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Missing Arcade-Classics on the 7800


Mister-VCS

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How would empire strike back look the vector based arcade game

Idk, it looks like most of the 8-bit computer ports are doing actual vector graphics through software rendering and it gets sluggish quite easily once a few ships occur.

 

Star Wars on the 5200 is 2D based but it renders at a more consistent frame rate, I think 2D and 160 mode are needed to run a game like TESB on the 7800 imo. There's just so much stuff and big stuff happening on the screen most of the time. Needs a lot of prerendering just like Space Harrier did on most consoles, a very 3D game even if you fake it.

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Already done. If you look at PMP's post.

Oh, well that vector based list to 7800 is much smaller than I thought. I am far behind on 7800 news lol. Were many carts made? I see Space Duel is in 160 mode, could PMP chime in on final reasons for going lower res in that instance.

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I know it's a different system and definitely not an Atari but have any home brewers tried adapting [arcade] Star Wars to the Vectrex? The lack of colors would annoy some but the system has a 6809 CPU and if I recall, so does the arcade original.

Hey it has color, are those overlays in black & white? ^_^ The Vectrex could probably come very close, I've often thought in homebrews they could try to do more 3D perspective stuff since they can scale vector objects more efficiently than non-scaling sprites can.

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Oh, well that vector based list to 7800 is much smaller than I thought. I am far behind on 7800 news lol. Were many carts made?

I don't know how many carts were made for Ripoff, but you still can buy the game at the Atariage store.

 

https://atariage.com/store/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1005

Edited by 8th lutz
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Would Popeye (which uses a much higher resolution for the character sprites than the backgrounds) be a good candidate for the 7800 due to its hi-res sprite mode? I'm a long-time fan of the original Nintendo arcade game, but no home version to date has really done it any justice. Although I'm sure there are many stumbling blocks to making a more arcade-accurate port of this title, one thing that I noticed right away by searching Google is that resources to work with appear to be limited as no has ripped the complete sprite sheet from the original game (using MAME or whichever custom utility they prefer). I'm aware that duplicating the original resolution of the arcade character sprites would be impossible on the 7800, but wouldn't someone with the requisite pixel-art skills be able to adapt/down-convert them into a form that puts all of the existing home versions to shame? Just wondering aloud what the possibilities could be for a title like this in the right capable hands.

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Would Popeye (which uses a much higher resolution for the character sprites than the backgrounds) be a good candidate for the 7800 due to its hi-res sprite mode? I'm a long-time fan of the original Nintendo arcade game, but no home version to date has really done it any justice. Although I'm sure there are many stumbling blocks to making a more arcade-accurate port of this title, one thing that I noticed right away by searching Google is that resources to work with appear to be limited as no has ripped the complete sprite sheet from the original game (using MAME or whichever custom utility they prefer). I'm aware that duplicating the original resolution of the arcade character sprites would be impossible on the 7800, but wouldn't someone with the requisite pixel-art skills be able to adapt/down-convert them into a form that puts all of the existing home versions to shame? Just wondering aloud what the possibilities could be for a title like this in the right capable hands.

I'm no expert but it looks like it could work within Kangaroo mode like Froggie did, basic straight up and down color layout without heavy orthographic projection. Detailed sprites but not that many, although a lot of hearts even if only 1 color lol.

 

The backgrounds look easy enough, whatever hardware they used it did that weird blown up low res thing you'd see in some arcade games in the 80s, Bally Midway was using that in sports games and Xenophobe for some reason. The arcade Popeye backgrounds are actually quite chunky and have looked better in most of the ports.

http://www.spriters-resource.com/arcade/popeye/sheet/64376/

http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/ballymidway/ballymidway.htm

 

I can't find any sprites either, just GBA ones. It's amazing that a fairly popular 1982 arcade game still doesn't have a sprite rip in 2016. I'm just not seeing any good proxies in the other versions. The Coleco ones have a nice size but are muted in color while the NES ones are decent but squashed shorter than the arcade ones. Would be a lot better to converting the arcade sources down.

 

Not much sense in replicating the arcade "res-mixing" thing and just unify everything into a 320X240 resolution or 160X240 if it ends up not running fast enough.

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The TIA is actually capable of doing quite a lot. The problem with it is that getting it to do anything requires extra coding since it only understands very raw commands. POKEY, and other chips, have more complicated instruction sets that take a lot of processes off the main processor. In other words, to tell POKEY to play a little tune, you just send along the notes and the voice you're using. In TIA, your program has to tell it what notes and voices are in the first place.

 

XL/XE/5200 Joust (POKEY) doesn't sounds better than 7800 Joust (TIA).

