GTIA Blast update

[+playsoft]

José Pereira, on 21 Jul 2014 - 05:38 AM, said:

To a coder it shouldn't be hard and Paul sure can get it.

That ship its already done and with that middle part rotation just adding someting like I said and it quickly fast 4ways moving it would look amazing.

You already have it and its a shame that no one ever thought in using it because its ideal for an end last to destroy.

Ask Paul and see whats his opinion...

 

It may make it in there somewhere. I did extract it and the robot a while back. I managed to get the robot into a character set quite easily but the mother ship will need some (a lot) of work. That was for putting it in a standard level though, I suppose if it is a special level then things could be done differently. So it's a possibility, although the end level seems far off in the future at the moment!

[+MrFish]

Yes, the final version will run in 16K too. That came about when we decided to go the Maxflash cart route. On one hand less people will run it on real h/w because they'll need a cart, but by making it run in 16K makes it of interest to 400/600XL owners too. As it turned out that was a good decision as it meant a 5200 version was possible with minimal effort (the 5200 only has 16K RAM).

 

The only annoying thing is that before deciding to go the cart route I had a 16K 400 which I upgraded to 48K as that's what we were originally targeting!

 

No doubt stock 400 and 600XL owners will be happy, as well as 5200 owners.

 

Is this in any way a hindrance to project, seeing you're attempting to exploit the full potential of the machine?

[kiwilove]

I have always viewed that AtariBLAST! being able to run on 16k Atari's as a plus, rather than a negative - because it reminds me of how Andrew Bradfield started off, with using an Atari 400 16k computer, buying ROM game carts - he turned from being a computer videogames enthusiast, into a videogame programmer. That all those 16k computers lying around still, can be put to good use (and 48k, 64k etc computers too). I had hoped that because AB! requires a maxflash cart to run - that it's retailer would automatically ship carts with AB! on it? That it gives a good reason to buy one now... Same for 1088k extended RAM users - you now have a game that shows how that extended memory can be put to good use?.

 

I did not provide any preferences for the very first screen setup - in which case I probably would have preferred the use of overscan? To have as wide an active screen area as possible? But of course, this would have required more processing time and probably would make the multiplexing of sprites more of a headache? So it's probably was better to have gone with the C-64 screen look? than make it an Atari only screen?

There were other options not used - such as having landscape designs wrap around - screen data compression.

 

Of course there will always be things seen retrospectively - that you would have done differently? If you were to redo things - but that will be left to anyone else who cares to revisit/visit the spacey shooter game format, which the Atari's were designed for.... to take advantage of.

 

My view is that the Fractalus mothership is better as a huge ship design, like the Atari Robot was blown up (ie. magnified) to then be blown to pieces - rather than use the original design intact - which was fine for it's intended use - but that it just looks too small in a game context. A dump/rip of it will still be very useful to aid in the blown up (magnified) version.

Of course - more can be done with it as well - when used in a final sequence shoot out - which I'll leave it to your imagination as to what may be possible?

 

Harvey

[+playsoft]

MrFish, on 21 Jul 2014 - 9:02 PM, said:MrFish, on 21 Jul 2014 - 9:02 PM, said:

Is this in any way a hindrance to project, seeing you're attempting to exploit the full potential of the machine?

 

Exploiting the full potential of the machine is really more Harvey's motivation. Obviously I want to make it as good as I can, but for me it was to see if I could write a sprite multiplexer like Crownland and now it's to see if I can write something to the same sort of standard. Crownland was what got me interested in the A8 again, I couldn't believe it when I first saw it.

 

It is a hard question to answer because it started off as a 48K program, so memory was tight from the start. One example I can give you is that each level has always been comprised of two character sets. After a previous tidy up exercise I offered Harvey a third but he didn't want it. So you could say that more RAM would make no difference to how the levels look today but Harvey's choice may have been down to not wanting to change completed designs.

 

From my point of view I've not yet had to throw anything out because of lack of RAM. There is quite a lot of bank switching going on, so putting more core code/data in RAM may free up the cpu to do some more work, but to what extent I don't know.

[Synthpopalooza]

I had a couple of thoughts, and I think I might have discussed them with you a few months back ...

