Arcticfox 100% by Scoopex [web]
s C O O P E x
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g E N E R A T i O N s a H E A d
: Present in 2020 :
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- [ Arcticfox 100 % ] -
It's Christmas time again and, just like last year, we bring you a fully
working version of game which wasn't cracked back in the glory old days
of the Amiga scene. As usual we enhanced the game to run on (hopefully)
all Amigas out there.
The Amiga version of Arcticfox was, as far as I (StingRay) am aware never
cracked back in the day (TM). This has now been fixed. The game was
protected with Electronic Arts' very own encryption which was very good
for its day and not trivial to crack. The game binary was encrypted and
loaded with a special trackloader which decrypted and relocated the
binary and used custom routines to emulate the dos.library behaviour.
The protection layers have been completely removed and all files have been
converted to standard DOS format. Converting the game from trackloaded
to normal DOS files was somewhat tricky as I had to write code to claim
sprite 0 (mouse pointer) as the game uses it. This is one of the reasons
why this release has been quite delayed as it took me a while to come up
with a proper solution. In the original game this didn't matter as it
doesn't open a CLI/Shell screen since it is trackloading.
The game also had a few bugs, it didn't work properly with fast memory
and the DOS routines (LoadSeg/Seek) didn't use correct registers and hence
only worked on certain Kickstart versions. These problems have all
been fixed. There also was a long delay before starting the game
(probably to aid debugging) which has been disabled.
Once I had fixed these problems I tried the game on a fast machine
and this delayed the release once more as the game didn't work
at all. It locked up after the title screen, this was caused by an
interrupt problem. Once fixed, I could test the game further and noticed
that it ran much too fast. Fixing these problems took a while, mainly
caused by the fact that I had to deal with very important projects at work
leaving almost no time for any Amiga stuff for several months.
Now the game worked fine on fast machines but there was one last problem
to solve. In the menu part (where you can select the game mode) there
sometimes were some very annoying graphics glitches. And these took
me quite some hours to solve as I first suspected that they were caused
by missing blitter waits, wrong timing or something similar. I created
quite a bit of code for trying to fix these, yet, without any success.
Once I tried the game on my 3.x A500 I noticed that these problems weren't
CPU related as they occured on my 3.x 68000 A500 too. Long story short,
after many hours I tracked down the problem to a SetRGB4 call (a function
in the graphics library) which I then coded a workaround for which solved
the annoying glitches. This all required quite a bit of code as the
game binary uses overlay hunks hence the patch had to be applied when
the hunk in question was loaded into memory. Didn't make it any easier
but trivial patches are boring anyway. :)
Here's a summary of all fixes:
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- All protection layers removed (encrypted binary, disk check)
- Wrong return code checks for several OS routines fixed
- Memory bugs fixed to make game run with fast memory
- Long delay when starting the game removed
- Graphics problems on Kickstart 3.x machines fixed
- Timing and interrupt problems on fast machines fixed
Enjoy a classic game from the early Amiga days. The manual can be found
on this disk too.
A Scoopex release in December 2020. Merry Christmas everyone.
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