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Games that should have been made for Intellivision


mr_intv

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How about Zoo Keeper?
INTV_ZK_Big_zpsrqbq5lkc.png
Mocked up a possible layout on INTV. I'm not that familiar with the game so I'm not sure if a smaller pen would affect the gameplay. Thought maybe a scrolling engine might work as in 1/4 of the pen visible at a time, again idk may hurt gameplay even if it expands play area.

 

*Tried a 4:5X pixel expansion, seem some 320X200 shots but those aren't 4:3 exactly. Mostly trying alternates to 159x96 tiny screenshots.

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I took your mock and made it into something the Inty could actually display :-

 

attachicon.gifZooKeeper_mock.png

 

My bricks need work, but its certainly possible to do the game on the machine.

Do you mean the resolution I was just trying out something for website screenshot display? I'll stop doing them big if that is actually bad, the original was 160X96 which at 4:5X was 640X480 giving me the 4:3 aspect ratio, was trying to see what it would look like on a SD-TV as there is a fair amount of vertical stretch.

 

Looks great, I see you add some "SuperGraphics" lol, I've been trying to see what I can do in the default resolution with sprites but I hit a project that looks terrible without more pixels. ;)

 

Yeah I have no idea how the brick system works in the arcade, only thing I could see was the pattern flows in clockwise manner with the corner tiles absorbing the tiling junction. Also not sure what the arcade does to crumble the wall or what the INTV can do to replicate it.

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Do you mean the resolution I was just trying out something for website screenshot display? I'll stop doing them big if that is actually bad, the original was 160X96 which at 4:5X was 640X480 giving me the 4:3 aspect ratio, was trying to see what it would look like on a SD-TV as there is a fair amount of vertical stretch.

 

The resolution wasn't right on real hardware. BACKTAB is at 160x96 (its 159 on the real hardware) displayed as 320x192. Some things were taking up too many BACKTAB tiles too. Personally, I find it best to do mocks at the resolution the machine actually works at (taking into account "fat" pixels. Rather than what the analogue display does to it. It gives me a better feel for the end result and also what I'll spend most time looking at in emulators and such.

 

Looks great, I see you add some "SuperGraphics" lol, I've been trying to see what I can do in the default resolution with sprites but I hit a project that looks terrible without more pixels. ;)

 

Not sure what you mean by "Super graphics" :ponder:. Sprites can be displayed at twice the vertical resolution of BACKTAB so they have a "double" resolution mode.

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The resolution wasn't right on real hardware. BACKTAB is at 160x96 (its 159 on the real hardware) displayed as 320x192. Some things were taking up too many BACKTAB tiles too. Personally, I find it best to do mocks at the resolution the machine actually works at (taking into account "fat" pixels. Rather than what the analogue display does to it. It gives me a better feel for the end result and also what I'll spend most time looking at in emulators and such.

 

 

Not sure what you mean by "Super graphics" :ponder:. Sprites can be displayed at twice the vertical resolution of BACKTAB so they have an effective resolution.

Well I don't compose at 640X480, mostly looking for a more impactful posting size, I guess 320 will suffice. 160 is just so tiny on modern LCD resolution I have to Save and zoom in to get a better look.

 

Yeah the 159 aspect while real is not great for editing needs especially in rescale, a one pixel lie can be forgiven I would think.

 

By the power of Grayskull! :lolblue:

The_Power_of_He-Man.jpg

Funny according to what I read it only appeared on box once, without the crash it probably would have been seen more. Although I never saw the term "Blast Processing" outside of a Sega commercial when I think about it. ;)

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Well I don't compose at 640X480, mostly looking for a more impactful posting size, I guess 320 will suffice. 160 is just so tiny on modern LCD resolution I have to Save and zoom in to get a better look.

 

Yeah the 159 aspect while real is not great for editing needs especially in rescale, a one pixel lie can be forgiven I would think.

 

By the power of Grayskull! :lolblue:

 

Funny according to what I read it only appeared on box once, without the crash it probably would have been seen more. Although I never saw the term "Blast Processing" outside of a Sega commercial when I think about it. ;)

Compose at 160X96 actual pixels, ignore the issue with the 160th pixel column, use a paint program that lets you zoom in and turn on the pixel grid (in paint.net, not sure what it is called in Photoshop.) Then save a copy and resize it without antialiasing by 300 or 400 percent for posting.

