemEvent in GetNextEvent, which caused some events, such as key press events, to not get passed properly to Desk Accessories – Fixes the issue of Key Caps DA not receiving text input
Allow BlockMove to receive negative lengths. After researching how the List Manager in some 68k Mac OS versions handle the case of having zero rows but non-zero columns, it seems that they do pass negative lengths (maybe on purpose) to BlockMove with no side effects, and BlockMove ignores those – Fixes the unncessary negative length assertion in ResEdit with empty resource files
vRefNum case was missing for GetWDInfo calls in NativeFS, which caused ResEdit to not be able to open files from root directory of a volume
Do proper setup of stack pointer on application launch to BufPtr, because this was missing (and SP was left in boot-time default), it cut amount of available memory to apps down to 75% of total RAM! This also surfaced another bug that the startup-time boot grafport (used to draw any stuff during INIT loading etc) was not closed, so any code assuming that all PortList entries were valid were randomly crashing
Added style support for TEDelete, so using backspace key in SimpleText works now

What next?

It’s always hard to estimate what will be done and when, but there are still some key goals we’re aiming in the near future:

To get the public binaries finally updated after we have time to figure out not only a nice, cheap and practical CDN or other way update the files
When electricity prices go down (which got crazy during winter, so had to turn off most of extra computer equipment), work on automating the builds for different platforms, instead of manually building everything (even though CMake does a lot of the hard lifting)
Get Sound Manager 3.x to work, so we can start putting out the color version too
Try to make sure ReserveMem & NewHandle combos work as expected, right now this is causing THINK Pascal to run out of memory – this is something we want to make sure works, before we move to:
32-bit memory manager. Something that’s needed not just to get more than 8 megabytes of accessible memory, but also to get some picky games (such as Doom) to run, AND to allow:
Direct memory access support, for avoiding the overhead of virtual memory interface, potentially speeding up emulation quite a lot. This requires 32-bit memory model to work efficiently.
Update build system to include creation of the System file from resource scripts – it’s still being handled as binary file that’s edited using native resource tools, which is not only cumbersome, but also makes it difficult to have variants of the System file for different system types – when we at some point do add process manager support, the way for example desk accessories and fonts are handled needs adjustment, as in process manager-aware (System 7 and later) those are external files instead of ones in System like in System 6 and earlier
Work on the so-many missing features (which do also cause known bad behaviour or crashes)
Debug and research the problems and crashes which we know about, but haven’t yet figured out what is causing them (such as F/A Hornet and F117A drawing issues, ball missing bug in Loony Labyrinth, timing issues in Monkey Island and Prince of Persia 2…)
Prepare a Discord server for public access
Many, many, ….many other things

We will as always update our progress on this blog, hopefully a bit more frequently. Your support and encouragement has been very inspiring, and we’re trying as soon as possible to share more and more of the stuff we’ve been making with you.

Full list of changes since last post

2023-02-15 14:56:38 +0200 • Fix 24-bit zone trailer & add bkLim validation
2023-02-15 03:45:35 +0200 • Add dummy ADBOp trap (for SoftWindows)
2023-02-14 21:47:21 +0200 • Expose & use low-level AutoInt1 vector for VBLs
2023-02-13 23:34:21 +0200 • Add LMKbdType and use it for Gestalt & SysEnvirons
2023-02-13 00:27:16 +0200 • Also adjust polyBBox in MapPoly
2023-02-12 17:40:45 +0200 • Style support for TEDelete
2023-02-12 17:39:11 +0200 • Disable font width table logging in debug mode
2023-02-08 23:48:12 +0200 • Merge branch 'master' of
2023-02-08 23:47:43 +0200 • Remember to close the startup-time GrafPort
2023-02-08 06:12:54 +0200 • Merge branch 'master' of
2023-02-08 06:12:50 +0200 • Handle TEMeasure start in middle of style run
2023-02-08 06:12:02 +0200 • Don't return random value if FindFolder fails
2023-02-08 06:11:09 +0200 • Some cleanup in HighLevelFSDispatch
2023-02-08 06:10:30 +0200 • Don't ignore opIFore and opIBack
2023-02-06 02:47:11 +0200 • Reset stack pointer A7 in non-multitasking Launch
2023-02-06 00:48:02 +0200 • Handle vRefNum case in GetWDInfo
2023-02-05 23:15:40 +0200 • Implement IUSetIntl selector for IntlUtils Pack6
2023-02-05 22:29:59 +0200 • Fix rare case of res map handle not initialized
2023-02-05 22:26:45 +0200 • Fix ADDA.W/L postincrement same as destination bug
2023-01-30 12:28:55 +0200 • Fix byteswap bug on spExtra handling in FMSwapFont
2023-01-29 01:26:40 +0200 • Add dummy stub for HMRemoveBalloon (for Excel 3.0)
2023-01-28 08:35:17 +0200 • Implement TESetText styled textfield case
2023-01-28 00:35:35 +0200 • Some process manager placeholder hacks for GURU2.6
2023-01-28 00:34:03 +0200 • Use 16-bit RLE decoder for PICT packtype 3
2023-01-28 00:33:37 +0200 • Add 16-bit RLE decompressor for QD Pictures
2023-01-28 00:32:33 +0200 • Add 16bit direct to indexed color pixel translator
2023-01-26 21:06:19 +0200 • Merge branch 'master' of
2023-01-26 21:06:17 +0200 • Fix 68k Bxx opcode with 32-bit extension
2023-01-26 01:07:16 +0200 • Fix return value of Microseconds trap
2023-01-25 14:45:34 +0200 • Hack face processAppSpec in GetProcessInformation
2023-01-25 13:52:55 +0200 • Partial CopyPalette (0xAAA1) trap implementation
2023-01-25 03:32:02 +0200 • Add dummy Lower/Strip/Upper/StripUpperText handler
2023-01-25 03:01:56 +0200 • Handle 'devt' driver gestalt in NativeFS
2023-01-25 03:00:19 +0200 • Return controlErr on non-support NFS Control codes
2023-01-25 02:41:18 +0200 • Add DriverGestaltParam & dummy handler in NativeFS
2023-01-25 02:39:21 +0200 • Fix broken return from NativeFS Status handler
2023-01-25 02:38:02 +0200 • Implement Microseconds trap (A093) for Time Mgr
2023-01-23 03:10:20 +0200 • Expose some rsc manager stuff for SetResourceSize
2023-01-23 03:09:21 +0200 • Merge branch 'master' of
2023-01-23 03:08:20 +0200 • Log also 68k program counter in trap debug msgs
2023-01-23 03:07:21 +0200 • Update TimeManager.c
2023-01-23 03:06:42 +0200 • Work on SetResourceSize
2023-01-17 22:25:49 +0200 • F-line handler for M68kHelper glue module
2023-01-17 22:04:05 +0200 • Implement FNEXTX and alternative FX2X selector $10
2023-01-17 22:01:38 +0200 • Fix f-line dispatcher installation in 68k cpu code
2023-01-17 00:27:06 +0200 • Add CountDITL, and a VERY bizarre A08B dispatcher
2023-01-16 14:06:31 +0200 • Fix invalid icon csCode in NFS + add assert checks
2023-01-16 13:54:23 +0200 • Fix byteswap bug
2023-01-16 13:41:18 +0200 • Remove VBL tasks in app zone in InitApplZone
2023-01-16 13:34:27 +0200 • Dispose palettes in app zone in InitApplZone
2023-01-16 13:22:09 +0200 • Close all open grafports in InitApplZone
2023-01-16 13:21:38 +0200 • Flush font caches in InitApplZone
2023-01-16 13:02:15 +0200 • Flush font caches in SetApplBase
2023-01-16 13:01:45 +0200 • Add SLCheckApplZoneAddress, for app zone cleanup
2023-01-16 13:01:04 +0200 • Detect use of ResErrProc in resource manager
2023-01-16 13:00:29 +0200 • Add (partial) font cache flushing in Font Dispatch
2023-01-16 12:59:34 +0200 • Implement FCMPL selector in SANE FP68K trap
2023-01-09 23:32:54 +0200 • Implement QDExtensions's GDeviceChanged selector
2023-01-09 23:22:39 +0200 • Implement QDExtensions's OffscreenVersion selector
2023-01-08 23:17:28 +0200 • Added AVL Tree node deletion routines
2023-01-08 13:49:24 +0200 • Implement SeedCFill + CalcCMask QD traps
2023-01-06 16:57:46 +0200 • Fix handling of zero & negative BlockMove lengths
2023-01-06 11:24:27 +0200 • Check VCB flags in SetFileInfo/SetCatInfo
2023-01-01 17:46:21 +0200 • List Mgr's LClick multiselect (shift+cmd) support
2022-12-29 11:06:57 +0200 • Implement RsrcMapEntry trap handler
2022-12-20 00:02:35 +0200 • Don't return mouseMovedMessage unless app4 bit set
2022-12-18 14:05:14 +0200 • Implement SysEdit trap handler
2022-12-18 14:04:49 +0200 • Fix issue of GetNextEvent not calling SystemEvent
2022-12-17 00:25:55 +0200 • Fix unneeded invalidate of menu bar in restorebits
2022-12-14 21:29:16 +0200 • Save 1-bit cursor data in SetCCursor
2022-12-14 16:21:12 +0200 • Fix wDrawGIcon incorrect offset in nonzero origin
2022-12-13 21:49:42 +0200 • Proper fix for horizontal stretch pixel masking
2022-08-24 02:02:08 +0300 • Fix ShieldCursor offset in ScrollRect
2022-08-22 23:21:44 +0300 • Improve relative mouse mode host cursor behaviour
2022-08-22 22:11:12 +0300 • Merge branch 'master' of
2022-08-22 22:11:02 +0300 • Add dummy MIDI driver module (for MIDI Manager)
2022-08-22 22:09:16 +0300 • Fixes to 32-bit direct-to-8bit color QD blitter
2022-08-22 22:08:03 +0300 • Fix mask overflow in 32-bit horizontal CQD stretch
2022-08-21 13:30:13 +0300 • Fix sound manager header
2022-08-05 03:58:52 +0300 • Add empty dummy MIDIGetClients selector
2022-08-05 02:58:50 +0300 • Refactor filesystem AVL tree code & add validation
2022-08-05 02:57:45 +0300 • Cleanup SoundDispatch & add SndDispVersion handler
2022-08-01 17:28:51 +0300 • Merge branch 'master' of
2022-08-01 17:28:46 +0300 • Implement DirCreate file manager trap
2022-07-31 23:09:20 +0300 • Re-export traps & selectors for status update

Summer ’22 update

In attempt to increase frequency of status updates on the project after slow progress during the past year, here’s some information about what we’ve been working hard during the summer vacation.

Styled TextEdit updates

One of the most overlooked – but still very important – features has been the Styled TextEdit support. We already had started working on the foundations almost two years ago, and had last year got the drawing to work pretty well (mostly focusing on Marathon’s “computer terminal” screens) – but actual editing features of the styled text have been largely missing. Luckily SimpleText, with its fully-featured styled text editing features, provides a bunch of test cases for a number of them. Below is screenshot of some text styling at work:

Right now, styled text can be finally entered (using various style parameters such as face, font, size), and SimpleText can also open various text documents with styling information. Below is one example, the READ ME file of Prince of Destruction:

Opening a styled text document in SimpleText

But a lot of work needs to be still done, as major features are still unfinished (such as hit-testing of styled text records, which is needed for both mouse click, arrow key and selection support).

“AppleDoubler” tool

Motivation to work on the “AppleDoubler” tool got boost by a question asked in the June on emaculation about our file system choices. We had planned for a long time to make tool for converting native Mac files to the ADF format, but hadn’t taken time to work on that until now. It didn’t actually take more than a couple hours to write (plus some random time to do some tweaks later), but as nice effect we are able now to convert applications for testing blazingly quickly (compared to the manual conversion process earlier). This has led to discovery of a number of bugs which were fixed, and missing special cases of existing features that have been tweaked.

The AppleDoubler tool will be available as soon as we sort out our binary distributions to work a bit better (until now, files have been hosted here on the WP blog, but due to a bunch of issues with executables, and the time-consuming progress of updating downloads page, we will look into more automated alternate solutions, to allow more frequent updates, and also more downloads to be available.)

