playsoft
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Posts posted by playsoft
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On 10/30/2019 at 11:11 AM, cgfatari79 said:
I have genesis controllers and 7800 dpad controllers. I know the 7800 controllers work on my xegs. I would have thought they too could be programed for use of the second button. Anyway back to topic great work on moon patrol. I woukd love to see Defender get simular treatment. I love the atari version but if I had the knowhow I'd have added the arcade title screen and would have tried to change the sound effects to be closer to the arcade. Especially the game start sound. It's so iconic. And obviously like I mentioned before have use of a second button for the smart bombs at least.
I think the issue with the 7800 controllers is that they operate in one of two modes; single (both buttons appear to be the standard trigger) or double button (both buttons are independent). However to put it into double button mode you need to provide power to one of the other pins, which is not an output pin on the A8. So to get it working in double button mode on the A8 you would need to modify the cable, so that +5V goes to that pin.
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1 hour ago, manterola said:
Regarding multi button joystick there is a pcb design already done, to build your own multi joy and many games already converted:
https://github.com/ascrnet/TestJoy2B/tree/master/games
https://atari8bit.net/multifire-3-button-atari-joysticks/
Is moon patrol redux compatible with this? or is multifire compatible with Sega Genesis control?
Maybe ascrnet or Mr. Robot can comment.
(side note: how can I add members names with a link so they get a notification?)
I tried Air Strike II from that collection with a Genesis controller and that works (B fires, C bombs). So I'd guess games that work with a Genesis controller would work with that one. Have you tried it?
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12 hours ago, tjlazer said:
How about like this?
5 hours ago, kiwilove said:I fired up the 800XL and gave it a good go. It does look amazing.
I do wonder if it's possible to support 2 fire buttons on the Genesis gamepad for this game? Does the coin-op use two fire buttons?
Don't know if it'll play better this way - but I think players who have the controller would like to try it out that way. Might need to offer the two ways of configuring it so that it'll suit the player?
Harvey
3 hours ago, slx said:Maybe you can make the control scheme selectable from the start screen (e.g. using the 5200‘s keypad). On the 8-bits the game could start with a two-button Genesis control scheme by using the second fire button to start.
Not sure how deeply you patched the game but if needed you can find an example of how to add start screen selections in the source code of Shamus+ (search for ‚New Mazes for Shamus‘). Sorry if this is inappropriate advice.
Thanks, I had already modified the keyboard code to change the keys for Continue and Demo, so it was easiest for me to hook into that. I haven't changed the keys on the 5200 but hopefully I can do something similar there.
Pressing J on the title screen will step through:
JOYSTICK = Atari joystick
GENESIS = Genesis controller, C will jump but up won't
MIX =
will work with either controller, up will jump as will C on a Genesis controllerreally this is the Genesis controller again, but both C and up will jumpThe settings apply to both ports during a two player game.
This also includes tjlazers text layout and a minor bug fix where the stack was filling up.
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The arcade machine has jump and fire buttons:
To get a taste of what using a button to jump is like you can play the (standard) 5200 version and decide whether you think it would work. To me it feels really awkward, on Altirra and real hardware too. Maybe the layout of the Genesis controller would make it better, I don't know.
So for the 5200 I do intend to release a version where moving the joystick up jumps as it feels so much better (not sure what to do with the existing jump button, leave it as jump or make it fire too... perhaps make 3 x 5200 versions to cover all combinations).
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On 10/23/2019 at 11:49 PM, David Alexander said:
Will the 5200 version get this treatment.
Yes!
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On 10/25/2019 at 3:37 PM, www.atarimania.com said:
Just my two cents...
The font itself looks great but, in my opinion, there's too much text on just three lines. I thought it would be better with the arcade lettering but it still appears way too heavy. Why not keep that great title screen and have the options / credits on a more airy screen?
On 10/25/2019 at 10:10 PM, Nezgar said:Maybe room to move the options text to the blank yellow area at the bottom of the screen, and put credits under the logo.
