Nop90

I have nothing against a new release on modern consoles, but do we really need it? I think that new generation players are not so much interested in such a kind of games and IMHO this release targets old Lynx fans. But almost every one of us has such games as original carts, has them as digital rom on a Lynx SD cart, and can play them on a lot of other devices that can run a Lynx emulator (PSP is still a great device for this). Not to say that these 6 games are already on the Evercade Lynx cart II, like the other title (Chip's Challenge) that Pixel Games already released on the Switch as a stand alone title. So why play it on the switch where the too large screen of the switch takes away a lot of the charm of the original games due to the huge pixels? Last but not least, all this releases uses an emulator based on the same old open source and CC code, with all its well know limits. It would be great to see a release of a lynx game supporting the comlynx mode working on a modern handheld that uses bluetooth or wifi to enable the multiplayer connection. Or at least such new releases should record the highscores on an online server, but this would require some reverse engineering on the lynx game code. Not too difficult honestly for most of the homebrew coders of this community, but who cares to ask the help of passionate homebrew coders for a commercial product? 😉 I think I would be happy to pay for a new release that brings us something new. This morning I must have woken up in a bad mood 😆

Thank you James and Tanya for playing again the game on @ZeroPage Homebrew twitch channel. I already fixed the 3 bugs you found and slowed down a bit the ball with the 8 shaped path. If you want to play again the game let me know and I'll send you the updated rom.

And finally the port is complete and it runs really fine. Current version is V1 Beta, I will not add anything more for the moment but fixing bugs if I found any. The game misses the possibility to add new hiscores, this could be an easy addon taking the code from other games of mine but I don't want to see a full working digital rom shared on warez sites 😉. I'm not going to release the game now, I will only share it with some friends of mine that will help me to test it and with James of @ZeroPage Homebrew, just in case he wants to play the game again on his twitch channel. I kindly ask who will receive this game to not share with anyone else the rom.the game. As a precaution I added a disclaimer in the title screen, it should be enough While waiting for the possibility to acquire a license from Epyx I'll work on an alternate layout of the game that could allow me to release or sell the game without copyright problems. If I will get an official license the new graphic could be added as an alternate version of the game. This is a quick mockup of how the new gfx could look:

Yes, SUZY skips it, so there is no effect on the drawing time, but I think that the loading time of the sprite data into SUZY is different if the sprites are chained or not. If I remember well, reading the Lynx patents it seems that SUZY has some data buffer in it and at low level it should prefetch some data for the next sprite while it parses the current one. Is this correct?

Now the game runs at a steady rate of 20FPS and all known bugs are fixed. I'm refining a couple of things in the game. then I'll add the train modes ("Platform only" and "Puzzle only") and the beta version of the game will be ready.

The fame limit using a counter in the VBL interrupt handler works really fine and it added only 11 bytes in the resident sector. Also I set the screen refresh rate to 60Hz and I limited the framerate to 20FPS (seems to be a nice value). Limiting all the different part of the game to the same FPS makes it easier to keep constant the timer of the game. Now I have to tune all the animations with this setting, but should not take too much. Thanks again to everyone for the support.

I did it the same in some game of mine 😉, but this time I have to find a solution that doesn't use too much memory Great solution, it's easy to add a counter in the audio driver already linked to VBL interrupt handler. Thanks.

I just completed the remake of Impossible Mission on the Lynx and started polishing the game. The biggest issue of the game is a not constant framerate in different rooms. The code is already heavily optimized to avoid slow instructions (like * / %), the performance bottleneck is the GFX drawing. For the elevator screen I used chained sprites, in the rooms at first I not used it for memory limits, now I forked the code and I changed it to use chained sprites, but to find the needed memory I have to load some code from the cart every frame (and pay attention to not do it while playing PCM samples from the cart 😒). This code is very buggy at the moment and doesn't seem to have a big boost of speed. I'll try to fix it, but I want to try a different way on the code without the chained sprites. I'd like to limit the framerate to the lowest value (about 12 FPS) so all the rooms run at the same speed, and tune the engine (I can do it', I don't update sprites every frame at the moment). I tried using tgi_setframerate, but id doesn't work as expected. The first screen of the game is a splash screen with a 255 color image that works fine at 50 FPS, but flickers with other framerates (higher or lower). If I set 50FPS for the splash screen then I change to 12 in the game init code it seems to not work. If I set 12 FPS from the beginning it works ok for most of the rooms, but some of them (especially the code rooms that have only few sprites) run much faster. So the first question is: how does tgi_setframerate work? Can I set every value I want or not? Why do I see the described weird effects? The other question is: how could I limit the framerate in other ways? I think I could track the execution code of every frame and wait before starting a new one till a constant amount of time. Not very clean but should work. Are there other strategies?

Don't worry, he is reputable. The problem is that the license is not available now, there are a lot of people asking for it (that makes the price go up) and at the moment it is already granted to someone else. Googling I found there are rumors for a new IM3 on C64, should be it. I got the advice to try again at the end of the year. Not too much, it will take almost this time to polish everything. So now I have several options: - Wait the end of the year and ask again for a licence to publish the game - Release the digit rom for free - Reskinning the game, making new levels, changng a bit the game logic. This will take from 6 to 12 month more. For the moment I'm going to continue to work on this version. The game is complete and I'm reworking the engine to gain some FPS in the rooms. Soon a new video, or maybe a new test run on ZPH.

I'm not in touch with the IP owner, I'm talking with someone that could produce the cart and could pay for the rights taking for him the profits, he is in touch with the IP owner.

Possible, but I woild like to keep the original look.

A phisical release requires to acquire the rights for the game from the owner. It costs money and before closing an agreement the producer wants to see the final product. And with such an investment he wants all the right on my code. I have to think about it before deciding, so for the moment the priority is to complete the game. The porting is almost done (omnly 1 room to complete) but there are a lot of improvements to do, mostly on code performance.

And another room completed: I really don't understand this room: no forniture, a single robot in the bottom left corner that is a point not easy to reach, a slow ball that is not a problem to dodge and the room can be passed with 3 simple jumps. 😏

Today I added the Balls in all the 5 rooms. One of the room (image below) is completed, in the others 4 the ball still flyes towards the character without obstacles. It's so boring to code all the interactions with the obstacles and with the moving platforms one by one. But I'm really close to complete the game.

Since @Kojote is on the forum, maybe he wants to say something more about the magazine.