mos6507
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Posts posted by mos6507
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that sounds more like marketing than like a fact .... i've had so many games on audio tapes in the eighties and i rarely had problems ... mostly rather with original datasettes that had bad tape quality.
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Magnetic media of all types, including things like diskettes, are fragile. Anecdotes like these don't change that. It just means you are lucky. There are countless counter-anecdotes of people who have tapes that won't load anymore, or disks with bad sectors.
The Starpath tape format is very robust compared to others (the Astrocade's was pretty weak), but no tape format can hold up to old worn out tapes beyond a certain point.
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Camera perspective is key when moving a 2D game to 3D. Almost all 2D games require full 360' perspective in order to see oncoming threats. Robotron is a good example. Adventure too. In Adventure you need to see the dragons and the bat whether you are facing them or not. Otherwise you can get cheap-shotted.
That's why I think most 2D games do not benefit from the 3D perspective because you wind up either doing a slightly tilted overhead perspective (so why bother??) or a first person perspective where you rely mostly on a tiny 2D radar.
Without the radar you'd need to constantly rotate to check behind you which would be visually annoying to everyone but FPS experts.
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There is no reason for Hozer to merely dub tapes because I shipped hundreds of remaining Cyberpunks Starpath CDs (and booklet materials) to him to offer to the public at cost. It would be silly to offer anything less to people until the CDs are completely depleted.
As for piracy, analog cassettes feature dropout, which causes problems with loading binary data.
Anyone dubbing tape to tape compounds hiss and raises the probability of dropouts. I doubt you could get more than one generation of dups from a starpath tape befor rendering it useless.
[ 03-02-2002: Message edited by: Glenn Saunders ]
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approx. 10 years ago i wanted to buy a 65816 expansion cart for my atari 800xl which would use 1mb ram & 20mhz 65816 cpu... that would be cool to code on... but at that time the board would have cost ca. 500 DM = 250 euro = 250 - 300 US$<<
Was that the DataQue? I don't remember anything out there that would allow both a 65816 and an accelerated CPU. The ANTIC/GTIA can't easily work with a faster CPU.
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Can't the 5200 only address 16K at a time on the cart port?
That's the way the Atari 8-bits work.
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and "Moon Patrol" (in their original forms, of course) still "valuable" enough to warrant a bunch of lawsuits.
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At least when you consider Midway/Williams/Atari games, they are.
Games like these are now going through another round of emulation and ports on the new systems. GBA in particular.
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quote:
Originally posted by Cybergoth:Hi there!Hm... what I don't understand, is how can one(!) copyright holder prevent mame.dk from offering any ROMs at all?!?
I bet it was voluntary.
If I were threatened with a lawsuit I might get scared enough to not want to risk another threat by keeping other ROMs online.
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quote:
Originally posted by BurgertimeBoy:I don't know the people that put out this CDbut I sure love them!
Dude, this is nothing but a pirate CD.
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The cool thing about the XEGS version of Lode Runner is that all the levels that were on the disk version are immediately accessible via the banked ROM. So it's like having a ramdisk or fast hard drive. And the XEGS version still has a level editor and disk support. So it's the best of both worlds.
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They used to sell an LCD shutter based goggle set for the Amiga. This is probably how all the 3D games were done, alternating frames like the Sega Master System.
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If you exclude bronze age coinop games like Tank, then I'd go with Starpath's Frogger port.
Berzerk is also really close, although it lacks the voice synth.
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I've got a MASH cart I got at one of the CG Expos with the T-shirt still shrinkwrapped.
The T-Shirt is wrapped around a square piece of cardboard, apparently, and the cart box is up against it.
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I believe this is the type of unit that Doug Neubauer and the other programmers used at 20th Century Fox.
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if it could offer richer experiences, no one every leveraged that power.
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I'm not sure I'd go THAT far.
I think Tower Toppler did a great deal with the 7800 hardware. Especially the submarine sequence with the parallax scrolling. Looks almost like a Genesis game there.
But that's about all I've seen that's that impressive. I'm sure the 7800 could do more with more innovative programming and more memory.
The 7800 really is optimized for low-color games with lots of small moving objects over a minimal background. I heard that the people who did the chipset also did the original Williams chipset, hence the excellent port of Robotron. That's not really the kind of game that people wanted to play in the mid to late 80s, but the 7800 can do a better job of it than the NES.
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I don't think Randy can make superchip games like Elevator Action or Save Mary.