 

You can use a hardware mode that I call Graphics 12.10 ... that is, engage GTIA to mode 10 while in ANTIC 4. You still get all 9 colors, with the limitations of 7 colors per character cells, but it makes inverse characters work better. How it works is, the color combinations PF3 and PM3 replace PF2 and PM2 whenever you inverse the character. Very easy to get tiles with two color palettes here.

 

Also, I wonder how possible it would be, to do a double font flicker on the scoring bar, switch the font and the mode between 9 and 11 (ICE APAC/Pryzm mode), and have the scoring area be in 256 colors. It would flicker, but since it's not on the whole screen, maybe you can get away with it. You can also change the color scheme if you use inverse characters, set CHACT to kill inverse, and alternate CHACT as well if you want to switch up the color scheme.

 

Do you have the font set for the scoring area? I may be able to play with it for you in ICE editor.

[José Pereira]

Synth dont get my talking bad but you're great work isn't just my like because I always have to activate some kind of tricks via emulators, don't know if its a yes or a no but I wish I could have my real machine back and working to see... PAL people says it flickers more and I am PAL country.

I am still thinking that PAL Blending its the way to go and that even NTSC guys get something of it. I still think that recent NRV's Project M or Popmilo's Minicraft its the way to go...

Maybe I am wrong and I'm just missing the real machine to test, for me this 'simple' scrolling 2d shooters or any platforms jumping scrolling or not can't never use a flicker mode.

I tried to convince Sheddy or other(s) to use the GR.7 (Emkays's mode ) just think in converting others Sega's arcades of that time using the same methods like Galaxy Force

[kiwilove]

Using a third character set - for level designs - of course does sound attractive - but you never have all those new characters available for use - because of the need for common characters to transition from one character set to another - invisibly. But still extra characters is good when you have all new level designs to work with. My only problem is doing the work to come up with them. That's why I opted for the easier way of re-using Hawkquest Levels. I had wanted to retain the original layout - as a way of showing where the hidden targets in that game are located - but that idea will probably fall to the wayside. In which case, the roads will then be taken out (because they serve no use at all, in AtariBLAST!.

But also reusing the Hawkquest levels or designs - does give me the opportunity to show the difference between back then, and now... Hopefully players who never played Hawkquest? (why not?) would visit that game and have some idea of how it could have been that much better - say if multiplexed sprites were present in that game?

 

I have however come to the conclusion that AtariBLAST! simply couldn't have been done back in the 80s' - although there was no real reason -why not??? That it simply would have had taken up too much time and effort for it to have been developed back then. That the use of the Internet, PC tools, etc - plus the mindset/experience of today played their parts too.

I have always felt about retrogaming development - that it's simply not enough to be developing for the 80s' hardware - that the software you are creating, have to be something special - for it to be worthwhile doing? And not simply produce something that looks like it was developed twenty something years ago - but rather it should look like something fresh and modern?

 

Of course I am only speaking from my own point of view, and how I personally feel.

 

I would be interested in working on a 2600 project - if it was trying to do something new and different for it? The chances for success would be slim - but you'd never know unless you try?

6 months or a year ago - I would have been totally disinterested, as I never experienced using a 2600 in any way. I guess it's the sheer challenge of doing anything with blocky pixels...

 

Harvey

[+MrFish]

Exploiting the full potential of the machine is really more Harvey's motivation. Obviously I want to make it as good as I can, but for me it was to see if I could write a sprite multiplexer like Crownland and now it's to see if I can write something to the same sort of standard. Crownland was what got me interested in the A8 again, I couldn't believe it when I first saw it.

 

It is a hard question to answer because it started off as a 48K program, so memory was tight from the start. One example I can give you is that each level has always been comprised of two character sets. After a previous tidy up exercise I offered Harvey a third but he didn't want it. So you could say that more RAM would make no difference to how the levels look today but Harvey's choice may have been down to not wanting to change completed designs.

 

From my point of view I've not yet had to throw anything out because of lack of RAM. There is quite a lot of bank switching going on, so putting more core code/data in RAM may free up the cpu to do some more work, but to what extent I don't know.

