F5 (option menu) keyboard shortcut does not work

[eero-t]

Tested the latest version from: http://www.happydaze.se/scummvm-lite-atari/

F5 key opens options menu only in monkey1.prg and samnmax.prg, not in tentacle.prg or atlantis.prg.

In atlantis.prg, only F8 (restart) key works, and tentacle.prg does not react to any key.

Note: I do not have full versions of these games, so I was using DOS demos from: https://scummvm.org/demos/#lucasarts

(You can see other variants of the demos by clicking on + signs on that page.)

After renaming demo files to same names as what ScummST expects, demos work otherwise fine with it, except that monkey1.prg does not proceed from game title screen with Monkey1 DOS demo.

PS. I'd rather have some config file (or CLI) options e.g. for switching music backend to MIDI, rather than needing to do that from F5 menu on game every startup...

[agranlund]

My best guess is that maybe this is a problem caused by using the demo versions. They are unsupported for other reasons and maybe they are also the cause of these issues too.

My real ST is currently packed away but I gave the same version of tentacle.prg a go in Hatari and it appears to work as expected; The F5 key worked, and the options I selected were being persisted in tentacle.inf and automatically applied on subsequent startups.

I was using Hatari 2.3.1 and 256kb EmuTOS1.0 (yes, I should update that emulator setup. But I never saw the issues you described on my real ST either)

[eero-t]

They are unsupported for other reasons and maybe they are also the cause of these issues too.

Are these reasons documented somewhere?

This F5 issue is the first one I've noticed with them, besides the Monkey1 demo not proceeding from title screen.

The F5 key worked, and the options I selected were being persisted in tentacle.inf and automatically applied on subsequent startups.

Ah, great! Could the file format be documented so that one can write it manually when F5 does not work?

I was using Hatari 2.3.1 and 256kb EmuTOS1.0 (yes, I should update that emulator setup. But I never saw the issues you described on my real ST either)

For ScummST case, I think the main reason to update Hatari (to v2.5) would be for a fix to MIDI interrupt issue that plagued BadMood development. More complicated user input handling can be tricky to handle well (see Miro's ScummVM and Doug's BadMood Atari-forum threads) and if emulation has Atari input interrupt issues when lot of MIDI output interrupts happen at the same time, it makes debugging awkward.

Another reason to update may be better 030 support, especially with MMU, but for that one should update also EmuTOS.

[agranlund]

They are unsupported for other reasons and maybe they are also the cause of these issues too. Are these reasons documented somewhere?

I really can't remember, it was years ago. There were definitely stuff with the demo versions since I explicitly stated in the readme that those are not supported. Monkey2 demo wasn't supported at all by the codebase this is mostly( ) based off. The other ones I can't really remember -- could have been special case code supposed to run on demo versions of a game, or code that weren't suppose to run on the demo versions of the game. ( ) It's mostly based off v0.6, with some parts picked from later versions and some parts picked from earlier versions. And even more parts either completely rewritten or heavily modified for size and speed - most stuff not relevant for the game that was compiled was ifdef'ed out. And stuff not relevant for anything I was interested in was basically removed, especially all those runtime compares all over the place dealing with if-this-game-or-that-game-or-that-platform etc etc..

Trying the Atlantis demo on the win32 version of ScummVM 0.6 exhibits the exact same behaviour - it will not bring up the options screen with F5, but it does with the full version of the game.

Ah, great! Could the file format be documented so that one can write it manually when F5 does not work?

It's a few bytes of binary so not really. Though I guess you could still construct such file with a hex editor or the like. I really think you ought to try the supported versions of the games, the key does work on the full version.