[Scummvm-devel] Re: DC port status

[Marcus Comstedt]

Max Horn <max at quendi.de> writes:

> I think I asked this already in the past on a tracker item, but for
> the sake of the other people on scummvm-devel: would you please give
> us a brief status update on the memory issue on the DC? Is the COMI
> intro now working fully? IIRC, memory is better now, but the CD speed
> (or rather, seeking times?) still pose a major obstacle. Is that
> correct? Or if memory is still lacking, can you estimate how much?


According to metafox, the whole intro runs now.  I haven't tried it
myself since I would have to dump the CDs as I need to use
CD-emulation for the plugin loading when developing.

As for "CD speed", the problem, as before with The Dig, is that the
heap management is poor and throws out things which are actually in
use, so that they must immediately be reloaded.  If this happens at
the same time as something is being streamed from CD (speech, for
example) the seeking back and forth will chop things up.  It can be
fixed by increasing the watermarks for the heap manager, although it
would take some experimenting to find out exactly how much.  Possibly
improving the algorithm would be a better plan.


> Maybe disabling the whole HE code for the DC builds would help. It
> should be possible to add a ENABLE_HE_GAMES (or so) #define to control
> that...

The scumm plugin is indeed very large, so it might be possible to
split it into serveral smaller plugins (HE and LAC for example) if
more memory needs to be saved.  I can't say whether this is actually
the case though.  Someone need to play though the game to find out if
the available memory we have now is enough or not.  Although I don't
think anyone would like to play it through with the heap management we
have now.


  // Marcus