Sinigord

The object processor is a very cool piece of hardware for its time, designed by some very smart people with no common sense. Had they not tried to squish all the data together in the object list and just used an extra 4 bytes to allow things to be on 8 or 16 bit offsets, all the software building the object list would be so much more efficient, no need to shift stuff left and right and cut bits off to make it fit.

Its been 25 years since the original release of Painter on the Atari ST.

I played thru all the community levels yesterday, 21 and the Xmas tree one seemed hardest, managed 21 with 3 secs left in 60 hz.

Doesn't anyone remember Scramble (arcade game from 1981)? This has end level boss instead of the evil difficult to navigate section and a hard to hit final bomb target. Did you put the rudetron sounds as a hidden option in llamatron?

Thought I'd just let you 64 people know about this new game on Kickstarter, it's like Uridium. Hewson Consultants are also behind this new version. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/robhwson/hyper-sentinel/description

I know him from way back, and that address won't work now. I'll drop him an email and see if he'll come to the lynx forum. Gordon

This is a real CD emulator box from Cross Products. When I bought 2 of the Cart Dev Systems, I remember seeing documentation about the CD Emulator. I'm not sure if any Jaguar developers ever used one of the cross products CD Emulators, so it's going to be hard to get it working on a Jaguar I suspect. The Cross Products Cart Dev Kits came with a dedicated Scsi card to talk to the Alpine like unit that plugged into the Jaguar. The software for debugging was totally different to the Atari Kit but not better... the DSP/GPU debugging was just as buggy as on the Alpine. Tempted to bid on the CD emulator, just out of curiosity....

check out http://www.mug-uk.co.uk/ He has a link to a cart image of the LLS Cart. It was a monst like debugger that you plugged into the cart port and activated by pressing reset. You can rip chunks of memory to disk and trace thru code etc.... It was used by most of the ST crackers back in the ST days.

I seem to remember playing with the jumpers on the Alpine a while back and I'm pretty sure one of them changes the default boot up stub memory location.

There are risc disassemblers available. I'm sure a few chunks of 4k risc code wouldn't be so hard to reverse engineer.

Bomberman and multiplayer Tetris would be two games that are certainly achievable and probably wouldn't take too long to code on the Jaguar. Anyone out there dying to play these titles?

Made a little update at the Sinister Developments page. Might be of interest to new budding developers... http://www.kewlplace.com/sinister Gordon

I'm still around. Just not had much time lately to do anything Jaguar. Work has been kinda nuts since January. That's some feat indeed Mendon, I don't think I managed to get past 41 without losing all my lives. Haven't tried recently though. I've been intending to put an update on the webpage for a while, I'll see if I can at least manage that at the weekend. Gordon

I used to have this game a long long time ago. Excellent game, haven't seen an original copy since then. I remember finishing Milennium 2.2 about 12 hours after I got it. Deuterous was a lot bigger if I remember correctly. But shouldn't you be playing Painter?? Gordon

It's always interesting to see your product mentioned for any reason at all. It's the "any kind of publicity is a good thing" effect. I've always had the following view on piracy. A person who will pirate any product and never consider purchasing the product (even if they actually like the product) isn't really a lost customer. These people would rather not have the product than pay for it. It looks like the ebay auction ended without bids anyway. Most people know that emulators can be obtained for free as well as rom images. Gordon

The tracks are actual race tracks from those countries. The layout should at least be the same shape, if WTR has the same tracks. I spent weeks playing Super Burnout when I got hold of it. It's a great game. Gordon

The Painter version on the BJL rom is an early version. The CD release version changes include game sound effects and music (which I think adds a lot to the game). There are 100 new levels, that start off easy and work up to hard. Essentially the game logic has not changed, most of the other changes were the addition of the 3D Balls menu screen and better password entry options. The BJL version is very small (less than 100k) whereas the CD version is almost 2MB. I'm working on a new version with some bugfixes and some enhancements that will be available as an encrypted CD, so that people without bypass Carts can also play the game. Gordon @ Sinister http://www.kewlplace.com/sinister

I think level 78 is probably the toughest. If you can defeat 78, it should be an enjoyable coast to the finish line. Not too easy mind you! Painter is one of those games you either love or hate. If you love fast paced, sweaty palm inducing, rage inducing torment, then this is the game for you. Sounds like I'll need to design a few more levels to keep Mendon tortured a bit longer. Progress is being made on the Encrypted re-issue of Painter. I'm not working for next 2 weeks, so I should be able to get everything finished that I wanted to. Gordon

Well, it could be done, but where's the fun in that I'm really trying to keep your brain agile, it's not so hard to memorize a few little squares... is it?? It's easy for me to say because obviously, I know where all the hidden boxes are when I play. You know, when I design levels, I have to go back and play them to make sure they are solvable. Sometimes I spend an hour on one level, before I'll decide ok... that's actually just too hard. I'll then tweak the number of monsters or add more time or modify the level a bit. I do remember spending a long time testing one level and then finishing it with only one second. I figured if I can beat it, someone else out there has to be able to do it and probably more efficiently. Gordon

Do I need to make some easier levels for you guys? I know that Matthias has finished all 100 levels, and I can finish them all. I think the best I managed in one sitting was to level 53 or so. I could put up a webpage with the level passwords, say 10 per page. Let me know what you think. Gordon ps. Still working on some fixes before I re-issue Painter as an Encrypted CD.

Interesting.... Gordon

1 & 2. I have had some thoughts about how Painter could evolve, maybe I should check out Pepper II since I have never seen it. I suspect any changes would probably make the game more puzzle and less arcade. 3. I have no plans to do any Lynx development. I've had too little time to spend on the Jaguar, so I don't want to further divide my efforts. Regards, Gordon

I could do that. I can also put code in to boot an unencrypted CD. I have a few bugfixes to include also. So, if anyone has any suggestions for inclusion in Painter, let me know! Gordon

Well, the ST is an older system but was a very capable system for the time. The real headache on the ST was the interleaved screen format and lack of colors. Doing any kind of scrolling on the ST was torture. It's not really fair to compare the ST and Jaguar, the Jaguar has so much more hardware available and faster processors. I guess I like the Jaguar better, it's a games console and nothing else. I think as far as Painter is concerned, the Joypad works better than keys. Slam Racer just would not have been possible on the ST, some of the precise masking code that allows you to drive under bridges, signs and trees would have slowed the ST to a crawl. I have done some work on Centipede, it's not even running yet on the Jaguar, but the ST source has all been modified to comply with the PC 68k assembler conventions. It'll be a while given how much time I've been spending at work recently. I'm hoping to get a lot done around christmas time. Gordon

Slam Racer was written as a cartridge game, and it works just fine from a CD. It all depends on what the developer had to use resource wise on the Jaguar. If there was a need to execute code from cart space to allow more ram to be used for graphics, then it's going to be real difficult to make that code from RAM only. I decided that the executing code had to fit in RAM only and the cart was basically a compressed file store. I did have a small loader which ran straight from cart and it would decompress and run each part of the code as necessary. Rebuilding the bubble Gordon