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Compose at 160X96 actual pixels, ignore the issue with the 160th pixel column, use a paint program that lets you zoom in and turn on the pixel grid (in paint.net, not sure what it is called in Photoshop.) Then save a copy and resize it without antialiasing by 300 or 400 percent for posting.

I'll give that a try, I usually try for clean pixel inflation but I'll experiment with percentages. It's a tough resolution to display outside of the original hardware, the VIC-20 wasn't easy either, kind of varied in aspect ratio within PAL and NTSC regions for pixel inflation in emulators.

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INTV_Bubbob_zpsw3vrts2n.png

Back near the beginning Janzl mentioned Bubble Bobble.

GroovyBee figured even with background cards the amount of bubbles would be too hard. I was thinking maybe there could be a limit put on the number of bubbles per player to help with that aspect. It changes things adding another layer of gameplay strategy not present in the original but it might be fair compromise to make the player pop bubbles in order to launch another once the maximum limit is reached.

-Lost a floor compared the arcade version, early arcade game makers sure were obsessed with vertical screen orientation lol. Pretty wide too that I couldn't figure out how much more floor to add.

-Tried a couple wall tile designs, softer division versus harder border lines, not sure which would be better.

-Bub & Bob use a couple layers, each color is offset horizontally but within 8 pixels width. Used a 8X16 block at double height, tried default 8x8 but it wasn't coming out very good.

-Scores are color coded as I couldn't fit labels in, 1PL, HI, 2PL. Maybe the Hi-Score could be a vertical stack allowing some space for label tabs, idk.

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I'll give that a try, I usually try for clean pixel inflation but I'll experiment with percentages. It's a tough resolution to display outside of the original hardware, the VIC-20 wasn't easy either, kind of varied in aspect ratio within PAL and NTSC regions for pixel inflation in emulators.

I thought your mock-up looked good. But sprites can have a half pixel height resolution so maybe you should use 160x192 with background pixels being double height. I prefer the 4:3 aspect ratio.

 

And yes Mattel SuperGraphics! It's not just a marketing ploy and is not referring to graphic resolution. It's about smoother animation. I think MOTU may have been the first and only game from Mattel to bypass the EXEC ROM and run at 60Hz. Maybe Bump'N'Jump did as well but that game was programmed by a couple of hackers outside of Mattel.

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I'll give that a try, I usually try for clean pixel inflation but I'll experiment with percentages. It's a tough resolution to display outside of the original hardware, the VIC-20 wasn't easy either, kind of varied in aspect ratio within PAL and NTSC regions for pixel inflation in emulators.

To clarify, I meant to scale the image by a factor of 200 percent doubles the pixels without antialiasing. Both gimp and paint.net let you rescale an image without introducing artifacts if you don't antialias. What tool are you using for these mockups?

160x96 resized by 200 percent results in a pixel perfect 320 x 192. 160x96 resized 400 percent is 640x384.

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I wonder if some careful and clever use of sequencing GRAM would make Bubble Bobble work more closely to the original? I thought MOTU and Worm Whomper both used sequencing GRAM to create the illusion of many more moving objects. Granted, those games have a pretty wide open field and objects only move linearly, but I wonder how feasible it would be.

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I thought your mock-up looked good. But sprites can have a half pixel height resolution so maybe you should use 160x192 with background pixels being double height. I prefer the 4:3 aspect ratio.

 

And yes Mattel SuperGraphics! It's not just a marketing ploy and is not referring to graphic resolution. It's about smoother animation. I think MOTU may have been the first and only game from Mattel to bypass the EXEC ROM and run at 60Hz. Maybe Bump'N'Jump did as well but that game was programmed by a couple of hackers outside of Mattel.

Well it is kind of why I keep some SD-TVs around, I tend to get fussy about emulator options so I favor real hardware most of the time.

 

Smoother animation too, hadn't considered that but it makes sense. I understand the upside of the EXEC and sometimes you can conform to it but other times you just can't.

