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[Hungry Horace]

hi again,

i've already explained in my intro' post that i'm not too great a coder (!) so any help would be great... i'll just slap anything i think you guys might be able to help me do / solve in this thread (feel free to do the same - hehe)


My current trouble is this.... i'm  making an AMOS program to act as front-end for some WHDLoad HD installed games....
WHDLoad brings up a splash-screen on its startup, so i'm really looking to keep my AMOS porgram multi-tasking in the background (to be returned to on game-quite, and to hide the splash-screen with something like the original game menus)

my current problem, is that i want my menu to play music whilst its on, (i use MEDs btw) but that WHDload will not start the game once AMOS has played music, since it still occupies the Audio channels. i have to make my program end before it will free audio.device, making the multi-tasking idea a non-option. Is there anyway i could call something from within my program, to make AMOS release the audio.device, without the need for a program end?  i noticed that if i run my program, let the music play, and even stopping the music before interupting the program, if i then multitask from the AMOS-editor back to Workbench to run the game, the audio.device is -still- used up, until such point as i run a sperate AMOS program, which does not feature any sound.... perhaps there is a way i could use this to free the audio.device somehow? although 'm really not sure how at the mo!

any help would greatly appriciated thanks

[SamuraiCrow]

Try running Amos_Patch on your Amos executable.  That should fix the multitasking problem with your Amos programs.

As for the audio.device, it is allocated when medplayer.library starts playing so there's not much you can do about that except maybe try stopping the music and flushing the library.  You may have to leave the built in Amos commands for accessing MedPlayer behind and use LibCall to access the medplayer.library functions.

[Hungry Horace]

thanks for the patch! i think i will get the program working without sound, multitasking and all, and then look into the med thing more closely.

i cant find a way to close the .med library from within AMOS, so i'm a bit stumped there. I see Lib Close in the manual, but i gather thats for a manully opened library from using Lib Open?

i know nothing about using librarys tbh, but i think calling MED directly may be the solution there. I will look at the OctamedSS docs to see if it starts to make sense to me, otherwise i'm likely to be back here for more help!


if only WHDLoad could be made not to bring up the "cancel  - retry - ignore" requesterm and select "ignore" by command line... it seems to leave the game running fine, even like that.... i may enquire about that on EAB at some stage, if the libs prove too difficult!

[Hungry Horace]

ok, my apologies for bombarding the forum with more questions....


however, if you dont ask, you never learn... and maybe it could help someone else out later on, if my problems are solved.

two things:

1)  is there anyway to stop the orange "default" AMOS screen appearing when starting my compiled AMOS program? i've been looking though the manual, but cant find any ay of removing it. I'm sure i've used finished games and stuff in the past which havent featured it, and closeing the scren immediately doesnt solve it!


2)  the GUI i am writing is of PSPUAE... which happens to have a rather nice "auto zoom" function on it. The game which runs,  runs in 320x200 and looks really nice on the screen.

however, my screen size is set to 320x200 on my AMOS gui too, but for some reason PSPUAE is picking up the screen size as 320x256 (leading to a big blank black section at the bottom of the screen)... it auto-detects the screen size from the amiga registers, so it must be something to do with the way amos makes its display screens.

is AMOS defaulting to actually opening ani invisible 320x256 screen? can i reduce this? is it becasue of the orange screen at the beginning opening as 320x256, and would removing it elliminate the problem?

just curious to see if anyone else here has come across anything like either of these!

i will of course let you know if i find any solutions myself...

[Sidewinder]

@HungryHorace

1.  You can disable to default screen in the AMOS Compiler options menu.  It's in the "Compiled Program Setup" menu.  Make sure the "Create Default Screen" option is set to "No".

2.  AMOS was first created for PAL systems in Europe.  This is why the default screen is 256 lines high.  You should be able to change this in the interpreter configuration program.  If changing the size of the screen in the config doesn't work, then you may want to look at using the =NTSC command which returns True if the machine is NTSC and False if it's PAL.  You could probably then use the Screen Offset command to move the screen into the center of the view on a PAL system (i.e. down 28 pixels).

Let us know how it turns out.