About IMPOSSIBLE MISSION playing

[Creature XL]

Just had a quick look at the C64 version.

If I see it correctly, the room itself do not scroll, do they?

And you say max 4 enemies?

 

that is perfect fit for a certain (general) game engine - with DLI each char line - I know of

[emkay]

What makes Impossible Mission unique on the C64 ist the Hires movement and the CLEAR SYNTHESIZED VOICE... From , what you see on the Screen, RGB is doing more already.

 

Maybe in 30 Years, we will have the fitting development tool for creating such voice without digitizing

 

Till then something more unique for The 800 could be done, just like a DooM in 4x4 mode and playable 20-25 fps, or even higher.

[José Pereira]

Just had a quick look at the C64 version.

If I see it correctly, the room itself do not scroll, do they?

And you say max 4 enemies?

02

that is perfect fit for a certain (general) game engine - with DLI each char line - I know of

The only thing there that scrolls is the elevator on other screen(s) and it's up an down

 

@Emkay: Yes that is the true but there's one thing that now I invite you all that is is get into YouTube and see some BBC&Electron games and how their gfxs guys in most games did on the sprites and frames design whenever they had to convert them into 2:1 ratio and also the soo small Beebs palette number of colours... This is best seen in games with man's sprite like this one and Last Ninja(s).

Instead of just convert the hi-res exactly and have the guys a bad bad tiny looking they're more fat but much better looking.

Just look how bad and totally unreal Impossible Mission guy looks in the Amstrad CPC and the Atari 7800 versions!...

Using the Beebs fat guy's frame in white and dark gray colours together with a nice and correct choose of the wall colour luminance the end result will be good, believe in me

 

And concerning the voice maybe someone taking IM maybe we get a way to have that

[José Pereira]

@CreatureXL: You have a maximum possible of 4robots per screen and 2 per line soo that is exactly the same as in RGB with each have one Player overlaping and our guy is PMGs only.

Although here they jump they indeed are just moving horizontally because the C64 21scanlines tall sprites jump 3scanlines that makes them 24scanlines=3chars tall and they are 7/8pixels wide soo you end up with a 2x3chars that with shifting they only take 3x3chars each.

 

In IM case there's also the black ball but that is done on C64 this way because of their maximum of hardware sprites per line: on screens with the ball and because it can be at any line then you'll have 1robot per line only.

 

The need is to having this same but have a general engine that the enemys can also move 4ways and maybe one or even more can also have 8ways moving like the ball (on all its 3x3chars soft sprite turns into a 4x4chars size one because of the shifting needs).

Edited January 20, 2015 by José Pereira

[José Pereira]

And CrtXL just to end my talking by now this will be a perfect one to have that majour engine for our '4 interleaved charsets' solve the A8 usual problem of the smaller charsets with just 128chars on each

Edited January 20, 2015 by José Pereira

[Creature XL]

yeah as said, this should be piece of cake for said engine. up to 6 soft-sprites moving freely, interleaved charsets, packed rooms, blah blah

If nobody tries it till autumn we can talk again (I might send you my Level Editor someday, so you can build some IM rooms

However, my priorities for the moment lay on another A8 project. So no IM from me

 

'Nuff said for now.

[Tezz]

@José, The ESS voice synthesis has already been worked out by another member here so that part is sorted if someone is interested and willing to invest their time into recreating IM for the A8.

[José Pereira]

@Tezz but is that voice available?

Is it done just for fun and as a proof of concept or was it supposeed to be used on a conversion and was anyone doing it?

[emkay]

@Tezz but is that voice available?

Is it done just for fun and as a proof of concept or was it supposeed to be used on a conversion and was anyone doing it?

Actually, someone could even integrate "SAM" in such a game.

I wonder what's meant by "ESS Voice Synthesis"... I'd have problems to believe, someone did a real Synthesis for recreating speech with POKEY's generators, instead of any digitizing.

At least , we should be happy, when the screen isn't turned off , and we see the Professor speaking ...

 

Well. The "ball" would be obviously be built better on PMg.

 

And, what's still the biggest hurdle , is the ease of the handling of the protagonist. It's particular on the A8 a problem, as the handling of the PMg always makes the coder to use them as they are, which results into "broom in the back" looking animations on the Protagonist. IT'S NOT how the Sprite looks, it's how the Sprite ACTS, that makes the gaming fun there. Every jump is a flip, and you don't feel restricted to a pixel on the screen.

 

But, you know what? Even due to all the "benefits" of the C64 version, it didn't make me wanting to buy a C64, because this type of game is boring, when viewing it from the side.

When you have seen games like Starraiders, Encounter or Dimension X before, you know how much more this fluent depth movement can put you more into a game for playing fun.

Edited January 21, 2015 by emkay

[Rybags]

The ESS voice stuff wasn't reverse-engineered or anything special like that. On C64 it uses Timer Interrupts, Wrathchild AFAIK simply recoded the relevant parts to work likewise on the Atari.

