User settings

Last modified: 26 May 2024

Although YeOldeDink's new features are mostly for dissecting the engine's internals, there are several new features that enhance the existing Dink experience. The following are available by activating debug mode with Alt+D and selecting them in the relevant menu.

Display options

  • Alternate text display is for when the author has used Seth's "multiple colours in text" feature.

  • Pause on focus loss will automatically pause and resume if you alt+tab out or similar and then come back.

  • Screen transition toggles the sliding effect upon moving screens.

  • Texture filtering switches between nearest neighbour sampling and bi/tri-linear filtering depending on OS/backend

  • Ignore aspect ratio will fill the entire screen in maximised window and fullscreen modes rather than using 4:3.

  • Smooth fades: will make fades work a bit more like they did in old releases of Dink.

Audio

The audio window allows one to change the music and SFX volumes independently, as well as choose the MIDI backend in MixerX builds.

  • Speech synthesis narrates all the game's text.

  • Direction-based positional audio adjusts the apparent direction of audio sources per the direction of the player sprite.

  • Positional audio distance delay simulates the speed of sound and helps get rid of the initial blast on screen change.

  • MixerX settings: change MIDI playback for subsequent MIDIs. For more permanent changes, set these in yedink.ini.

Authentic-sounding MIDI output

To hear MIDIs as one probably would have in 1998, selecting the ADLMIDI option under MixerX settings will provide OPL3 Sound Blaster-style output.

Of the various emulation engines for ADLMIDI, Nuked is the most accurate at the expense of CPU.

SoundFonts and high-quality MIDI output

For the best MIDI output, a good-quality sf2 FluidSynth-compatible SoundFont is recommended for use such as "General User GS". SoundFonts can be set in yedink.ini, and also from the command line with the SDL_SOUNDFONTS environment variable.

Set the var to the full path of your soundfonts, and then set SDL_FORCE_SOUNDFONTS to 1 to override the inbuilt SoundFont search. Using the environment variable allows for "chaining" of SoundFonts in which one with more instruments will fill in the gaps of one that doesn't. Be aware that this occurs in reverse order, so your least-populated SoundFont should be specified last with all separated by a semicolon.

Please keep in mind that your RAM usage will skyrocket with particularly large sf2 files (such as Timbres of Heaven) which may degrade overall performance.

TiMidity GUS Patches

If you'd like to use the TiMidity MIDI backend, you'll need to install a set of patches beforehand. These are a bunch of samples that allow for it to render audio rather than instantly crashing. Download these and then decompress to the root of your C:\ drive on Windows. On GNU/Linux, they may be installed with the relevant TiMidity packages from your package manager, or extracted to /usr/local/lib.

A search for "TiMidity GUS Patches" with your favourite search engine should yield myriad alternative pats in case the collection above is not to your liking, with many being available on Doom source port sites.

Input

In the "Gamepad and Touch" window, you may check to see if your controller has been detected and if it has a mapping assigned. Pressing 'reinitialise input' will allow you to force recognition of newly-added controllers regardless of the -nojoy command line option.

If you have a touch-capable device such as a 2-in-1 laptop that sends touch events, you will also be able to switch on touch input and configure the amount of fingers for each action.

Quick and Auto save

Available from the "quick save" menu. Saves into high-numbered slots except for autosave which uses slot 10 every time a screen border is crossed or a warp is stepped on.