Sheddy

Glad people are enjoying it The guys are right about the flicker modes. If there is too much variation in brightness of the colours the flicker becomes very noticeable - One of the required colours was a black, so none of the other colours could really bright. The main reason for the darker seeming colours in the last few years was I changed to a more accurate palette in the emulator I was using for doing screen-shots and videos. The earlier emulator screen-shots were very over-saturated. I've said here some Months ago that those Sega Arcade Shoots are real good ones to try... Driving ones like OutRun or Hang-on probably Flicker would not look good. But I said on that post that Galaxy Force could be the best one to use this. With the Sheddy code and someone remake the Gfxs... it certainly would be the best example I remember. But I wasn't an Arcade user... what other ones do you remember (Sega or any others)? No! Just No! While those games may look pretty, they're utterly unplayable, and for spectators only! Some of the code and ideas could be reused, but probably not as much as you might think. Nope, sorry - it'd need more memory than a standard Atari as well. Hope you got your input mappings on Altirra sorted. The blending feature is great for this game - Otherwise you'd need to set your monitor refresh to 60Hz to make it look like the real thing and bearable to look at for more than a minute. The guys are right about the player/missile use. The man uses all the players in overlap mode, and missiles make the screen a bit narrower than a standard screen. Everything else is made from background graphics. PM0&1 for Player as it seems that, probably,... 10pixels wide is enough. Or not... I was reading this right now and don't even bother to open another Window, but probably the ten or so pixels of the guy are probably two Multicolour Players. And I am now saying this because the screen isn't a Normal 32/40/48bytes wide (if I remember it right). Like that and because Sheddy is using a Bitmap Mode then the 5th Player enabled with four Missiles (two left and two right) with PF3-Black Mask side Borders. But even this there's another thing: If this is working in a 'Flicker between two Palletes' then there's (PF0,PF1,PF2) x 2 (I think I read it that the Flicker is two Palletes) then you'll see/study and there's more than two Palletes of these (PF0,PF1,PF2). Why? Because it seems a it exists a third Pallete: The shoots 'Dark greenwish' There are two 'Flicker' palletes than changes colour/luminances according to gfxs./levels but the shoots are always that 'greenwish'. The 'common colour' it's Backgr. register and there's only one, what 'Flickers'/more than one Pallete are the PFs. That's why the Ground aren't 'Chess Board' nd just Lines line the Sky, all these Lines are Backgr. Register DLIs. And this is another possible win of cycles? Bitmap Masking over (00) and just 16cycles ? Just some Thoughts of a 'Non coder' José Pereira. Not far off! 16 pixels needed for the man There are only 2 palettes though: 1) Background, Green, Blue, Black 2) Background, Grey, Red, Black The missile DMA still being fetched is annoying, as is the fetch every scan-line even when players are 2-line resolution. Maybe I was a little anal turning DMA on and off above and below the man though... Phaeron noticed I hadn't really optimized the sample playback routine yet when sent him something to show a problem in the Maxflash emulation of Altirra. Putting it in Zero Page was a pretty extreme suggestion of his!

[quote name='snicklin' timestamp='1310062168' You must be a great player of this to have tested the higher levels! I assumed that you must have had some cheats for testing purposes Nah, just had the assembler set up so that it was easy to a build different versions that only start from a particular stage rather than 1

Believe it or not, there aren't any cheats. That is what the "easy" and 5 men options are for . You get 1 continue straight off when its on "easy". Once you get past a bonus stage you get another continue added, plus you can then start from that stage if you want. (BTW those features were only available as cheats on other home versions). A tip: go round in circles to avoid the alien missiles - they always aim at your current position when launched - so don't go back on yourself.

Does that include an Atari 7800 console version if somebody was interested in doing that? That could be very interesting on a 7800 with enough RAM

Thanks for all the kind words, people Regards a version for 1MB machines: will need to think about it; there are a few things that complicate it, such as screen clipping relying on the memory where the cart is to be read only. I'm really not too keen on having to re-do and re-jig everything right now, but I'm willing to help someone else if they are familiar with porting stuff to these upgrades. Regards manuals...it's just a real basic arcade shoot em up - No story or real tactics required ...just shoot everything or get out of its way if it won't die

http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/184410-space-harrier-released/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-B-_6-RuJR0&feature=feedu Sal was a bit quicker with the video than I thought I didn't think the day would come, but I've decided to stop messing about with the game and just release it. Hopefully there aren't too many problems with it... It's suitable for all XL/XE machines with at least 64K RAM. In the .zip is a MaxFlash cartridge image suitable for emulators. Of course you can also use the cartridge image to program a real 8Mbit MaxFlash cartridge to run on a real machine. sharrier.zip

It's a *really* big game the way I've done things. It needs a whole 8Mbit cart to itself. Without a complete re-write and a very big RAM expansion, an ATR or EXE isn't really feasible. Many of us will receive Ultimate1MB internal expansion so memory would not be a problem. A complete re-write is a big problem! I hope kjmann this time will make a good package because I would like to buy this game. Ah, OK. With 1MB RAM it should be quite do-able. Will have to check out the Ultimate1MB.