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SID, to me, is optimized for music, and POKEY is optimized for sound effects. So it depends on what's more important to you in game sounds.
I think the POKEY chip's rumbles and explosions are more convincing than the SID chip's sounds.
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Originally posted by Eckhard Stolberg:The 7800 can easiely display 24 colours (plus the background) in one scanline in different objects. And if you are talking about a pixel-by-pixel base without overlaying objects, you can still get 12 colours (plus the background) per scanline in the 160x4 mode.
If 160x4 means 4 colors, then how do you get 12 colors on one scanline?
I'd love to see a demonstration of this to see exactly how you build a colorful display.
Most 7800 games that I've seen don't appear to display anywhere near that many colors per scanline.
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The 7800 is effectively limited to 160x200 because that's the highest color mode (8 per scanline).
Most games use this mode, which makes the games look a little too much like the Atari 8-bit. Remember, the 7800 was designed during the C=64 era. The C=64 was doing 320x200 with 16 colors (albeit garish hardcoded ones).
There are some weird modes in 320x200 but I don't know how effectively they can increase the color count. There is only so much you can do with palette shifting on a scanline by scanline basis. Rainbow-stripe type games with vertical separation were pretty played out during the 2600/5200 era.
The 7800 really should have supported at least 16 colors per scanline at 320x200--as the Amiga did. I don't know what the limiting factor was during the engineering phase, but the 7800 does only has 4K of RAM inside. That's less than the 5200 had! So that limits you.
A lot of games don't even appear to use 8 colors per scanline even at the lower resolution.
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How does the 7800 know when you have a 2-button joystick or not? Would it require that you press one of the buttons to reset the game perhaps?
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Wow. Exidy really pushed the gore envelope, didn't they? First Death Derby and then this!<<
You mean Death Race. Death Derby is the name of my port in progress.
Chiller has some really cool audio also. Lots of cool reverb-laden squeals and cackles and things. I doubt the NES version has audio that matches the coinop.
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quote:
Originally posted by Matthew Vigor:If I ever get around to learning Assembler and making a homebrew project, it will have a label in the style of the original text labels.
Let me know if you can find an affordable way to make those. They use some kind of laminated metal foil.
I have yet to find a company who could even quote me on a job like that.
If any homebrewer wants to use a label that will last--that's the type to use.
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I still have all my original 2600 manuals from when I was a kid. I kept them in a comic book sleeve.
I think the manuals are very important, and it is depressing how uncommon it is to see used carts with manuals--even more depressing that manuals are not seen as a more valuable commodity to collectors.
[ 02-17-2002: Message edited by: Glenn Saunders ]
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Thomas, what did you ultimately do to get the driving controller code to work in Sprintmaster?
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How many people would like it if everyone and his brother took a classic movie that fell into the public domain like Metropolis or Night of the Living Dead, recut it or colorized it, and slapped their own credits on it?
Is it an homage, a gag, or is it plagiarism? I think you cross the line when you take hacking so seriously that you put hacking on equal footing with new game creation.
Sure, have fun with it, but at least give credit where credit is due.
Otherwise years from now when the ROM image is all we have, nobody will know who made these games or what the original version is.
"Hey look, it's Tron Light Cycles by Pyramid Studios"!
"No, that's Surround by Al Miller from Atari."
"Who is 'Otari'? The filename says TRONLC.BIN and the emulator database says it's by Pyramid Studios. They must have been some old game company from the 1970s."
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Board Games
in Atari 2600
Posted
Othello
Video Chess
Backgammon
Flag Capture (dumbed down Risk)
3D Tic Tac Toe
Checkers (Activision and Atari)
If you consider the puzzle genre equivalent to board games, then homebrews have been busy with them, like Okie Dokie, Qb, and Jammed/Crazy Valet.
Board games are hard to do on the 2600 because they are background-graphics intensive. This generally means dynamic playfield bitmaps which are hard to do on the 2600 and still yield few colors to work with.
Battleship would require too much RAM for a stock 2600. It's two 10x10 boards and there are three states, unknown, hit, and miss.
It's probably doable with Starpath RAM.
Visually indicating a hit vs. a miss would also be tricky. You'd have to resort to striping because the playfield only has two colors, one for background and one for foreground. If you interleaved the background you could have odd scanlines be red and even be white.
[ 03-03-2002: Message edited by: Glenn Saunders ]