Berzerk

[walter_J64bit]

I would like to see Berzerk on the lynx I'm not sure if the A8 source code is out there but I know this would help out. I'm not programmer this is just a thought I wanted to put out there.

Edited June 22, 2014 by walter_J64bit

[108 Stars]

There is a homebrew beta called BeFok including source. Maybe some homebrewer will finish it, I already askd Gadget UK once.

[Prosystemsearch]

the closest thing released on the lynx to Berzerk is Robotron 2084.

[108 Stars]

Here's the thread I started last year, with a link to the website with the unfinished homebrews and sourcecodes, including Berzerk.

 

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/212566-berzerk-choplifter-moon-patrol-will-anyone-ever-finish-them/

[ZylonBane]

I would like to see Berzerk on the lynx I'm not sure if the A8 source code is out there but I know this would help out.

Why exactly do you think the A8 source would be more helpful than the source to, y'know, the actual original arcade game?

[108 Stars]

Probably because the A8 is a 6502 machine, whle the arcade game is Z80 based.

[ZylonBane]

Probably because the A8 is a 6502 machine, whle the arcade game is Z80 based.

First, you honestly think Walter knew that? Second, the serious answer, it's not as much of an advantage as you might think for such a simple game. The main challenge of getting Berzerk going would be reproducing the graphics and sound, but the arcade machine, the A8, and the Lynx all have vastly different audio/visual hardware. So you'd need to recode all that stuff from scratch anyway.

 

Even if the A8 code could be used directly on the Lynx, it would still be better to port the arcade code. The A8 version was most likely not derived directly from the arcade code (though it is possible). Back then you usually just played the heck out of the game you were trying to port and reproduced it as best you could.

[108 Stars]

I can't say what Walter actually knows, but it has been talked over on various points how similar CPUs could make "quick and dirty" ports possible, at least for rather basic games. Here in the Lynx section, where there was at least talk about the possibility of porting NES games based on that, and the ports of the C64 games Alien and Jack Attack (while I am not sure how much of the original code was used in either). And the Jaguar has been blessed with the Atari-ST-conversions thanks to the 68 000 CPU.

 

So I can imagine Walter did have that in mind, with the advantage of similar CPUs having been talked about here before.

 

You are right though in that home ports of arcade games back in those days were generally not based on sourcecode, but on just playing the original and trying to recreate that feel with your own code from scratch. That said, maybe the A8 version of Berzerk was a very good one, making it a worthy starting place while saving a bit of time. I never played it, I really can't say.

 

Whatever route a Lynx version would go, I hope the voices are implemented. In case it is too complex to recreate the computer generated voices maybe recordings of a few of them could be put in and played instead.

[ZylonBane]

In case it is too complex to recreate the computer generated voices maybe recordings of a few of them could be put in and played instead.

If by "recreate" you mean emulate in software the Berzerk machine's speech synthesis chip, uh... yeah... somehow I doubt the Lynx would be capable of that. Of course they'd use recorded samples instead. That's what lots of Lynx arcade ports did. It's actually quite good at playing back digital audio.

[108 Stars]

My line of thinking was that maybe the custom chipset of the Lynx could handle it with its advantage of being released almost a decade later. Yet I am not even sure if Berzerk had extra hardware for that, and how advanced it was.

 

Recorded samples would work for me just as well, I just fear for the memory they cost if they are to be good quality. That was the major reason so few games used many voices. Of course, the Berzerk way of randomly putting together sentences out of a pool of words may be helpful, if that is translated to the digi speach; this way each single word would only have to be stored once, no repeat words that waste memory. And of course Berzerk has little else that would cost loads of memory.

[ZylonBane]

Berzerk used an LPC voice synthesis chip (much like Astro Blaster, GORF, Wizard of Wor, etc), with a small set of LPC-encoded words burned into its ROM.

 

The speech was done using LPC coding that I believe was invented by T.I., although I remember we used a National Speech chip in it. This was when speech and memory was expensive, so we didn't just digitize sounds and dump them out through a DAC. I remember it cost something like $1000 per word to have the compression done, so we tried to come up with a limited vocabulary which could be rearranged and reused as much as possible.

http://home.hiwaay.net/~lkseitz/cvg/berzerk.html

 

Yeah, running a software emulation of a hardware LPC decoder on an overclocked 6502 seems highly unlikely. Even MAME wasn't able to emulate this chip until 2007. Prior to that, it used samples.

[LX.NET]

I think that source code of a game being ported will help to get the original game mechanics in correctly instead of reverse engineered and "only" similar. E.g. the behavior and AI-ish elements of the robots in Berzerk. For a port I think the source code helps getting a clear picture of that. How (identical) and if it can be ported is a different thing.

[Lynxpro]

Use samples then. No shame there.