Targeting XL/XE w/ 64K Minimum: Advisable?

[DocFlareon]

I'm in the early stages of building a multi-platform RPG. I'm thinking about requiring the latest and best from the 6502 machines. On the Atari front, would I be shooting myself in the foot by freezing out those with 48K machines such as fully-expanded 400s and 800s?

[Rybags]

Not really. Anyone serious about the 8-bit probably has multiple machines or at least a 64K XL or XE as a minimum.

Those that can't be bothered, just let them use emulation.

[baktra]

I believe that it all depends on requirements of the game.

XL machines (except 600 XL) all have 64 KB, but the last 16 KB are hidden under ROM, so these 16 KB cannot be used straightforwardly.

If the game unconditionally needs these 16 KB, it would be OK to target the XL/XE machines. If not, then you can target 48 KB machines. Just be careful when interfacing with the OS - no unofficial vectors please.

 

I take it that a RPG game will be loading data from disk during the game play (portions of the game world). So a combination of a slim DOS (or sector reader) and 48 KB can be OK.

[Justin Payne]

I have to agree with Rybags. Machines are much more affordable then they were backnin the day and with memory upgrade options for systems with less that 64k, if they choose not to hit those requirement, they always have emulators to fall back to.

[Rybags]

If you're doing disk access then consider 48K if it's not going to adversly affect the game. But really, we got shafted continuously from 1983 onwards with so many lame games compared to other systems for the sake of 48K machines - typical penalty being that you played through a game all for the reward of a crappy 2 line rainbow text congratulatory message.

 

Another consideration is do what AR - Dungeon does. It's possibly unique in that it detects 48, 64, 128K systems and will use the extra Ram as cache which unltimately can reduce disk IO a lot.

[atarixle]

Two sides of a medal:

stay pure XL, and not go PC like with all these unfinished ressources

 

- or -

 

make use of all the new stuff people developed the last 20 years because they're there and should be used ...

 

IMO if you make use of all these enhancements made for the 8 bit, it should be a huge gameplay project (not only graphics and sound)

Edited June 23, 2017 by atarixle

[xxl]

If you mean lack of memory then write a cartridge game (there is no limit in avaiable memory), but if you think of other extensions... then you have to rely on that atarians will be playing mainly on emulators.

[xxl]

[Rybags]

Somewhat of a crock - Commando is a cart and runs on 64K.

Bombjack is far superior on Atari. It and the Yie Ar are homebrewed without the resources of a large software company.

 

But yes - cartridge is well worth looking into. With very little extra programming you can treat part of the cartridge like a storage device, even using CIO if wanted.

Downside of flash cartridges is that they use cumbersome block sizes so doing trivial game state saves isn't so easy.

[atarixle]

I would (and plan to make one day) use a 16MB image - it can easily be emulated via SIO2xx devices. The machine itself will only have to have 64k RAM.

 

A Pre-configurated SD-Card (for a SIO2SD or SDrive) can hold a game using 8x16MB without any issues to the machine it runs on. And even these ATRs can be used by AspeQt/RespeQt/sio2bsd (or any other SIO2PC-Software).

[Bryan]

The Atari doesn't have big colorful sprites so the only way around this limitation is to do it in software and the way you make software run fast is to use a lot of RAM and pre-formatted/shifted data. Even faster is to do everything with immediate values meaning embedding redundant code in with the data. I don't have a problem with doing things this way, but I think it's cooler if you can get it to work in 64K.

 

If you're clever, you can often shrink a large project down with some background trickery, but sometimes you just have to target an expanded machine.

[JamesD]

My 2 cents...

If you intend to sell the game, is someone unwilling to spend money upgrading their machine likely to pay for the game, or pirate it?
If you are giving away the game, people that are unwilling to upgrade their computer don't have any right to complain.
If you make your game into a cart, RAM probably won't matter, but it will require more work.

[Mathy]

Hello guys

 

It shouldn't be to hard to find out how much memory the computer has and how it is configured. And then use what is present.

 

Sincerely

 

Mathy