Here is a small picture of me at the beach of Abel Tasman in January.
My plan is to make a public release of Lynx Solitare at the Lynx 20 years event.
This solitare will have Klondike, Freecell and perhaps Spider as available card games. In addition to that I will sit down on my arranger and fill the cart with cool midi backgrounds you can buy with your credits in the game.
So what is the status of MegaPak?
Well... To put it out short. DONE!!!
The final release candidate was number 16. My kids have been playing it at home and it seems to be stable, playable, fun, great, absolutely Wonderful and definitely worth to be found in your collection of great entertainment for the Lynx.
So now we are done with the playtesting and fixing bugs.
The next step is the user manual. Yes, unfortunately some programs require explanations to get the most out of
The MegaPak cart is now pretty much filled up with bytes. As a matter of fact a bit too full from Xmas stuff so I have to put it on diet. Around 331 bytes needs to come off to be of the ideal weight (256k).
I try to create release candidate 6 on the 31st of December. If this succeeds and the cart is error-free you will see some fireworks around midnight on the 31st.
The title says it all. The X-mas is approaching at an alarming rate but the MegaPak has halted to complete standstill.
The last cart build is stable and nice in my opinion. Carl wants to have an intensive bug hunt in January before the cart goes into production.
--
Merry X-mas, Seasons Greetings, Happy New Year and so on,
Karri
Time flows at an alarming rate. Is it possible to release multicart 2006 in the year 2006?
The fine tuning goes on all the time but as this is a hobby project I get a few fixes per week from some developers. But this is good news for the MegaPak cart as now we have ChopperX high scores saved in the eeprom. And the cart is really quite playable.
I had MegaPak with me on the plane on my trip to France last weekend. As the Lynx is a bit bulky (it does not fit into my shirt pocket) I played
I assume that the Soundtool is the most developer-oriented piece of software on the MegaPak cart. But it can be entertaining for others too.
The MegaPak orchestra consist of 5 instruments.
2puck.zip
The Lynx has 4 channels that it can play at the same time. For some tunes like the Mozart Sonata I have one channel for the right hand and one for the left. Both hands play the Piano-instrument, of course.
Some other tunes have Drums, Saxophone, Trumpet and Bass.
For the MegaPak I co
This bug has bugged me for over a year now. And now I found it
A few years ago I started to play around with the Lynx sound engine. It sucks.
Anyway, I decided to find out if there is any decent sound available in that hardware and wrote a piece of code that produced every sound the Lynx is capable of producing. After that I started to remove duplicates and after around 20 hours of math on a modern PC it finally spit out a set of unique waveforms.
I found out that the Lynx can only
Wow. After lots of work the final build of the MegaPak is here.
My impression is that the LOL operating system makes the Atari Lynx feel very much like a modern console. It is fun just to move around the menus, listen to the tunes and fine-tune the preferences.
2600palgames_retrofan.zip
So the next question is what games are on the cart? Well, I let the screenshots speak for the content - enjoy
2600palgames_retrofan.zip 8kha2_20_21.zip
8kha2_20_21.zip wolfenstein_label.zip
Riding on the scandies in Norway is like being part of the Fellowship of the Ring.
No roads or houses to be seen anywhere, just vaste green hills and crystal clear cold rivers to wade in.
The summer has been exceptionally hot so we even arranged some foam-dancing to cool down in the evening.
You should try it - it is great clean fun
Hmm.. Natalias and Leru's make-up did not seem to survive it.
The cart is getting better all the time and I hope we can get the final build to
There is an old saying that when you code a game you get 80% done in 20% of the time. The last 20% of the game then takes up 80% of your time.
This seems to be the case also with MegaPak. We are now fine-tuning the playability of the cart, adding new graphics and fixing tons of small nasty details that our beloved testers don't like.
My other project is also going well. It is a love story on stage
The premiere went well and despite my terrible singing we got nice reviews.
I am t
The project is getting on quite well. Despite the crew of practically perfect programmers in this project we have found some bugs. They must have been introduced late at night when I spilled some coke on the keyboard and tried to wipe it away with my T-shirt. Anyway here is a simulated screenshot of what the LCD looks like on a real Lynx and also on the Handy emulator.
wantlist.zip
Enjoy the screenshot. The release date is real close now...
Hooray!
Today, 15 minutes ago I created the first complete cart build for our nice testers. The feature freeze was a success and now we have eight completed, polished applications on the cart. The names of the applications is still a closely guarded secret known only by me, Carl, lots of developers, their girlfriends and anybody who cares to read through my blogs or AtariAge newsgroups
For the next few days we collect bug lists and then we divide the fixing work to the developers.
The title says it all. Renya Iizuka really cheered up my day by sending me TWO entries for the multicart. I started by browsing through his code and it is a joy to read it. I wish I had innovative coders like this to work with during my real daytime job also. I work for a Japanese company with headquarters in Osaka nowadays so if I get a chance to go to Japan during the summer I just have to meet him.
