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Golden Axe XT

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n0p

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While digging through floppy archives i remembered that long, long time ago i was so impressed with the Golden Axe, that i tried to run it on my XT and experience was awful.
My XT had no turbo mode, so it was absolutely not playable. I managed to find "problematic" part - it was a timer routine running at 7Khz. It had an internal 8 cycle counter so i removed counter and reduced frequency 8 times as well and removed sound. It started to run much better.
I have recreated that hack now, and it's again somewhat playable at 4.7Mhz and runs absolutely nice at 8Mhz / CGA. if anyone interested - i can provide executable.
Video (NEC V20, 8Mhz):
 
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Yeah, my wish from 30 years ago too. I always assumed it's a 286 game since it would just freeze my M19, CGA or VGA.
So please attach your version, I'll try to run it on both systems
 
Great, I'll run all that stuff later tonight.
How much does the original PC speaker music routine take cycles, can it be retained somehow?
 
Zare said:
Great, I'll run all that stuff later tonight.
How much does the original PC speaker music routine take cycles, can it be retained somehow?
Click to expand...

I didn't dig that deep, though i admit having music would be great.

Well, i took a deeper look. I thought (from those times) that GOLD.EXE is just a stub that runs AXE.DAT. Boy i was wrong. GOLD.EXE is music driver expecting to be run at about 875Hz. So now there's a version with music :) It runs definitely slower, but tolerable in turbo 8Mhz mode. But you can decide yourself :)
Attached:
AXEXT_NS.EXE - no sound at all, best speed.
AXEXT_M.EXE - with music, actually renamed GOLD.EXE that runs AXE.SND, not to interfere with original files.
Have fun!
P.S. Loading times are still very long.
 

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  • AXEXT.zip
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Great game! Despite my introduction to the series starting with the third part on Sega, I came across these games later on.
 

This is on 4.77MHz M19 with 512kb of RAM. It's...actually playable. Keyboard routine is suffering, but when you get into the 'groove' of the slow input scan you can play it consistently. Becomes more tactical less arcade :D

If I could run this back in the 90s when this was my main PC I would probably play a ton and beat it.
 
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Mbaya29 said:
Great game! Despite my introduction to the series starting with the third part on Sega, I came across these games later on.
Click to expand...

One of the first, if not the first, IBM PC game to have same qualities as console games of the age.
 
Zare said:

This is on 4.77MHz M19 with 512kb of RAM. It's...actually playable. Keyboard routine is suffering, but when you get into the 'groove' of the slow input scan you can play it consistently. Becomes more tactical less arcade :D

If I could run this back in the 90s when this was my main PC I would probably play a ton and beat it.
Click to expand...

IIRC i finished at least first level on my Poisk-1 back then :)
 
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