Software cursor

One longtime “to-do” task has been proper software cursor implementation, which has been delayed mostly because SDL’s cursor API has handled the monochrome cursors quite well for most of the use cases. However, there have been three downsides of this approach:

The “inverted” cursors (such as the I-beam, and Lemming’s cursors) don’t show up properly, as most modern host systems don’t support inversions in cursor graphics. Especially in lemmings this has been tricky in the monochrome mode, as the cursor would appear black on black background, making the game really hard to play
The native cursors don’t show up when doing screenshots of windows, or when capturing in OBS using window capture. This has been mostly prominent on Twitch streams where mouse has been invisible
Color cursor support has been unimplemented, as for proper ‘crsr’ display the mapping of cursor color table needs to be done

The final push for software cursor implementation came when we tried running Super Studio Session editor, which replaces a number of default cursor vectors with its own implementation (which it uses to align the “note” cursor on music sheet at certain spots). We saw that the cursor that application implemented all by itself worked mostly really well, but because of some ShieldCursor bugs, it was leaving trails at certain places. Below are screenshots of Super Studio Session (ignore the “THINK Pascal” window title, we don’t yet have proper general-purpose shell/desktop application yet, so we used the very practical “Transfer” feature of THINK Pascal to launch any application from the file system through Standard File dialog, without needing to do any extra work 😀 )

It took a couple days of work to get the software cursor to work (the work was sped up a lot by a number abstractions we had done earlier, related to VBL task execution etc), and adding color cursor support was not that tough as ‘crsr’ and ‘ppat’ resources share a common heritage, and thus their color table and depth expansion code could be shared. Below are some screenshots of Civilization, showing the color mouse cursor in action:

SoftWindows

As a curiosity, in progress of trying out various applications, we noticed that SoftWindows 1.x (the last 68k-compatible version of that application) seems to work pretty well. As it does have quite high memory requirements (considering the currently implemented 24-bit memory manager by default has only 8 megabytes of RAM), we did have to make a temporary hack to boost the RAM limit in the test configuration to 12 megabytes (leaving space for only 3 slots in the emulated slot address space – while the default configuration allows up to 7). This allowed us to actually boot into Windows 3.1 and run a number of games/apps on it (biggest limiting factor for what worked was that this version SoftWindows only emulates a 286, thus allowing only Standard mode in Windows 3, instead of the Enhanced mode required by a lot of applications). Below are some screenshots of what we tried out:

MIDI Manager research

As we knew that certain Sierra games do advertise MT-32 compatibility, we did some quick snooping around, and learned that at least Space Quest 1 does use Apple’s little-known MIDI Manager to handle the hardware MIDI playback (unlike Thexder, which appears to have its own serial driver for MIDI, choosing to use the serial port directly). This led to some curiosity about the MIDI Manager implementation, for which there is sadly very little documentation – an article about programming it on the always valuable MacTech archive and the universal headers. A couple articles from mid 90’s point to ARPA as source to buy the MIDI documentation and SDK from, which sadly is no longer available.

The work on MIDI Manager support is still ongoing, but we feel it might be relatively easy to write a layer that emulates MIDI Manager’s patching features, and wrap the MIDI driver as a abstract device that could pass the MIDI packets to host OS’ native MIDI interface (in Mac OS X case, the CoreMIDI). All MIDI Manager calls go anyway through the same SoundDispatch trap like a number of Sound Manager calls, so tapping to that interface is really easy. (Another question, though, is how well timing will work, and whether default MIDI synthesizer (or the SC-55 midi hardware) will handle Space Quest’s MIDI output that expects an MT-32…)

Various other updates

As mentioned before, there have been a ton of fixes and updates, but here is mention of a couple ones that might be of interest:

Popup Control CDEF (and TextEdit) fixes: There were a number of bugs in both the Popup Control drawing (and TextEdit setup) code, which manifested quite visually in the HyperCard script editor. Below are screenshots of “before” and “after” to show what kind of effects the fixes had:

Menu Bar Pattern Control Panel: As another curiosity, we tried this one old Control Panel from early 90s, to see what would happen – and seems that whatever magic it uses to draw patterns behind menu bar, it seems to be 100% compatible:

FracSin/FracCos: The After Dark module called “Spotlight” (not to be confused with the OS X search tool) was the first case that needed FracSin/FracCos implementation to work, so we used it as a test case for those traps and got it working pretty well:

Palette fixes: There were a number of bugs & missing features in Palette Manager code (for example, SetEntries had bug that made it fail incorrectly with cProtectErr, which caused a number of issues around the place). Here is Lode Runner: The Legend Returns editor, which had weird color issues before the fix (ignore the palette debugger in bottom right):

Lode Runner: The Legend Returns level editor

BitmapToRegion: This trap was already before used by Escape Velocity, but as that game needs a couple other improvements to reach playable state, Snood worked out pretty well as a use case for this (as it uses it for practically all of its sprites to convert their masks to regions for drawing). After a couple hours, the game seems to be quite happy with the routine (Snood 1.x pictured):

Snood using sprites with masks defined by BitmapToRegion

Default MDEF ‘cicn’ support: While trying out Snood, we noticed that Snood 2 was the first use case of color icons (‘cicn’s) in menu items. As the MDEF already had almost-working handling for this case, we added some temporary code to the Icon Utilities module and got nice color icons in menus now:

More blitter fixes/improvements: There were numerous fixes to basic blitters too, which affected test cases such as 3 in Three, “Spotlight” (when brightness was other than 0%), Shanghai II mahjong, etc). Here’s some screenshots of what we got working with the improvements:

Next step

We will continue working on the missing features as always, trying to reach the goal of a generic runtime release as soon as possible. We also will try to find solution for the binary file distribution in near future, so anybody interested trying the new features out could do that as soon as possible (especially considering the last released binaries are already getting quite old). We will keep you updated on this blog on our progress as always.

Full list of changes since last post

2022-07-31 00:45:08 +0300 • Implement colorizing srcOr rectangle blitter
2022-07-30 23:49:00 +0300 • Implement colorizing srcBic rectangle blitter
2022-07-30 13:34:42 +0300 • Fix missing handle derefence bug
2022-07-30 13:47:58 +0300 • Implement SaveEntries trap for Palette Manager
2022-07-30 04:09:17 +0300 • Disable potentially invalid check in Entry2Index
2022-07-30 03:08:06 +0300 • Stretching subPin blitter + improve call interface
2022-07-30 03:07:01 +0300 • Reinforce zone checks for handle operations
2022-07-30 01:27:53 +0300 • Fix AppendMenu/InsertMenuitem legnth > 127 cases
2022-07-30 01:14:39 +0300 • Implement a rudimentary PlotCIconHandle (for MDEF)
2022-07-30 00:39:04 +0300 • Merge branch 'master' of
2022-07-30 00:38:58 +0300 • Proper implementation for BitmapToRegion QD trap
2022-07-26 23:16:20 +0300 • Add dummy MIDIManager (+ MIDISignIn & MIDIAddPort)
2022-07-26 20:35:26 +0300 • Merge branch 'master' of
2022-07-26 20:35:16 +0300 • Implement PaletteDispatch ResizePalette selector
2022-07-26 18:28:13 +0300 • Fix timer thread race condition issue
2022-07-26 15:53:28 +0300 • Implement color QD opDefHilite PICT opcode
2022-07-26 15:52:42 +0300 • Implement opPnLocHFrac PICT opcode
2022-07-26 15:52:06 +0300 • Fix edge case of shielding cursor in classic mode
2022-07-26 14:51:53 +0300 • Fix GetNew(C)Window autopositioning code
2022-07-26 14:07:53 +0300 • Fix TESetStyleScrap (StyleDataPtr -> TextStylePtr)
2022-07-26 05:35:47 +0300 • Version 9 compressed resource support (+fixes)
2022-07-26 03:05:37 +0300 • Add dummy ReplaceText selector stub for ScriptUtil
2022-07-26 00:46:57 +0300 • Add TESetStyleScrap (needs still some work)
2022-07-25 03:33:36 +0300 • Update line start for redraw when setting heights
2022-07-24 14:12:29 +0300 • Implement styled TESetSelect
2022-07-24 14:11:48 +0300 • Partial implementation of styled TEInsert
2022-07-24 06:08:06 +0300 • Merge branch 'master' of
2022-07-24 06:05:17 +0300 • Work on styled text (TEContinuousStyle selector)
2022-07-24 06:03:22 +0300 • Implement AdMin blend mode in color region blitter
2022-07-23 22:33:53 +0300 • Call vector #4 for unimplemented instructions
2022-07-23 02:07:22 +0300 • AppleDoubler: cleanup tool console output logging
2022-07-23 01:40:40 +0300 • AppleDoubler: add timestamps,buildscript & cleanup
2022-07-21 16:26:26 +0300 • Fix incorrect cProtectErr check in SetEntries
2022-07-21 15:32:55 +0300 • Implement FracSin and FracCos traps
2022-07-19 15:40:00 +0300 • Only mark arc dirty, if drawn on the screen port
2022-07-19 15:02:32 +0300 • Fix some compiler warnings (missing QD includes)
2022-07-19 15:00:12 +0300 • Use bullet (0xA5) as mark in popupUseWFont CDEF 63
2022-07-19 14:58:54 +0300 • Fix one-off error in MBDF hittest (crashed popups)
2022-07-19 06:45:32 +0300 • Fix saving of port state in TextEdit calls
2022-07-19 06:44:33 +0300 • Fix warnings in cursor module
2022-07-19 06:13:22 +0300 • Merge branch 'master' of
2022-07-19 06:12:48 +0300 • Add color QD hilite & fix font state in CDEF 63
2022-07-18 21:14:00 +0300 • Merge branch 'master' of
2022-07-18 21:13:52 +0300 • Cleanup: Refactor cursor code out of Mouse module
2022-07-18 04:12:22 +0300 • Support also function key (F1-F15) key codes
2022-07-17 07:38:02 +0300 • Fix incorrect ShieldCursor offsetPt in CopyBits
2022-07-17 07:27:27 +0300 • Implement DefaultSetCCursor (for 'crsr' support)
2022-07-17 07:26:49 +0300 • Fix MCallSetCCursor (called wrong vector)
2022-07-17 07:26:03 +0300 • Fix handle resizing bug in GetCCursor
2022-07-17 06:15:09 +0300 • Fix cursor left-side clipping
2022-07-17 02:36:52 +0300 • Color QD monochrome software cursor implemented
2022-07-11 23:12:03 +0300 • Use DoVBLTask do update cursor in color QD mode
2022-07-11 23:09:54 +0300 • Implement AddIconToSuite selector in IconDispatch
2022-07-11 21:56:20 +0300 • Implement NewIconSuite selector for IconDispatch
2022-07-11 19:40:19 +0300 • Implement AttackVBL trap
2022-07-11 14:27:11 +0300 • More color vs b&w QD cursor code specialization
2022-07-11 02:43:18 +0300 • Cleanup Cursor module code
2022-07-11 02:42:49 +0300 • Specialize Color QD case in ShieldCursor
2022-07-11 02:35:42 +0300 • Init cursor at startup
2022-07-10 14:29:23 +0300 • Redraw software cursor in SetCursor, if changed
2022-07-10 13:13:16 +0300 • Fix clamping of mouse in DefaultCrsrTask
2022-07-10 04:07:45 +0300 • Merge branch 'master' of
2022-07-10 04:07:02 +0300 • Implement software cursor for "classic" QD mode
2022-07-10 04:05:22 +0300 • Fix DefaultShieldCursor (it did not erase cursor)
2022-07-10 03:58:34 +0300 • Fix CrsrObscure handling in the DefaultCrsrTask
2022-07-10 03:57:44 +0300 • Only setup AllocCursor and SetCCursor in color QD
2022-07-10 03:56:18 +0300 • Increase screen buffer refresh rate temporarily
2022-07-10 03:55:34 +0300 • Fix mouse native window clamping (-1 from bounds)
2022-07-08 02:35:07 +0300 • Merge branch 'master' of
2022-07-08 02:35:00 +0300 • Vectorize SetCCursor (& fix some setup bugs)
2022-07-08 02:17:30 +0300 • Merge branch 'master' of
2022-07-07 20:25:22 +0300 • Fix ShieldCursor bugs
2022-07-05 23:44:59 +0300 • Fix Serial.h
2022-07-05 02:56:01 +0300 • Merge branch 'master' of
2022-07-05 02:55:56 +0300 • AppleDoubler: Fix OSX's weird swap of ':' and '/'
2022-07-04 16:50:27 +0300 • Fix LoadSeg 32K+ offset wraparound (use unsigned)
2022-07-04 16:29:48 +0300 • Merge branch 'master' of
2022-07-04 16:29:41 +0300 • Add dummy serial driver stub (AIn/AOut/Bin/BOut)
2022-07-04 15:04:51 +0300 • Fix UPP call signature of JShieldCursor
2022-07-04 04:28:09 +0300 • Merge branch 'master' of
2022-07-04 04:27:59 +0300 • AppleDoubler: Also encode folder names
2022-07-04 02:16:46 +0300 • Fix byteswap bug in font size check
2022-07-04 02:00:14 +0300 • Fix FOND style lookup: start at 1st match,not last
2022-07-04 01:56:59 +0300 • Add Oregon Trail (1.x) to test app configs
2022-07-03 14:05:54 +0300 • Implement QDDone selector for QDExtensions
2022-07-03 13:56:22 +0300 • Merge branch 'master' of
2022-07-03 13:56:16 +0300 • Add (no-op) LockRange & UnlockRange in FSDispatch
2022-07-03 04:29:30 +0300 • Add first version of AppleDoubler converter tool
2022-07-02 06:13:32 +0300 • Handle NFSGetDirInfo errors in NFSCreateFileHook
2022-07-02 06:12:36 +0300 • Implement DateToSeconds
2022-07-02 04:06:13 +0300 • Add SoftWindows test app to JSON configs
2022-07-02 04:05:42 +0300 • Implement GetGWorldDevice selector in QDExtensions
2022-06-18 02:05:16 +0300 • Add ZPC to test app config JSONs
2022-04-28 04:01:02 +0300 • Fix crash in TECallCharByte utility routine
2022-04-28 04:00:57 +0300 • Add missing header file from previous commit
2022-04-28 03:57:54 +0300 • Tweak naming of some private TE data structures
2022-04-28 01:18:54 +0300 • Fix GetCTable crash of locked 'clut' in 24bit mode
2022-04-23 22:04:03 +0300 • Implement styled TESetStyle
2022-04-23 21:42:07 +0300 • Work a bit on InitScripts (load smRoman 'itlb' 0)
2022-04-23 13:55:03 +0300 • Add Font2Script & implement FontScript+IntlScript
2022-04-18 11:28:33 +0300 • Temporary fail-safe in _Enqueue
2022-04-18 02:06:31 +0300 • Finish faster non-MeasureText path in NPixel2Char
2022-04-17 22:52:23 +0300 • Use NPixel2Char in TextEdit (FindLine etc)
2022-04-17 22:50:50 +0300 • First version of working NPixel2Char in Script Mgr
2022-04-16 21:08:10 +0300 • Implement SndControl (classic SM2)
2022-04-15 05:03:02 +0300 • Prep TEHitTestHook calls to work with NPixel2Char
2022-04-15 04:59:57 +0300 • Handle 0x2C (font) and 0x2E (glyph state) in PICTs
2022-04-13 16:20:10 +0300 • Fix Munger ptr2=nil & len2=0 case (search)
2022-04-13 02:41:36 +0300 • Allow bypass of ampCmd and timbreCmd in snth 4101

