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Re: Super ThunderCats: The Lost Eye of Thundera -BOR on DC

Posted: Sat Oct 02, 2021 10:47 am
by marchegiano
Ian Micheal wrote:Oh yeah sorry 32 16 bit pal use way more memory and will not run above 15 fps 8bit pal will run 60fps on lastest dreambor :) IrfanView can dump and apply pal files

and yes it's a pain in the ass lol but it works correct
There was a very good tool that some use but it dont work for me Person called Dreambor put it up in one of my topics new version is trash it makes the files all pngs which is not what you want..



By hand hyper final fight almost broke me for doing any more over 1300 files 1 by one by hand it runs 60fps it was 15fps game that crashes on level 3 before the optimizing ..

It looks as good as the 16bit pal it was only using 256 colors

Problem is when using 16bit pal dreamcast has to sort throu millions to find the 256 used with 8bit it dont Not having to sort thru all those colors to find the same 256 means speed..
Bit of a mixed bag on that.

First thing I noticed is the majority of ThunderCats' images are already png.

Next thing I noticed, was these pngs are already 8-bit images.

I looked at dub's since I have it already extracted. He has gifs. Seems like I need to convert everything to gif, which, unless I don't understand images much, just open the pic and resave it as gif correct? Shouldn't muck with the pal at all if it already says 8-bit.

In all, I counted no more than 20 colors on any given palette. I might could get away with less than 256 without making the any noticeable change to the end result. What I'm looking at looks like what you described, a very empty palette with just a ton of space. From what I understand, if I were to eliminate that unused space I'd gain speed?

I'm going to convert all these pngs to gif and make a cdi and see how that goes. I looked in the .txt files. I realize I'll have to manually change .png to .gif there as well....such a pain!

Then, even if it runs well, I'm going to try and see if I can cut down to whatever is smaller than 8-bit. 6,4, I dunno yet, I'm just guessing based on the old windows display settings, 16 colors, 256 colors. I really think I can get this game down to 16 color palettes which I think is just 4 bit. May as well give it a go right? At least do it once because even if this isn't needed for Tcats it'll be something I want to know how to do for future games.


I'll be working on it as much as my family will let me today. Hopefully by the time y'all side of the planet is up I'll have something to show y'all.

Re: Super ThunderCats: The Lost Eye of Thundera -BOR on DC

Posted: Sat Oct 02, 2021 1:37 pm
by marchegiano
All .png images habe been converted to .gif, all the text file code with .png have been replaced with .gif as well. I've confirmed everything is 8 bit and converted what wasn't then made a cdi exactly the same way as I have been, with BootDreams.

Now I can get to the title screen but when I try to start a game the loading screen fades to the credits screen then exits.

I'm not terribly sure what the issue is, but, I'm going to guess it's probably the text files. I opened them all in notepad++ and used its replace feature to replace every instance of .png in the text with .gif. Seemed like a good idea but if converting all the images to gif is always safe on DreamBor then it must be something in the blind/auto conversion of the text.

I'll look around in the files and try a few different ways of doing the same thing.

When making cdi's do you need dummy files for dreambor?

Re: Super ThunderCats: The Lost Eye of Thundera -BOR on DC

Posted: Sat Oct 02, 2021 1:50 pm
by Ian Micheal
You can use nulldc it has console out put it will say what it cant load or why Dreambor is the only version that works on nulldc which was how i started this people had no console output with out a coder cable ..

Fading to credit means there was ether file loading error or script error or it could find the files only way to know is run it ether like me debug on hardware or on nulldc watch the console output .. other wise your pissing in the wind..

Other thing use openbor pc load it then put the errors in the start log if it cant load on openbor pc it cant on dreambor etc

Make sure your video.txt is set to 8bit pal find that in data

Re: Super ThunderCats: The Lost Eye of Thundera -BOR on DC

Posted: Sat Oct 02, 2021 1:58 pm
by Ian Micheal
send me the cdi and i will run it on nulldc and give you the ouput if you would like.

Re: Super ThunderCats: The Lost Eye of Thundera -BOR on DC

Posted: Sat Oct 02, 2021 3:18 pm
by marchegiano
Ian Micheal wrote:send me the cdi and i will run it on nulldc and give you the ouput if you would like.
I got it sorted actually. I hadn't found all the text files but once I did it booted no problem.

I am at a loss now. All the images are gifs in 8 bit. All the text files, this time I'm very sure, have had their pngs replaced with gif too. Boots fine, the first level starts fine but as it progresses it gets noticeably slower and by the second stages it's a mess, still.

I've not yer tried to make the gifs into 4bit so I'll give that a go, but, I think I'm going to pick another pak to work on. Because if I get better results that means I need to look else where to optimize Tcats, but if I get the same results then I need to pay more attention to my process and figure out what I'm messing up, I think.

