Super Cart I to Play Aquarius Games

[chjmartin2]

I now have a Supercart I, and a brand new EPROM burner. Which, frankly, nobody in my family seems to appreciate. They all think it is very, very geeky. Anyway, I need to decide which Aquarius game to play first, and I thought it would give me a chance to read about people's opinions of various games. I can write any cart based game I want, as I only own Nightstalker, so I haven't really enjoyed any Aquarius games. Also, I never owned an Aquarius as a kid, so I don't have those memories to draw on. Now, I did play Astrosmash and Snafu on the Intellivision, but I am afraid that I'll be very disappointed in the Aquarius in comparison. Maybe there are Aquarius only games, that are much more special.

 

It is that weird thing, that when you are checking out an old system that you didn't own, you go look at people's opinion of the games for that system. I feel like there are so many games I had to miss, on all of the systems ever made. For example, I never have once played a game on an MSX and someday I would really like to. I always love to see ports, from the arcade version all the way to the Atari 2600. I know a lot of people just focus on one or two consoles, but I want to enjoy them all. I have like 20 projects, all backed up. Computers/Consoles/Projects I have that I want to play with/do include a Ti/99a, a Pentium 2, an iMac, a G4 Cube, Magnavox Odyssey 2, Neo Geo, my new Atari Harmony cart, restore my Gyruss cabinet, restore my Double Dragon cabinet, mod my first XBOX 360 and get a new DVD drive for it, buy an NES Multicart, buy the SNES Multicart, resetup by C64 and play some games, write a TRS Color Computer graphics program, demo a flicker mode on a CGA to get a 320x200x16 colors and the same for 640x200 with 4 colors, help my cousin get his Outrun machine working, find other cool things to do with my new EPROM writer, mount a ZIF socket on my Super Cart I and buy an EEPROM to have the ultimate developer tool, fix my Aquarius flicker program, make a 1MEG graphics demo cart for the Aquarius, make a better flicker bitmap viewer for the Atari 2600, and do a flicker demo on a Tandy 1000 to make a 320x200x64 color mode, make a reduced flicker aquarius flicker program by reducing the luminosity difference between the colors I pick, and on... but not too much.

 

I am rambling too much... The reason why this stuff is all on my mind, is because I have to choose my time carefully because I want to get to the next thing. Maybe you can help me prioritize. (I realize I could wait until Jay is done with the Multicart, but I can do it now, so why wait?) Anyway, back to the original purpose of the thread. If you could burn any Aquarius game to ROM, and you had the Extender, what game would you burn and why would you burn it?

[jaybird3rd]

I remember being in a similar position when I got my first Aquarius last year: I wanted to explore its library, but many of its cartridges were simply unobtainable. I ended up pulling the chips from a FinForm cartridge, modifying it slightly for 16K EPROMs, and burning copies for myself. That was the board I used for my first switch-based multi-carts, before I decided to design my own boards and to go with a menu-based design instead. I continued to use that socketed FinForm board as my "testbed" until I got my first batch of SuperCart I prototypes late last summer.

 

Most of the Aquarius games (at least the first-party titles released on cartridge) were Intellivision conversions. The only exceptions were Melody Chase and the two "edutainment" titles, Space Speller and Zero In, and all three are exceedingly rare on original cartridges. I'm sure the Aquarius would have gotten more exclusives if it had lived longer. You might consider burning yourself a copy of Melody Chase: it's unique to the Aquarius, and it's a bizarre little game which makes effective use of what the Aquarius can do. Here's a video of it in action:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vh5r0uxmKN0

 

Of the Intellivision conversions, Astrosmash and Snafu are probably two of the best: there are some compromises to the graphics, but they play almost identically to the Intellivision originals; if you have the Mini Expander, Snafu even uses the music from the Intellivision version. Utopia and AD&D Treasure of Tarmin are very good, too, and AD&D in particular is fun to look at because of the creative ways they used the Aquarius character graphics to draw the monsters and other objects. TRON Deadly Discs is less successful, in my opinion: the Aquarius version is fun on its own terms, but it's much more like the 2600 version than the Intellivision version, so you're bound to be disappointed if you compare it to the original. I initially had mixed feelings about BurgerTime: I was turned off by the "choppy" animation and the funky graphics, but it grew on me as I learned to adapt to it. I've memorized a complete pattern which allows me to max out on lives and peppers on the very first screen, which is something I haven't figured out yet on any other version.

 

But anyway ... whichever game you choose, I would recommend putting multiple copies inside the ROM. If you're using 64K chips, put together four copies of a 16K game or eight copies of an 8K game. You can do it at the command prompt like this:

 

COPY /B 16KGAME.ROM+16KGAME.ROM+16KGAME.ROM+16KGAME.ROM 64K.ROM

I say this because some of the games will try to write into the cartridge space, which was probably a form of copy protection; this was done on several systems to disable pirated copies running from RAM. On the SuperCart I, this will result in a bank switch, but if you have the same game in every bank, this shouldn't matter (I added some extra circuitry to the Aquaricart to get around this problem). You should also reconfigure the board for 16K mode rather than 8K mode: just clear the solder jumpers W2 and W3 on the back of the board (which are currently set to "2-3") with a bit of solder wick, and then set them both to "1-2" by bridging pads 1 and 2 with a bead of solder.