Sound Manager 2.x Support

It’s again been quite a bit of time since last update, as we’ve been busy on doing other stuff for the latter half of 2021, and the winter – but now in spring, we again had time to work on the emulator. During the past couple weeks, Toni spent time finishing the first round of Sound Manager 2 research, so we were able to move to implementation phase last week. And after first week of coding, we already have a handful of test applications with (mostly) working Sound Manager 2 support – although, as planned, it is at moment limited only to applications running in the “classic” emulation mode. Here’s a short video demonstration of the new audio capabilities:

Sound Manager 2.x tests on M.A.C.E.

In the video, the following test applications are shown:

Civilization, with fully working sound output (exclusively with bufferCmds through ‘snd ‘ resources).
Prince of Persia 1, also fully working (interestingly, even without Sound Manager, PoP1 was able to *mostly* output audio with Sound Driver, but looping sounds (door opening) caused hang in that mode because of the way it used the Device Manager routines. With Sound Manager, none of those issues are present and all seems work fine (again, using bufferCmd commands).
Bard’s Tale was a bit different test case for us, as it uses soundCmd combined with noteCmd/restCmd etc commands to play the music. But it also works now, apparently fully.
Railroad Tycoon has also fully working sound support, again using bufferCmd with ‘snd ‘ resources like Civilization 1. This game has interestingly its own sound queuing system, separate from Sound Manager command queues – which allows funny way of queueing multiple sounds if invoked rapidly after each other, which eventually get played in turn after each other. Also this behaviour seems to match fully how audio in the game works on real Macs.
Pararena 1.3 also has now working sounds
And Pipe Dream finally also got sound and music
Finally, Loom also has working sound & music, although the Mac Plus/Classic style behaviour of music does sound a bit “fishy”. We checked that the music does sound same way at least on minivmac, although it appears to have been meant to be played using 4-channel output, while the “classic” hardware is limited to only one channel at once. This game also uses soundCmd/noteCmd to adjust playback frequency of samples, like Bard’s Tale. Also, there is still at least one known race condition issue in playback, which appears to actually be identical to a deadlock that happens also in minivmac, if the game is run under that emulator on faster than 1x speed.

Also, there’s working button click sounds in Speedometer system info window, and we’re working on getting sound to work also in Bolo soon (it uses apparently older style selectors for SoundDispatch at least in one case, which we don’t handle yet, so we need to improve that next).

All of the features of Sound Manager 2 haven’t been implemented yet, as we’ve been adding them “on demand” as we’ve been trying out various test applications. Some of features not yet implemented include:

Compressed sound decompression/compression
At moment, only ‘snth’ 5 (sampledSynth) synthesizer is supported (the squareWaveSynth and waveTableSynth still need to be added)
Sound Manager command timing is supposed to the drift-free Extended Time Manager tasks, but they for now default to regular TMTask behaviour. This will cause songs played using noteCmd/restCmd/etc, that depend on command duration for timing, to drift off a bit (at least in Bard’s Tale and Loom)
And as mentioned before, only Sound Manager 2.x for “classic” mode was implemented, so the color mode does not yet have audio. But that will follow up later as Sound Manager 3.x compatibility after we finish research on it (we plan to implement Component Manager emulation as first step on way to SM3 compatibility, which both allows us to provide Sound Component capabilities, and also allows in future other APIs that depend on Components to be implemented – such as QuickTime and Internet Config)

Other fixes

There are also a number of other improvements, of which some are listed here:

MDEF 0 now supports scrolling in popup menus, which allows the Machine Record selection popup to be opened in Speedometer, when screen size is smaller than the menu
Fixed issue in “classic” QuickDraw PICT color translation mapping, which was causing black credits screen in Railroad Tycoon
GhostWindow low-memory global handling was added – this fixes most of the issues in SuperPaint 1
ScalePt/FixDiv had a couple bugs, which caused at least two separate issues in MacDraw (related to calculation of object coordinates on the document)
Color search proc support and a couple color picker package traps were added (for HSV conversion) were added to allow Solarian 2 to work
Rounded windows (WDEF 1) finally have the close box (and color support) – this allows for example the about screen in Glider 2 & 3 to be closed 🙂
Allocation of WDCBs through OpenWD now check for existing working directories, to not flood the WDCB table and run out of memory. This happened at least with certain applications using the “Mercutio” MDEF, which on each message did SysEnvirons call, which in turn opened a WD in the system folder
A bunch of other important fixes
And finally, as first step of getting FPU support, Pukka has started implementation of the 68881/2 emulation, so we will eventually be able to run applications requiring the math co-processor instructions (such as Specular Logomotion and Pixar Typestry)

