Sheddy

Can't remember how the arcade controls worked, but if it was like mame has it, then I don't think how you have it now affects gameplay. mame version doesn't spin the plane any quicker by you pointing the stick in the direction you want the plane. left/right for spin is fine IMO. I think you know my opinion on the clouds. It would be nice to have at least some big clouds Even if you only have them when things are quiet elsewhere on screen it would be cool.

Way to go on the Basic tutorial Nukey! Liquid Sky - if you're still stuck, could be zeros and o's problem. all but the sound and goto should be zeros. Just double check Cool idea for a game Atari Master. Remember clearly something similar on 8-bit, instead of more balls, the walls shrunk each round. It was a great game - very addictive gameplay. Can't remember what it was called - Think it was a type in listing from a UK mag..

Of course.....a 1/x table.... I did know that really if I'd thought about it a bit before asking...:oops: Sounds like I must check the Stella mailing list, Thomas. I'm always on the lookout for new coding tips and algorithms. Thanks. Might give some of these ideas a go if I have enough memory left. Space Harrier can get away doing hardly any real division, so it's not a big problem, but I'm always interested in faster ways of doing things! Cheers

Sounds like you're in safe hands now Joel. If anyone can do it on 2600, Thomas can. Thanks Fox for that explanation. I actually managed to follow that for once! Don't suppose you know any good tricks for division as well ?

Hi Jetboot, think Holmes may have that (there's something listed as LA Machine 2.0) Looks like he's just added a whole load of utilities. There were just loads of games there the last time I looked. Amazing resource! http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/atari/

Well, now everyone else who spent the time trying it out isn't going to have the satisfaction of knowing that others will be following them to their doom... Nearest you'll get to Doom on 8-bit is going to be Vector (you'd have to ask Fox, but I don't think it'll be for 5200 too) shame. hoping that would run a bit longer. Better techo-babble next time, Nukey?

Remember seeing that somewhere before, but can anyone explain why that works or point me to a derivation - I could do with "Maths for Dummies" as my solitary math brain cell must have died. Thanks... PS Ireland through with 3-0 as well as Germany through!

IMHO even BETTER than the arcade game. It's just so playable. At least you have some (small) chance on the later levels (you can also make the man go a bit faster by waggling the joystick unlike the arcade) I never looked, but maybe half the cart must be just data for speech....and yes, it sure kicks the crap out of the proc to play samples, keeping the timing precise enough for it to sound right is the main problem. [ 06-10-2002: Message edited by: Sheddy ]

There sure is a lot of manipulation going on somewhere. The GRAM only has room for 64 8x8 (1 colour) tiles...although it can be changed on the fly by overriding the EXEC (according to an Intellivision site I just found) [ 06-09-2002: Message edited by: Sheddy ]

Rumour has it that www.emuchrist.com has the system roms - and that you need to rename them to grom.bin and exec.bin and put them in the emulator's program directory.... Have to agree with Nukey, pretty hard to see things past the title screen - the 5200 could do better colours as Skatepunk says.

Welcome, Fox, Like your stuff a lot I'm sure the 5200 guys would find this assembler useful - any features that would help make a rom have got to be good. Never tried creating one myself (not even for an emulator) so I don't know what would help. (Cafeman/Calamari/Old Guru, what features are missing that would be useful for creating carts?) Chris [ 06-05-2002: Message edited by: Sheddy ]

Well, so far it seems pretty clear cut then. Unless someone can come up with a compelling reason after this, I'll just do a few screenshots from time to time. I did a couple more the other day, Al, with a bit of a clean-up of the site (although it'll never be as professional looking as Atariage due to my poor design skills!). I'll try and update the site, maybe once a month with the screenshots. Gunstar, I'll let you know when I'm ready! Thanks everyone, Chris www.sheddyshack.co.uk

I'm undecided on Space Harrier....... On the one hand, I don't really want to spoil the full game by releasing demos of every single stage, on the other, the full thing is at least another year away (if it is finished), and the technical updates are really boring for most people. What do you think? 1) The game released as every stage is done 2) A couple of more extensive demos 3) Demos of just 1 or 2 selected stages 4) No more demos (just screenshots) 5) Just stop now, you're wasting your time! 6) Other suggestion Thanks, Chris [ 06-04-2002: Message edited by: Sheddy ]

