MADS: Nebular: Animation sometimes freezes in intro scene transitions

[eriktorbjorn]

In at least some scene transitions in the intro, the animation freezes for a moment. Is it supposed to do that? It's easiest to see it in the scenes where you see the planet with some sort of cloaking/force field around it. Like this one:

[eriktorbjorn]

I've uploaded two recordings of a small part of the intro (with reduced quality to try and keep the file sizes reasonable). DOSBox would only give me PC speaker audio for some reason, but hey... at least that makes them easy to tell apart.

In DOSBox, the animation of the force field starts pretty much immediately. In ScummVM, it doesn't.

[fusefib]

Fixed in mads-animview-fix branch. PR later. There were intro issues across the three games.
The second to last commit should match DOSBox behavior @ CPU speed of [max] cycles.
The last commit adds a subjective compensation for fast systems - most relevant to Phantom or Dragonsphere - without throwing the timing out of sync.

The late Matt Gruson had some coding habits that didn't age well for porting. To quote him on his actual best game (WIP): "...you had to know how to talk to the chips back then. Programming down to the metal is a lost art."

And VGA was apparently part of the conversation. In this case, writing the palette and waiting on vertical retrace provided part of the timing... Among other issues.