Demo THE CURE

I've just noticed that I never told you about my demo THE CURE here - at least, I can't find any post about it here, neither from me nor from somebody else. Well, given that I've released an update a few minutes ago, I can tell you now about both the demo and the update

The demo is available for free download from https://www.retream.com/THE_CURE, where you can find also further details.

The update is due to the fact that lately I realized I could make the startup and cleanup code of SkillGrid more robust, so I improved it further. I decided to apply the same improvements to my other productions, and today it was THE CURE's turn...

v1.1 (20210602)
* Made startup and cleanup code more robust.
* Fixed (unlikely) memory leak in cleanup code.
* Replaced "actual" with "current" in standings graphics.
* Fixed/improved README.

Thank you so much Saimo for this update. The demo is one of my beloved demos out there. Great work.

At the itch.io you have the following graph




is there a way for someone who runs the demo on his machine to get similar values, so to somehow benchmark his machine?

@walkero

Thank you :)

For the performance graph, you'd need a special executable by me, then to send me the data logged by it and then to wait for me to process the data... sorry, not feasible :p

No worries. I was just curious... Thanks again for the hard work you do.

My pleasure!

Just released a slightly revised version.

v1.2 (04.08.2021)
* Made startup and cleanup code more robust.
* Made a few tiny optimizations.

https://www.retream.com/THE_CURE

While working on the SkillGrid update, backporting to it all the improvements I recently made to my other projects, I realized that those improvements came with a couple of new bugs. THE CURE was affected by them, so here's a new bugfixed version.

https://www.retream.com/THE_CURE

v1.3 (19.08.2021)
* Fixed recently-introduced memory leak in startup code.
* Replaced unreliable CIA-access-based delay code at startup with machine-agnostic code.
* Made a couple of minor internal changes.

@saimo

thanks for the update Simone & congrats again for getting 1st place last year for this awesome and one of a kind DEMO for our AMIGA

@328gts

Thank you so much :)


@all

This update was not planned, but, still, it happened - and makes the demo even better. In short: it improves the music, it improves the audio-to-video sychronization, it adds a few more palette effects and brings other little improvements (for the details, check out the changelog below).

Get THE CURE v1.4 from https://retream.itch.io/the-cure and enjoy!

v1.4 (29.04.2022)
* Improved music: improved S/N ratio by eliminating a peak (caused by the "str" of "street" in the spoken part) and re-normalizing the waveform; amplified initial part a little bit; reduced greatly the noise that affected the coda (due to the 8-bit quantization) by amplifying that part of the waveform to the maximum and balancing that with a real-time volume change; increased sampling frequency to 29073 Hz (side effects: channels 2 and 3 can no longer be used, so the output volume is lower; music decoding takes a little longer as there is more data to decode each frame; the CHIP bus time taken by audio DMA is almost halved, which makes the demo less demanding).
* Added switch-off of filter to ensure music sounds as it is supposed to.
* Fixed audio-to-video synchronization: fixed drifting caused by the difference between the actual and theoretical rates (~49.92 VS 50 Hz) of the video refresh (that, by the end of the demo, caused an asynchronism of ~0.5 s); fixed 60 ms asynchronism caused by the fact that the first three frames required for music setup/buffering were ignored; fixed a few timing marks in the script (an off-by-one mark which caused a peak of operations in the specified frame; a mark that caused the following effect to execute 4 frames too late; a few marks that were off by a frame).
* Fixed a bad routine pointer (caused by a wrong letter in a label in the source code; it is quite incredible that this did not produce disastrous results).
* Added some palette effects.
* Optimized music decoding by unpacking and undeltaing data at the same time (why it was not like this right from the beginning is a mistery).
* Made some other small optimizations.
* Made startup and cleanup code more robust by shielding some critical operations from NMIs and by dealing with audio playback performed with direct hardware access by other programs concurrently.
* Added version string.
* Improved/extended README.

Just released a little update. This should cure (heh) the stuttering I've seen on some boards that are more than capable of running the demo at full speed.

https://retream.itch.io/the-cure

v1.5 (2.1.2024)
* Improved CPU data cache handling on 68040 and 68060.
* Ensured the system MMU setup does not affect performance.
* Ensured the 68060 susperscalar dispatch is enabled.
* Made some small optimizations.
* Made startup and cleanup code more robust.

Really nice demo, thanks.