retroclouds

Any news on Flyguy II ? Can hardly wait playing the finished version

Thanks for putting this online! This is the only book I'm aware of that specifically addresses TMS9900 assembly language for writing games. It covers the Mini Memory line-by-line assembler, which I personally wouldn't use when writing arcade games for the TI Nonetheless, the book does cover the basics on Sprites, Sound, TI graphic modes.

Excellent work! I will add a reference in the development resources thread. I'd really love to see a PDF scan for Compute's Beginners guide to assembly language on the TI-99/4A. The hard-copy of the book is pretty hard to get by now and there are close to none good beginner tutorials on TMS9900 assembly language available.

Owen, I like what I see there ! Not having scroll isn't that bad if you have that kind of screens in your game. Very nice

I'd highly recommend TI99Dir for handling your CF7+ disk images. You can grab it here.

Interesting stuff. I'm thinking about adding a new section to the "Development Resources" sticky thread. I don't have a name for it yet, but this is the kind of stuff I'd like to add references to. I'd see this as the basics every good homebrew game programmer should know about * Algorithms used in game development (e.g. Bresenham, pseudo 3D, ...), pseudo random generators, ... Hey I don't know much about these but I'm willing to learn * Free Bit-map font resources, sprite graphics, ... * Tutorials about graphic conversion, ... * Video's on how to create cartridge labels, how to create cartridge boxes, ... * ... If you have stuff you want to contribute, just let me know and I'll be more than happy to add it to the list. Also if you have an idea for a proper name for this section let me know. "Miscellaneous" sounds rather boring. Any feedback on what you like or dislike about the "Development sticky thread" is appreciated.

Don't worry about the scrolling guys, it will be as good as the colecovision version In this early prototype I just do a basic dumping of the screen while it is being displayed. There are smarter ways to do this, but first want to have some more functionality in place before I get into the optimisations. The sprite is moving 1px at a time and should be smooth. The video was recorded in MESS. I then took the uncompressed AVI and converted it using DIVX converter before uploading to Youtube. I guess some frames are skipped. Just give the binary in the zip file a try As far as the original TI prototype is concerned, I prefer to stay out of that discussion In the end each version will have its pros/cons. What I can tell is that Brian gave me a valuable hint on how to deal with the joystick handling, so am happy about that.

Not really sure, but I seem to recall that Tursi has plans on adding a cartridge library (perhaps something in the style as win994A has?). At this time, I suppose the only way to add cartridges to the menu in classic99, is to add the appropriate entries in the classic99.ini file. Something like this: [usercart0] name=Tutankham rom0=3|0000|8000|D:\Projekte\tutankham\tms9900\TUT.bin I'm afraid you'l have to read the manual (in this case classic99.txt) Here is an extract on the ROM section [roms] cartgroup 0 Apps 1 Games 2 User cartidx -1 No cartridge selected ?? index of the cartridge from the appropriate menu [userCart0] (and so on up to 99) name Name of the cartridge. If blank or missing, the cartridge is ignored. message Compatibility notes, if desired rom0 (0-3 for a total of 4 ROMs per cartridge) Contains notes for loading the cartridge. This is a pipe-limited row of data, formatted like so: T|AAAA|LLLL|filename T is the single character ROM type. Most carts only use G, C and X types. C CPU ROM D DSR ROM E DSR ROM bank 2 (used for p-code) G GROM* P P-Code GROM R CPU RAM - this is loaded like CPU ROM but is not flagged as read-only! S Speech ROM V VDP RAM X XB Bank 2 ROM (called 'D' in some systems, but I used D already) A AMS memory, RLE encoded (not working correctly yet) K Paste string for the keyboard after boot (to autostart tasks, not a filename) 3 Packed banks with a '379 style decoder. Similar to XB style but more banks and all in one file. Note that this assumes a load at >6000, so you are specifying the offset in the banking space, with bank 0 at >0000, bank 1 at >2000, etc. SuperSpace carts (CRU >400) can be loaded this way for now, too, but will likely split them up later. Max size is 64k. (* GROM is special - to support multiple GROM bases, you can now load GROMs into different memory bases - up to 16 of them! By default, GROMs load into memory base 0. Append a hex number 1-F after the G to specify a different base (like: G1). The console will detect these and add them to the start menu! Note that not all GROMs will work at alternate bases. Also note, in the real console, the console GROMs appear at all bases, so you can't load alternate bases at less than >6000. Classic99 does not support using this with cartridges that include CPU ROM. Each GROM base is offset 4 from the previous, ie: GROM Read is >9800, >9804, >9808, etc.) AAAA - load address in hexadecimal LLLL - length of data in hexadecimal (will override actual size of file) filename - filename on disk to load This system supports both raw ROM files, and ROM files with a 6 byte GRAM Kracker style header. The header is detected by checking if the first byte is >00 or >FF, and if the 5th and 6th bytes represent the load address. The header will be ignored if detected - the data in this INI file is considered authoritative.