[+MattelAquarius]

Having the Aquarius as a kid, and no friends with Intellivision (all 2600's, a 5200, and an O2) kept me from having to compare the games to the Intellivision (though I was very familiar with the INTV, since it was well advertised).

 

My brothers and I logged many hours on Utopia & AD&D. Snafu got a lot of play, along with Astrosmash, but not as much as the first two. I remember one classic 80's scenario where the whole family was watching me set a family record score in Astrosmash on the old Sears console tv. Nobody ever asked to play Tron. I played it, mostly because I loved the movie, and I needed a little variety now and then. I remember getting a very high score in Tron and really battling it out with the more dangerous enemies that showed up later. Although I did not even know I was missing the better play of the Inty Tron, it still left me a bit bored on the Aq.

 

AD&D was one where once I started getting into the deeper levels of the dungeons, my brothers and neighbor kids would start collection around to see what I would find. It was a great way to spend some cold winter days in Wisconsin.

 

I did not get any other games, until 1999 as an adult, when I found myself jumping headfirst into collecting for it, from a cold start. Once I plugged in BurgerTime, was giddy. I love it. The illusion of 3 color graphics for Peter Pepper, really made the game possible. Without that little color bleed of NTSC, it somehow would have looked a bit pathetic. (See how it looks in the emulator). Actually, it was so exciting to finally get my hands on all the Aquarius software and hardware I used to dream of from the catalogs as a kid. Great fun.

 

So, my personal ranking of Aq cart games would be:

 

1st: BurgerTime, AD&D, Utopia

2nd: Snafu, Astrosmash, NightStalker

3rd: Melody Chase, Chess, Tron

4th: Space Speller, Zero-In

 

Disqualified: Shark!, Biorhythms

 

Incidentally, there is a neat graphic effect in the Melody Chase game, as shown in the video Jaybird3rd embedded. Watch the man get fried at 1:30. Neato.

[chjmartin2]

How did they do that neato electrocution effect? Anybody ever disassemble it?

[jaybird3rd]

How did they do that neato electrocution effect? Anybody ever disassemble it?

I unscrambled the ROM for the Aquaricart, but I haven't disassembled it. It is an interesting effect, and I'd imagine it was simply a rapid flickering of characters or colors (or both), much like what you've done in your flicker demos. In this case, they were able to do it very quickly, since they only had to manipulate two characters.

[+MattelAquarius]

How did they do that neato electrocution effect? Anybody ever disassemble it?

I unscrambled the ROM for the Aquaricart, but I haven't disassembled it. It is an interesting effect, and I'd imagine it was simply a rapid flickering of characters or colors (or both), much like what you've done in your flicker demos. In this case, they were able to do it very quickly, since they only had to manipulate two characters.

 

Do you suspect purposeful timing of the vblank or hsync, or something along those lines? (speaking out of ignorance) Or is it likely just a matter of "change it as fast as possible"?

[+MattelAquarius]

How did they do that neato electrocution effect? Anybody ever disassemble it?

I unscrambled the ROM for the Aquaricart, but I haven't disassembled it. It is an interesting effect, and I'd imagine it was simply a rapid flickering of characters or colors (or both), much like what you've done in your flicker demos. In this case, they were able to do it very quickly, since they only had to manipulate two characters.

 

Do you suspect purposeful timing of the vblank or hsync, or something along those lines? (speaking out of ignorance) Or is it likely just a matter of "change it as fast as possible"?

 

After rereading, I just wanted to clarify that I was speaking out of ignorance.

[chjmartin2]

Dude... I am pretty ignorant as well, but there is only the VSYNC signal - what I wouldn't GIVE for an HSYNC signal to use. I think they would have to time it somehow, which is probably counting clock cycles. I can't get my flicker program to work correctly on the real thing, which is why this interests me. I have to figure out how many cycles my code takes and compare that to the time I have to load the memory, I have a sneaking suspicion that a full-screen flicker is too much for the AQ to handle - but I could be wrong. What frustrates me is that I can get the bottom 3/4's of the screen to be perfect.

[jaybird3rd]

Do you suspect purposeful timing of the vblank or hsync, or something along those lines? (speaking out of ignorance) Or is it likely just a matter of "change it as fast as possible"?

I'd have to look at the code to be sure, but I don't see why it couldn't have been done in VBLANK. Changing the characters and colors in two cells is only a matter of writing four bytes into RAM, and there's plenty of time during the VBLANK interval to do this, so that would probably be the approach I would choose for timing purposes. They're probably also using VBLANK to play the (relatively simple) music in the game, for the same reason.