It's a *really* big game the way I've done things. It needs a whole 8Mbit cart to itself. Without a complete re-write and a very big RAM expansion, an ATR or EXE isn't really feasible.

Perhaps, some of those famous g2f-artists from Poland would do better? Depending on the "conversion style" , the title is ok. The real sad thing is the music that still fits to the game like a flea in the hair of a giant. The digis are still to low at volume compared to that tweeter killing noise... The title screen uses the same in-game method for extra colours to allow for animation, plus some player-missile under and overlays, but there are still limitations on the colours - light blue instead of white was a necessary compromise. Think it'd be quite tough to do much better in G2F. Actually, I've just finished redoing the digi to dual pokey music volume levels, prompted by previous comments about it Digis are now using 2 channels for added volume and I've reduced the volume in the music some more. Still a few things left to do, but I'm not too far from being happy with how things are with the game. Thanks for all the comments

Kinda off topic, but I just wanted to say that I'm really glad you've found the time to get into the coding, Avram

What's the use of this NLM feature then in this case? Does it mean the linear/non-linear volume ratio between GTIA & POKEY? Or is the Digi-sfx played by Pokey? IIRC, it was perry_m (who's working on ASAP emulator) who mentioned this NLM feature. The real pokey also has an NLM feature, having its effect on mutual volume ratios between the 4 pokey voices. I'd suggest doing a final testing round of this "DIGI vs MUSIC"-volume-ratio on the real thing! Not on any emulator! If I'm correct ALL of the vids linked to in this thread were recorded from emulator. I think you're right that Altirra Non-Linear Mixing feature makes it more accurate to real hardware, although it is not always easy to hear the difference. Most of the earlier videos didn't use stereo POKEY, which is why the Digi sounds louder than these new ones from Sal. I only have single POKEY machine but volume levels seem very similar to Altirra on that (less so on Atari800WinPlus). I will fix the stereo volume balance.

Money is a little short at the moment as there's a little Snicklin on the way, so I assume that your image will still work in an emulator? Is this so? yep, of course if you found a way to make things not work on anything but real hardware you'd be seeing a new version of Altirra pretty soon..

Good question. I do have 2 Atarimax flashcartridges, 1 MByte each, so in theory I've enough space to burn (a free version of) space harrier into one of these. (not that much money now ) Yep, the cart image will be free, so you'll be able to burn your own for free if you've already got a 1MB (8Mbit) maxflash cart spare

I haven't done much testing with Stereo POKEY, except on emulator, and didn't really notice how quiet it is (7 channels against 1 digi). The digi certainly isn't as unbalanced on single POKEY (only 3 channels against 1 digi). I'll have a look and see if I can change things for the better. There's not separate songs for mono, and separate songs for stereo, so just changing volumes in the songs won't do it. Maybe make the digi write 2 channels when stereo is detected (slower of course), or use the "global volume" feature of RMT?

Nice work Tezz. Sounds like you got the c64 sample playback routine working too?

What a great song, and excellent conversion The mono version is one tough prospect, but you've just about pulled it off! Real hard to see how it could be much better

OK then, proof the Atari can do nothing faster than a C64 Read it and weep, Atari fanboys nop OK, I was bored!

Where'd you get your ZMBV decoder from? They seem to be quite rare, and I had difficulty finding one that worked properly, although I didn't get a crash like that. I had success with ffdshow (after install you have to enable ZMBV decoder in the "video decoder configuration"). Could be worth trying.

I always wondered how these types of games were done, but I never imagined they'd be possible on 8-bit at such a good frame rate with such a large display. And with APAC! Amazing stuff. Even Doom on Sega 32X had very small window.

I think everyone here loves Altirra and all versions of project-M !! Group hugs?? Seconded Thanks Phaeron for all your work

OK, I have no opinion on best techniques, but the results are impressive however it's done (Actually, for some reason I was particularly drawn to the way the colours flow out of the logo at the top - don't know if it's really hard to do or not, but just looks really nice to me)

I'd have no problem with it being converted to file. I'm sure Fandal could do it, but it may be more work than you imagine.

No, it won't run on extended RAM Ataris, except as a cart. It would be possible to do, but it would require rewriting as the bank locations for extra RAM and carts are different.

Yes, the binary and flash image will be freely available to program your own 8Mb cart with, and it'll work on all 64K Ataris. And I should also add, thanks for all comments. Some of them have had me ROTFLMAO!!