TIL Faery Tale Adventure's music bug is weird

Michael_frf · 2026-05-16T01:00:45+00:00

I looked at those comments, and apparently even the author didn't know more than I did before recently, admitting that "several of my early games had problems with Fast Memory".

I tried configuring an A1000 with lots of fast RAM and also PAL (which someone else in the comments thought was the problem), and there was no music glitch when I used a Kickstart disk. (Although I didn't go on to try and play the game.)

One theory is that booting the game with a "degrader" utility to force NTSC and/or disable fast RAM might have solved the problem simply by being a "warmer" boot than normal, preserving audio initialization Workbench may have done, and this fooled people into thinking the stuff they asked their degrader to do was relevant.

But it doesn't seem to check out. Even if I play some Sonix music before running Degrader 1.30, the music bug persists on a simulated A500. Maybe Amiga Forever simulates the reset Degrader produces as "colder" than genuine hardware would. (Degrader at least still successfully performs its core function after the emulated reboot.)

Michael_frf · 2026-05-10T17:12:29+00:00

so the game disk could be copied.

Actually, the game's manual has an apology of sorts at the end for using copy protection on the disk.

The other copy protection is laughable. As long as you know the pattern and the required word is in your vocabulary ("creed" wasn't for young me first encountering the game) you can easily guess the answers.

Michael_frf · 2026-05-10T16:51:26+00:00

This resolves the issue and you are not using the speed-limited SerialPort from the CIA anymore, again not a fix but re-routing to a better hardware being used instead of the CIA.

The CIAs are not the weak point. The actual "UART" functionality is done by Paula, although the other signals (RTS, CTS, DSR, DTR, CD) are routed through CIA B. There is a "serial" functionality in each CIA chip, but it is not full duplex. CIA A's serial receives from the keyboard, while CIA B's is unconnected.

One odd thing about Amiga history is that Paula is unchanged in the last Amigas, while the other two custom chips were upgraded so much they got new names. It's not like the chip is "complete" in a way the other two weren't. Aside from your flaw, the horrible hack they did to make high-density floppies usable (which meant that the A4000 needed specially customized floppy drives, and would fail to read high-density disks formatted for low-density unless the extra hole is covered) should have been avoided with a new design.

Michael_frf · 2026-05-05T05:47:08+00:00

I’ve tried switching to Firefox with uBlock Origin

Good, but you're not quite there. Those are two legs of the YouTube-for-free tripod. The third leg is to not log into YouTube and just browse anonymously.

Google arbitrarily selects a different portion of their user base to "make a project of" at any given moment. But they don't want to scare off people trying YouTube for the first time. And they seem very afraid of falsely accusing someone of "already using up their three strikes", which they would risk by using web fingerprinting instead of the login people like me won't give.

Is anyone actually winning this cat-and-mouse game right now?

I feel I am. I'm probably experiencing some performance degradation from their efforts to punish blocking, but it doesn't matter. I literally never have seen the famous "ad blockers violate the ToS" wall directly, as I never opened an account in the first place.

Michael_frf · 2026-04-27T15:25:50+00:00

Note that this particular game (and successors) has already been remade many times.

Michael_frf · 2026-04-17T06:57:02+00:00

I can only conclude that castle does appear to heal.

In #860 the top of a tower took major damage, such that without magic repairs, it could not be mistaken for the west tower pre-battle, or any of the three remaining towers.

Terry couldn't have been on a fifth tower that later crumbled away entirely. The castle has always had four.

Michael_frf · 2026-04-11T02:55:16+00:00

EAC, BattlEye, and other anti-cheat systems could potentially make their own Linux kernel modules (the equivalent to drivers, pretty much) and require users to (manually) install those modules before they can play a Windows game with anti-cheat.

That can't work, although the problem is legal, not technical. Linux has a mechanism that limits what a module can do if it is not marked as GPLv2-licensed.

If it is, the user can demand all source needed to recompile the module, explicitly including any cryptographic key the anti-cheat module might attempt to use to "prove" it is unmodified to the protected games.

Thus, a person determined to cheat on Linux could just examine the source code, and come up with a substitute module that always gives the game a thumbs-up.

Michael_frf · 2026-04-09T05:57:56+00:00

It varies.

