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[MadMunky]

Bit, over on the Dungeon Master forums has told me he is currently disassembling the PC version of Bloodwych, I will post up as he makes progress or advises he can not progress this but hopefully with this we will get two things

1. A Windows version of Bloodwych (crappy PC graphics unfortunately, but maybe one day these can be replaced with the Amiga/ST graphics)
2. An understanding of all the functions used in the game so we can fully understand how the logic works for Monster AI, Combat etc..

[Hungry Horace]

a real shame he is not disassembling one of the 68k versions :/

Still ... you are right that an understanding of the general game code would be of great help to producing sequels/remakes etc!

[MadMunky]

a real shame he is not disassembling one of the 68k versions :/

Agreed but the logic for all versions will be the same so will hopefully make remakes a lot easier

[Bit]

Hi folks!
MadMunky brought me to this place, and I'm pretty surprised about the activity 
After he presented his project in our forums, I spontaneously decided to support him in any way, because I ever loved this game too and it was already a theme this year.
About the progress: It works fine - but I'm still not sure if I just work on an interpreter language compiler - sure that this was done in C?
Amiga conversion - well - if at all, I'd prefer the Atari - if there weren't the endianess problem. All data formats longer than one byte are 'upside down' and I've been through with this when I worked on DM-stuff. BW for PC is pure 16-bit-code, but on the 68000 it's probably not - the compilers will have done their optimizationx...
Perhaps - if I got the PC-version running at all, we can have a look on it.
Until then, simply press thumbs that it comes up at all.

Edit: Ouch. I just realize what you are talking about when you say AMOS. So it *is* a basic program after all? If so, I maybe bring it alive at all, but no one can bother me to analyze basic tokens then. That's a shock! 

[MadMunky]

Hi Bit,

I believe they are talking about wanting to port it to AMOS not that it was originally written in AMOS

[Bit]

I just hope that you are right and that it wasn't vain.
Let's see how far I'm after the night - keep you informed.

[Hungry Horace]

The 68k code of the amiga and Atari versions are almost identical. I am sure from everything I have read about development that the games were written directly in 68k asm... Having disassembled some parts, it's obvious from how clean and tidy it is in structure.

The comments about Amos, yes I am talking about using that for a remake on the amiga (Bloodwych pre-dates AMOS!).... And purely to make additional development easier/quicker.

[MadMunky]

Well hopefully from all the information Bit finds on the PC it will make writing a clone very easy as we will already have most of the functions/logic

Only disappointing part is there is no Data Disk for the PC though I don't believe they really added much which we couldn't work out ourselves once we know more about the original

Maybe Bit could take a look at the ST version of the DD if he manages to get somewhere with the PC Version.

Best of luck Bit Keep us updated, exciting times for Bloodwych

[Bit]

something's working 

[MadMunky]

something's working 

This looks very promising!

[Bit]

Don't be too excited, that's just a beginning. It shows that the translation was basically successful and the emu is working at all, first dos-interrupts too.
So it loads the sounddriver fine then - which is pretty obsolete, because that one will surely be replaced (not knowing yet how the sound gets generated at all).
In the next part it sets some interrupts - for that workarounds are necessary too, and then it comes to the graphics.
Once I got the character selection screen in the window, with a working mouse, we can celebrate having the biggest problems solved, because then it should run until it hits one of those couple of leftover jumptables. Think I'm not too far away from that.
Those estimated two months seem to shrink 

[MadMunky]

This all sounds VERY promising, it would be so good to finally know all the inner workings on the game 

Keep up the good work Bit, I cant believe how quickly you are getting this done, all them late night doing Dungeon Master has paid off

[Bit]

Now, this one really means a lot more!
It means:
- the graphics driver gets loaded
- it can read, inflate and convert the original PC pictures to truecolor(!)
  (so the emu-code survives a lot!)
- which also means, the workaround for local memory (de)allocations works
- the combined linking of allegro42 and allegro5 works - need the old one for a MIDI-driver. Both libraries don't bite each other.
- Multithreading works! Eventqueue (incl. timer-ticks) runs in a separate thread.

TODO-list: sound, mouse, keyboard, timer, leftover jumptables.

btw: it runs in windowed mode only, but you can resize the window as you want, so also click it fullsize. still, the basic resolution stays for 320x200 (for now!).

[MadMunky]

Excellent work!!!!

[Bit]

Will answer the PM here, because of the picture:
Yup, even with better graphics, for analysis the EGA-chip is a showstopper. That's why I proceed with CGA (which is still slow enough in decoding). Once analyzed, the driver part can be replaced completely to handle even hires-truecolor-pics (if available).
I do have some stops in it because of unrevealed indirect jumps and sound is bypassed yet, but there are not much problems left.
Still - obviously is smth wrong with the map here - the view should have some elements. Will fix that. But well - a lot of things work! 

Newer VS-versions - ... probably - don't have them. There will be surely people that can test too once I got the source stable.

ps.: see the resolution? that's all done on a simple notebook