ST-games with Falcon

[tuipveus]

Hi!

Can I know that why havent any of you used program called "backward" to play st-games with Falcon. That is really great peace of software.
Today I was able to play old games like Mega-Lo-Mania, Rotor, Downfall, Arcadian, Tom & Jerry, Beam, Double Dragon with that.

I used that software somewhere in -95 or -96 then I broke my falcon by editing settings of nvram with some software... Can't remember which. Now 17-18 years later I tried Falcon again and it worked. Probably nvram is corrupted somehow, or modern VGA -monitors can show NTSC-picture. I just remember that in ninetees I changed monitor to NTSC and was not able to change it back.

It is nice that there are other utilities like Gamex, Hole etc.

But of those "new adaptations" games listed in here: http://atari.8bitchip.info/plafh.html, I was able to play already in 1995 with Backward (At least Falcon and Space Harrier where that man flyes and shoots).

You can find backward from here:
ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/atari/falcon/utilities/

Backward is shareware and I tried to contact to developer, but didn't reach him. I would like to register it now.

I have some games I would be happy to share with you. I will make a new thread of those.

[Petari]

Thanx for this infos. I'm sure that most of Falcon users heard about Backwards and other similar utils, lite STEtoFalcon or something like ... 

http://atari.8bitchip.info/plafh.html  -  this is pretty old, and in fact outdated (over 4 years) - I did a lot of new support and many games in meantime. 

Backwards and other similar are good utils, but can not solve Falcon compatibility for many games. They set STEbus, Cache, PMMU, CPU clock and couple other things, but it is not enough if:  game for instance writes into Vfreq reg. of shifter - in such cases usually you loose video on Falcon (and TT) - only solution is to correct game's code. Then, we have stackframe related problems (8 bytes on stack instead 6 by Traps, Interrupts) - also needs correction of code.
And many other situations - often with timers.  So far, the hardest was to fix games where self modifying code writes only few bytes ahead - it fails on 68030 because of pipeline - CPU reads 3 instructions ahead, and if you write to RAM after that fetch (in time), CPU will have old data instead new, and there is a problem -  case of Maupiti Island, Vroom, etc.

I would not bother with finding Backward's developer - it is usually not possible after so many years.
Newer game hard disk adapts include all what Backward does, plus much more.
http://atari.8bitchip.info/fromhd.php

Of course, I'm interested in sharing games . Waiting for list.