mos6507

>> It was his opinion it was too little too late, << Technological innovation always outpaces the ability to make said innovation affordable. There is also something better on the horizon, but it takes a while for it to trickle down into something truly affordable. So I don't blame Joe for thinking of the 8-bit in historical terms at the time when the Amiga was on the horizon. But it would be several years before the Amiga would become remotely accessible to the masses (when the affordable Amiga 500 was released). But when you talk about market share, you know, the C=64 was probably more popular after the crash than before. The crash was brought on in part due to the shift from consoles to home computers. While the 8-bit platforms were aging, you have to remember that when they first hit the scene they were very expensive relative to the mid 80s, mostly because of the high cost of RAM. You know, between 1977 and 1982 I think there were far far fewer home computers sold than there was between, let's say, 1983 and 1987, mostly because of economic factors. Early on, they were not penetrating beyond the early adopting geek crowd who didn't mind spending $2000 to max out their memory. It really wasn't until 83-84 that 64K machines were less than $300. So the 8-bit machines were really just coming into their own. (You know, most people who bought their first computers back then were NOT comfortable spending thousands of dollars. They only became accustomed to the higher pricepoints when the 8-bits were phased out and there was no alternative.) The first wave of 16-bit machines were at too high a pricepoint for those making that console-computer transition, whereas 8-bit home computers were becoming as affordable as game consoles. Not only that, but most 16-bit machines had generally worse graphics than their 8-bit predecessors. I'm mostly talking about the early CGA PCs and monochrome MACs. The mid-80s were really a two-teir computer industry of 8 and 16-bit machines. The 8-bit machines didn't fade away until the early 90s. So while Atari was torn down by the crash, the 8-bit platform itself had a future at least as long as its past at that time. That's something the Tramiel's didn't realize when they focused all their attention on the ST at the expense of their existing userbase.

<< They did look at the Apple userbase initially. The Apple II was the original competitive model for the design of the PCS's. Both in hardware and software. >> Gladly they didn't copy the Apple's weak graphics and audio. The product that would have saved the 8-bit line was the 1090XL expansion box. Products like the Black Box and MIO exist only because of the initial R&D related to the parallel bus and parallel bus driver specifications. The Black Box is more than a hard drive. It's also a printer and serial port. So it duplicates a lot of what separate 1090XL cards would have done, in one device. Not only that, but the BB serial port is the fastest available on the Atari, and the only one that supports hardware flow control which is the only way to reliably hook up a high speed modem to an 8-bit. The MIO lacks hardware flow control. The parallel bus isn't just faster than SIO. It also allows you to run multiple devices at once. As you know, with the SIO, any individual device monopolizes the bus. This is an especially bad problem when downloading (or uploading) from a terminal or BBS program. Disk access halts the modem and vice versa. The 8-bit line was definitely a model in economy which had its good and bad point. Sometimes the products could be a little cheap and fragile, but they still allowed you to get the job done. I really was spoiled in the early 80s by the pricepoint of home computers. It was cheap enough that parents could purchase them for their kids as expensive toys. They didn't necessarily have to be sold on the idea that this was an important household appliance. As limited as they were, they were accessible to the masses. when the PC took over, the PC pricepoint of $2000+ took over and only in the last few years have we seen the resurgence of the <$1000 PC.

>> Glenn actually it wasn't THE first.... in fact technically Computer Space was NOT the first commercial video game, a few months earlier Bill Pitts, a Stanford graduate and Hugh Tuck, a friend of his built and installed "Galaxy Game", a coin-op version of Steve Russells Spacewar inside the Stamford student hall.... << But this was never productized and offered to the general coinop industry the way Computer Space was. I consider that a one-off prototype in the same sense as Tennis for Two was, and since it was really just a PDP-10/11 under the hood, not nearly as influential in the evolution of the videogame industry as the CPU-less design in Computer Space (which would be the standard way to do things until the late 70s). It was Nolan's cost-reduction design in the electronics that allowed the first generation of coinop games to happen.

>> Oh, and I'm not the one planning on writing it, though if I could code in 3D << Until someone builds it, then it's really just a useless exercise in hypotheticals.

Did you know that the Mindlink controller was available to the public in limited quantities in connection to some Atari 8-bit game? I had a chance to pick one up used in the early 90s but balked on the price.

>> Make it all in 3D. In other words, make the game nothing more than a change of perspective while leaving the rest unchanged.<< That's just it. You CAN'T leave it unchanged unless your 3D perspective is basically just a tilted overhead view, like a relief effect. While your ideas sound good on paper I really think you are going to run into gameplay problems with the shift to a more realistic perspective. You can't really go halfway, it's all or nothing. So much of Adventure relies on unrealistic physics and an unrealistic perspective that you can't avoid losing some of the quaint features when you shift to 3D. Remember, Adventure isn't really a top down perspective. It's like a flattened isometric 2D perspective. I call it "iconic" perspective. This is the way most classic games are done. When you move to 3D, all your sprites magically stand up rather than being on their side. And the background graphics becomes cubic rather than seeing just the front face (think of the castles in particular and how you can walk into the battlements). To make matters worse, think about the screen tiling for the mazes, how they are symmetrical per screen, but to get around that, they don't completely line up on the edges. I don't think you could emulate that in 3D if the entire game is one big level rather than separate screens that you walk into and out of (kinda like fog of war in a RTS). There is something very ESCHER-like about the perspective in classic games. The perspective is impossible to exist in reality, but that's what makes it cool. The screen-by-screen perspective is also very key in the way the gameplay works. If you could see down the hall you'd gain extra reaction-time against dragons and the bats where in other places you'd get cheap-shotted by your view being obscured by maze walls. You really should go ahead and make a demo so you can see what I'm talking about.

