Sheddy

I'm hoping the pull of Castle Crisis is down to the use of the fujii on packaging. If not, then are we going to enter the twilight zone of the look and feel of a game? (Atari - Hey they used a white line and a dot on that textured polygon - Pong is one of ours!)

-Bry could be unauthorised use of the Atari fujii (on packaging/manual)? hopefully it is not the game itself - which would be very sad indeed. Even more so since the "Castle Crisis" name is not theirs and you tried very hard not to tread on their toes, Bry.

Looking good Heaven. Like the idea for the game too. Hope you can pull it all together in time

Thankyou Mark, this looks like it will be very useful, it can take ages to debug things without features like these

Nice parallax effect - how many characters can you dedicate to that to get different underneath patterns? Hope you make the mini-game deadline!

from what I hear Irata's Quest is going to be a 64K game, by using bankswitching. That's not necessarily the maximum either. (The Atari 8-bit can have 1024K carts, or possibly more if someone cares to design one.)

Thanks Mark, Guess I'll just have to plow through some of the code in the player routines. Of course you are right, the routines must be linked, it is just a matter of figuring out exactly how. I expect the playing of an "instrument" (which could be a sound effect) in, say, RMT can be done through other means than the usual song sequencer with the right variables/registers set. Or, possibly, if the position in the song can be determined, write the data into the song real time...ah, but then it has to be cleaned up again afterwards. Yes, how many channels to use...a bit tricky...some musicians would want to have 8 for just music! (Stero Pokey), so they certainly wouldn't like to get by with just 2 channels of the normal 4. I think the amount of channels given to the music will have to be at least 2 and then override any sound effects when it needs to have 3 or even 4 - dynamically. that'll take some figuring out though.

Suppose I want to create some good in-game music, but also have sound effects too...at the same time. Is it possible to have both music and sound effects controlled by replay routines of something like Raster Music Tracker or Theta Music Composer? I see the Raster Music Tracker instructions mention how to play one song, but is there a way to set off simple sound effects "songs" (on different channels of course) ? Theta Music Composer - I can't understand the Polish instructions. Does anyone have an English translation or know if it can do what I'm asking? Maybe the best way is to create a separate sound effect program from the music player? (But it seems a shame to re-invent the wheel) Any advice appreciated, as there's no way I can make an in-game music and sound effect player as good as the above programs which musicians can work with.

Hm... especially this problen should not happen on a soundchip, like pokey, because it uses a frequency divisor. So perhaps you may not get the 220/440 Hz with the 8bit resolution, but you should get 217/434 I guess that the real problem is the note-stepping at the 8bit resolution, which is sometimes hitting a note and sometimes it doesn't. Another problem ist the volume when going through the sound-spectrum. With simple squarewaves, the sound is getting louder when using higher notes, because of the higher-frequent voltage-switching. That's why distorted sounds off the pokey are used for bass-sounds....they are "loud" (but not stable at deeper notes) Actually, in the german "ATARI-Profibuch" you can read, that POKEY is able to do sinewaves... per generator ... (it can do some sawtooth-sine shapes for real.... which make a flute sounding possible) So sinewaves are continously changing the voltage-level, they are the best wave-form for bass-sounds. I don't know why it comes out wrong either, something just doesn't sound right. (maybe it is a matter of getting the 16-bit frequency values correct for use with the 8-bit frequencies, if the software does not do that?). It just does not give a convincing demonstration of the different instruments you are creating to the non-technical listener - A bit like a conductor telling people "I have created this great orchestra with all the best virtuoso players in the world", and then getting them to perform an out of tune "twinkle twinkle little star" as the proof of it. That is a harsh comparison, and I'm not really comparing your songs to that one, but you see the point I'm getting at? Your technical demonstrations, are great, as cybernoid has said - it just needs some really highly skilled musicians to prove it can be made into truly outstanding music, before people can be convinced by what they hear, that this is a good way to do things. The "tuning" problem must be resolved before this can happen though.