I hadn't realised quite how big all the objects actually were...you're doing well so far on the speed of the sprites. Some tricky decisions for the screen drawing then...maybe other people have some good ideas? I think your idea for drawing and clearing different bits on different frames could work, but you must be careful never to leave one erased between frames. Also, if it had to drop below 25/30 fps you might start to notice it was updating only a few objects at a time. My gut instinct has always been when things take longer than a frame, you need to double (or triple) buffer. I know why you would want to avoid that, as there'd be quite a few extra overheads (and you'd need an extra version of the sprite engine for each screen, if you want to keep that zone ranger speed) I never benchmarked space harrier draw engine properly. Sprite numbers are meaningless when they're all different sizes. Normally it's happy chugging along at 15/17 fps with not too much going on. A couple of full size objects slows it down though. I had 32 trees going with an average of 6-8 fps on an early test (I haven't any super fast code, just most of the time the objects are small) Don't give up. It just might take longer than you think to get something you're happy with. If I'd known how much time I'd be wasting......... [ 06-05-2002: Message edited by: Sheddy ]

Just an obvious suggestion I know, but rather than make them much smaller, why not have slightly fewer clouds? Is the problem that you're running out of cycles in 1 vblank?

quote: Originally posted by Heaven/TQA: well...preshifting on disc is no good solution when you just have 130kb... but why not using megaimages (1 meg)??? ok...will not work anymore on real machine... except via sio2pc... Well,um, that was me being lazy. I really didn't want to have to write that conversion routine in machine code, but things should be better for it now it's done. I set myself the goal of making something that would work on real Atari hardware, so I didn't consider megaimages. Moving to 130xe only was a difficult enough decision(although I'm still contemplating the possibility of a megacart so it would work with 800xl) Good luck with TimePilot.

quote: Originally posted by Heaven/TQA: cool stuff... you are my aim in getting a professional conversion! keep on doing! Thanks Heaven, I hope we will keep each other from getting lazy....knowing everyone is expecting great things should be a great motivator too (The 5200 guys are also keeping that quality bar raised high)

A couple more screenshots, some interesting notes (LOL!) and a (slighly) more professional look for the website. I've had a nightmare this last couple of weeks when I realised I would run out of disk space if I wanted to have all the alien creatures in the full game. I've spent those last couple of weeks going back and changing everthing to a different graphic format, and coding some nasty conversion routines in-game. You'll notice the loading differences when the next demo comes along (another couple of months, I think) www.sheddyshack.co.uk

I've never seen it available on-line before, Al. I think Karolj mentioned somewhere that they use a version of this assembler internally in the Taquart group. Is that right Karolj? Anyway it's nice that they decided to share

Thanks for pointing us to this one Karolj, it looks very interesting. I would try it some more if I hadn't already done so much code using Atasm (and notepad!) It has some nice features: -Being able to not produce address headers is well handy... the 5200 guys could like this assembler too. -The Psuedo code should speed development, but you soon end up with stuff that is very un-6502! (Fine if you know a few other languages though I guess) No direct illegal op support? Not hard to create a macro though I suppose. Fox sure must be a very busy person. This assembler project might also explain why we haven't seen too much of Vector yet!

Mark Schmelzenbach has brought out a new version of his 6502 cross-assembler for Atari 8-bit. It's tidied up a few problems, and is even faster! Here's a link for you 8-bit coders. ATasm

I'd say the same about looking through old Antic mags (also available on the web). www.6502.org has some tutorial stuff if you follow the links, but nothing you could call outstanding.

quote: The 2600 has the same "scaling" capabilites. It can also flip/mirror them. Shame they didn't keep that for the 8-bit

Sweet. Appetite well and truly whetted. Bring on the main course! Please keep us fed with screenshots in the meanwhile

Not quite the answers you're looking for, but I thought I'd write something since no one else has replied yet! Home's Site has many "mega image" collections of games already created, which use a menu selection program to access them. You may find the games you want already on some of these Also he might explain how you could use his "DOSMENU" program yourself if you drop him a line - there's a mail link there too. Certainly doing it all manually would be a bit of an effort. Dumping each of the games into a different area of a "mega image" disk in binary load format, then telling the menu loader (somehow) where to find them on the disk. Hope this helps a bit Sheddy