Re: Super ThunderCats: The Lost Eye of Thundera -BOR on DC

Posted: Sat Oct 02, 2021 4:11 pm
by Ian Micheal
marchegiano wrote:
Ian Micheal wrote:send me the cdi and i will run it on nulldc and give you the ouput if you would like.
I got it sorted actually. I hadn't found all the text files but once I did it booted no problem.

I am at a loss now. All the images are gifs in 8 bit. All the text files, this time I'm very sure, have had their pngs replaced with gif too. Boots fine, the first level starts fine but as it progresses it gets noticeably slower and by the second stages it's a mess, still.

I've not yer tried to make the gifs into 4bit so I'll give that a go, but, I think I'm going to pick another pak to work on. Because if I get better results that means I need to look else where to optimize Tcats, but if I get the same results then I need to pay more attention to my process and figure out what I'm messing up, I think.
You can send it to me if you like and i will have a look sometimes these game creators put silly things in the scripts that kill speed

Re: Super ThunderCats: The Lost Eye of Thundera -BOR on DC

Posted: Sat Oct 02, 2021 5:25 pm
by Dakangel
Ian Micheal wrote:send me the cdi and i will run it on nulldc and give you the ouput if you would like.
You can send it to me if you like and i will have a look sometimes these game creators put silly things in the scripts that kill speed
DreamBOR wrote:That game is converted for OperBOR-Dreamcast make months for a Chinese, seek it on YouTube the gameplay.
When I have time, update the update and transfer it... Bye

Ese juego esta convertido para DreamCast-OpenBOR hacen meses por un chino, buscalo en youtube el gameplay.
Cuando tenga tiempo, actualizo la actualizacion y lo traslado al DreamBOR... Salu2
This is the exact same game requested here and is from Ro Magnus Larsson in january 2021 in this same forum:
https://dreamcast-talk.com/forum/viewto ... =5&t=13901

"A first attempt of a Thundercats game for OpenBOR engine (No other in existance playable in DC), a 2D Beat em up game. Graphics is not the strong side of this game, One can easily realize it was not supposed to be a Dreamcast level work and of course it can be improved in many aspects."

Download MEGA temporary link:
https://mega.nz/file/OGoEFSRS#06mDzujcq ... J3R4DkZ2Gg

Re: Super ThunderCats: The Lost Eye of Thundera -BOR on DC

Posted: Sat Oct 02, 2021 5:36 pm
by Ian Micheal
Yes it crashes later on and is very slow Also not unpack correct on that and would take 10 mins to load

Re: Super ThunderCats: The Lost Eye of Thundera -BOR on DC

Posted: Sat Oct 02, 2021 6:02 pm
by marchegiano
Ian Micheal wrote:
marchegiano wrote:
Ian Micheal wrote:send me the cdi and i will run it on nulldc and give you the ouput if you would like.
I got it sorted actually. I hadn't found all the text files but once I did it booted no problem.

I am at a loss now. All the images are gifs in 8 bit. All the text files, this time I'm very sure, have had their pngs replaced with gif too. Boots fine, the first level starts fine but as it progresses it gets noticeably slower and by the second stages it's a mess, still.

I've not yer tried to make the gifs into 4bit so I'll give that a go, but, I think I'm going to pick another pak to work on. Because if I get better results that means I need to look else where to optimize Tcats, but if I get the same results then I need to pay more attention to my process and figure out what I'm messing up, I think.
You can send it to me if you like and i will have a look sometimes these game creators put silly things in the scripts that kill speed
Zip with all the plain files: https://archive.org/download/thunder-ca ... derCats.7z
Dakangel wrote:
Ian Micheal wrote:send me the cdi and i will run it on nulldc and give you the ouput if you would like.
You can send it to me if you like and i will have a look sometimes these game creators put silly things in the scripts that kill speed
DreamBOR wrote:That game is converted for OperBOR-Dreamcast make months for a Chinese, seek it on YouTube the gameplay.
When I have time, update the update and transfer it... Bye

Ese juego esta convertido para DreamCast-OpenBOR hacen meses por un chino, buscalo en youtube el gameplay.
Cuando tenga tiempo, actualizo la actualizacion y lo traslado al DreamBOR... Salu2
This is the exact same game requested here and is from Ro Magnus Larsson in january 2021 in this same forum:
https://dreamcast-talk.com/forum/viewto ... =5&t=13901

"A first attempt of a Thundercats game for OpenBOR engine (No other in existance playable in DC), a 2D Beat em up game. Graphics is not the strong side of this game, One can easily realize it was not supposed to be a Dreamcast level work and of course it can be improved in many aspects."

Download MEGA temporary link:
https://mega.nz/file/OGoEFSRS#06mDzujcq ... J3R4DkZ2Gg
Link is dead

Re: Super ThunderCats: The Lost Eye of Thundera -BOR on DC

Posted: Sat Oct 02, 2021 6:09 pm
by Ian Micheal
Thanks :)