So now we have entries from all over the World - Japan, US, France, Finland, Germany...
Now it is less than two weeks to Vappu or the 1st of May - the Biggest Celebration of the Year - at least where I live. It is the time to dress up in graduation hats, sing about love and the spring, drink champagne to the tunes of a marching band and stroll around the streets with balloons.
It is also the recommended deadline for preliminary submissions to the Multicart 2006. The real drop-dead line is on the 1st of June. Unfortunately my theater season will also start on the 1st of June whic
I have been awfully lazy lately. But fortunately the power of teamwork keep things going. Jum has again updated his wonderful ChopperX. Now there is new sounds, music and animation. The first level used to be full of balloons. Now there seems to be pine trees, hang-gliders and zeppelins.
Now I have a dilemma. Should I start coding again or just compile Jums game and play. That decision was not hard to make
The Atari Lynx software scene is very much alive. It is like a living language evolving from day to day. The limits of our beloved console has not been found yet. To show the life of the beast I decided to give it a visual heart beat. It was easy to do with just tickling the scaling engine a bit.
Its alive...
I also changed the playlist selection user interface a bit. With the A button you can start a tune. With the B button you stop the tune AND also toggle the selection in the playlist.
Although not really Mozart's first piano sonata, it is the earliest that survives. The opening Allegro is rather dispassionate exercise; although it's still a very good example of that gracefulness for its own sake which the period's produced in sometimes quite disgraceful overabundance. In contrast to this, the Andante is a sober, almost bittersweet moment of personal reflection.
Imagine. Mozart was only 19 years old when he produced this masterpiece in 1775. I just realized that Mozart is
The Lynx Multicart needs radio buttons. I don't mean web radio or FM reception but those round things that cause exclusive choices.
So now you have a tool to set the Multicart ComLynx in a mode to listen to incoming data streams. Usually you only have a choice to listen at 9600 bauds. But as I recently bought an USB-ComLynx dongle that can work at higher speeds I want to have the option to do this. This interface can be used to download data for running it in RAM or perhaps even to drop in sm
Today I did small improvements in the Images display. Now I have more backgrounds to choose from and I also implemented a menu-toggle button B so you can get rid of the menu while you browse through the bitmaps on the cart. Pressing A automatically advance you to the next image.
While I was playing around with the menus I also created a both-way scrolling list system for all submenus and used the button B for turning the music off in the Music menu. You turn it on my pressing A in the music
Today I integrated the French Multicart entry. I cannot make up my mind if it is easier or more difficult to play Tetris with a ball smashing things to pieces all the time.
The name and graphics is still going to change. Fadest has coded a very playable thing but I have not yet got the touch for using the ball to my benefit. Right now the ball just breaks lines that I have managed to put together.
The movements of the ball is very predictable and it moves slowly. You can use your dropping
Chris created a nice entry in a competition loooong ago. It was a simple simulation of a toy called Etch-A-Sketch that most of us probably had as a kid.
Chris has written it using lyxass. I hope to get the sources when he has finished fine-tuning the application. To integrate it fully with the LOL system I just need to add hooks for the Opt 2 key to allow background music and also to separate the background sprite into a separate RODATA-segment. Then I can use the background picture as a back
Today I finally managed to include a binary blob into the cart design.
Chris coded Picross in lyxass and he sent me the binary only. So here it is - tadaa - integrated into the mcart structure as a binary blob.
The funny thing is that when I first received it I wondered what it is. Some kind of icon painting program? But then Carl started to talk about that he has lived under a rock and had no clue about these new puzzles like Sudoku and Picross.
It took me about 10 minutes to solv
Today I started to fix all the broken instrument files and added a feature to run background music with lower volume levels in the background.
To control the music you use Opt 2 on any screen. It will cycle through the playlist like:
play_next_tune -> stop music -> play_next_tune -> stop music ...
In the software where you want to be able to use background music you just need to call a routine called play_next_tune() every time you press Opt 2.
PS. In case you wonde
Sometimes things don't work out the way they should.The Lynx has a flip-screen button for lefties that let you turn around the screen. Now you have to turn around the Joypad as well otherwise right/left and up/down get mixed and won't work.While writing the joypad driver for the cc65 compiler the joypad mask looks like80 UP40 DOWN20 LEFT10 RIGHTDue to some stupidity I obviously flipped it to10 UP20 DOWN40 LEFT80 RIGHTwhen this might be correct40 UP80 DOWN10 LEFT20 RIGHTWhat makes me even more pu
Remember the times when you sat in the back of a car with a tiny Game&Watch unit in your hands beeping. Now you have a real good chance to get nostalgic with TurboLasers (Sampo) new game Parafly.As usual it integrated nicely into the mcart structure. Some small audio problems remain to be solved as the ABC player has taken a few steps since Sampo wrote his game.At first I thought that this game is far too simple for the Lynx. But actually now after having played it for a while I suddenly re
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