 

Crownland is an amazing piece of coding. There is no small amount of work on the graphic design side either, and Miker did a great job creating music for the atmosphere. Some people leveled criticism against it here, after it's release, for some of it's shortcomings, because they were disappointed it didn't turn out to be all they'd hoped. Subsequently I think the author was discouraged from doing much further along the same lines. I think he's the same guy that did do some of the really nice multiplexing experiments after that though, such as Ripper, Contra, and SMB, which use an improved engine based per sprite, rather than scanline based as Crownland's engine was. I think these were done in part to answer some of the criticisms about the multiplexing sprite engine used in Crownland. Ripper bears some relation to your project, in that it's a vertical shooter and uses multi-color sprite multiplexing. It has some nice backgrounds by way of quite a few DLI color changes too. Maybe you've seen it already?

Edited July 22, 2014 by MrFish

[+MrFish]

I have always viewed that AtariBLAST! being able to run on 16k Atari's as a plus, rather than a negative - because it reminds me of how Andrew Bradfield started off, with using an Atari 400 16k computer, buying ROM game carts - he turned from being a computer videogames enthusiast, into a videogame programmer. That all those 16k computers lying around still, can be put to good use (and 48k, 64k etc computers too). I had hoped that because AB! requires a maxflash cart to run - that it's retailer would automatically ship carts with AB! on it? That it gives a good reason to buy one now... Same for 1088k extended RAM users - you now have a game that shows how that extended memory can be put to good use?.

 

That's great if you can fit everything in there you want and make it work on 16K machines, and allow people with 1MB upgrades to take advantage of their hardware while saving from buying AtariMax carts. You guys will make a lot people happy, including Steve over at AtariMax.

[fibrewire]

Exploiting the full potential of the machine is really more Harvey's motivation. Obviously I want to make it as good as I can, but for me it was to see if I could write a sprite multiplexer like Crownland and now it's to see if I can write something to the same sort of standard. Crownland was what got me interested in the A8 again, I couldn't believe it when I first saw it.

You know there is that ONE SPECIAL PROJECT that only needs graphical overlay to complete it. Load up v0.07.atr if you want to see it.

 

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/150778-super-mario-bros-on-atari-8bit/?p=2348119

[+MrFish]

You know there is that ONE SPECIAL PROJECT that only needs graphical overlay to complete it. Load up v0.07.atr if you want to see it.

 

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/150778-super-mario-bros-on-atari-8bit/?p=2348119

 

Not to discourage your enthusiasm, but I think it needs a lot more work than just that. Not that the graphics would be any small task on their own either, since I think pixel-wise it's not set up as being one to one with the NES version, horizontally, as it it stands...

Edited July 22, 2014 by MrFish

[fibrewire]

 

Not to discourage your enthusiasm, but I think it needs a lot more work than just that. Not that the graphics would be any small task on their own either, since I think pixel-wise it's not set up as being one to one with the NES version, horizontally, as it it stands...

 

Maybe, but the 0.07.atr in the uploads folder is playable. I played it side by side the original NES version and it does work. Maybe GTIABlast style graphics would be fitting for this game? I'll post a pic and maybe a short video showing how well the game plays next to the actual NES game.

Edited July 22, 2014 by fibrewire

[kiwilove]

No - I have not seen Ripper before... which is certainly interesting to see now...

Don't know where the Contra is, to look at it.

The SMB (probe) looks pretty good. Can't seem to get the others to work properly...

 

While it would be nice seeing a decent platform game on the A8 - there is a lot of work involved, even with porting any desirable game. But I always think - why not go the extra distance (which only requires 25?% more work...) to add some extras/variations you can call your own?

 

You could tweak the graphics/colours so that it's more suitable for the A8 - also to avoid Nintendo's fury...

 

I don't think it's easy to come up with the best graphics for any game ---- that you'll usually have to put in the work necessary to find stuff that does work well...

That porting over graphics from some other system - can be very difficult. A prime example being a coin-op Zaxxon.

 

I don't think GTIA styled graphics can be used for any game or game type. The lower resolution is a problem to live with, and GTIA 10 is limiting because of how the sprite colours are tied to certain colour registers, likewise with GTIA 11 - the lack of a white and contrasting colours. It's a matter of finding out for yourself, whether it will or will not work for you.

 

Harvey

[+MrFish]

Don't know where the Contra is, to look at it.