Full list of changes since last post

2022-04-12 23:42:44 +0300 • Fix typo in Bolo JSON config                      
2022-04-12 23:29:35 +0300 • Fix signed/unsigned comparison in FMSeek          
2022-04-12 23:28:33 +0300 • Tweak test apps for sound tests + add BoloSounds  
2022-04-12 22:06:17 +0300 • Fix classic QD color-to-mono translation mapping  
2022-04-12 21:31:19 +0300 • Implement rateCmd in snth 4101 (classic SM2)      
2022-04-12 21:24:47 +0300 • Fix uninitialized SndChannelPtr in SndPlay        
2022-04-12 00:48:08 +0300 • Add scrolling support to popup menu case of MDEF 0
2022-04-11 17:00:05 +0300 • Fix disposal of channel if SndNewChannel fails    
2022-04-11 16:45:48 +0300 • Some PrimeTime prep for extended timer mgr support
2022-04-11 16:43:27 +0300 • Fix timer task deactivation in RmvTime            
2022-04-11 16:42:37 +0300 • Fix setting of channel idle state from quietCmd   
2022-04-11 16:41:42 +0300 • Swap new buffer in note/freqCmd if already playing
2022-04-11 14:55:02 +0300 • Fix duration passed to timer in waitCmd           
2022-04-11 14:53:59 +0300 • Setup synthesizer state correct in noteCmd/freqCmd
2022-04-11 14:52:36 +0300 • Fix bug in checking whether timer was active      
2022-04-11 00:34:59 +0300 • Implement emptyCmd in snth 4101 (classic SM2)     
2022-04-11 00:33:56 +0300 • Fix sample rate conversion bug in soundCmd        
2022-04-09 19:10:16 +0300 • Handle noteCmd/freqCmd in snth 4101 (classic SM2) 
2022-04-09 00:02:14 +0300 • Implement waitCmd (classic SM2)                   
2022-04-09 00:02:01 +0300 • Implement restCmd in snth 4101 (classic SM2)      
2022-04-08 23:37:15 +0300 • Handle soundCmd in snth 4101 (classic SM2)        
2022-04-08 20:23:59 +0300 • Fix SM2 locking (dispose channel during playback) 
2022-04-08 20:21:14 +0300 • Fix  end-of-buffer handling in snth 4101 VBL Task 
2022-04-08 20:19:38 +0300 • Set correct state in quietCmd handler in snth 4101
2022-04-08 20:18:56 +0300 • Clear busy flag correctly at end of snth VBL Task 
2022-04-08 13:01:33 +0300 • Fix size mismatch when setting channelIdle flag   
2022-04-08 12:47:08 +0300 • Implement flushCmd handling (classic SM2)         
2022-04-08 12:46:50 +0300 • Implement SndDoImmediate (classic SM2)            
2022-04-08 12:25:55 +0300 • Implement freeCmd in snth 4101 (classic SM2)      
2022-04-08 12:25:41 +0300 • Fix a couple byteswap bugs in channel flags       
2022-04-08 12:23:09 +0300 • Implement SndDisposeChannel (classic SM2)         
2022-04-08 04:18:00 +0300 • Implement callbackCmd (classic SM2)               
2022-04-08 04:12:18 +0300 • Handle quietCmd in snth 4101                      
2022-04-08 03:56:40 +0300 • Implement resumeCmd handling                      
2022-04-08 03:47:29 +0300 • Handle tickleCmd in snth 4101 (classic SM2)       
2022-04-08 03:36:14 +0300 • Implement basic snth 4101 buffering (classic SM2) 
2022-04-08 03:34:44 +0300 • Implement Timer1 & tickleCmd sending (classic SM2)
2022-04-07 03:49:16 +0300 • Handle bufferCmd in 'snth' 4101 (classic SM2)     
2022-04-07 03:47:59 +0300 • Handle high-level pauseCmd (SM2 classic variant)  
2022-04-07 02:08:33 +0300 • Implement command timer & dequeueing (classic SM2)
2022-04-06 20:25:16 +0300 • Implement queueing in SndDoCommand (SM2 variant)  
2022-04-06 19:21:39 +0300 • Handle initCmd in 'snth' 5 (SM2 "classic" variant)
2022-04-06 18:21:17 +0300 • Implement availableCmd and versionCmd in 'snth' 5 
2022-04-06 18:08:38 +0300 • Implement quietCmd handler                        
2022-04-06 17:58:52 +0300 • SndAddModifier mostly implemented (SM2.x variant) 
2022-04-06 02:17:47 +0300 • Implement SndPlay 'snd ' format 1 resource parsing
2022-04-06 01:33:48 +0300 • Fix typo in previous commit                       
2022-04-06 01:33:08 +0300 • Initialize Sound Manager (and fix byteswap bug)   
2022-04-06 01:17:33 +0300 • Use SndAddModifier in SndNewChannel               
2022-04-06 01:14:29 +0300 • Add SndAddModifier trap (dummy stub at moment)    
2022-04-06 01:13:07 +0300 • SndNewChannel proto implementation (SM2.x variant)
2022-04-06 01:11:00 +0300 • Add snth 0x1005 (mac plus variant of sampledSynth)
2022-04-06 01:10:33 +0300 • Update sound manager headers with new information 
2022-04-03 22:31:59 +0300 • fix constants                                     
2022-04-03 21:32:09 +0300 • base for fpu                                      
2022-03-23 00:27:09 +0200 • Reinforce IODone to handle weirdness of SimCity1.3
2022-03-20 05:02:17 +0200 • Add missing GhostWindow check to FrontWindow trap 
2022-03-19 03:47:11 +0200 • Fix ScalePt special case byteswap bug             
2022-03-19 00:31:53 +0200 • Better fix for FixDiv overflow case               
2022-03-19 00:29:30 +0200 • Set MemErr to noErr when MoreMasters succeeds     
2022-03-18 04:39:24 +0200 • Avoid weird C bug causing FixDiv fail in release  
2022-03-08 03:14:17 +0200 • Add missing music file to PipeDream test app      
2022-02-17 22:40:14 +0200 • Re-use existing WDCB when possible (not MF-aware) 
2022-02-17 15:24:34 +0200 • Allow skip of selector high byte in some selectors
2022-02-17 15:20:12 +0200 • Fix overflow in iteration of WDCB list            
2022-01-12 02:43:01 +0200 • Implement _DelSearch (0xAA4C) Color Manager Trap  
2022-01-11 04:02:15 +0200 • Implement FADDL selector for FP68K in SANE        
2022-01-11 04:01:28 +0200 • Implement HSV2RGB in Pack12 (color picker package)
2022-01-10 00:25:46 +0200 • Implement RGB2HSV in Pack12 (color picker package)
2022-01-09 21:08:25 +0200 • Add dummy SndChannelStatus to SoundDispatch       
2022-01-09 08:56:43 +0200 • Call searchProc in _Color2Index trap when needed  
2022-01-09 08:56:05 +0200 • Implement _AddSearch (0xAA3A) Color Manager Trap  
2021-12-01 15:15:21 +0200 • Add dummy GNEFilter for modal dialogs             
2021-12-01 15:14:06 +0200 • Support kSpecialCaseGNEFilterProc mixedmode calls 
2021-11-03 05:54:14 +0200 • Fix handling of MP lock flag in MMSetSize24       
2021-11-03 05:52:18 +0200 • Fix measuring memory purge range in memory manager
2021-10-29 13:09:10 +0300 • Add Uninvited to test app JSON configs            
2021-10-27 14:52:29 +0300 • Fix calculation of offset to font name in 'ictb'  
2021-10-27 14:33:29 +0300 • Fix opOrigin PICT opcode (disposed wrong region)  
2021-10-27 13:54:33 +0300 • Fix typo in the Hornet JSON test app config file  
2021-10-27 13:31:04 +0300 • Add F/A-18 Hornet 2.0.1 to test app configs       
2021-10-27 13:30:38 +0300 • Fix SysEnvirons, use 'proc' instead of 'cput'     
2021-10-27 13:29:04 +0300 • Handle special palettes with bit 14 set in flags  
2021-10-27 05:13:14 +0300 • Fix minor Palette Manager bugs                    
2021-10-27 04:18:39 +0300 • Add ADB Manager & dummy CountADBs/GetADBInfo traps
2021-10-27 03:57:20 +0300 • Video DRVR: Handle status codes & add linear gamma
2021-09-26 20:45:07 +0300 • Disable SDL minimize/close keys (3rd party lib!!!)
2021-09-26 20:40:59 +0300 • Temp fix for return address of TRAP # instructions
2021-09-26 20:38:25 +0300 • Fix 32-bit overflow in ASR.W instruction          
2021-09-26 20:37:53 +0300 • Fix RTE instruction                               
2021-08-22 13:10:43 +0300 • Fix pattern masking bug in arithmetic rect blitter
2021-08-17 23:32:14 +0300 • Add dummy SRsrcInfo selector for Slot Manager     
2021-08-17 03:47:44 +0300 • Fix artifacting of outline/shadow color QD text   
2021-08-16 17:42:58 +0300 • Fix some Memory Manager type conversion warnings  
2021-08-16 17:42:03 +0300 • Add srcOr/srcXor/srcBic colorQD region blit modes 
2021-08-16 14:35:33 +0300 • Add missing WDEF 1 changes from previous commit   
2021-08-16 14:35:06 +0300 • WDEF 1 (rounded window) color support & GoAway box
2021-08-16 14:34:13 +0300 • Fix array overflow in the minilauncher hack proto 
2021-08-12 22:06:06 +0300 • Fix memory leak in DialogManager (Get)New(C)Dialog
2021-08-12 22:03:05 +0300 • Fix memory leak in CloseWindow (call CloseCPort)  
2021-07-29 19:48:49 +0300 • Add 1-to-2 bit non-colorizing pixel translator    
2021-07-13 23:42:11 +0300 • Sanity check ioNamePtr in _GetVol trap            
2021-07-13 23:41:02 +0300 • Add Bards Tale test app JSON configs              
2021-07-13 18:21:41 +0300 • Add Macintalk test app JSON configs               
2021-07-07 00:12:25 +0300 • Bump up version number                            
2021-07-07 00:12:14 +0300 • Fix VBL interrupt crash from start race condition 
2021-07-06 21:42:48 +0300 • Fix changes that broke .Sound DRVR #3             
2021-07-06 00:05:22 +0300 • Install dummy DRVR 4 at startup                   
2021-07-05 23:06:35 +0300 • Tweak Space Quest 1 config JSON (pass copy checks)
2021-07-05 23:06:02 +0300 • Add missing DskErr lowmem from previous commit    
2021-07-05 23:05:48 +0300 • Add dummy .Sony driver, allows DRVR 4 Status calls

First status update of 2021

For the past half year progress has been a bit more slower than usually, mostly due to Toni being busy with the daily work, playing around on Twitch, and experimenting with his retro raycaster 3D engine prototype, while Pekka has been busy with work and private stuff. There has however been some bits of progress, which are summarized in this post:

“Classic” audio upsampling

Even though Sound Manager support is still under development (with relatively good progress), the audio support for “Classic” type audio (that is, the emulation of audio hardware of Mac 128K through Plus/SE/Classic series machines) has been improved a bit. Originally the audio buffer with 22255 Hz sample rate was passed directly to SDL2, which caused some problems as some systems were not able to handle that format very well. Even though it worked on Mac Pro, for example on M1 Macs it caused the audio in other applications to start cracking and breaking up. By allocating the SDL2 audio buffer in default native format (usually 44100hz), and upsampling the audio data in emulator, most of this problem was eliminated. However, in some cases, clicks are still present in the audio, mostly due to the way how original hardware handles square-wave and sampled sound as a mix of both unsigned and signed 8-bit samples (that is, square wave sound amplitude ranges from 0 to 255, while in same buffer, sampled sounds are in range -128 to 127, with different “silent” baseline level.

TextEdit fixes

There were two critical fixes in the TextEdit, one of which caused at least one of Marathon terminals to crash:

In styled text line height table handling code, the code that was used to zero newly added line heights (when adding new lines) was not working properly in the case number of lines was reduced (causing it to try to clear a negative number of lines, wrapping around to a crazy number)
TESetStyle was calling TESelView with an invalid pointer

With these fixes, this particular Marathon terminal is now working without crashes – and looks identical to the one on real Macs:

The previously crashed Marathon terminal that works now

Minor fixes to allow streaming of The Fool’s Errand

Most of code needed to support running The Fool’s Errand was already implemented long time ago, but one of the most important things, a way to display the prologue and finale was missing. The original game used a separate application for prologue, and also a dynamically generated file for viewing the finale after completing the game.

On real Macs they were opened using Finder, but we needed to have an easy-to-use way to open them when running the emulator from the single-click app bundle. For this purpose, we hacked very quickly a “MiniLauncher” tool, which allows not only selecting the launch application, but also passing a document in launch parameters – which is required to show the finale (as clicking “Show finale” on Macs actually launches “prologue – finale” application passing the “Show finale” as opened document to it).

Right now the Minilauncher is very primitive and a quick hack to support this one single game, but we plan to improve it later to a more reusable launch tool, probably similar to Apple’s old MiniFinder, to use as a stopgap tool for the first general-purpose version of M.A.C.E.

The quickly hacked and very rough MiniLauncher, used for The Fool’s Errand playthrough

While implementing this, we found a minor byteswap bug in Launch trap’s handling of AppParmHandle. (Also, Toni was able to complete the full Fool’s Errand playthrough on Twitch using this improved version).

Star Wars day

This year we also celebrated the official Star Wars day (May the 4th) by trying out how the Brøderbund’s Star Wars arcade game’s Mac port works on M.A.C.E. and streaming a bit of it on Twitch:

Both the sound and visuals seemed to work without any problems. The “main menu” of the game did seem to run a bit faster than on real Macs, but luckily the actual ingame play was not affected by machine speed, and ran just fine.

Monkey Island

Inspired by the number of people recently streaming Monkey Island on Twitch, we were interested to see how the Mac version of that game would run on M.A.C.E. There were a couple tweaks needed to get it to run:

The Start Manager traps GetVideoDefault and SetVideoDefault traps were needed, and it seems the the dummy implementations were good enough to make Monkey Island happy
ReserveEntry palette manager trap had a bug where the GDevice’s color table was not reseeded when clearing the “reserve” (only when setting it). This caused the inverse color lookup table to not update properly, turning at least the pile of monkeys in Monkey Island about box from grayscale to black & white 🙂

It seems that Monkey Island runs quite well now on the emulator, although doesn’t yet have any sounds until the Sound Manager implementation gets finished. Also, it has some timing glitches at least in cutscenes, which may be related to the timer issues with Prince of Persia 2 and Loony Labyrinth (which need more investigation).

Hilite transfer mode

Another task from long time ago was implementing the hilite transfer mode for Color QuickDraw. It is basically a special transfer mode used to improve the highlighting of selections, done with simple color inversion in monochrome Macs, with a more colorful visualization.

In this mode, the color ports have special rgbHiliteColor field used to determine highlighting color (which by default is populated from HiliteRGB low-memory global). If using the hilite transfer mode of 50 or 58 (or when the special hilitebit in HiliteMode low-memory global is cleared in combination of using xor transfer mode), QuickDraw will swap background and hiliteColor with each other, producing toggleable highlight coloring:

Additionally, the hilite mode was also one missing piece of the scrollbar CDEF thumbnail drag drawing code, so that is now also visualized correctly.

The mysterious stuff in Sierra games #1: Sound in Mixed-Up Mother Goose

Although King’s Quest 1 was already working nicely since last year, Mixed-Up Mother Goose was interestingly having trouble playing audio, so we did a bit of investigation about it. It turns out that game is very strangely using some of the unused 68K user exception vectors to save handle to data being used to track music/audio playback in their VBL handler.

The reason this didn’t work, is that all those vectors were originally uninitialized (set to zero), and this particular version Sierra’s AGI engine checked if the exception vector pointer was set to a value above ROMBase, and it being lower assumed some handler was already present, and skipped using it for its own data. On real Macs, every unused 68K exception vector is initialized during startup by the Error Manager to DS exception handler, which by default is in ROM, and thus makes the game work on those systems. By adding a dummy exception handler and populating all the exception vectors, Mixed-Up Mother Goose was able to play music & sounds without any problems (Toni also did a one-hour playthrough of this game on Twitch to celebrate this fix).

Mixed-Up Mother Goose (with audio working)

The mysterious stuff in Sierra games #2: Color support

One of Toni’s friends on Twitch mentioned that some Sierra AGI games had problems running the 16-color versions in Mac emulators (specifically Space Quest 1), so we were curious and investigated this issue. On the first try, the same problem manifested also in M.A.C.E., so we started to dig a little bit deeper to find the cause of this, and found something interesting.

When I dissected the AGI code in Space Quest 1, I noticed that really weirdly, as the very first thing, the game checks if the the baseAddr of screenBits is above $F000 0000 – and if this check failed, even if the screen would be set to higher bit depth, it would go on and assume it was displaying the game on a monochrome screen.