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I wonder if the Atari 8-bit version could be used on the 7800, maybe just visually with a Dark Chambers code base.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6leSngK-2cM

There was a really awesome title screen and a couple screenshots shown of a gauntlet type game for the 7800xm. This was 5 or 6 years ago and the programmer quit the 7800 scene.
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There was a really awesome title screen and a couple screenshots shown of a gauntlet type game for the 7800xm. This was 5 or 6 years ago and the programmer quit the 7800 scene.

That's too bad, happens all the time, hard to keep that motivation in the long run. Many people like things but it takes real love to follow through to the end. I'm no better, I got passion but I can't stick to one project at a time. I don't get bored of the projects but a lot of them can only go so far with my skill set without a partner to fill the spaces I can't. Actually makes me think of the scene from Blazing Saddles. ^_^

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Idk, it looks like most of the 8-bit computer ports are doing actual vector graphics through software rendering and it gets sluggish quite easily once a few ships occur.

 

Star Wars on the 5200 is 2D based but it renders at a more consistent frame rate, I think 2D and 160 mode are needed to run a game like TESB on the 7800 imo. There's just so much stuff and big stuff happening on the screen most of the time. Needs a lot of prerendering just like Space Harrier did on most consoles, a very 3D game even if you fake it.

The 5200 port isn't that slow. It looks as if they are playing an NTSC game in PAL mode.

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The 5200 port isn't that slow. It looks as if they are playing an NTSC game in PAL mode.

No my point was the 5200 port ran faster at a more consistent frame rate because it was 2D based while the other ports used true 3D models and slowed down to a crawl when more than 1-2 ships were on screen. So to be clear I'm suggesting the 5200 version is better for its graphics approach, not worse.

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No my point was the 5200 port ran faster at a more consistent frame rate because it was 2D based while the other ports used true 3D models and slowed down to a crawl when more than 1-2 ships were on screen. So to be clear I'm suggesting the 5200 version is better for its graphics approach, not worse.

Ah.. Cool. If you look hard enough (maybe I can find it), there is a version for the A8 that uses a vector approach. It is a little choppier. I think it is less colorful too.

Just something interesting.

 

Found it...

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Ah.. Cool. If you look hard enough (maybe I can find it), there is a version for the A8 that uses a vector approach. It is a little choppier. I think it is less colorful too.

Just something interesting.

 

Found it...

The vector approach through software rendering has its advantages like the Death Star zoom looks great as its a flat "vector drawing" that scales big efficiently. Harder to approximate with straight 2D sprites but they didn't even try on the second port.

 

For the ships they got the vertex/line count down as far as they could in the 3D version but any kind of clustering or peaks in rendering gets really slow for a game about fast action. In the 2D approach the frame rate was better but the sprites were kind of small as you only get one distance sprite rather than 2 or 3 versions which I think the 7800 could do better than 5200 using sprites especially in size. I think the 5200 suffers in controls mostly because of the way ship sprites are more of an overlay rather than approximate 3D objects that can move independently.

 

Idk maybe a combination would be better, 2D fighters with a vector based Death Star and background objects.

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I'm no expert but it looks like it could work within Kangaroo mode like Froggie did, basic straight up and down color layout without heavy orthographic projection. Detailed sprites but not that many, although a lot of hearts even if only 1 color lol.

 

The backgrounds look easy enough, whatever hardware they used it did that weird blown up low res thing you'd see in some arcade games in the 80s, Bally Midway was using that in sports games and Xenophobe for some reason. The arcade Popeye backgrounds are actually quite chunky and have looked better in most of the ports.

http://www.spriters-resource.com/arcade/popeye/sheet/64376/

http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/ballymidway/ballymidway.htm

 

I can't find any sprites either, just GBA ones. It's amazing that a fairly popular 1982 arcade game still doesn't have a sprite rip in 2016. I'm just not seeing any good proxies in the other versions. The Coleco ones have a nice size but are muted in color while the NES ones are decent but squashed shorter than the arcade ones. Would be a lot better to converting the arcade sources down.

 

Not much sense in replicating the arcade "res-mixing" thing and just unify everything into a 320X240 resolution or 160X240 if it ends up not running fast enough.

Of all of those, the NES version has the most polish. Why didn't he review the GBA port on the list, assuming the GBA port was an actual port and not a sequel.

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Of all of those, the NES version has the most polish. Why didn't he review the GBA port on the list, assuming the GBA port was an actual port and not a sequel.

That's a completely different game, it's like a side scrolling race game. Popeye Rush For Spinach, looks okay, a little claustrophobic in graphics scale IE. make the sprites smaller or the screen resolution bigger.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ55H7U7_JA
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