It wasn't one of the first, it was THE first. I don't think the gameplay is that bad. Think UFO for the O^2. It's just that editorials about the game always blast the gameplay and I think a lot of people who have never played the game in person knee-jerk repeat what they've read instead of making up their own minds. As far as the kind of computation that seems to be going on, it is definitely beyond Pong and most of the other early coinops.

>> The reason which made me thought about is was that even for the Jaguar there are new games published. And also homebrew games are developed. That made me thought about why nobody seems to develope games for the 7800. << The Jaguar probably sold fewer units than the 7800, but the Jaguar being a newer system, it still has people who originally bought it who are still interested in picking up games for it. The 7800 belongs to an older era so the demographic is different. Also, if you took away Carl Forhan there isn't much going on in the Jag domain at all. Songbird is almost solely responsible for keeping the Jag and the Lynx relevant.

quote: Originally posted by Pitfall Harry: But now that I think about if further, I'm really starting to LIKE Glen's 400 bits of table idea. 00 = no shot taken, no ship present 01 = no shot taken, ship present 10 = shot taken, no ship present (i.e. MISS) 11 = shot taken, ship present (i.e. HIT) Ben Not like that, like this: MISS TABLE 0 = no shot taken, no ship present 1 = no shot taken, ship present HIT TABLE 0 = shot taken, no ship present (i.e. MISS) 1 = shot taken, ship present (i.e. HIT) I imagine it as two bitplanes like the Amiga. One would store misses (white over bg) and the other stores hits (red over bg). Since you only have two colors available per scanline (unless you change colors dynamically which I don't think would work with this tight spacing) you alternate scanlines. This would be really easy to draw because your playfield RAM index is reused for both bitmaps. Any other method would take too long to decode into playfield register settings.

I think Oystron is the best 2600 homebrew game of all time. It's the winner of the first annual (and only annual) Stellalist programming contest (1997).

>> Sure, it's not authentic -- but either is the transition to 3D. Certain modifications and sacrifices are necessary when making such a change. << That's the problem. Why bother if it isn't authentic anymore? Lots of games BECOME other games when you change the perspective. If you consider text games a predecessor to 2D games, then you can say that things like Star Raiders and Adventure were remakes of earlier text adventure games. But really, they were entirely new games because of the realtime graphics. The originals have enough reason to exist as the new ones, hence things like Dark Mage or Stellar Track being technological contemporaries. But when you talk about remaking on a modern system, you have to ask yourself whether the end product might lose its connection to the original in the process and play just like another game already in that genre (first person shooter, 3D RPG, whatever). Take Hasbro's Galga remake, for instance. They turned a great classic 2D game and wrung all the good aspects away from it to turn it into a railed Starfox type shooter. The irony here is that one the one level, the reason we even think about remaking the classics is because of their quaint charm, but in doing so the first thing we do is throw away the quaintness in favor of the everyday state of the art. You're probably asking then how CAN you remake a classic game on a modern system? Well, if people can't accept a more faithful adaptation, maybe you can't. But I definitely do support things like the Archon project. There is nothing shameful about doing a 2D game, especially if you put as much effort into tweaking the gameplay that the original designers did. Too often 2D games for the PC are sloppy shareware programming exercises. People don't devote enough care to them.

>> Also just like in real life. :-) << Since when have games been about making things just like real life? At least not until recently. When you have a game that plays out mostly in a flat 2D manner, if you restrict vision to 1st person perspective you are just making things harder to play and you are having to add in extra views that just force you to look in multiple screens at once to get that missing perspective back. For flight sims and driving games I can understand, but not games with gameplay that is designed around a series of 2D screens that pop in and out (i.e. Adventure). Think of what it does to the gameplay when you are in the mazes, for instance, if you can't see the fact that something is on the same screen as you because it's behind a wall. That would be a nice feature of a different game, but to impose this on Adventure CHANGES the game dramatically. If you raise the camera high enough to peer over the walls then you are back to a perspective that is almost identical to a flat 2D one anyway, so why bother? If you give the player camera control then it's just one extra thing for the gamer to control that he shouldn't have to worry about. Think of classic 2D games as "omniscient" perspective, and the gameplay is tuned accordingly. Perspective problems began real early. For instance.. Anyone remember Sega's Strategic Operations Simulator? I like the game, but the 1st person display is almost useless except for lining up long-range shots. It's pretty much a glorified Space War game because you focus your attention on the radar screen. The same is commonplace with a lot of 3D games with "2D Omniscient" gameplay. The radar in Defender and Wizard of Wor are really good examples of using the radar, because the game intentionally obscures part of the game from you to make it more challenging. But you don't want a radar to become your primary playfield display.

>> With 8 bits in every byte, one byte of RAM can record the shot history of 8 consecutive grid coordinates. << That implies a simple on/off state for a grid coordinate. There are 3 states for each coordinate, unknown, miss, and hit. So you really need 2 bits per coordinate. For 200 coordinates, that's 400 bits. Okay, that's 50 bytes. You are right though. It is still doable. I was thinking in terms of bytes per coordinate rather than bits. That being said, Milton Bradley probably should have attempted the game when they could have...

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 ]

>> 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. << 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.

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.

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 ]

>> 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.

Can't the 5200 only address 16K at a time on the cart port? That's the way the Atari 8-bits work.

>> and "Moon Patrol" (in their original forms, of course) still "valuable" enough to warrant a bunch of lawsuits. << 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.

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.

quote: Originally posted by BurgertimeBoy: I don't know the people that put out this CD but I sure love them! Dude, this is nothing but a pirate CD.

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.

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.

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.