retroclouds

Hi Owen! I just saw your latest video. Man I'm impressed. Your lava world looks so cool! :thumbsup: The only thing I have to ask: Why don't you make the viewport bigger ? You still have plenty of screen space and you'r running assembly language my friend. Lot of power there

ok folks, I have to ask this: Were there any cool arcade games written in GPL ? I mean Munchman, TI invaders, Parsec, ... that's all assembly language. Is there a good example for a game running in GPL ? This brings up memories. Back in the 80's one of our young TI club members got all excited about GPL. I don't remember the details because I was a kid myself. Guess about 12 years old or so. I do recall I was very impressed by this university student that got into GPL all the way. He did little demos that looked pretty cool. Wonder how he did that cause there was hardly any information available at the time.

Excellent post Gary! Thanks.

To be sure I guess we'd have to ask the senior guys at the yahoo group. I seem to recall that Kyle bought a complete stock of stuff when one of the last distributors quit in the early to mid nineties. That was a time where the interest in the TI-99/4A was dropping like a falling rock. So I guess it was either he took the stuff or it went out to the dumpster. Sure he's making cash with it now, but no one is forced to buy from him. And who could foresee that there would be a renewed interest in the TI ? He kept all the stuff for at least 10 years. Now this might be different in the US, but here in Germany I can't afford the storage space for keeping all that gear. That would be way to expensive. So I guess he sticked to the TI at times where most (including me) left the TI scene for exploring other areas. I hope to think he still has a good heart for the TI and it's not all about cash. It happened to me more than once that he put in an extra article for free when I ordered something. However, I have to make this clear: there is no excuse to what he did with Marcs' Neverlander. Trying to sell it on ebay was way out of line. I'm sure he is lurking in the yahoo group and I think he learned his lesson. Hhhmmm, he might even be here among us right now Kyle, if you are, then please become a member of the atariage group and be part of this great community. It would help us to better understand

I've bought stuff from him several times in the past and can't complain. Delivery, packaging, etc. was all fine. Yes, some of the stuff is expensive. But he does occasionaly have stuff up for sale that I haven't seen from any other sellers. This especially goes for technical documents and the like.

i u want, i agree for pay half with you. I just bought 3 cardridge from him, i can add this ok, I'll send you a PM shortly

Rumors have it that TI originally planned a "GPL processor" as CPU for the TI-99/4A. hhhmm, makes one wonder if with todays FPGA possibilities such project would be possible. Kyle has an interesting GPL document up for sale on ebay. Check out here: eBay Auction -- Item Number: 150447363604 I considered buying it, but it's a bit too expensive. If someone is interested in a group buy. I'm willing to contribute 20 EURO

In the last few years the CF7+ compact flash adapter has become the de-facto standard device for the "unexpanded" TI-99/4A. Still, it's kinda surprising that there is hardly any proper documentation or tutorials available on how to use this great device. What I'm looking for is: * Video Tutorials and/or text format tutorial on how to use the CF7+ * Video Tutorials and/or text format tutorial on how to use TI99Dir, CF2k, ... * Starter CF7 image dumps with the most common utilities/games * .... Any volunteers? Would be more than happy to add the tutorials/images to the development resources thread

Added Cf2k (Compact Flash 2000) to the utilities section.

Updates are in, hope I didn't introduce too many new bugs I can't believe I had the java download link pointing to Microsoft, was so sure I tested that

Had some fun playing with the sprite editor

Sure, I'm game to allow any kind of import and export. All I need is a sample file and a short explanation of how it stores data and I'm happy to do the filter for it. I still want to implement DSK saves and ColecoVision data formats as well. I can do that as well. In fact, I'll probably release the source for Magellan. There's no reason to keep that secret, and if folks want to learn from it or improve it, that's cool with me too. I'll likely release that the same time I put out the proper manual. I'll get you a few VDP dumps and the settings required for processing Great stuff! This thing is getting better and better

Thanks for the updates people! I'll add the required modifications

Added Magellan.

Played with GraphicCV, that's great stuff! Here are some more ideas: 1. Possibility to save graphic definitions so that you can continue work later on. 2. Add grid boundary on 8x8 pattern boundaries so that you know what is for first 8x8 pattern, second 8x8 pattern, ... 3. Perhaps the levels could be selected using radio buttons instead of pulldown, would allow quicker selection. 4. Possibility to work with multiple sets of sprites and copy/paste between them. 5. Swap sprite orders, e.g. sprite 1<->3. That can be important if you have overlapping pixels. Nice seeing that many new graphic tools for the TI-99/4A in development!

Here's another request for a feature version Most emulators (classic99, MESS, meka, ...) offer the possibility to dump the full 16K VRAM to a binary file. It would be cool if you could import such raw VDP memory dumps into Magellan. This would be an easy way to "convert" between computers/game consoles runnning the 9918 (TI-99/4A, Colecovision, MSX, SEGA, ...) It would allow for an easy import of patterns, colors and tiles. When doing the import, Magellan could ask you to specify the offsets where the corresponding tables are located in the binary dump. This ofcourse the user has to enter. So how does the user know what to enter? Again, most emulators allow you to view this type information in their debugger (or by dumping the VDP register values). If the above is not possible, would you consider opening/documenting the map data file format ?

Excellent work! A true masterpiece!

You just have to click on the "chat" link in the top menu bar and confirm you won't harm anyone. It's still pretty basic as there aren't multiple chat rooms at this time. Albert (Atariage Admin) told us that a new version is in progress.

I think you first have to "import" the character set. There is a demo character set PNG file in the Magellan directory.

No, the name of the game will be "Tutankham" Here are some mockup pictures of the cartridge label (thanks ti99userclub!)

Some modifications to the development sticky thread: * Partly reorganized for better overview * Added some video tutorials about the TMS9918/9928 VDP

Thanks for pointing this out. Matthews' sound player tutorial was added to the development sticky thread. Magellan will be addded as soon as Codex does the official release and gives permission for adding it

Owen you are really make some very nice progress here. I'm impressed! Keep up the good work.

Thanks for the explanation Seems it inspired some of the SNUG products that appeared later on. 500 ? Would be a shame if these got thrown away and lost in time. With the interest on atariage, yahoo online groups and selling on ebay, guess you would for sure get a big enough audience. That again makes it interesting for coders. Don't forget many of these users have the CF7+ with 32K memory. Plus we now have emulators that "run" these modules, making the development process a lot easier. hhmmm, the features built into RXB look very interesting. I wonder what XB3 has to offer.

Thanks for looking this up sometimes99er So it seems that the v5.55 version is the newest one. Will give it a try.