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2022-11-05
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³¼COMPATIBILITY¼³
³¼PLEASE !!¼³
²
In the latest issue of McDisk,
Mount/Parasite wrote about the lack of
compatibility of many productions,
even today. I couldn't agree more, so
consider this article as: Quality
Coding, part II...
¹
Now, what kinds of incompatibility do
we have? The absolutely lamest is of
course when a program doesn't run with
fastmem, because the coder 'forgot' to
declare his copper-lists etc. as
chip-hunks. Luckily, this is not very
common nowadays.
Secondly, there's the productions
requiring a specific type of fastmem,
usually (or actually ALWAYS)
'slow-mem', that is, internal
A500-fast, located from $c00000
onwards. Examples of demos requiring
this are: Guardian Dragon 1 & 2 from
Kefrens, and Seeing is Believing from
Anarchy. A lot of you have probably
seen the text 'this demo needs 1/2 Mb
fast and 1/2 Mb chip' when trying to
run Seeing is Believing on an A2000.
As I have 2 Mb fast and 1 Mb chip, I
wondered a LOT when I saw this. Well,
of course I didn't, because I knew
this was just another example of the
typical lazyness among coders. Seeing
is Believing is just one of the few
demos that CHECK whether the type of
memory it needs is present, as opposed
to both Guardian Dragons, which just
crash when slow-mem isn't present.
Actually, even (? -ed) Hardwired
isn't totally A2000 compatible: If
run with 1 Mb chipmem, the music
crashes, and if run with real fast,
the demo 'locks' after some time.
Hopefully, most coders will soon check
which type of memory is present in the
computer their productions are run on.
There are several ways of doing this,
and none of these take more than 5
minutes to code.
Finally, there's the lack of compati-
bility with Kickstart 2.0 and the new
chipset. A LOT of bugs in utilities
are results of the coder 'forgetting'
to preserve registers a0, a1, d0 and
d1 between system calls, or forgetting
to initialize undocumented structure-
fields to 0. In hardware-coded
programs it's a bit more tricky to
mention some general mistakes, but all
I can say is: Follow the official
programming guidelines from Commodore,
as stated in the previous Coder's
Corner.
Of course, the coders aren't the only
ones to blame. A demo-competition-
rule like: 'The demo has to run on an
A500 1.2/1.3 with 1/2 Mb chip and 1/2
Mb fast' doesn't exactly force the
coders to make their demos as
compatible as possible! Instead, the
rules should be like: 'The demo has
to run on an Amiga with 1 Mb or more,
and multi-disk-demos MUST use extra
drives'. Demos that don't run on e.g.
A2000 should simply be disqualified.
Not even demos that NEED fastmem, but
run with both fake and real fast,
should be allowed, that is, 1 Mb
chipmem should be supported as well.
I think this would be appreciated by
many owners of A500+, A2000, Kickstart
2.0 etc. Remember: Quality coding
isn't just about adding 4 or 5 faces
to your glenz-vector, totally ignoring
compatibility with certain Amiga
models or operating system versions.
There ARE a LOT of other Amigas than
'1.2/1.3 A500s with 1/2 Mb chip and
1/2 Mb fast'.
³Estrup/Static Bytes