retroclouds

I'm not aware of a TI version of this game and it looks doable Checked the mentioned wikipedia link and the BBC micro even has a TMS5220 speech synthesizer Makes me wonder if some of the games actually used it ? same sound chip + speech chip = good candidate for TI conversion ?

HI-SCORE 275

Damn, I wished I could write Extended Basic games like that. As always, very polished and cool sound effects :thumbsup:

Want to take the opportunity to thank all of you who helped support Pitfall. It's a huge success. I still have a few spare Pitfall cartridges so I will be contacting a few of the people on the wait list. By the way, my next homebrew cartridge project has started. It's a conversion of Parker Brothers' Tutankham of the colecovision but enhanced with a decent title screen and Tutankham tune. I'm heading for a 32K cartridge but might end up with a 64K one

Absolutely, I think we need a lot more source code! If we want any newbies to give the TMS9900 a try, it certainly can't harm to let them take a look at existing code Would also want to take a look myself

Well, I guess you could do the below: 1. Draw the screen 2. Copy the screen 3. Switch VDP name table pointer to copied screen 4. Do your funky animation stuff on copied screen 5. Switch VDP name table pointer to the original screen

Are you kidding? That is one of the coolest thing of the game

22600

Excellent work Matthew! This is fun. Now that assembly language is used it would be cool to move the flyguy pixel by pixel (but still let him snap to the grid) Dunno if someone asked this before, but why not make a homebrew cart out of this ? Either way, looking forward playing the final version

Very interesting topic people! And yes the design of the TI-99/4A might be, well let's just call it exotic However the power of the TMS9900 CPU is really impressive if you ask me. Especially if you manage to get as much as possible out of the 16 bit scratch pad memory. And don't forget we have hardware multiply (MPY) and divide (DIV) instructions. Now how many home computers had that back in the days ? It is really a shame there aren't that many high-quality arcade games available for the TI-99/4A. But we all know the reason for that is not the machine itself, it was TI's marketing strategy. Anyway, I for one am hoping to see new homebrew games written in assembly language

You can burn the cartridge binary image created by Asm994a directly to EPROM. The only thing I had to do was to concatenate the 4 individual binary files into a 32K rom image. I have some more details here.

Yes, tried it with classic99 and works ok, but the calculated length is too big. Reason is that the TMS9900 is a 16 bit CPU and opcodes must be at even addresses. That is why winasm automatically adjusted the address of label ND. This causes the length to be 0C (12) instead of 0B (11). 1 0000 0000 REF VMBW ; External function VMBW 2 AORG >A000 <---- Assemble starting at absolute address >A000 3 A000 0200 SFIRST LI R0,1 ; VDP target address 3 A002 0001 4 A004 0201 LI R1,ST ; Source address in RAM 4 A006 A012 5 A008 0202 LI R2,ND-ST ; Number of bytes to write 5 A00A 000C <----------- should be 0B 6 A00C 0420 BLWP @VMBW ; VMBW = Multiple Byte Write 6 A00E 0000 7 A010 10FF JMP $ ; soft-halt ($ means program counter) 8 A012 4845 ST TEXT 'HELLO WORLD' 8 A014 4C4C 8 A016 4F20 8 A018 574F 8 A01A 524C 8 A01C 44 9 A01D 0000 EVEN *>>> Assembler Auto-Generated <<< 10 A01E 0000 ND END SFIRST 10 I'm afraid that won't work. There are several reasons: 1) You can't mix numbers with TEXT. But you could do the below ST BYTE 11 TEXT 'HELLO WORLD' 2) However, you would still be loading R1 with the address of ST instead of the required value. We also still have the issue with the 16 bit registers. If we do MOV @ST,R1 then R1 gets loaded with >0B48 where >48 is the hex value for character 'H' of 'HELLO WORLD' 1 0000 0000 REF VMBW ; External function VMBW 2 AORG >A000 3 A000 0200 SFIRST LI R0,1 ; VDP target address 3 A002 0001 4 A004 0202 LI R2,ST ; Number of bytes to write 4 A006 A012 <----- Value of R1 is address of ST 5 A008 0201 LI R1,ST+1 ; Source address in RAM 5 A00A A013 6 A00C 0420 BLWP @VMBW ; VMBW = Multiple Byte Write 6 A00E 0000 7 A010 10FF JMP $ ; soft-halt ($ means program counter) 8 A012 0B ST BYTE 11 9 A013 4845 TEXT 'HELLO WORLD' 9 A015 4C4C 9 A017 4F20 9 A019 574F 9 A01B 524C 9 A01D 44 10 A01E 0000 END SFIRST Some of the tricks used for 8 bit processors don't work out for the TMS9900 16-bit processor. Still you can easily work around the issues reported in the second solution. However, I'd pick the first solution as its consumes less code and memory space

Cool that there is some interest in TMS9900 assembly language. We can use some games written in assembly You also might want to check out the development resources sticky thread.

No need to enter the hex numbers in front of the statements. They are not part of the source code, they are the output of the Mini Memory line-by-line assembler. Here is how you do it with winasm99 REF VMBW ; External function VMBW SFIRST LI R0,1 ; VDP target address LI R1,ST ; Source address in RAM LI R2,11 ; Number of bytes to write BLWP @VMBW ; VMBW = Multiple Byte Write JMP $ ; soft-halt ($ means program counter) ST TEXT 'HELLO WORLD' END SFIRST These are the settings I used in winasm99 And here is how it looks like in the classic99 emulator

Looking forward to what you have in mind for the final version

You sure keep 'em coming Your previous game already costed me a lot of my precious time Here is the zip file for classic99 usage. Very well done indeed! ps hoping that sometimes99er can make such nice animated screenshot again SPACE-TRAP.zip

Hi ti99userclub! Good to hear you are doing better To be honest I like your first original picture better. I'd stick with that one. I like the pictures of rocky007 too, but I don't think its a good idea to mix them. They are a different style. Also the 2nd picture is from Pitfall II, and you never know perhaps I might give that one a shot sometime retroclouds

Both the Editor/Assembler manual and 9900 Data Manual PDF's can be referenced from the development resources sticky thread.

HI-SCORE 1050 3250

Holy crap! That is impressive, had to check twice to see if this really is Extended Basic The quality of the SSGC entries is impressive!

Excellent stuff! Oh, and for what it is worth, you might want to take a peek SPECTRA (shameless plug ) as it offers some routines for task scheduling, handling sprites, etc. Anyway, great to see a new assembler game in development! .. and what is even better hope to see this as a full tutorial

Very addictive! Will try again at home this evening. :thumbsup:

For anyone who wants to take a shot; you might want to take a detailed look at the development resources sticky thread for things like "TI-Intern", Editor/Assembler manual, etc.

Excellent stuff Jon! Looking forward seeing what we can get out of this

Several changes: * Partly rearranged; Tutorials & Manuals divided in Assembly Language / XB / Others. * Added CS1er tape conversion to the "utilities -> file/transfer" section. * Added TMS9900 microprocessor Data Manual to "Tech Manuals" section. * Added MG Smart Programming Guide for Sprites to "Tech Manuals" section. * Added Matthews' Assembly sound player for XB to "Tech Tutorials" section. * Added SN76489 Data Manual to "Tech Manuals" section. * Added commented sources of Pitfall!, Munchman and TI Invaders to "Tech Tutorials" section.