As the problem on other Mac emulators may be partially related to inability of switching to 24-bit mode (at least when I tried it with Basilisk II), I believe that what is happening is that Slot Manager addresses the cards in different way in 24- vs 32-bit modes (for example, card $9 is accessed through “minor slot space” range of $009x xxxx, which translates to 32-bit address range in “standard slot space” of $F90x xxxx – problem is, that in 32-bit mode, the address would be in “super slot space” of $9xxx xxxx). It should be noted that even in 24-bit mode, at least QuickDraw handles the actual video memory access in 32-bit mode by using SwapMMUMode to temporarily switch the mode – same thing that some 24-bit compatible early color games also do, such as Maelstrom.

In our emulator, as we ran everything in pure 24-bit mode, including the video memory access, we didn’t care about the high byte of the address, which being zero originally displayed the same behaviour. However, after populating the high byte with “faked” standard slot space-type address of 0xF9900000 for video memory as a hack, both Space Quest 1 and Mixed-Up Mother Goose started to work in color mode:

A more proper memory addressing and slot manager implementation will however be definitely needed, and that will most likely be done when we will be adding the 32-bit memory addressing support in the later part of this year.

Minor Warcraft 2 demo progress

We also did a little bit of work on trying to get Warcraft 2 (and its demo) to work. As it’s so far the only game that requires Thread Manager, it was previously put on a hold due to uncertainty about how much threading features it would be using. Turns out that adding dummy implementations for MacGetCurrentThread, SetThreadSwitcher and YieldToThread were enough to get Warcraft 2 progress a bit. Naturally proper Thread Manager implementation will be added at a later point, most likely in combination of Process Manager and EPPC/AppleTalk support which all are related to each other. But for now, we are able to get at least to the startup options screen – but sadly not further yet:

What’s next?

For now, we will try to focus on continuing the research of Sound Manager during the summer. So far the progress on that has been pretty good, as we have already good idea about some of the sound manager data structures and behaviour – but more work is still needed to get it to the point where it can be used in the test applications, and to actually produce the sounds. It should be noted that we will be adding two variants of Sound Manager, the 2.x compatible version that will be used in the “classic” mode (which was the highest Sound Manager version supported by the old monochrome Macs), and 3.x compatible version for the color-capable (i.e. slot manager) emulation mode. We also may need to implement ASC-compatible version of the “.Sound” driver to support stuff like fourtone synthesizer in early color games (but instead of hardware emulation like in “classic” mode, that will be all done directly in software).

Full list of changes since last post

2021-06-21 03:42:10 +0300 • Add dummy IconIDTorgn & PlotIconID to IconDispatch
2021-06-21 03:41:08 +0300 • Fix NewGWorld fail crash (duplicate DisposeHandle)
2021-06-21 03:39:03 +0300 • Add dummy SPBOpenDevice to SoundInputManager      
2021-06-21 03:38:17 +0300 • Add dummy YieldToThread selector to ThreadDispatch
2021-06-19 13:27:53 +0300 • Fix some incorrect PaletteDispatch selector sizes 
2021-06-19 13:04:30 +0300 • Add dummy SetThreadSwitcher to ThreadDispatch     
2021-06-19 13:01:37 +0300 • Don't crash MDEF 0 on unsupported messages        
2021-06-18 21:00:20 +0300 • Add ThreadDispatch & dummy MacGetCurrentThread    
2021-06-18 17:30:21 +0300 • Add dummy Thread Manager module                   
2021-06-14 16:30:06 +0300 • Add Space Quest 1 test application JSON configs   
2021-06-14 16:29:41 +0300 • Add 16-color Sierra AGI compatibility HACK        
2021-06-14 16:27:15 +0300 • Add dummy _Eject trap handler                     
2021-06-05 04:09:17 +0300 • Fix drawing of scroll thumb outline in color mode 
2021-06-05 03:18:30 +0300 • Add Civilization DEMO test application JSON config
2021-06-04 22:18:11 +0300 • Fix GetResource (DON'T set resNotFound to ResErr) 
2021-06-04 00:03:10 +0300 • Implement PixMap32Bit                             
2021-06-04 00:02:12 +0300 • Fix initialization of screen GDevice pmVersion    
2021-06-03 23:39:35 +0300 • Fix byteswap bug in GetPixelsState in QDExtensions
2021-06-03 23:00:04 +0300 • TextEdit fixes for the hilite mode support        
2021-06-03 22:58:40 +0300 • Implement GetIconSuite for IconDispatch           
2021-06-03 21:11:28 +0300 • Fix inet_ntop buffer size in AddrToStr in MacTCP  
2021-06-03 17:43:28 +0300 • Also add hilite transfer mode to region blitter   
2021-06-03 17:21:44 +0300 • Support hilite transfer mode in rectangle blitter 
2021-06-03 17:18:33 +0300 • Fix mask of source pixels in transparent blit mode
2021-06-03 01:39:31 +0300 • Merge branch 'master' of <redacted> 
2021-06-03 01:39:26 +0300 • Fix ReserveEntry (reseed CT also w/ reserve=false)
2021-06-03 01:35:55 +0300 • Add StartManager + dummy Get/SetVideoDefault traps
2021-06-03 01:35:02 +0300 • Add Monkey Island test app JSON configs           
2021-05-31 11:50:14 +0300 • Merge branch 'master' of <redacted> 
2021-05-31 11:50:10 +0300 • Add dummy minilauncher code, to be improved later 
2021-05-30 22:01:00 +0300 • Fix nested VBL interrupt support (to not hang)    
2021-05-30 20:25:37 +0300 • Add a generic DS exception handler to all vectors 
2021-05-30 20:21:55 +0300 • Add Mother Goose test app JSON configs            
2021-05-04 04:55:48 +0300 • Add Star Wars test app, for May 4th celebration 🙂
2021-04-13 16:47:10 +0300 • Merge branch 'master' of <redacted> 
2021-04-13 16:47:05 +0300 • Fix 1-bit pixmap expansion with custom colortable 
2021-03-30 02:09:37 +0300 • Fix byteswap bug of AppParmHandle in A5 world     
2021-03-03 13:15:25 +0200 • Ignore thirdparty lib xcode user workspace folder 
2021-03-02 22:45:30 +0200 • Merge branch 'master' of <redacted> 
2021-03-02 22:45:12 +0200 • Fix invalid pointer bug in TESetStyle             
2021-03-02 22:44:15 +0200 • Fix negative bytecount bug in TESetLineHeights    
2021-03-02 19:42:19 +0200 • Fix debug mode in posix file copy utlity (errno)  
2021-03-02 19:41:43 +0200 • Fix __APPLE_ preprocessor typo to __APPLE__       
2021-03-02 19:11:43 +0200 • Make raspberry pi version compile again           
2021-03-02 02:45:14 +0200 • Make CMP0114 policy compatible with old CMake too 
2021-03-01 22:22:12 +0200 • Remove printf                                     
2021-03-01 04:09:50 +0200 • Setup QoS class for main thread on Apple M1       
2021-03-01 04:09:09 +0200 • Upsample audio from 22255 to 44100 manually       
2021-02-24 22:56:53 +0200 • Universal compilation cmake config for M1 macs    
2021-02-21 01:20:48 +0200 • Minor fixes(?) to 16/32-bit bitmap upscaling      
2021-02-21 01:18:25 +0200 • Fix planeBytes comparison in PixMap equality check

Happy new year! First M1 benchmarks, and other fixes

First tests on Apple Silicon

Toni finally got a M1 MacBook Air in mid-January, so we have now been able to try out compiling the emulator on macOS arm64 target. As all arm-specific issues were already fixed in the Raspberry port, the code compiled directly without any modifications needed, and is also running without any issues. However, the CMake build system needs to be tweaked a little bit to allow universal builds, as by default it generates only arm64-only builds. Soon when this is sorted out, we will update the available downloads to include the M1-native versions. Below however are some Speedometer test that we got from quick testing:

Here’s breakdown of the scores:

The first score, 35.8 total (0.774 cpu) is from x64 native code running on 2015 MacBook Pro (2.7 Ghz i5)
The second score, 90.6 total (1.700 cpu) is from x64 code running on M1 MacBook Air in Rosetta emulation
The third score, 146.2 total (2.770 cpu) is from arm64 code running on M1 MacBook Air natively

So it seems that the Apple Silicon builds seem to be working quite well (even though according to Pukka, there is a lot of possibility for optimization; more about this later)

Color support for scrollbar controls

Another TODO-task from long time ago was adding finally color support for the scroll bar control (CDEF 1). The windows, standard buttons and menus had already color support, but this was the last piece missing from a full reproduction of System 7-style appearance. Technically the control code is complete, but the scrollbar thumb dragging is still missing hilite mode rendering, so it is only 99% complete. Below is screenshot of one of the games where this visual change is visible (scrollbars on the SimCity 2000 map window):

Color scrollbar (CDEF 1) contols, here in SimCity 2000

Boolean bitmap color blending fixed

Another fix we did was analyzing and fixing the problem with text rendering in Master of orion, which we wrote about in the last month’s update. What we found out, was that according to IM:Imaging With QuickDraw book, sourcing any bitmap transfers from monochrome sources to color destinations need to be colorized in a bit different way compared to color transfers. What this means, is that when doing pixel scaling, the source color table lookups are skipped, and the foreground/background colors are applied directly on the source bitmap data. With this fixed, all the texts appear now correctly in Master of Orion:

Master of Orion with text blending issue fixed

Trying out a couple more new games

We also added some new games to the suite of test cases, in this case Might & Magic II and Loom:

Might & Magic III needed a couple Script Manager routines, which we added as placeholders, so the game starts up, but text rendering is still a bit off
Loom seems to work nicely as-is, although like all other color applications, needs Sound Manager support to get any sound.

68k TRAP instructions and THINK Pascal LightsBug

Another thing that we got to work was the 68K TRAP instruction handler, which enabled the debugging in THINK Pascal to work quite nicely. Breakpoints, execution control, LightsBug features (variable views, 68K registers, heap) seem to work mostly okay. The IDE does however complain about memory zone corruption, although all zones are fine (something is also causing the LightsBug zone explorer to fail, so there may be still some minor incompatiblity there).

Pukka is currently in progress of improving the exception support in the 68k emulator, so we will have the support for TRAPs fully implemented soon.

THINK Pascal LightsBug with variable list

Other stuff

Here’s a couple other things that were fixed:

Added support for drawing labels for the popup menu control (CDEF 63). This is used by Master of Orion in the new game setup dialogs
Don’t assume FMExist low-memory global exists on “classic” type Macs. This came up as THINK Pascal does a lot low-level patching on a number of Toolbox routines (to allow running applications inside THINK Pascal itself), InitFonts is expected to run on the older machine profiles even if FMExist would be marked to tell that Font Manager is initialized
Fixed CopyBits device port pre-draw intersection to take port origin into account; ignoring this cased scrolling up ResEdit editors to make contents of window disappear as the origin moved far enough up off the screen
Graying of standard button control (CDEF 0) checkbox and radio button variants; this fixes the issue that disabled controls did not render as grayed out in color ports
Added a number of color menu table access routines (GetMCInfo, SetMCInfo, DisposeMCInfo + other tweaks), which allow ResEdit to now display MENU resource previews also in Color QD mode – and also, the MENU resource editor seems to also work, with full color editing features

Regarding optimization, after discussion with Pukka, we decided that we should try in very near future an alternate way of mapping the emulated machine memory using host system/machine paging instead of the currently VM lookup table. Theoretically, using mmap (with possible combination of libsegv or similar) to map memory to a certain fixed “window” in memory, we could almost completely eliminate the penalty of emulated machine memory accesses. According to profiling results, should theoretically double the emulation speed, but we need to experiment with this to see how the results are. We will write more about this when we soon have chance to try it out.

Also, Toni has been doing a couple small experiments on using M.A.C.E. for trying out Twitch.TV streaming at https://www.twitch.tv/truetonizz.

