Soldier Blade (J/U)– Screen Mode Bug

[elrymer]

Enter the "SET UP" mode from the title screen and then toggle the "SCREEN MODE" option from "NORMAL" to "ARCADE". All the text quickly disappears leaving only the solid background color. It is possible to continue by blind-navigating to "EXIT" and the game seems to run normally otherwise. Same behavior on both digital/analog video output, corroborated by one other forum user.

/media/fat/games/TGFX16# md5sum Soldier*Blade*.pce 45a6dc816ebde2de10e4286d72957770 Soldier Blade (J).pce 59d23b7af39ea827eceb1d7e2cc363c0 Soldier Blade (U).pce

[dshadoff]

I'm on vacation and I'll check this out when I get back to my system in a couple of weeks, but in the meantime, you can document your video output chain, as that might be involved. So:

• are you using HDMI or analog output (or HDMI direct) ?
• If you are using the HDMI output, what scaler settings, resolution, and screen are you driving ?
• If you are using analog output, is is driving a scaler, an LCD/OLED monitor, or a CRT directly ?

I don't keep a list of MD5 checksums, but I can validate CRC32 from here.

My initial guess would be that there is an effect in the game which flashes the text - displaying on alternate display fields (and blanking on the remaining ones), and that somehow you aren't seeing the "displayed" ones. But the mechanism of why that is happening is not yet understood. In any case, I can't test from here, but will check when I return.

[elrymer]

This core looks fantastic over composite to a consumer-grade standard-definition NTSC CRT TV, so that's what I like to use. Using analog video output with an active adapter. Same issue over HDMI to a consumer-grade 1080p-native NTSC LCD TV.

Scaler settings and resolution in MiSTer.ini: vscale_mode=0 vscale_border=0 video_mode=8 ; 8 - 1920x1080@60

Scaler settings and resolution in TGFX16 core OSD: Scale: Wider HV-Integer 270x216 15.74KHz 59.8Hz 1920x1080 148.07MHz 59.8Hz

Turns out the (J) dump had some kind of 512-byte header; after I removed it I got CRC32 that matched the bright-green No-Intro Dat-o-Matic entries I learned about today from the other forum user (J, U). No observable change in behavior, though. $ crc32 Soldier\ Blade\ \(*.pce 8420b12b Soldier Blade (J).pce 4bb68b13 Soldier Blade (U).pce

I believe my displays can show every-other-field effects just fine in general, either with the MiSTer or with original PCE hardware.

Thank you for commenting here and all your contributions through the decades. Just wanted to post the bug report after getting corroboration in case it helps any work you'd still like to do. Hope you are enjoying the vacation!

[dshadoff]

OK, I was able to reproduce this on MiSTer, and to find that it doesn't have this fault on real hardware. It's interesting, and seems to be somehow related to video register settings on a higher dot-clock mode. I'll take a look at this soon - possibly this week.

[srg320]

I made a fix, but tested it only on this game.

[MP2E]

Looks like the change works perfectly, I tested most of the games in the following list in the higher dot clock mode and spotted no issues at all, everything worked as expected.

http://www.tg-16.com/arcade-mode-high-resolution-shmups.htm

[srg320]

Looks like the change works perfectly, I tested most of the games in the following list in the higher dot clock mode and spotted no issues at all, everything worked as expected.

The changes are not related to dot clock. It is related to the VRAM access mode (register MWR: VM=3,CM=0).

[dshadoff]

I recommend that the fix gets merged.

Full-scale testing will probably only happen as a result of a merge (that's an unusual combination for MWR setting - nobody knows which games would use that; maybe only this game),

Also, it's a small fix, and easy enough to roll back (or improve) if any new issues appear.

[dshadoff]

I just noticed that this was already committed to the core. Since it fixes the issue, perhaps this issue should be closed.