I like the new font.
On 10/26/2019 at 4:36 PM, gozar said:I would put State/Select/Option, right justified to the :, on the left, and C/D on the right.
On 10/27/2019 at 12:27 AM, irich2 said:+1 on the second option. Looks really good!!
Updated with the second option.
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I'm not keen on the first one, second is OK though. If anyone has any more layouts they'd like to see then please post the text as you want to see it so I can just paste it in.
;012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567 scrcode " START: NEW GAME " scrcode " SELECT: 1 PLAYER C: CONTINUE " scrcode " OPTION: BEGINNER D: DEMO "-
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24 minutes ago, www.atarimania.com said:
Have to say this looks fantastic now!
The only thing I would change is the order and centering of the options at the bottom of the screen but not sure it would fit:
START on the first line
SELECT and OPTION on the second line
C and D on the third line
Like this or did you have something else in mind?
It is simply 3 rows of 40 characters if you want to lay it out.
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16 hours ago, EnderDude said:
Does the title screen look fine on a real atari?
This is what the latest version looks like using composite output from a NTSC 130XE and PAL 800XL.
NTSC/LCD:
NTSC/CRT:
PAL/LCD:
PAL/CRT:
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Would it be possible to have the release date of each "final" versions of the games?
Regards,
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Sorry, I don't know. I guess you could search Darryl's posts and see when he made them available.
I think I only posted the hack to allow the RMT version to run from the Utlimate Cart (it runs OK from other loaders).
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Yes, playsoft did a patch for v7.4 and it works with the Ultimate cart.
Same hack applied (so that it runs from the Ultimate Cart correctly).
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Allan posted Dan Kramer's 5200 trak-ball guide here if you have not already seen it:
http://atariage.com/forums/topic/125406-8-bit-conversions/?p=3306094
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Looks really good. I think the 'small' version even looks better.
I like the small ones too. The 7800 sprites are only a little larger than these, so the paths are better suited to the smaller size.
I think the 7800 formation paths are too slow and the challenging paths a mixed bunch; some are fine, others are too slow or too fast.
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You did a really great job with this. It is a great start. I will go with this set up for the completed version.
As you have seen mentioned in this thread, there are lots of other possibilities which need to be explored. I will share anything I do in case it is useful, but I am only likely to touch it a couple of times a year.
I think for the challenging stages it would be better to double buffer the bitmap and do proper and/or plotting. This will actually be quicker as the advantage of the single buffer exclusive-or is really only for the formation. From a previous test (for something else) double buffer with column draw/erase was able to handle 12 sprites at 60Hz similar to the large sized sprites here (from what I remember). So I think the challenging stages can work perfectly at this resolution with the large sprites at 60Hz. Of course that will require some memory, for the second buffer, the column draw/erase routines and the sprite masks.
It is also feasible in the formation stages for the program to detect when it is too busy for 60Hz and switch to half frame rate mode where it doubles up the movement steps. Similarly when it detects that it can run at 60Hz again it can go back to full frame rate mode (with a bit of hysteresis to stop it switching too often). This will mean that the player would not notice any slowdown, just that the sprite movements become more coarse. Most of the time the player is blasting enemies so maybe this will only happen if they keep missing!
I do think you need to explore character mode. At it's busiest my test moves 5 formation sprites plus the 8 incoming ones in a single frame. Really there should be 10 incoming ones, as after the opening stages you get 10 incoming enemies, 8 go into formation and 2 go straight into attack. Potentially character mode allows you to do the formation with hardware, so even if the sprite handling is not significantly quicker it may still benefit.
Anyway, just my thoughts.
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I think you probably have to compromise somewhere if you want it to run on stock hardware and there will be various opinions about what it must do. For me that would be 60Hz, single line resolution with the full number of enemies - I am not concerned about colours or how the formation moves. I would not want to put a lot of effort into something unless I was confident of the results, so for me it's something only to dabble with now and then.