Full list of changes since last post

2021-01-12 13:55:56 +0200 • Add missing path to toolbox cmake build script
2021-01-12 11:03:38 +0200 • Inline VM access calls & add dummy page handler
2021-01-12 02:57:09 +0200 • Add Loom test app JSON config settings for CMake
2021-01-12 02:55:57 +0200 • QDScaleColorize1ToIndexed4 (colorizing 1-to-4 bit)
2021-01-08 13:58:28 +0200 • Add QDScale1ToIndexed4 (1-to-4-bit depth scaling)
2021-01-06 05:12:58 +0200 • Apply bgColor in patBic mode in color rect blitter
2021-01-05 22:22:34 +0200 • Force also ROM clut copies to NoPurge in GetCTable
2021-01-05 22:19:49 +0200 • Set MemErr in HPurge/HNoPurge/HClrRBit/HSetRBit
2021-01-05 16:37:01 +0200 • Handle empty (zero-size) 'ictb' resources properly
2021-01-05 02:10:20 +0200 • Fix also graying of CDEF 0 radio/checkbox buttons
2021-01-05 01:50:08 +0200 • Color QD button graying (text & default frame)
2021-01-04 22:41:52 +0200 • Fix color QD CopyBits when scrolling w/ SetOrigin
2021-01-04 06:00:32 +0200 • Implement GetMCInfo/SetMCInfo/DisposeMCInfo traps
2021-01-03 03:10:35 +0200 • Don't use FMExist on "classic" b&w configuration
2021-01-03 03:09:32 +0200 • Use non-MacPlus trap table profile in THINK Pascal
2021-01-02 20:32:55 +0200 • Minor code cleanup in standard windowproc (WDEF 0)
2021-01-02 20:31:57 +0200 • Add color support to scrollbar controls (CDEF #1)
2021-01-02 20:30:52 +0200 • Merge branch 'master' of
2021-01-01 10:49:54 +0200 • Clean up Dialog Manager drawing save state locals
2021-01-01 02:28:56 +0200 • Implement VisibleLength selector for ScriptUtil
2021-01-01 01:34:20 +0200 • Add dummy StyledLineBreak selector to ScriptUtil
2021-01-01 01:12:18 +0200 • Partial implementation of TEGetStyleScrap selector
2020-12-30 23:20:43 +0200 • Merge branch 'master' of
2020-12-30 23:08:14 +0200 • Add CMake JSON test config for Might & Magic III
2020-12-30 20:47:49 +0200 • Add colorizing 1-to-8bit pixel translation
2020-12-30 20:45:07 +0200 • Fix ctSeed byteswap in stretch dither mode check
2020-12-30 18:45:02 +0200 • Uncheck item after popup menu selection
2020-12-30 18:41:35 +0200 • Draw labels in popup menu control + colorQD stuff
2020-12-30 10:14:41 +0200 • Fix some byteswap bugs in the popup menu control
2020-12-30 00:42:07 +0200 • Fix popup menu control MENU reloading
2020-12-29 23:28:18 +0200 • Fix mouseMoved message signature
2020-12-29 22:16:18 +0200 • Pixpat expander a bit safer in case of memory move
2020-12-29 22:12:37 +0200 • Add correct 1-bit boolean stretching depth scaling
2020-12-24 00:11:46 +0200 • use memory macros for all 68k emulator memory i/o
2020-12-24 00:10:27 +0200 • use memory macro in cpu look, remove unused proc..
2020-12-24 00:09:10 +0200 • make index offset branchless
2020-12-22 00:09:37 +0200 • Add Solarian II to test application CMake configs

Merry X-Mas! (with Glider 4 and Scarab of RA)

Even though it’s been a rough year around the world, soon will again be the time of the year, when the friendly, white-bearded dude in red outfit from Lapland will fly around the world, giving presents to everyone.

This year we are able to contribute to your holiday celebration, as we got permissions for distributing not only one, but two new classic Mac games, which you can enjoy during the holiday break:

New application bundles available for download: Scarab of RA and Glider 4

Thanks to the generous permissions by John Calhoun (author of Glider 4), and Rick Holzgrafe (author of Scarab of RA), those two defining samples of the classic Mac gaming history are now again available for everybody to play with during the holidays!

To download and try out these classics, go to the https://mace.software/files page on this site, and you will find links to both Mac and Windows 10 versions of these application bundles, including details about these games.

Although Glider already runs quite well in color mode, it is only available as the “classic” version for the time being, as sound is not yet working in the color mode. I will update the application bundle later in the spring, when the color version is ready for public testing.

NOTE: The current version of M.A.C.E. may cause random “pops” on macOS platforms, and possibly low-volume high-pitch background noise on Windows 10 platform. This is most likely is caused by the old classic sound emulation code we are still using, as it passes the 22255 Hz frequency used by old Macs directly to SDL2. It may apparently, depending on platform, give the job of upsampling it to the host operating system, which in some cases may give varying results depending on the audio hardware and drivers being used. This is a known issue, and it will be fixed when Sound Manager implementation is added in the spring, possibly even before that.

Most recent new tests cases: Holiday Lemmings, Master of Orion, Pararena 2.0

Fitting for the holiday season, we tried running X-Mas Lemmings demo, and for most parts it seems to work pretty well. However, in this game, the most important features missing are still Sound Manager and color cursor support.

Another test case, which we recently added, was inspired by watching a Twitch streamer playing the DOS version of this particular game: Master of Orion. The Mac version seems to work okay’ish in M.A.C.E., but there are some minor glitches:

Dialog items are missing from various new game setup dialogs
A lot of the color texts are drawn reversed, i.e. the text is transparent but rectangle around is text color. This is probably just a minor glitch in text blitter, which we will investigate and fix soon.
Sounds are missing because of the aforementioned missing work on Sound Manager

And as part of getting John Calhoun’s great games to work in our emulator, we also made some fixes which allow Pararena 2.0 to (almost) work in M.A.C.E. The only missing feature, which we know of, is again Sound Manager support. I guess that will be a main goal to aim for during the spring…

More Styled Textedit updates

In other news, there is progress in various parts of the emulator, one of them being the ongoing work on improving Styled Textedit support. Two of the test cases most recently made functional are Speedometer and the aforementioned Pararena 2.0 (which both ironically use it for help screens, by pure coincidence):

There is still some work to do, as for example editing a Styled Textedit field does not yet work, because caret and highlight features are still not updated for multi-style support.

Full list of changes since last post

2020-12-21 03:14:09 +0200 • Fix updating FSSpec name from TE field in StdFile 
2020-12-21 03:12:17 +0200 • Implement StandardPutFile selector (#5) in Pack3  
2020-12-21 02:56:24 +0200 • Add Master of Orion test app to CMake JSON configs
2020-12-21 02:04:46 +0200 • Implement DisposeCCursor trap for Color QD
2020-12-20 01:21:33 +0200 • Merge branch 'master' of
2020-12-20 01:21:23 +0200 • Add Holiday Lemmings Demo CMake JSON configs
2020-12-20 01:19:57 +0200 • Fix handle MP flag check in ResrvMem
2020-12-19 17:36:06 +0200 • Remove colon from CMake JSON config app names
2020-12-18 17:01:07 +0200 • Merge branch 'master' of
2020-12-18 17:00:41 +0200 • Color PICT recording updates
2020-12-17 01:10:47 +0200 • Rename native EqualRect to not collide Win64 API
2020-12-17 01:09:52 +0200 • Make GestaltKeyboardType windows compatible
2020-12-17 01:09:16 +0200 • Update windows icon caches
2020-12-17 01:08:26 +0200 • Update appname in cmake configs to support windows
2020-12-17 00:40:50 +0200 • Fix invalid character in wolf 3d cmake json config
2020-12-10 23:38:31 +0200 • Implement TEGetOffset trap
2020-12-10 23:32:23 +0200 • Add Pararena 2 CMake JSON test application config
2020-12-10 23:31:31 +0200 • Implement TEGetStyle selector for TEDispatch
2020-12-10 23:01:36 +0200 • Add patOr color QD rectangle blitter mode support
2020-12-10 02:44:49 +0200 • Mark rect dirty in b&w CopyMask (+fix warnings)
2020-12-10 01:44:02 +0200 • Add some john calhoun's games to CMake JSON conf..
2020-12-10 01:35:42 +0200 • Use ShieldCursor instead of HideCursor in CopyMask
2020-12-10 01:34:02 +0200 • Some cursor code cleanup (init state, AllocCursor)
2020-12-09 16:07:08 +0200 • Add patOr, patXor & patBic color QD StdLine modes
2020-12-09 13:57:13 +0200 • Fix missing icon check in Dialog Manager item draw
2020-12-08 03:14:20 +0200 • Handle launch failure more gracefully
2020-12-06 05:26:53 +0200 • Add SimpleText test app JSON config to CMake
2020-12-06 05:25:59 +0200 • Tweak Glider 4 CMake config, update 4.06 to 4.10
2020-12-05 16:21:48 +0200 • Fix Pixel2Char output width on TRUE result case
2020-12-05 14:30:26 +0200 • Work on TEStyleInsert; Speedometer help works now
2020-12-04 05:50:01 +0200 • Fix start pt to bottom right clamp in GrowWindow
2020-12-02 22:47:00 +0200 • More CMake tweak + update build number
2020-12-02 20:30:30 +0200 • Update some CMake test app JSON configs
2020-12-02 02:37:25 +0200 • Fix compilation on Xcode 12

TextEdit update: first styled text features added

The progress has been a bit slow in the last month because of us being extra busy at our regular daytime jobs, but we did manage to squeeze some long-awaited changes in. We finally started the work on multistyled textedit support, which is extension added to TextEdit API around System 6.0.4, allowing more than a single style to be applied within text edit records.

As we did not have much time to work on this yet during November, we only have so far roughly these features implemented for style support:

Multistyled TE record creation using TEStyleNew
Partial setting of appending multistyled text using TEStyleInsert
Adjusting existing styles using TESetStyle
Drawing multistyled text within the TEDoText’s teDraw selector
Measuring multistyled text

And the following style properties can be used within the styles:

Style font family
Text face (bold, italic, underline, etc…)
Font size
Text color

From the test applications we have been running, the most important ones requiring styled textedit support have been HyperCard 2.x and Marathon. Below is screenshot of HyperCard 2.0 Home stack, with multistyled text showing right on the welcome screen:

HyperCard 2.0 Home stack with multistyled text

And even more importantly, Marathon terminals can now be opened and operated, which means that we can finally proceed forward in Marathon gameplay to the other levels beyond the first one:

Marathon’s terminal view, with multistyled textedit field used for the text rendering

However, there are still some missing features, of which we need add these most important ones next:

Finalize TEStyleInsert to handle given StScrpHandle data properly
Implement other multistyle TEDoText selectors, such as teFind and teCaret, to allow actual styled text editing
Merge identical adjacent styles after style adjust operations, to avoid excessive style run array growth
Add other missing selectors to TEDispatch where needed
Also implement any other missing toolbox calls used by textedit where needed

With current speed of progress, the most important ones of the remaining parts textedit API should be usable within a couple of weeks. Unless we get too distracted by playing Marathon 🙂

