Cabal graphic glitches.

[Neville]

I'm just thinking that "Cabal (Bootleg)" has been showing graphic glitches for ages. Is there anything that can be done about it?

[Tux]

probably, but it takes time... This one worked at a time I think no ? Oh well, I'll have a look then I guess... !

After a quick look, it's a super old driver that nobody touched in ages and it shows !

The text graphics had been badly dumped at the time and so it was using only 2bpp (should have used 4bpp !). I think the game worked better in 8bpp in the very old dos versions though...

Anyway everything or almost should be redone in there, automatic rom loading instead of the painful decoding there, using graphic layers, and using the roms of some good dump... ! I never liked this kind of game so I never took the time to look into it. To fix these chars alone, should at least use a new rom for the chars, which will make the old romset incompatible.

In short, it's a mess !

Edited January 26, 2021 by Tux

[Neville]

I don't remember the game looking this bad on the old DOS builds of RAINE, either. But then, that was around v0.28, and in those days being able to play the game was already amazing. I wouldn't mind a romset change, as far as the set remains MAME compatible.

As for the game itself, I hated it on the arcades. Too difficult for me. On emulation, though, it's become one of my favorites. You should give it a try with the lowerst difficulty settings.

[Tux]

which is the default in the dipswitches, yeah.

Ok I think I'll fix it... (it's quite fun, the broken text layer is broken for 2 reasons : it misses half of its bits (!), and its transparent color is 3 instead of the usual 0 !

It's going to require some very special treatment, I can spend a little time on it... !

[Neville]

Great, thanks! I'll wait as long as it takes.

EDIT: Just read of the new version, that was fast! Now the game looks like it should.

Thank you very much!

Edited January 29, 2021 by Neville

[Tux]

I played with an old 0.28 in dosbox lately and I can confirm that the old dos version had the right colors (but in 8bpp only, there was not even a setting to display the game in more than 8bpp actually, these were the very old dos days !). But the sound was mostly broken, no wonder it gave me a lot of troubles here, there was some kind of weird bitswap on the sound command, like a protection to make it more complex than what it should be, anyway...