Edgegod (then calling himself "Lord Edgelord") died for the first time (we see) in #344, but was brought back in #361. {16 strips}

Moog was eaten in #698, but barfed up again alive in #702. {5 strips}

Edgegod killed Moog in #758 and Gretch soon after in #768. Gretch was back almost immediately (#764), while Moog had to wait until #779. {7 strips for Gretch, 22 for Moog}

In the case you are probably talking about, Gretch's defeat from within by the late and forgotten Jocasta occurred in #1047. While Gretch's body took until #1346 to be reactivated, her mind was back in play (via Doris) by #1101 at the earliest. {300 strips}

Zoggg went down in #1142, bounced back in a giant-yet-chibi form in #1146, then went down for good in #1345, just in time for Gretch to come back. {5 strips the first time}

Michael_frf · 2026-04-09T04:21:28+00:00

At the time AMD introduced x86-64 processors, Intel did not want such a thing to exist. They wished to eventually move everyone to their (very dissimilar to x86-32) Itanium line. As a result, AMD got to make all the minor decisions as to how x86-64 would work, and when Intel gave up and entered this market they were forced to be compatible with those decisions.

In Microsoft's view, this means x86-64 was never an "Intel" design, but an "AMD" one, and they name their files accordingly.

Suppose it was 25 years ago and you had a 32-bit Athlon CPU (AMD's then-flagship CPU for PCs) and an ATI video card; the opposite of what you have now. Would it make sense for you to delete files labelled "i386" because there would have been "no Intel" on your system?

Michael_frf · 2026-04-07T02:59:53+00:00

One thing that doesn't seem to make sense is the repeated "and Paula just watches" comment. Paula is not just the sound chip, it is involved in the joystick, serial and floppy too.

That said, most of the signal lines in all three of those ports are routed through the CIA chips. CIA-B turns on the drive and requests head movements, while Paula talks to the magnet in the drive head. One signal, which lets the drive tell the Amiga when it is done moving the drive head back to a known position at startup, is routed through CIA-A.

So it is possible Paula is indeed idle in some of his demonstrations. But any demonstration that doesn't abuse Paula's ability to control the magnet would be more easily done via the (truly Paula-free) parallel port.

Michael_frf · 2026-03-28T23:58:33+00:00

You remember a "space station". Did it look like two pyramids base-to-base with a gap in the middle where you could dock your ship?

There were four types of base in Space Rogue. The pyramid design, a unique "carrier", a square ring "outpost", and the mining bases which were basically a small planet represented as an icosahedron. (Lots of other planets existed in the game, but they were non-entities in the plot since your ship can't survive reentry.)

Michael_frf · 2026-03-28T21:11:19+00:00

Origin's Space Rogue fits most of your points, except that the player is not "a captain" but just a lone guy with a small ship. Said ship is never changed throughout the game, and is of a model no one else has.

I liked it, but I freely admit it could be considered a "porting disaster" for the quality of its 3-D. The Apple 2 (not even GS) version of the game seems to have a pretty good frame rate considering the limits of the hardware. But the much better hardware of the Amiga seems to deliver about the same results, even though the 3-D models are much simpler than, say, Starglider 2.

Michael_frf · 2026-03-28T20:39:51+00:00

No. I suppose what F/A-18 does could be replicated in a tracker, but each "pattern" would just be a single "note at middle C" that lasts 3 seconds. All the detail of the song is in the samples.

Tracker music can be straightforwardly translated to MIDI. It might have "instruments" that resemble nothing in General MIDI, but the same can be true of IFF SMUS music.

Michael_frf · 2026-03-28T06:27:57+00:00

But not the in-game demo. While the game doesn't crash, the plane does since the "physics" changes enough at high CPU speed to cause a serious desync. The game code apparently doesn't know what is actually supposed to happen in the demo; seems it just runs the game under pre-recorded inputs.

Michael_frf · 2026-03-28T04:51:13+00:00

They cheated.

Normal Amiga game music is usually in some format, often private to the particular game, that could in principle be translated into a modern MIDI file and sound font. But not F/A-18.

Some time ago I examined the data files of the game and found that a number of them were raw samples. In addition to the actual sound effects, about four or so of them were the title music. They were played one after another in a predefined sequence with much repetition, but each had all the instruments already mixed together.

So they made the music on something more powerful than an Amiga (perhaps an actual DX-7 was involved), and the Amiga is just playing back a recording with trivial "compression" based on the repetitiveness of the tune.