Here is the first early prototype of my homebrew version of Tutankham. It's a remake of the colecovision game that will be enhanced with title screen, theme music and speech (when using TI's speech synthesizer). This game is 100% pure TMS9900 assembly language, only using the 256 bytes scratch-pad memory and designed as cartridge ROM image from day 1. The idea is to release this game as cartridge with instruction manual and cardboard box in early 2011. Note that my homebrew version is not related to the ultra-rare-only-1-to-find-prototype mentioned at the Videogame House. Here's a YouTube video of the v0.1 prototype: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If6C6jPQR9w Version 0.2 (05-25-2010) * Teleporters are working * Level 2 maze in place * "white-flash" working (press fire button or space bar to engage) * Movement is a bit smoother, and resembles colecovision version more closely * Bug-fix: you can't walk through walls anymore Version 0.1 (04-04-2010) * Initial version EDIT: I've decided I won't be releasing any ROM images of WIP versions anymore. There will be a BETA phase for a closed group of people before the cartridge comes out. I might release the final ROM to the cartridge buyers and release to the public domain at a later stage. But that isn't confirmed yet.

Mind sharing what game that would be ?? Screenshots ?

Just gave it a try. Pretty slick for Extended Basic Guess if you want to get more out of this you'd have to implement some assembly language routine. Then again, I'm not that much a fan of hybrid extended basic/assembly programs. But for this type of game (with complex logic) writing everything in assembler seems pretty hard/time consuming/cumbersome. Wonder if C99 would be the way to go in this case.

Nice work! A bit too difficult for me, I totally suck at this game! Here are some pics

I used Tile Studio for my (currently stalled) Time Pilot project. Had a real basic exporter for handling VDP9918 16x16 sprites. What I like about Tile Studio is that the source code is available. Don't ask any questions about this, I have totally forgotten how it works ; -------------------------------------------------------- ; Tile Studio Definition File ; TI994A_sprites_16x16.tsd ; ; Generate 16x16 sprite raw data for the ; Texas Instruments TI-99/4A ; ; by RETROCLOUDS ; ; v0.1 12.07.2009 ; -------------------------------------------------------- #file sprites_16x16.raw #tileset *-------------------------------------------------------------- * Sprite 16X16 pattern data by Tile Studio <TSVersion> * <CurrentDate> <CurrentTime> - <TileSetIdentifier> *-------------------------------------------------------------- * Tiles: <TSTileCount> #tstile * Tile: <TileNumber> #tiledata "\[email protected][email protected]:" "" "" "|" "" <(Pixel+1) :"%01x"> #end tiledata #end tstile #end tileset #end file

Not knowing anything about hardware. Too bad the load interrupt signal is not on the cartridge port. That way some genius could put a timer on a cartridge PCB for generating the load interrupt. ok, this would require 32K memory as the vector is located at >FFFD and >FFFE. hhmm, thinking about it more I recall we had some discussions about a cartridge PCB that plugs into the sideport.

No need to spend some thousand dollars on the "Tutankham" prototype. I'm working on my own homebrew version. It is based on the Colecovision version, not on the TI prototype and will be better Currently going for a 32K ROM image but might end up with a 64K ROM image. Oh, this is not some april fool (living in Germany, we already have April 2nd)

hehe, thanks man. It was fun to do, but in the end as I was glad I finished it. I don't wanna take a second look at that game. Done with that. I'm hoping my next game will be a blast, but unfortuntatly work has been a killer lately. So we'll see how it goes. Well for me the true heroes are those that implement new game ideas all by themselves. Looking what you guys came up with in the competition, it's just amazing. I definitly want to see Flyguy as a homebrew cart. And I'm sure Karstens' Destroyer will kick butts big time. Looking forward seeing how this all further develops. Have to admit, I now check this place out more often as the yahoo group. Atariage rocks!

opcode games is working on a new Donkey Kong version for the colecovision. I think they are using this procedure where they change the frontend (graphics engine) but keep original code for getting the version as close as possible. check out this thread.

No I wasn't aware of that. But there were quite a few game consoles and home computers of the era that had a TMS99xx related VDP (colecovision, SEGA SG-1000, MSX-1, TI-99/4A, Tomy Tutor) and later MSX-2, SEGA Genesis, ... I think it was matthew180 (also active in this subforum) who did the interview with Karl Guttag.

Below is the article I mentioned yesterday. It is extracted from The Smart Programmer February 1984 and deals with Basic programs that are too large to run from disk.

ok, that's a good plan Think this may work. Guess it mainly depends if the BASIC game uses character set 15 and 16, which aren't available in Extended Basic. I don't know what BXB is. Is it used for dealing with the character set issue ? Good luck

I think that the problem with Atlantis will be that it won't work if there any disk drives (or CF7+) connected to the console. Most likely the game requires all of VDP memory (which it won't get as there are some disk buffers in VDP). Just this morning I came accross an article in the Smart Programmer (february 1984), the trick for actually running the game from disk would be to use the Mini Memory module and some of it commands (SAVE MEMEXP2, OLD MEMEXP2) in combination with CALL LOAD(-31888,63,255) for turning the disk drives off. I have no TI time at all today but will get back tomorrow with the article from the Smart Programmer. Could be that an initial conversion program will be required for writing the BASIC program from >A000 to disk (that would be a one-time thing) and for the data files. Don't have the details on this yet. Would help if the cassette file would be available as WAV for processing with CS1er

wow! Very impressive :thumbsup:

Welcome Steve! The more the better I'd say; we can always use some more TI-99/4A programmers

URL to VDP Programmers' Guide was broken. Fixed that.