Posted By
Luca
on 2015-09-23
17:52:19
 |  Myriad crashes
Tonight I saved a slice of time in order to play Myriad and try to beat the new hiscore entered by Brazil. I played both the PRG file and the TAP file: both games have crashed apparently randomly, at certain times during the gameplay.
Am I doing something wrong, or someone else experienced the same with Myriad?
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Posted By
Brazil
on 2015-09-25
07:34:34
| Re: Myriad crashes
Its a simple buggy software, you don't make anything wrong. Very frustrating when a game crashing near a new high score, so if you break my current highscore, maybe i never try it again to do a better one 
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Posted By
Luca
on 2015-09-25
08:00:39
| Re: Myriad crashes
Terribly frustrating... I should save a state at a certain point in order to not be stopped by the game's bug, but that would sound as unfair :/ My best one before a crash is now 26000 ca., but every attempt is doomed by this random bug which make you loose any score when occurs...
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Posted By
Chronos
on 2015-09-26
13:29:55
 | Re: Myriad crashes
Maybe ..>.. Fire Crew ..<.. can fix it and brought a 100% working version to the scene 
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Posted By
Luca
on 2015-09-26
15:02:38
| Re: Myriad crashes
Mmmm... :/ Didn't examine the stack when the game's running, but it smells from far as missing usage of JSR/RTS when the IRQ occurs...
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Posted By
Rüdiger
on 2015-09-27
07:07:26
| Re: Myriad crashes
At what weapon the game crashes? Did it also experienced times but with active cheat ... otherwise would have to be a cheat for indestructibility have time and just wait, where the crash happened exactly ...
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Posted By
Luca
on 2015-09-28
04:42:54
| Re: Myriad crashes
Had a quick view at the code, and it looks quite hard to solve 
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Posted By
Brazil
on 2015-09-28
15:35:13
| Re: Myriad crashes
Forget it Luca, not worth it, its not a really good game.
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Posted By
Chronos
on 2015-09-28
17:54:12
| Re: Myriad crashes
for debugging: if i have jiffydos installed, the game crashes every 5-10 secs
the proggy looks sometimes around $ea63, eac3, eac9 ??? .. no clue yet.
Marcel Wargowski's version is a piece of junk with messed up charset..
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Posted By
Luca
on 2015-09-29
08:00:51
| Re: Myriad crashes
Rüdiger has saved a .FRE snapshot file in which if you die (wave 2.7) due to the only one enemy present, it crashes for sure, 100%. This means that something wrong has just happened to the code in that precise condition, and that's weird, because the fault comes out from a bad IRQ clearing, sometimes and somewhere
The game continuously swap SEI and CLI, ans sometimes weird kernel calls are used too, like the tape IRQ or the RS232 one... While playing, your ship's movement is $DB11 driven (SEI), all the rest is IRQ driven (set at $1A2F and called once every two frames:
LDA $FF09
AND #$02
BNE *+5
JMP $FCC3
while the main code simply stays in idle:
.2AA4 CLI
.2AA5 JMP $2AA5
The same occurs when your ship collides, then the IRQ is cleared and the main code jumps to a simple time loosing code. Once finished, a terrible series of JSRs takes the code to reactivate the CLI and to JMP to $E3E4 taking advantage of the tape's IRQ.
If the game crashes, it can be fixed by calling a CLI, the best way to perform this with G 2AA4 of course.
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Posted By
gc841
on 2015-10-01
05:43:05
| Re: Myriad crashes
There's a problem with this line of code:
.361A BNE $3607
It's a bad branch, I'm not sure if that routine ever gets called though.
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Posted By
Luca
on 2015-10-01
06:10:44
| Re: Myriad crashes
gc841: you're right, that routine would manage the setup of the data panel on the left when the game starts, but it ain't called at all, probably because in a later moment the author opted for zp usage. Yes, that line of code is another specimen related to the overall controversial code behind Myriad, but that one is a minor fault, not the infamous one which pushes the game to occasionally crash
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Posted By
Csabo
on 2015-10-01
08:02:33
| Re: Myriad crashes
Wait a minute, multiple people are looking at Plus/4 assembly code? My dream come true
Seriously. I always wished we would 1) code more, 2) collaborate more. What are the chances of putting some more effort behind this? Something like putting the code up to GitHub or CodePlex or something - which would require that we all "standardize" on the compiler at least.
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Posted By
Brazil
on 2015-10-01
09:41:05
| Re: Myriad crashes
Ok Csabo, lets make a little framework with standard codes for a Plus4 
I have a character mode sprite engine (what you seen few days ago), near to release state, need some debug, some minor extra function, and maybe a little optimization. (and time to do these, its the hardest part of my projects...)
I am using 64TASS cross assembler, i like it.
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