Sheddy Please try to explain, why you like this tune, and at the same time the converted tune I did in the other thread is sounding mostly out of tune for you. This shall neither be a complaint nor an argue... It's only for better understanding. So I hear from this tune a nice melody with typical POKEY-sounds The only "in tune" is the main melody. The bass-sounds are heavily out of tune. The "attendance" is destroying the main voice in it's characteristics, because it uses nearly the same pitch, but yet another notation. All features are given easily in RMT though. The last Conversion of "Ode to ..." uses a melody in a range of 4 octaves without losing it's focus. The "attendance" is done with a full different pitch. The Percussion ist clear and distinguish... So all three used voices are full usable by stable sounding and different pitches. To enhance this tune, POKEY has the abilities of switching AUDCTL inside an instrument that RMT does not support (exept filtering), as RMT does not support any feature like "portamento" or "frequency adjustment" , when using 16 bit with another generator than "A" ... neither it does support "16" bit as a melodic voice. OK - I'll try - and please don't take this personally, emkay, - just trying to explain, and I'm sorry if I tell you things you already know. True, Sack's tune is not pushing POKEY especially in any new wonderful way, wheras your experiments get some different interesting sounds. It is simply the composition of Sack's tune and its rhythms I like. It is not totally "in tune", but as close as can be with the 8-bit frequencies. OK you may use 4 octaves, but the voices in your tune all have different focus - because you are not following the generally accepted rules of harmony. (I'm using AtariWinPLus 4 to listen, hopefully not too different sounding from the real machine.) I know you don't claim to be a musician, but there are certain "rules" that are commonly accepted when playing simultaneous notes (chords). The exact frequencies are critical to clean sound of the chord - fiifths, thirds and octaves make up the simple chords. for example C, E, G make a simple chord. When one of the notes playing simultaneously is even slightly wrong by a few hertz it totally messes the clean, clear, "in tune" sound of the chord. For example - you play a 440Hz note - you should not play a 217Hz note at the same time. 220Hz sound OK though - as it's octave apart. There are also many other "rules" about deciding what are good chords to play after each other. (check out some sites on music theory to see what I mean!). Anyway the main point is that all the notes you use for all your intruments must be tuned to the same frequencies or multiples of..the notes in the music scale A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A...etc. or your chords will sound "out of tune". Hope that makes some kind of sense to you, and not too patronising

Like the song, Sack. Maybe could do with a bit more of a Latin rhythm though? - Way better than I could do though. What's your tracker of choice on the Atari? RMT?

reminds me of my favourite John Cage piece - 4' 33" not knocking the tune - which has some OK sounding harmonies - just that ; - ) causes all kinds of trouble with unzipping/showing up in the emulator

reminds me of my favourite John Cage piece - 4' 33"

I wonder what kind of compression this one uses.Simple RLE or something more advanced ? And what about this "XIP" packer ? The program seems to be for the C64 , but is there something similar for the ATARI ? Because I need a packer for an 1Kbyte game for the ATARI. Thimo With just 1K to compress I'd be very surprised if you'll get much compression worth having - it's all about data redundancy and patterns of data, and unless you're very sloppy with your data or code, there shouldn't be too much of that in just 1K. Don't forget you have to get better than 10% off even with the 128b unpack prog to make it worthwhile. You'd really be better off thinking of the most efficient ways to represent your data (IMO). That said, of course it's worth trying the packers to see if they do help though

Much more like traditional western music harmonies than some of your other interesting experiments emkay ...but unfortunately, still not all the voices are in tune with each other. that is going to be a serious problem for "music" rather than just soundfx if the voices can't be tuned more finely , although it is great to hear Pokey doing these different kind of sounds.

Great work Nice to see Graph2Font pics and less chunky mode 9/10/11 graphics - they're a bit of a cliche, even though we're stuck with them for getting lots and lots of colour

Nice to know I'm not alone in creating really weird bug puzzles to try and figure out! It always amazes me what the cause of some of these bugs turn out to be. You're making good progress. In case you don't already know - Sorry to say there is some kind of problem it running when the emulator is running in NTSC(Atari800WinPLus 4.0 beta3)

Thanks Alex H, I goofed on that 2nd adc #1 - should be adc #0 like yours.

oops -128 =11111111 10000000 -0.5

The way you're moving the puck should work fine with + and - You have to be a bit careful on your 2's complements though: your code whilst pretty neat by saving a couple of bytes, doesn't deal with any carry generated by the low byte, which means that when puck_h=0 and negated, the high byte will be out by 1. Not sure, but depending how accurate you want things, that might not be a major issue? I'm sure someone else can clarify that though. This code for 16 bit 2's complement should work ok though: clc lda puck_h eor #$ff adc #1 sta puck_h lda puck_h+1 eor #$ff adc #1 sta puck_h+1 -128=11111111 01111111 when you're testing the -128 don't forget that that high byte must be 255 not 0, as well as the low byte being set to 127. hopefully the darn puck will move the other way then

I'm looking forward to analmux's game(s?) too!

on the homebrew comment, my only point was that if a demo comes out only a few months or so before the game is finished, everyone is happier all round. I just feel in retrospect that it is worth holding back until you know you're ready for sure. I misjudged how long it would take me to finish the game - but I'm glad people have enjoyed the demo. It is still my intention to finish the full game, and the status of "resting" isn't strictly true anymore thanks all for the encouragement

Cool. I still haven't got round to using mine yet, so let us know how you get on!

The sprites and background tiles do exist in the game. If you notice, there are only really 5 PF colours used. and the Player overlays on BUB and BOB. I have recoloured the items to fit the scheme. The cake for instance used the pinks rather than the original arcade spongecake with it orange and creme look. The level colour schemes and the related enemies and items are currently being worked out so that the actual game logic is next. I've got a long way to go yet! I really didn't want to announce the project until I had a working preview to post or a least some of the early stuff as a running preview. Regards.. Oh yeah, I see now! Looks very effective by using the players as overlays. Good Luck with everything!

Nice! Is that level 1 screen shot a mockup or actual in-game? - very colourful!