 

The actual sampling and data encoding technique has little publicly released info, it is still sufficiently good to the point of having commercial value.

Also note, it's not a synth like SAM, it just plays back sampled data.

[Irgendwer]

I wonder what's meant by "ESS Voice Synthesis"... I'd have problems to believe, someone did a real Synthesis for recreating speech with POKEY's generators, instead of any digitizing.

 

It's not really voice synthesis. It's a high compression scheme for sampled speech data and can be found already on the A8 in "Kennedy Approach" & "221b Baker Street".

[Rybags]

They also did the work for Ghostbusters. Supposedly, Epyx didn't deal with them again after IM because they wanted way too much money for their work.

[Mclaneinc]

The only thing that drew me to IM was the nice player movement of the main character and the really nice speech, other than that its just a basic platformer that I reckon a talented person could knock out pretty well, if the sample player from the Ghostbusters Atari version could have the data from the C64 IM then it would be ace..

 

Anything but S.A.M., fun as it is its not the same...

 

IM was a game you put on to show off the speech to mates but never really enjoyed playing it..

[Tezz]

Yes that's correct, it's just the encoding and high compression of the sample that was their invention at the time. I suppose it's refered to as "speech synthesis" as ESS designed it for digitizing the human voice but anyway with that aside, you'd have the usual restrictions to work around in using char mode for the game. I wrote a kernel for Chimera for its in-game sample.

Edited January 21, 2015 by Tezz

[emkay]

But programmed speech would cost less CPU and RAM....

 

You know one of my early tests:

 

The first 2 minutes I did some addition

 

 

 

 

You hear a clear difference resembling "AA" "ER" "OU" ... In another tune I used "AI/High" ...

As soon as you can produce clean vocals, the rest will become easy. It's just some stable triangle sound missing that you cannot directly produce with RMT (I'm not talking about 1.79MHz filter)

After that , you can let the Atari speak a whole demo long, instead of a scroller, if you want

Edited January 21, 2015 by emkay

[Wrathchild]

Here's the program Rybags was recalling.

Under emulation you can enter debugger and then change SDMCTL to zero (e.g. in Altirra, F8 then "e SDMCTL 0") to turn the screen off.

There is a small difference in sound due to the time attending to the screen.

im_replay.xex

[emkay]

Here's the program Rybags was recalling.

Under emulation you can enter debugger and then change SDMCTL to zero (e.g. in Altirra, F8 then "e SDMCTL 0") to turn the screen off.

There is a small difference in sound due to the time attending to the screen.

The demonstration sounds fairly enough. 11K for the whole package is also small.

[José Pereira]

Hi.

Because of this recent topic: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/260086-games-for-c64-not-available-for-a8 I decided to see again what I could get and found a new, simple and possible way that is using the gfxs from BBC&Electron version with some changes.

It can have them with some changes like in future better rocks on the lift screen(s), turn into Antic4 charmode to get a 5th colour,...

The idea is the rooms have as PFs colours:

-> BAK: always black;

-> PF0: always white;

-> PF1: always brown (because some of the furniture fits better and also on the [\ \] lift);

-> PF2: the background wall that can be any colour and suggestion is that is in luminance A;

-> PF3: always blue that is in the platforms, pillars,... seems the best looking one;

Then there are a maximum of 4 robots per room but only 2 per line so we can use 2 per each robot in 5th Player Mode and because they have PF2_brown that is also on the furniture but these haven't blue there aren't any clash.

And our guy is made of the 4Players in Multicolour mode that I occasionally found yesterday a remake from our friends on here in the 7800 Forum: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/206915-possible-mission and for me is the real solution .

 

First let me show these frames in different possible colours using the 2+2 A8 PMGs:

Because of the colours I choose for the gfxs like the blue and the brown then I decided that the best for the player is to use the last one have the dark as dark gray (04) + red (28) gives the skin as light pink (2C).

Here are two screens of the plaforms rooms with all this together:

And the lift screen that can have, like I said, better looking rocks and lift gfxs:

 

Regarding charsets the lift screen(s) is only 1charset for the playing area and other for the panel. The platform screen(s) can go with 2charsets but this explanation I'll leave to the person who would be interested and will contact me ...

Edited December 21, 2016 by José Pereira

[Irgendwer]

On 1/22/2015 at 9:47 AM, Wrathchild said:

Here's the program Rybags was recalling.

Under emulation you can enter debugger and then change SDMCTL to zero (e.g. in Altirra, F8 then "e SDMCTL 0") to turn the screen off.

There is a small difference in sound due to the time attending to the screen.

Yeah kind of NB ?‍♂️ but I just asked myself if there was any attempt to patch "Ghostbusters" to include also the speech from the C64 ("He slimed me.", the yell while closing the portal). Not that I'm in the position to do so, but if anybody else hears the call...

This was something that bothered my back then and the A8 version still sounds "incomplete"...

[rdefabri]

Whatever happened to this project - still WIP?