Alex H

Hi Folks, it's about time I posted an update. Unfortunately I haven't made much progress with MGD over the past year or so. I've had some heath problems to contend with (including a brain haemorrhage - ouch!!!), and it's hard to get back into a project when it's been left so long. Anyhow, the latest binary is here. The level data is still far from complete, I still have more speech to add and other little bits to do here and there. I've put in some title screen music (known bug: music goes crazy when you reset out of the game). And I've updated the scoring system (the number of points scored for each platform passed increases depending on which fruit you're on). I'm sure there were other changes but I can't remember off-hand. Hopefully I'll get this finished sometime soon. Alex

; divide value in temp by 10 lda temp lsr lsr clc adc temp lsr clc adc temp lsr lsr lsr clc adc temp lsr clc adc temp lsr lsr lsr lsr sta temp I think that's right.

Here's another little scroller demo. Binary only this time until I get it cleaned up. I wrote this on a PAL machine (PAL60) and haven't sorted out NTSC colours yet. The background should be red/blue but will be purple/green in NTSC. Runs ok in Z26 (press the "-" key to switch to PAL colours) but Stella chokes on this with my 3GHz machine! pscroll.zip

So they make the bubble less evil? Each down arrow collected adds a very small amount to gravity, irrespective of what other power-ups you have. It's very subtle - you need lots of them before you really feel it, although even a small increase in gravity can make all the difference with the longer platforms. The later levels will be faster and it becomes increasingly difficult to not get pushed off the top of the screen, so extra gravity is worth having. Remember, this is a WIP so lots of things aren't quite perfect yet. I'll adjust things like the amount of gravity added once I do more thorough play testing. Well, reversing the controls I can deal with if I'm prepared. Depends where the mushroom is when I grab it. But I'll agree sometimes they can be deadly. The mushrooms give a good/bad trip depending on what colour they are. The bad trip is obvious, the good trip let's you miss fruit without starting back at the cherry plus a points bonus (not sure if that was in the last version I posted). I don't know that I've ever missed a gold cherry, but I know I often don't reach the cherry and yet still get the warp option. Probably because I have an Atarivox. At the end of each level is a golden fruit. Collect the gold fruit to enable teleport back to that level. Say you have collected 2 gold fruit, then you will see the teleport at the beginning. Jump through that and you will see a second teleport, etc. The number of opened teleports is stored in the AtariVox - this is basically how I've implemented the level select. The blue zone is the end of the test data - there is nothing (playable) beyond it in this version.

50/60 bytes/sec is fine for speech, not so good for the synth. I output the speech during overscan which has little else in it apart from sound. At one point I was testing the timer after sending a byte and if there's enough time, repeat. (Usually fitting in 3 bytes per frame.) But I couldn't hear the difference. With the longer speech strings it was filling the SpeakJet buffer anyway at a single byte per frame, so there seemed little advantage. The latency is pretty tiny unless there's a whole heap of control codes. The way I look at it, latency isn't a problem if the user can't/doesn't notice it. But I must admit, I haven't done much with the SpeakJet synth functions. I've only just started work on it again after being unwell recently. But I'm hoping to have a finished version (or nearly finished) for CGEUK on 13th Aug. So hopefully not too long after then.

I've not noticed that That's deliberate. I put a pause in the data so he burps a moment after eating the food. I also tend to put short pauses at the start of other speech strings in case one bit of speech interrupts another. (Not that that happens much in MGD.) I made a habbit of doing that after coding the Verzerk speech hack (Vectrex) where speech strings get interrupted more often. Just sounds better that way.

Like the title says. wscroll.zip

Yes, what was I thinking? And I was programming sound just an hour before writing that. Yep. I think the main reasons there isn't much in-game music on the 2600 is because it only has 2 channels, and developers wouldn't want to use up valuable ROM space on music that sounds nasty.

So if the TIA was "by all accounts" better than the sound chip of the spectrum, why did Atari use the speccys chip for the Atari ST instead of its own "superior" TIA? 900398[/snapback] The 48k Spectrum didn't even have a sound chip. It had a single I/O line connected to the speaker which was twiddled under CPU control. The Atari ST used the Yamaha version of the Intellivision (GI) sound chip. (The later 128K Spectrums used the GI sound chip, as did the Vectrex, MSX and others.) The TIA has more waveforms than the GI chip so is more flexible in the type of sounds it can make, but only has 2 channels and 8-bit pitch control. The GI sound chip has 3 square-wave oscillators with 12-bit pitch control which makes it more tuneful, plus a noise generator and envelope generator which can also be used as a triangle/sawtooth oscillator.

$351!

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewI...item=8205899912 I wonder how much it will fetch? This was the previous one sold on eBay: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewI...item=8193364813

Better on the CD than not at all. He's still making them, but as and when he has time. He only sells them on eBay when he has a batch made. No, sorry I don't. I'll ask around.

No problem! Hmm... The mag is sold for profit presumably, and it's the content (print and CD) which is where the value is and what people pay for. No print/CD, no sales. So, technically I would say it's a no no. The copyrights are still in effect - they're not PD. Also, some of the games were licenced from Cinematronics, Konami, Namco, etc., and there may be limits on how/where those titles can be published. So it's possible that Jay himself wouldn't be able to give permission. Having said that, Sean Kelly sells his multi-carts and some of the websites that have the ROMs for download carry advertising. But if I were in Martyn's shoes, I'd really want to speak to Jay Smith. Some of the homebrewers might be happy to have their ROM images on the CD? My stuff doesn't work in the current emulators so there's not much point. BTW, Jeroen received an email from Jeff Corsiglia and posted it to rec.games.vectrex. Here's a copy: (Hope that's ok Jeroen?) Perhaps Jeroen could put you in touch and he might be up for an interview for the mag?