 

Contra Test

 

They're all just tests for their sprite multiplexing engine. I think SMB (Probe) graphics were whipped up pretty hastily, just out of consideration for the other SMB source code conversion (or rather source code to Atari grafting) that was going on at the same time. I don't think too much time was spent on Contra either. It looks like Ripper was the only "proof of concept" that much time was spent with graphically. Anyway, just for reference...

[+MrFish]

I don't think too much time was spent on Contra either.

 

Although Tezz was inspired to make up a nice looking Contra title screen in Graph2Font, which you can find further down in the thread I linked to.

[kiwilove]

The SMB and Contra's were excellent tests - as the graphics and the feel/handling of the game sprite was very good. Whereas in Crownland - my fuzzy memory tells me it was not that good, when I tested it - some time back...

I personally don't see much point in doing straight conversions - that putting in some extra work and effort to make it your own, will be more satisfying, and you'll likely end up with a better end result too... in playbility?

Of course - you can only do projects - that you really want to work on, and not because of someone else's insistance.

 

To comment on another thread - about bringing Xenon to the A8 hardware. That you'll be hard pressed to bring 16-bit graphics to an 8-bit machine - successfully. I'd doubt it's possible.

That you can only do what the hardware does well... That if you were to do such a project - that you should take advantage of what the A8 can do, and use that.

That it should stand well on it's own two feet - and hopefully not to be compared with it's 16-bit origin. Which it can never equal.

 

Though I see nothing wrong with doing an Atari version of say - Megaman? or Metroid?

 

Harvey

[Tezz]

IIRC. The intention Pr0be had with Ripper, Contra and SMB was simply to provide a few proof of concept examples for his multiplex sprite engine as he was going to release it for others to use in their own game developments. He did say a couple of years ago that he was in the early stages of working on a new game and he has released a few productions in the demo scene since then. He's a real credit to the A8 community, I hope he is still finding time for it.

[+playsoft]

Synthpopalooza, on 22 Jul 2014 - 12:01 AM, said:

I had a couple of thoughts, and I think I might have discussed them with you a few months back ...

 

You can use a hardware mode that I call Graphics 12.10 ... that is, engage GTIA to mode 10 while in ANTIC 4. You still get all 9 colors, with the limitations of 7 colors per character cells, but it makes inverse characters work better. How it works is, the color combinations PF3 and PM3 replace PF2 and PM2 whenever you inverse the character. Very easy to get tiles with two color palettes here.

 

Also, I wonder how possible it would be, to do a double font flicker on the scoring bar, switch the font and the mode between 9 and 11 (ICE APAC/Pryzm mode), and have the scoring area be in 256 colors. It would flicker, but since it's not on the whole screen, maybe you can get away with it. You can also change the color scheme if you use inverse characters, set CHACT to kill inverse, and alternate CHACT as well if you want to switch up the color scheme.

 

Do you have the font set for the scoring area? I may be able to play with it for you in ICE editor.

 

At the moment there are no plans to add another GTIA 10 level, but if we do then we can try ANTIC 4 underneath.

 

The status area graphics were just thrown together quickly to have somewhere to put a score. I'm not sure what will end up here, but as the sprites do not pass over it using PMs to colour it would be my preferred option rather than a flicker mode.

 

I can send you the font if you want to play around with it anyway, and it'll be easy enough to try out anything you come up with, but I don't want to add flicker.

[kiwilove]

Yes - GTIA 10 mode is problematic to use. With the players/missiles using the same colours as the landscape - it has always looked to be the less effective of the GTIA modes to use, because of that.

Ways to amend this would be desirable - if there is the time and desire to do so. Currently we have been using the mode as is.

 

Harvey

[Synthpopalooza]

Yes, 10 can be problematic ... altho I think there is a setting where priority blending on PM's gives a third color. I wonder if this also works when the PM's blend with the same PM-colored playfield?

 

If you could, send me the font you used, I'd still like to play around with it and see what happens.

[Synthpopalooza]

To comment on another thread - about bringing Xenon to the A8 hardware. That you'll be hard pressed to bring 16-bit graphics to an 8-bit machine - successfully. I'd doubt it's possible.

That you can only do what the hardware does well... That if you were to do such a project - that you should take advantage of what the A8 can do, and use that.

That it should stand well on it's own two feet - and hopefully not to be compared with it's 16-bit origin. Which it can never equal.