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To clarify, I meant to scale the image by a factor of 200 percent doubles the pixels without antialiasing. Both gimp and paint.net let you rescale an image without introducing artifacts if you don't antialias. What tool are you using for these mockups?

160x96 resized by 200 percent results in a pixel perfect 320 x 192. 160x96 resized 400 percent is 640x384.

Oh yeah, I gotcha, I don't antialis ever with pixel art rescales. I tried 640X384 but much like 320X192 it wasn't exactly 4:3 in aspect ratio thus the 4:5X pixel inflation IE. every pixel becomes 4X5 pixels just to top off the height enough.

 

Lol you'll laugh, I use MS Paint. :lolblue: There's just an elegant simplicity to it but I really should learn how to use layer based programs more. For rescaling I use GIMP.

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Well it is kind of why I keep some SD-TVs around, I tend to get fussy about emulator options so I favor real hardware most of the time.

 

Smoother animation too, hadn't considered that but it makes sense. I understand the upside of the EXEC and sometimes you can conform to it but other times you just can't.

 

There really is no upside to the EXEC, except in the early days. When the Intellivision was being developed in 1978, ROM was expensive. The EXEC was a way to share some game code so a 4K cartridge was actually a much larger game. It was a good competitive advantage in the early days. Later ROM prices came down so cartridges got bigger and there was no need to use the EXEC and its outdated code anymore.

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There really is no upside to the EXEC, except in the early days. When the Intellivision was being developed in 1978 ROM was expensive. The EXEC was a way to share some game code so a 4K cartridge was actually a much larger game. It was a good competitive advantage in the early days. Later ROM prices came down so cartridges got bigger and there was no need to use the EXEC and its outdated code anymore.

What about a Text Adventure, any benefit to using the EXEC to maximize text storage space? I remember some early computer games used something along the lines of the Dewey Decimal system to direct players to a printed text because they couldn't store the text volume on the disk capacity. Not a bad compromise but I'd rather have the written text in the cartridge.

Well it was fairly rare for a console to have a system character set as that was usually reserved for home computers, I've just been thinking of taking advantage of the font built in which also has lowercase characters which were a luxury for that vintage of hardware.

 

Only limitation in display has been scale mostly, at 8X8 in 159X96 characters are kind of huge where even moderate sentence length barely fits on screen. If I were to bypass the EXEC I'd likely use a 3X7 pixel font multiplexing the 8 MOBs for every second character just to squeeze in some more text if that would work.

INTV_More%20Text_zpshkjnqre3.png

I know the add-ons add more text but wondered what the default system could do?

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The default character set is in GROM and has 213 characters. GRAM has the limit of only 64 user defined characters but can be changed throughout the program. The STIC works with these 8x8 characters/cards for the background. You're stuck with the limitations of the Intellivision graphics system regardless of the EXEC. See here for some technical information. http://www.intellivisionlives.com/bluesky/hardware/intelli_tech.html#systag

 

Edit:

I think intvnut explained an idea where you can program a smaller font by constantly updating the GRAM. However, if I understood it correctly, the small GRAM size would severely limit how much text you can display per screen. Multiplexing text sounds crazy.

 

Here you can see all the GROM characters. http://wiki.intellivision.us/index.php?title=Graphics_ROM&oldid=14925

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What about a Text Adventure, any benefit to using the EXEC to maximize text storage space? I remember some early computer games used something along the lines of the Dewey Decimal system to direct players to a printed text because they couldn't store the text volume on the disk capacity.

 

The EXEC doesn't really gain you anything here, at least not that I can think of (I'm not terribly imaginative though).

 

Given that you can store 96KB on a cart these days with very little effort - that's already a fair bit of text. And you can do all sorts of dictionary tricks, compression, etc to cram a lot more in. I wish I was more interested in this type of game because I've already whipped up a bunch of routines to store and quickly read back arbitrary text from ROM, inserting names and other variable bits into it. The bigger challenge (to me anyway) is to use a smaller font, so that you're not limited to 20 characters per line. Intellivision text is just a bit clunky to read.

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