Hello, and welcome to a glimpse behind the scenes of the LP. Above is what I got when I first fired up La-Mulana to start preparing for this project. Well, almost, the VRAM message that pops up four or five minutes in wasn't working and I forgot to undo the fix before recording the above and I'm not sitting through it again for the sake of realism. Anyway, the GIF is almost six minutes long, consists only of the logo appearing and a message popping up below it, and I don't suggest watching the whole thing (I haven't). Read the rest of the post and come back and see how far along it's gotten.
Anyway, that's an easy fix. The game has two scaling methods, hardware and software. I don't know which one is running super-slow on my computer, but I do know that pressing F6 switches from it to the one that works normally, shown above. I've scaled the image down to the game's internal resolution, 256x192, but in full screen it scales up to display at 1024x768.
I also had a problem with slowdown at the first boss I fought. I fixed it in the LP by increasing the frame rate of the video, but the game itself was still running slowly. I had a play around afterwards, and found that the slowdown didn't occur if I switched from full screen (my preferred way to play) to windowed with alt-enter. But the colours were messed up.
Pressing F6 again fixed that. And it didn't bring back the ridiculous slowdown I was getting in the other stretch mode on full screen. But the image is now tiny! It's running at MSX resolution, 256x192, on my 1680x1050 screen. This is what the F7 button is for:
F7 switches between 1:1 pixels, 2:1, and 4:1. You get a nice big picture, but for some reason part of the screen cuts off when you go above 1:1, making those sizes unuseable.
So I hit alt-enter again to return to full screen, and things have changed again. The game is now running at 640x480 in full screen, with its internal resolution of 256x192 doubled to 512x384 and black borders added to the edges. When I take a screenshot with printscreen, each apparent pixel is actually a 2x2 block of pixels where normally they're 4x4. This isn't as nice to play as when the game takes up the full screen, but there's one crucial difference: there's no slowdown against the giant boss in this mode. Unfortunately I can't find a way to set the game to run like this, I can only get to it by switching in and out of full screen, but assuming it works for any future slowdown I've found a way to keep the game playable.
Pressing F6 again gets me this: the game stretched to 640x480. That's not a clean multiple of its original resolution, and it looks terrible.
So I hit F6 again, getting the image back how it should be. For whatever reason, the border of the screen remains what it was at the stretch.
Here's my copy of the game's font file. It's a bitmap that I guess the game pulls from when it needs to draw text. You may remember I had some difficulty with text not showing on the in-game MSX computer. For whatever reason, in recent versions of Windows the white text wouldn't show on those screens. So I had to edit this file to change the colour of the white text. To do that, I used a hex editor called xvi32. The white used in the game has the hex value FFFFFF, so I searched for that and replaced it with FFFF99, the blue seen here. But it doesn't show as blue in-game. Instead, it's grey. I think the reason for that is that the game runs on a 16-colour palette. I just had to change it to something closer to the in-game grey than the in-game white, and it the game would round the colour to one of its sixteen options.
This fix I didn't come up with myself, I got it from here, although I had to set a different value than they did to get it to work. That page also mentions another bug with shadows showing up behind all the sprites that fortunately I haven't had happen. Yet. Hopefully I don't have any more difficulties running this decade-plus old game. It's entirely possible there'll be windows updates that break it in new and annoying ways before I finish.
Next Time:
Part 10: Life
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