 

You really couldn't do it without using a flicker mode like MIN (12+9) or like what Sheddy used on Space Harrier. It would look okay on modern LCD tv's (no flicker) but on CRT's, sadly, it seems not doable. Not to mention you'd need to scroll the screen at 1/2 speed (30 fps or 25 fps PAL) or else the whole thing falls apart.

 

A better method perhaps might be to use monochrome HIP mode in Graphics 0 (font switch), make the game a horizontal scroller, change HSCROL on the VBLANK, stepping it by one on each alternate frame (this scrolls the background by one color clock), and also be sure to use BAK as the character background in both frames. You'd be stuck with monochrome for the players as well as the background but it might work better than other flicker modes, as HIP only blends pixels within one luminance of the other to minimize flicker.

[+playsoft]

MrFish, on 22 Jul 2014 - 02:34 AM, said:

 

Crownland is an amazing piece of coding. There is no small amount of work on the graphic design side either, and Miker did a great job creating music for the atmosphere. Some people leveled criticism against it here, after it's release, for some of it's shortcomings, because they were disappointed it didn't turn out to be all they'd hoped. Subsequently I think the author was discouraged from doing much further along the same lines. I think he's the same guy that did do some of the really nice multiplexing experiments after that though, such as Ripper, Contra, and SMB, which use an improved engine based per sprite, rather than scanline based as Crownland's engine was. I think these were done in part to answer some of the criticisms about the multiplexing sprite engine used in Crownland. Ripper bears some relation to your project, in that it's a vertical shooter and uses multi-color sprite multiplexing. It has some nice backgrounds by way of quite a few DLI color changes too. Maybe you've seen it already?

 

It was 2011 when I discovered Crownland and I was in awe of all aspects of it. And yes, the music is great especially that first track which is so catchy.

 

It had never occurred to me, nor had I ever heard of, the idea that when you have too many sprites to display horizontally you simply draw different ones each frame. When I figured out that's what Crownland was doing, I had to dig out the 8-bit and have a go at writing one myself. I could see that Crownland was drawing as much of each sprite as it could, but in mine I only draw a sprite if it is fully visible. I did that for no other reason other than simplicity and regarded Crownland as the more sophisticated approach. I'd seen the Ripper video before but did not realise it was by the same author. In the other demos it looks like he has gone that route too, so presumably opinion was that it's better to see no sprite at all rather than parts of it?

[+playsoft]

Since Mario has found his way here, my initial intent after being inspired by Crownland was to do some sort of Mario game as you can see by the sprites included in my original multiplexer demo (test.xex) which I released with the player editor tool. I never got around to doing anything though.

test.xex

[José Pereira]

kiwilove, on 22 Jul 2014 - 05:53 AM, said:

To comment on another thread - about bringing Xenon to the A8 hardware. That you'll be hard pressed to bring 16-bit graphics to an 8-bit machine - successfully. I'd doubt it's possible.

That you can only do what the hardware does well... That if you were to do such a project - that you should take advantage of what the A8 can do, and use that.

That it should stand well on it's own two feet - and hopefully not to be compared with it's 16-bit origin. Which it can never equal.

Hi.

I did some experiments some time ago on Xenon using ANTIC4 with Interleaved charsets to have many enemys ships and we would also have some PAL blending on some scanlines (but it's indeed just a simple 5colours ANTIC4) and created a new status based on the old but at the bottom and the screen has 32Bytes wide narrow mode.

Our main ship it's the PMGs in Multicolour mode and then you can have the ships in gray.

I wouldn't have perhaps some colour explosions but it could work for Xenon or something related...

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/207261-a8-pal-blending-bitmap-brothers

Edited July 23, 2014 by José Pereira

[+playsoft]

These are some of the early versions:

 

(1) ag.xex - the initial NYD 2013 version.

(2) ag2.xex - adds control and missiles, no collision detection.

(3) ag3.xex - Harvey joins, include his first sprite designs.

(4) first_bg.xex - shows the early background designs from the first version of the editor where screens were composed out of 4x4 character tiles. Other than the café wall illusion, I think the other designs were all mine so you get an idea of how Harvey has improved the look of the game.

ag.xex

ag2.xex

ag3.xex

first_bg.xex