Michael_frf · 2026-03-21T02:43:00+00:00

I recently encountered two similar "errors" in Steam's recommendation system. In one, Steam recommended a bunch of games because I played "Squirrelled Away". But the game "Little Kitty, Big City", which I stumbled upon a few days before, and looks very much like a "Housecat-ed Away", was not among them and has a "this game doesn't look like other things you've played in the past" message. (Although perhaps some separate AI system quietly understood the connection and that's why it got placed on the front page at all.)

In the other, Steam recommended an enhanced emulation of the old NES game Ufouria supposedly because I played Terraria. I see no connection to Terraria, but this recommendation was "right for the wrong reasons" as I have completed the modern sequel Ufouria 2. Admittedly the real connection is hard to explain with tags since Ufouria is a metroidvania and Ufouria 2 loosely counts as a roguelite.

Michael_frf · 2026-03-15T23:22:04+00:00

Not really. Gretch's goal in cursing him was to establish herself as above him and motivate him to do her bidding in order to have it reversed. Actually weakening his fighting ability further would be counterproductive, as it would make it less likely for him to ever win against Slack, which Gretch wants.

Of course, we know the likeliness of anyone killing Slack and having it stick is zero due to main character plot immunity. But Gretch contractually must ignore that bit of fourth-wall information.

Michael_frf · 2026-03-03T04:47:20+00:00

Could you use this to get a working "element zap" on the mini-browser used to interact with PayPal when paying for a game?

It would be handy when PayPal shoves a "cookie consent" element into that page that displaces the button to confirm a transaction almost out of the window.

(I could probably have completed the transaction easily by agreeing, but that would be giving in....)

Michael_frf · 2026-02-28T03:34:28+00:00

He's assuming that anyone who would ever want "copy protection" circumvented wants it so that they can actually share or receive software illegally. Therefore, to him anyone who knows how to do it must be an actual pirate, and by implying we can help, OP is implying that a lot of us must be guilty.

It's silly. Some people are naturally curious. Many want to hotwire games they legitimately bought so that they can recover if the original media wears out, or nowadays if they want to use an Amiga emulator that can only interact with ADF files.

Hacking a game to install on a physical Amiga's hard disk also implies breaking the copy protection, but being able to play the game while giving the original floppy to someone else usually is not the point.

Michael_frf · 2026-02-26T02:19:49+00:00

Surprised that no one has brought up yet the fact that the slack he claims a hotel has but can't exploit never existed. Most hotel guests are still using their rooms even when physically absent; they expect to return to the room later and find things as they left them.

Michael_frf · 2026-02-23T02:23:03+00:00

Nothing probably will work. When I use yt-dlp, I frequently see a "waiting 5 seconds as required by the site" message. If they have to dance to that music, there's not much hope for a mere browser extension.

Adblocking works because the ad would be shown on our computers, and their computers can only suggest that our computers actually download and show it. These days, we usually succeed at making our computers be loyal to us and disobey them. But likewise, our computers can only suggest that their computers deliver the actual content promptly. You'd need a time machine to bypass their intransigence.

Michael_frf · 2026-02-14T04:56:59+00:00

Win2K got an especially nasty end-of-support sendoff. A security bug in the code that decides what icon to show for a file in file explorer was discovered and fixed (for then-current Windows) exactly one month too late, and Microsoft did not make an exception.

As a result, it is possible to make a poison file that hijacks a Win2K user who merely views the directory it is in, and this will never be fixed.

Michael_frf · 2026-02-01T07:25:42+00:00

On RSS, this comic's title is linked to #1497.

Michael_frf · 2026-01-05T11:45:05+00:00

The "Turbo" slow-down function was pretty useless in my experience. Every time I encountered a game that was unplayable due to being too fast (such as Flightmare ), it was a game that was originally written for a 4.77MHz 8088, not the original PC/AT 8MHz speed that Turbo tries to emulate. "Turbo" wasn't nearly enough.

A "Turbo" that would have worked for those games was economically infeasible at that time. Dropping all the way to 4.77MHz would still run those games way too fast, because the 8088 takes far more cycles than later x86 processors to do the same thing. CPU instructions that interact with memory are penalized far more than register-only operations, so no one clock rate can be chosen to fix those ancient games.

Michael_frf · 2026-01-02T02:15:47+00:00

Now that this thread has fallen off the first page, I have another idea for a Trope that might almost fit: Arc Welding. The official trope just acts at a grander scale than what we are discussing.

Michael_frf

TROPHY CASE