Full list of changes since last post

2020-11-29 23:52:29 +0200 • Added PortChanged (no-op) selector in QDExtensions
2020-11-29 23:27:24 +0200 • Add JSON cmake config for HyperCard 2.2 test app
2020-11-29 23:26:55 +0200 • Add no-op dummy InitDateCache ScriptUtil selector
2020-11-29 23:22:50 +0200 • Implement partially ScriptUtil's SetEnvirons
2020-11-28 04:47:13 +0200 • Fix clamping of negative offset in TEPinScroll
2020-11-28 04:46:09 +0200 • Fix clamping of below bottom in pt-to-line routine
2020-11-28 03:48:03 +0200 • Implement TEGetPoint selector for TEDispatch
2020-11-27 01:30:49 +0200 • Handle styled text in TEDispose
2020-11-27 00:52:53 +0200 • Refactor TE locals, don't cache dereferenced hTE
2020-11-26 05:38:32 +0200 • Other fixes to make TESetStyle to work & add debug
2020-11-26 05:33:34 +0200 • Get correct style run idx for singlebyte edge case
2020-11-26 05:31:53 +0200 • Fix lineheight calc (wrong index & zero new slots)
2020-11-26 05:28:27 +0200 • Add missing TEApplyStyle byteswap (run->startChar)
2020-11-26 05:27:33 +0200 • Return correct style index @ existing style lookup
2020-11-26 05:26:30 +0200 • Set stCount, stHeight and stAscent for new styles
2020-11-26 05:25:31 +0200 • Add viewRect validation to TEDoText (debug mode)
2020-11-26 05:24:38 +0200 • Set stCount to 1 when inserting a new style
2020-11-26 05:23:52 +0200 • Re-deref TEHandle in TEStyleNew after hText alloc
2020-11-26 05:22:51 +0200 • Increment text pointer in TEFindLine for new style
2020-11-26 05:19:32 +0200 • Fix byteswap in numerator check in StdText
2020-11-25 04:28:32 +0200 • Work on TESetStyle (not yet working, but almost)
2020-11-23 03:24:16 +0200 • Start work on TESetStyle (and TEContinuousStyle)
2020-11-22 05:15:36 +0200 • Add style support to TEGetLineForV
2020-11-22 04:47:30 +0200 • TESetSelect styled text support
2020-11-22 04:45:35 +0200 • More TEStyleInsert work (line heights calculated)
2020-11-22 00:57:54 +0200 • TEStyleInsert progress (TEFindLine style support)
2020-11-21 04:53:05 +0200 • TextEdit BIG refactor & start adding TEStyleInsert
2020-11-21 02:46:25 +0200 • Implement GetCPixel and SetCPixel (ResEdit PACK 1)
2020-11-20 15:59:17 +0200 • Fix colorQD colormap bug, 1&2-bit modes flipped fg
2020-11-20 15:37:02 +0200 • Implement GetEntryUsage trap for palette manager
2020-11-20 15:23:33 +0200 • Implement old-style FONT lookup in RealFont
2020-11-20 14:47:15 +0200 • Fix bugs in styled text rendering, it works now
2020-11-20 13:56:34 +0200 • Don't set/read flags for purged/unallocated handle
2020-11-20 12:44:49 +0200 • Implement TEGetHeight (non-styled) for SimCity 2K
2020-11-20 12:28:04 +0200 • Make SWAP macro single-line safe
2020-11-20 05:48:11 +0200 • Fix for what looks like VERY strange bug in Excel…
2020-11-20 05:45:10 +0200 • Add dummy GetPortNameFromPSN selector @ OSDispatch
2020-11-20 05:44:27 +0200 • Add PPC trap dispatcher w/ dummy PPCInit & PPCOpen
2020-11-20 05:20:57 +0200 • Temporarily increase system heap size
2020-11-20 05:20:15 +0200 • Dummy switcher info data for testing Excel 3.0
2020-11-20 04:36:18 +0200 • Prototype styled TextEdit draw & linewidth measure
2020-11-10 22:48:13 +0200 • Implement TEGetStyleHandle for TEDispatch
2020-11-10 22:28:22 +0200 • Implement dummy IsLayer selector for LayerDispatch
2020-11-10 22:09:35 +0200 • Add TEDispatch, and TECustomHook and TEFeatureFlag
2020-11-10 03:22:20 +0200 • Implement TEStyleNew trap handler for TextEdit
2020-11-10 03:20:44 +0200 • Update Scarab of RA test app config to new version
2020-11-08 13:47:35 +0200 • Optional release version logging/assertions toggle
2020-11-08 13:46:56 +0200 • Minor code cleanups (logging, prep dirtyrects etc)
2020-11-08 13:27:22 +0200 • Fix src/mask address calculation in B&W CopyMask
2020-11-08 00:54:19 +0200 • Reinforce save of auxiliary regs in C->68k calls
2020-11-08 00:42:58 +0200 • Fix clamping of teLength in TextEdit's DoDraw proc
2020-11-04 16:17:43 +0200 • Add GWorld rowbytes calculation method selection
2020-10-31 03:26:53 +0200 • Handle wInGoAway also in SystemClick (Close DA)
2020-10-31 03:25:08 +0200 • Add missing change from the slot manager commit

Marathon fixed & INITs revisited; Fun with Control Panel (cdevs & After Dark)

Marathon color fix

As predicted in the previous post, the culprit for the messed up colors in Marathon was actually just the unfinished implementation of UpdateGWorld. What caused problems in this case was, that the color table in the backbuffer GWorld, which the game uses for off-screen drawing, was created during loading when the intro color table was active, and thus it “inherited” that active color table from the GDevice. However, UpdateGWorld was expected to update new colors from the GDevice when entering the game, and as it was not implemented, that left the old color table intact and messed up the colors. The current implementation of UpdateGWorld handles most of the cases, but does not do the existing pixel data conversion cases, which some applications might required (TODO-assertions were added there though, to signal when we encounter such case).

One handy source (literally!) for debugging Marathon’s backbuffer behaviour was the Marathon source code, which Bungie published quite some time ago at: http://infinitysource.bungie.org/

Also, we noticed that Marathon has pretty decent support for mouselook, so we enabled the relative mouse mode for test JSON config, and it feels pretty playable with it.

Here are some screenshots of the first level of Marathon running (finally) with proper colors:

Here are also a couple screenshots of one of the demo levels played by the game after staying idle in the main menu:

The first level seems to be completely playable until the end, except that the terminals on the level do not work yet (they require the Styled TextEdit implementation, which still remains on the TODO list – however with quite higher priority now, as so many applications seem to need it already). This is especially tricky as the teleport used at end of the level requires that feature also to pass the level 🙂

INITs revisited

Some time ago, we played around a bit with the INIT loading during startup, and used it to load After Dark screen saver. However, the handling of memory during startup was not optimal; basically BufPtr, which is the top of memory usable for application zone, and 68k stack pointer, were colliding, which caused random crashing.

As the color support is already quite nice for most basic cases (in indexed color modes), we wanted to see how After Dark would work in the color mode, so we did some quick fixing for this. Basically we moved the stack to near middle of the memory range, in a area which was very unlikely to hit the top of system zone, and way below the BufPtr limit, which After Dark wants to lower. This seems to fix that problem for now.

Control Panels

Another important thing we wanted was to allow the After Dark control panel to be usable, so that the screensaver modules could be configured. As we don’t have yet our own control panel to support running cdev resources (the control panels), we temporarily tried out what happens if we run the actual, real Control Panel desk accessory from System 6 – seems that there almost no issues getting this to work, as seen below:

System 6’s “General” Control Panel (cdev) running in the System 6’s Control Panel Desk Accessory (DRVR) running on M.A.C.E.

Surprisingly, bunch of the functionality in “General” control panel was directly working; The desktop pattern editor was almost completely functional, but required implementation of the SetDeskCPat trap, which it uses to apply modified pattern on the desktop. Menu blinking and caret flash controls work directly (as TextEdit and Menu Manager were built to use those low memory globals), and speaker volume control works when run in the “classic” (monochrome Mac Plus style) mode – color version still has the unfinished Sound Manager implementation. The date & time controls show placeholder value as the International Utilities routines are still unfinished, and RAM cache does nothing 🙂

*System 6’s “CloseView” Control Panel (cdev) running in the System 6’s Control Panel Desk Accessory (DRVR) running on M.A.C.E.*

Even more interestingly, the CloseView control panel (above) also work almost without any fixes; The Key1Trans and Key2Trans low memory procedure pointers were needed to allow shortcut keys to not crash. The zoom controls and zooming work neatly and follow mouse properly, as the cdev does some clever patching of a number of QuickDraw routines, so all the native C drawing is directed to a secondary buffer, which the CloseView cdev draws actually on the screen – when active, it seems to replace WMgrPort and WMgrCPort with the backbuffer, and even modifies ScreenBase to make CopyBits work properly! However, there is still some issue with the algorithm it uses to track “dirty” area, when magnification is off but closeview is active, as it leaves some artifacts on the screen when for example moving windows.

*After Dark Control Panel (cdev) running in the System 6’s Control Panel Desk Accessory (DRVR) running on M.A.C.E.*

But most importantly, After Dark is now also working. There were a couple fixes needed to make the control panel itself, and some modules, work – such as blend and subpin transfer modes for rectangle blitter, and a number of System 7-type temporary memory handle allocation functions (which for now just directly map to regular handle allocations in the application zone).

But most importantly, the rather complex and deep mix of native C, 68k DRVR, INIT and cdev code with patched traps included, surfaced a rare register trashing condition in the invocation of 68k code from native code – this was only present as a crash when using “Demo” feature of After Dark control panel! The problem was, that as certain 68k procedure calls needed arguments to be passed in registers, they were not saved before the call – and as native C part of the toolbox does not use the 68k registers, and thus does not internally save them, certain 68k -> native -> 68k call combinations resulted with registers being trashed. After adding the fix by implementing proper register save/restore, After Dark is much more stable, and looks great! Here are screenshots of some of the modules which work now (you can click image for larger view):

There are still a number of things to fix though; for example, MultiModule does not work yet (cannot configure modules for some reason), and other modules have unique cases which need to be handled separately (such as “Down the Drain” requiring GetCPixel), and some modules occasionally spitting “Not enough memory” error, but this is good as it provides a lot of test cases for the future!

Also some of the other desk accessories were kind of working and not; some such as “Mouse” control panel won’t have any affect (mouse is right now completely controlled by host operating system), “Monitors” requires proper Slot Manager implementation for handling the graphic devices to not crash, “Color” (probably) needs to have support for modifying the labels in System file, and “Sound” does not do much without Sound Manager. We will in future also try out other cdevs to see what happens 🙂

Full list of changes since last post

2020-10-30 04:38:37 +0200 • Rename SMSlotInterruptGlobals for clarity
2020-10-30 04:36:28 +0200 • Iterate INIT resources in LoadNamedINITFile
2020-10-30 04:33:32 +0200 • Enable relative mouse mode for marathon cmake JSON
2020-10-30 04:33:05 +0200 • Add control panel files to TeachText cmake json
2020-10-29 23:57:28 +0200 • Implement CloseCPort trap
2020-10-29 23:53:50 +0200 • Also add subPin mode to pattern rectangle blitter
2020-10-29 23:26:20 +0200 • Arithmetic blend mode in pattern rectangle blitter
2020-10-29 23:24:53 +0200 • Save & restore ALL 68k register on C->68k calls
2020-10-29 17:40:16 +0200 • Fix byteswap bug in UPP routineCount
2020-10-28 03:55:16 +0200 • First part of Key(1/2)Trans lowmem proc support
2020-10-27 07:09:52 +0200 • Add dummy TempFreeMem/NewHandle/HLock/DisposHandle
2020-10-27 05:52:11 +0200 • Add ShutDown Mgr (+ dummy ShutDwnInstall selector)
2020-10-27 05:30:12 +0200 • Make SystemTask more compatible with DAs
2020-10-27 03:05:01 +0200 • Implement SetDeskCPat trap handler
2020-10-27 02:49:46 +0200 • Implement PixPatChanged selector for QDExtensions
2020-10-27 02:43:19 +0200 • Also fix the hack in boot-time temp memory size
2020-10-27 02:42:05 +0200 • Temporarily move SP out of below BufPtr at startup
2020-10-27 02:41:05 +0200 • Fix a really stupid DRVR call bug (HLock missing)
2020-10-13 01:03:50 +0300 • Set RAMBase during startup
2020-10-06 01:17:40 +0300 • Dummy placeholder for WriteParam trap handler
2020-10-06 01:16:12 +0300 • Fix directory ID for indexed non-HFS GetFileInfo
2020-10-06 01:14:03 +0300 • Implement (kind of) TempTopMem OSDispatch selector
2020-10-03 17:27:12 +0300 • Add SlotManager dispatcher (and SVersion selector)
2020-10-03 03:33:17 +0300 • Fix memory leak in ClosePort
2020-10-03 03:30:57 +0300 • Add rest of UpdateGWorld (except pixmap data copy)
2020-10-03 02:33:45 +0300 • Handle _MapRgn wideOpen case; Fixes Marathon map
2020-10-03 01:34:23 +0300 • Clear MemErr in Lock/UnlockHandle on success
2020-10-02 16:30:08 +0300 • Fix warning in LayerDispatch from missing #include
2020-10-02 05:07:00 +0300 • Pass right pixelDepth to NewGWorld in UpdateGWorld
2020-10-02 04:57:55 +0300 • Some progress on UpdateGWorld implementation

Notarized test applications & Other fixes

Most of the past couple weeks have again been a bit quiet due to busy time at the daytime job, but there are a couple improvements which are worthy of creating an update in this development diary:

Notarized macOS downloads

The set of (macOS) app bundles on the downloads page have finally been notarized, after Toni enrolled again in (& paid for) the Apple developer program for one year required to do it. So, there won’t be any longer any trouble with the scary warnings on the recent macOS versions.

The downside is, that the default notarized applications require macOS 10.9, but we’ve left the old, unsigned application bundles for Mac OS X 10.6+ compatibility, for now.

There are not much functional differences between the most recent notarized applications and the previous builds, as most of the recent progress has been on improving color compatibility, and other features in applications not currently part of the set of the downloadable app bundles.

