!Hopper running in different screen modes
Terry Swanborough (61) 152 posts |
I am still working from home and in a moment of rest (looking for an excuse not to do real work) happened to click on !hopper in the Diversions directory. I was surprised to see that !hopper would not run as standard on my Titanium as it needs mode 13 which is 320 × 256 256C I had downloaded the sources some time ago so I located !hopper for a quick look?. What started out as a quick look soon became a quest :-) Try it out and let me know if it works OK. Anyway the end result is go to This allows !hopper to run in mode 28 (640 x480 256) which seems to work on my titainium and PI400 If interested read below to what I changed. Terry Shift Double Click in !Hopper icon This will enable !hopper to run in 640 × 480 256c (mode 28) !hopper will run in almost any mode, you may see some colour font changes Once !hopper has been run once you can just double click !Deskimage I have included the files I have changed in the c and h directories. How it works. I have changed the program to use a sprite and all screen output is now drawn I have not attempted to update the RISC OS sources and will leave this to Terry |
Doug Webb (190) 1158 posts |
And ARMX6 as well. Thanks Terry, can you arrange to look for excuses and be bored more often :-) |
Rick Murray (539) 13806 posts |
Could be worth investigating if a contemporary machine has low enough latency to allow it to render into a window so can be played within the desktop…? I’d imagine, as long as it was co-existing with well-written apps, it ought to be pretty smooth on >=1GHz hardware. |
Terry Swanborough (61) 152 posts |
@doug Good to know that it works on other hardware, thanks for the response, not sure about getting bored more often, this distracted me a bit longer than I expected :-) @rick Although hopper is well written its always a challenge looking at other peoples software and working out what’s going on, as always hopper threw up some unexpected hurdles to overcome but if it was easy it would be boring :-) |
Sprow (202) 1155 posts |
I took a look at Hopper back in 2017 though I can’t remember now where I put my changes. I figured going for 640×512 was safest because that’s just a straight power-of-2 scaling on 320×256 so no need to worry about losing 32 rows. While it worked I quickly concluded that shifting 4x the data around wasn’t workable (it should still run on a Risc PC, like it used to) and that the real task was to change the way the redraw was done to only plot the bits that are moving rather than the entire screen! Even querying the available modes isn’t helpful, because you might have a platform with the mode available but not enough grunt to run the game. |
Andrew Rawnsley (492) 1443 posts |
Might I suggest that not having enough grunt to run the game shouldn’t really be considered a fatal problem if the alternative is “can’t run the game at all” due to the 320×256 being below the HDMI floor. I’ve tended to leave Hopper out of distributions simply because it fails to run on any modern hardware except Pi in non-default hardware-scaling mode. I’m really pleased to see Terry working on it, and would welcome any updates – esp if it can intelligently check to see what modes are available. |
Terry Swanborough (61) 152 posts |
I have had added a desktop window to hopper and have the graphics drawing in the window, it may take a while to untangle the intro screens and the main game from the tight loops they are running in. As you can see from the deskimage hopper can adapt to any screen mode,it runs OK ish on an iyonix I suppose we always have the original to run on older machines. If people think it’s worthwhile I could attempt a desktop version? I’m away for a couple of weeks, no computer access so I might have another go at hopper when I return if it’s of interest. |