Hahaha wow I fucking suck. The floppy with the Koala Painter software is fucked up, it was bent during storage and wouldn't operate in the drive. I thought "Oh this is already online, I don't need to worry about protecting the disk" and did surgery on it
Disk is now giving constant read errors and the software is not online. I might have destroyed one of the only copies. Actual Fuck.
HOLY SHIT
I retried like 40 times and *took the disk out of the jacket and wiped it down with iso* in desperation, then got another twenty read errors AND THEN IT SUCCEEDED
..aaaand it's genuinely Pcjr only, so it only runs under DOSbox :p :p
I retried like 40 times and *took the disk out of the jacket and wiped it down with iso* in desperation, then got another twenty read errors AND THEN IT SUCCEEDED
..aaaand it's genuinely Pcjr only, so it only runs under DOSbox :p :p
And while I can't run it on the real steel machine with a real gameport, with a USB>Gameport adapter DOSbox is able to at least prove the program executes. There's something about how this works that screws up the sampling so it's unusable, but I could select items, make dots.
I did some hacking on DOSbox and built a rudimentary mouse-to-joystick patch. JOYTEST.EXE proves it works from the POV of a normal joystick app but KP is not a normal joystick app so, unsurprisingly, it has issues.
By taking the mouse position within the dosbox window as a -1 to +1 float and sending that as a joystick position I am able to get JOYTEST to reflect the position of the mouse accurately. And KoalaPainter's cursor DOES track the mouse, but,
I'm not sure what valid values for joystick X and Y are within dosbox, so maybe 0-128 (per joytest) isn't correct? However the second joystick wobbles around 64,64, and there *is* no second joystick, so I assume that was "center"
So KoalaPainter would track the mouse but it was off by 50% - full extents put the cursor in the middle of the screen. Lost for an explanation, I set the multiplier to 3 instead of 2 (so the float now runs from -1.0 to +2.0, definitely invalid) and now KoalaPainter roughly tracks
JOYTEST also now reads values from 0 to 190 or so, which makes me REALLY curious where the fuck this is supposed to max out. 256? Why is J2 at 64,64 with literally no input? Curiouser and curioser
Footnote: Ever calibrate an analog stick in Windows? Ever notice how its uncalibrated center position is never center or upper left, but roughly 25% of the way down the X and Y positions? That's about 64,64 in a 256,256 coordinate space, so maybe this is normal.
Anyway, I got KP to track *roughly* but it's not what I'd call working. The "mouse" cursor in the app jitters constantly even though I know for a fact the joystick isn't moving - it can't be, it's a float value stored in memory, it's *impossible* for it to change.
I was able to *sort of* click on things. Like I can get a few menu items to register after I hammer the mouse button like 30 times, and one time i even got into the drawing interface but i couldn't get it to draw.
This all feels like timing issues so I wasn't surprised when, on a whim, I changed the cycles count in DOSbox and the cursor suddenly jumped 3". Turns out the cursor position is being calculated through some kind of timed loop that depends on a fixed CPU speed. Whoops!
This is an intriguingly negative outcome: There is no reason for me to continue making attempts to get this working, because it will *never* work correctly on anything that isn't exactly the speed of a PC Jr. Maybe pcem can do it, but DOSbox is incapable.
It's that weird, rare outcome where you didn't get what you wanted, but you were mercifully released from the cycle of pursuing it by a definitive "no, never"