Escape Velocity map “works” now

After a couple days of debugging, the code crashing Escape Velocity when opening the map was isolated. However, curiously it would appear there might be a bug in Escape Velocity causing the issue; in map, the game keeps track of four data structures of 10 bytes each (which I assume may contain coordinates for at least the nebula and asteroid field pictures), but in the map drawing code it accidentally accesses a fifth element in the array, which will contain random data at end of the allocated memory area. I briefly tested this part on a real Mac running Mac OS 9 – and it exhibited the same behaviour, but luckily SectRect intersected the offending corrupted coordinates, before running CopyBits, which would crash on negative source rectangle size; in M.A.C.E. as a workaround the StdBits (which CopyBits uses) was reinforced to ignore negative transfer sizes, which appears to be invalid operation on the QuickDraw on real Macs.

The Escape Velocity map window now works without crashing

There were also a couple other minor fixes:

MakeFSSpec did not populate the FSSpec fields correctly for non-existing file, which was required behaviour when using it to create FSSpecs for creating new files with FSpCreate
The “search & replace” mode in _Munger trap did not work correctly; The mission list was using this to replace “<DST>” with destination name, but in the case the search string was not found, it would keep appending it in the end of string infinitely
StandardGetFile selector in Std File Package was missing typeList pointer, causing the “Open pilot” dialog to not display any files

Thexder

We recently also tested Thexder on M.A.C.E., which seems to be working quite well in both “classic” monochrome mode (with audio), and in the color mode. The controls are also quite responsive, although having played previously the DOS version it took a short bit of learning to play with the numpad controls, where vertical and horizontal movement keys are combined, as holding down multiple arrow keys is disabled in the Mac version, perhaps to avoid conflicting with the use of space bar as fire button.

This game is quite rare in the sense that it is the only game which we know that uses 2-bit (four-color) mode in the color version; this however works as a perfect test case for the 2-bit display mode testing and debugging. Interestingly, the monochrome version of the game seems to have some bugs (such as enemies not following player horizontally in the same way as in color version, and also some walls destructible by lasers seem to not work correctly). But as these bugs appear also on real Macs and minivmac, it seems that at least the emulation is working as intended.

Palette fix for Loony Labyrinth

As mentioned in the previous post, Loony Labyrinth was having some color corruption problems, which seemed to only affect the playfield. After a quick evening of debugging, it appeared that as the game used custom palette for intro screens, it was trying to reset color table back to default using RestoreDeviceClut selector of PaletteDispatch, which contained some code which was left previously as unimplemented to-do task. With a quick implementation to release the palette links from the GDevice, and doing a reallocation of color entries to restore original palette, the playfield now appears and displays as it should:

Loony Labyrinth playfield now displays correctly

Also, to celebrate this in combination with the physics fixes from earlier this month, here’s a video of how well the game’s own AI is able to play the game in the demo mode:

Loony Labyrinth playing one game of pinball in the auto demo mode

Although this does not fix Marathon’s color table issue, we luckily we have identified the problem with that game, and will be fixing it before next week. More about that in the next update!

Full list of changes since last post

2020-09-29 03:12:46 +0300 • Finalize (mostly) RestoreDeviceClut implementation
2020-09-29 02:13:02 +0300 • Fix PortList allocation & add PortList debug tool
2020-09-27 03:26:40 +0300 • Fix missing typeList in StandardGetFile
2020-09-27 02:56:59 +0300 • Fix "search&replace" mode in _Munger trap
2020-09-27 02:19:43 +0300 • Implement FSpSetFInfo for HighLevelFSDispatch
2020-09-27 02:17:32 +0300 • Add dummy empty NewAlias and NewAliasMinimal
2020-09-27 02:15:44 +0300 • Populate properly fnfErr result case in MakeFSSpec
2020-09-22 11:09:13 +0300 • Merge branch 'master' of
2020-09-22 11:09:08 +0300 • Minor tweak in colorQD detection in CDEF 63
2020-09-22 02:06:41 +0300 • Fix warnings causing errors on the new Xcode
2020-09-21 03:26:21 +0300 • Fix StretchBits crashing on negative srcRect width
2020-09-21 03:24:14 +0300 • Fix ADF filenames starting with % to map correctly
2020-09-21 03:23:00 +0300 • Add OrbQuest test application JSON config to cmake
2020-09-10 13:22:57 +0300 • Fix vfs file dependency command in cmake
2020-09-10 11:57:35 +0300 • Tweak Thexder JSON config
2020-09-10 11:57:03 +0300 • Pixel-doubling support for 4-bit (16-color) mode
2020-09-10 11:56:35 +0300 • Pixel-doubling support for 2-bit (4-color) mode
2020-09-10 04:13:30 +0300 • Fix cmake to allow again unsigned apps in OSX 10.6
2020-09-10 03:19:58 +0300 • Also return success code for decoding opOpColor…
2020-09-10 03:18:11 +0300 • Add Thexder test app to cmake json configs
2020-09-10 03:17:43 +0300 • Implement opOpColor in PICT playback

Many fixes: DIVU.W, Bitfields, Time Manager; Prince of Persia 2…

A lot of has happened past week, perhaps thanks to the summer finally starting to be over, and us having more time for the project again. Here’s a breakdown of most important advances made last week:

Fixed the DIVU.W overflow calculation

A long-time bug in unsigned 16-bit division instruction was finally found, and fixed by Pukka! We accidentally calculated overflow using signed 32767 limit, while it should have been unsigned 65535. This immediately fixed highly noticeable glitches in two of the test applications, Vette! and Test Drive II: The Duel (both ironically of same racing simulation genre):

Before the fix, Test Drive II had noticeable warping and glitching in the road near the bottom, and the polygons in Vette! had sometimes incorrect tangents, causing them to get messy depending on the angle of polygon edge.

This also fixed the “Divide overflow” bug occurring in SoftPC, which was weirdly happening on certain times of day, which does indicate that some calculation related to the computer clock time was failing because of the incorrectly signaled overflow. Now SoftPC works quite reliably.

Bitfield instruction fixes

One recently added test application, Prince of Persia 2, used a lot of the bitfield instructions for the SHAP resource drawing on the screen (apparently RLE/LZ decoding), which originally had a really messy artifacts:

But after fixing the instructions, the levels finally looks as they should:

Time Manager fixes

Besides the bitfield instructions, Prince of Persia 2 also uses Time Manager heavily for timing, and that surfaced a couple nasty bugs in the code, which were fixed.

There are still so oddities to investigate, for example the intro sequence does not advance past second screen yet, and the death and level completion delays do not trigger during the gameplay.

Sadly these fixes do not (yet) fix the one special case in Speedometer, where Dhrystone test does not work properly because of some issues that may be related to Time Manager (it starts the same timer twice, and stops it before test, so it never runs).

Keyboard handling threading bug

There was also a nasty bug in keyboard handling, which had rather surprisingly managed to stay hidden for a quite long time; Basically, the SDL2 key events that were handled by the keyboard code on main thread had chance to accidentally modify data structures and especially the A0 register, while 68K was running in VBL interrupt handler, causing in some rare cases the A0 register value to get corrupted; This caused a lot of crashes in Prince of Persia 2, and is most likely the cause of a very rare crash in Wolfenstein 3D. The offending part code was made thread-safe, which fixed this particular crash completely.

Sound in SoftPC

This was a very minor fix, but still worth mentioning; the reason for why there was no sound in SoftPC was caused by the fact that the application was setting the sound driver volume from the SPVolCtl low memory global, which had been set to zero on startup. By improving the PRAM simulation to populate all low memory PRAM values with sensible default values, the sound works now nicely in SoftPC!

Dark Castle “_Random” bug

As Pukka guessed last Christmas, the reason for buggy behaviour of robots, and some other minor glitches, in Dark Castle was indeed related to calling of the “_Random” trap! Of the last weekend was spent on searching the bug in other places at first, such as robot behaviour code, until we noticed something strange.

In Apple documentation, and all references known to us, the QuickDraw random number generator is defined simply as a Pascal type function with the following signature (in IM: Mathematical and Logical Utilities, 3-51):

pascal short Random (void);

Which means, that the function takes no arguments, and returns a 16-bit signed integer on stack. But, however, the way Dark Castle used was rather odd:

Disassembly of Dark Castle’s code calling _Random

This screenshot of ResEdit showing disassembly of the part of Dark Castle code calling _Random shows, that it actually ignores the result value at offset 000B60 by discarding it off stack! And later looking at the code, it was actually using value in D0 instead…so, a quick look at System 7 _Random trap handler gives some insight to this:

MacsBug disassembly of _Random trap handler on System 7.5

Here actually it is visible, that on real Macs, the trap trashes a number of registers, and has the side-effect of leaving result value in the D0 register (being a toolbox trap, the trap dispatcher does not clean up any of the registers, unlike it does for some of registers after calling OS traps).

So, to fix Dark Castle, we added extra code to set up the D0 register as the game expected it, and everything started to work perfectly.

Some other progress from these changes

A couple other test applications seemed to benefit of these changes too, although they still need a bit of work to make sense: Loony Labyrinth now loads correctly after bitfield instructions were fixed (and physics in it also work correctly after the DIVU.W fix), and Marathon now actually runs and is playable with the Time Manager fixes:

Loony Labyrinth, with still messed up board colors

Interestingly both of these games still seem to suffer from having colors completely messed up, but besides this glitch, they appear to be playable and run quite nicely.

Bonus video

And to celebrate getting SoftPC finally to work properly, I recorded this short video of M.A.C.E. running SoftPC running David Murray’s (The 8-bit Guy) Planet X-3:

You can find more information on Planet X-3 here: http://www.the8bitguy.com/product/planet-x3-for-ms-dos-computers/

Full list of changes since last post

2020-09-09 23:29:07 +0300 • Merge branch 'master' of
2020-09-09 23:28:59 +0300 • Update CMake scripts to support Apple notarization
2020-09-09 21:14:01 +0300 • add missing addressing fixes
2020-09-09 20:32:11 +0300 • memory addressing fixes
2020-09-09 20:26:50 +0300 • Fix compilation error in QDColorStretchBits.c
2020-09-09 20:00:29 +0300 • Fix some warnings in StretchBits color blitters
2020-09-09 19:59:57 +0300 • Fix some warnings in CodeResourceWDEF1
2020-09-09 19:26:58 +0300 • Fix return value in C_PlotCIconHandle
2020-09-09 19:18:10 +0300 • Merge branch 'master' of
2020-09-09 19:16:59 +0300 • fixes for bitfield and divuw instructions
2020-09-07 04:23:28 +0300 • Tweak more Dark Castle CMake JSON configs
2020-09-07 00:04:11 +0300 • Simulate PRAM (SysParam) to make SoftPC sound work
2020-09-06 23:04:58 +0300 • Update MACE version in CMake config
2020-09-06 13:14:44 +0300 • Color pixeldouble & (disabled) CRT simulation
2020-09-06 03:45:52 +0300 • Update trap generator XLS file
2020-09-06 03:44:13 +0300 • Tweak Dark Castle JSON config settings
2020-09-06 01:52:48 +0300 • Hack Random result value in D0 to fix Dark Castle
2020-09-05 03:54:17 +0300 • Get correct tmCount in RmvTime for non-first tasks
2020-09-03 02:16:54 +0300 • Fix the conversion of positive count in PrimeTime
2020-09-02 19:30:04 +0300 • Fix threading issue with keyboard input module
2020-09-02 19:28:30 +0300 • Don't crash on purged handles in GetHandleSize
2020-09-02 19:27:42 +0300 • Fix a lot of Time Manager bugs & clean up the code
2020-09-02 19:23:45 +0300 • Fix typing of region handle to CMDoDrawControls
2020-08-31 23:01:40 +0300 • A simplified MakeFSSpec implementation, for POP2
2020-08-31 04:17:44 +0300 • Add missing EqualRect change in EmuUtils.h
2020-08-31 04:16:59 +0300 • Fix GetCCursor crash when ResLoad was FALSE
2020-08-31 04:16:08 +0300 • Add dummy SCSIDispatch for Loony Labyrinth
2020-08-30 21:32:44 +0300 • Add Prince of Persia 2 to test app JSON configs
2020-08-03 01:45:10 +0300 • Make NewGWorld's rowBytes to work w/ Color VETTE!
2020-08-01 20:08:42 +0300 • Record PICT2 opHiliteColor, opOpColor &opDefHilite
2020-08-01 19:45:53 +0300 • Record HiliteBit as opHiliteMode in PICT2 format