On www.magicengine.com, David mentioned recently that some of the keyfiles were
coming up corrupt. I got mine today and it was fine. I'm sure that
if you drop them a line, a second (correct) keyfile will be mailed out.
I am mostly impressed with the project, though I do have a few small
qualms:
* I have a CD-ROM that the new version (w95) refuses to recognize.
The DOS version (.90) is fine with it. Another CD-ROM (an external)
that I attached to the same machine was fine with W95 as well.
(Naturally, new drivers for the Pioneer CD that's a problem are
nonexistent.)
* The W95 version is a bit slower, as I expected. Not a big deal on my
P2-266 at work, but on my P-120 here at home it's a minor issue, because...
* ...the frameskipping has taken a turn for the worse. Instead of four
settings on Function keys for frameskip, now the only option seems to be
auto-frameskip similar to what MAME does, and it's often choppy on my
P120. I would have preferred a way to set this manually. (I can set
a framerate of increments of 10 on the numeric keypad, but that's for
slow-motion, not for speeding things up!)
* Disabling sound (not just turning the volume off) has NO effect on
framerate! I couldn't believe this, but I tested it every which way.
That's my main method of gaining speed on every other emulator, since
taking away sound should take a lot of heat off the game engine.
No luck here. I'd rather have Blazing Lazers at 100% speed with no sound
than at 50% speed with sound.
On the plus side:
* It's here and it works and it's compatible with damn near everything.
The only game I tried that ME still has issues with is Saint Dragon,
which has no background plane; 200+ others all worked perfectly.
I haven't done much with the CD support yet, though (I'll dig up my Ys
disc and see if I can use it under Windows now). All of the games
I reported problems with in the beta cycles (Blazing Lazers, Devil's Crush,
Rastan Saga 2, etc.) all are fine now.
* Built-in system cards.
* If you have a machine fast enough, it's certainly capable of running
damn near anything at 100% speed.
Me? I'm registered and eagerly awaiting any upcoming DOS versions while
I'm playing this (which should be some months away, alas).
jeff. Or I could just go buy one of those EToaster things...
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