In case they may be of use these tests take the path data from the 7800 version and use exclusive-or bitmapped mode with reasonable results. The graphics for the small version come from Galactic Chase, one of the first games I brought for the A8. So perhaps I would end up doing Galactic Gala. Anyway, my "plan" is to do character mode tests next year.
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Done inking all ships and backdrop as soon as Im done coloring this week it should be ready.
It looks fantastic. I like all the detail but especially the viewpoint from behind the ship.
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So then it is a specific issue with 2 ports vs 4 ports. Like we speculated but at least now we know why. Wonder why this wasn't discovered until now? You would think something like this would have been found YEARS ago...
It is a software bug in the game, just that you get away with it on the 4-port but not on the 2-port.
You cannot rely on uninitialized RAM having any particular value, so reading this uninitialized location and writing it to the GTIA register is a bug. The programmer was unlucky that the uninitialized value was OK, otherwise it would have been easily found and corrected before the game was released.
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1) it looks.....weird. The rotating backside isn't too bad to watch, but the cockpit.....what's going on in there ?
:D Sorry but it looks like a goose flying with it's head bobbing constantly....it really is weird...never saw a spaceship do that 
Seriously: Scramble is not a game that tries to be funny, but this animation makes the ship look laughable.....
I would say that is a matter of taste as there are comments elsewhere that single out the ship design as being "cool". I like it, it looks anime inspired to me.
2) the rotation of the backside (and in lesser sense the bobbing of the cockpit) makes it a bit "random" when you might hit something. F.I. you could move close to the ground or a building when the ship is very small vertically, but a quarter of a second later it "spreads it's wings" and becomes much taller vertically which may well make you hit something.... this is especially true in the narrow tunnels in the city....
You say "narrow tunnels"... Wide narrow tunnels or Normal narrow tunnels? The default should be Normal tunnels on the A8 version; reach them and find that which you desire.
I did not think this was necessary with Wide tunnels since you have so much more leeway.
I can add a cheat code that will put the ship into tunnel mode. That way most people will play the game with the graphics as Harvey intended but the option is there for those that really don't like it.
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From here: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/246939-altirra-270-released/?p=3477587
The issue is that the game reads an uninitialized memory location ($0C) and writes it to a graphics chip register (GTIA register PRIOR).
That it's OK on the 4-port but not the 2-port is down to the initial power up state of RAM on the two different systems.
On the 4-port the initial power up state is a value (perhaps $00) which doesn't cause an issue when written to PRIOR. On the 2-port it is a value which puts the graphics into GTIA mode 11 (80 pixels wide, 16 hues, 1 luminance), hence you can't read the text.
Note that it is not related to the BIOS as the cart runs in diagnostics mode and takes control of the system before any initialisation.
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Thanks.
That looks fantastic!
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I'm a little disappointed in a large number of users here. This game is so damn good and it's been downloaded over 400 times, but the guy for all his hard work has gotten less than 20 likes? Come on people, click on the LIKE button, after all his hard work, it's the very least you can do!
Thank you - but it's fine. My enjoyment from this hobby is from developing the game which takes many months, not how many likes I get in a few days. It's had lots of downloads which can't be bad.
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Love how the explosions change once you get past the first base!
Very cool idea.There are other "rewards" in the same vein when you progress further.
Two suggestions:
- In the arcade version of Scramble, the player's collision detection with the terrain was much more forgiving. Here, there's no margin for error. It might be nice to loosen that up just a little bit.
- In the arcade version, you're credited with reaching a new stage as soon as you cross into it. Here though, the old stage has to completely scroll offscreen. So if you die right at the beginning of stage 4, you have to replay all of stage 3. That seems a bit harsh.
Plays great though. Very, very nicely done! Almost makes me wish I owned a 5200.
Thanks for the suggestions.
I prefer the more accurate collision detection. I think the ship is a little smaller than the arcade and there is the small ship option.
I will change the stage check though. I originally coded it like the arcade but it felt wrong to be able to skip the last part of a stage by crashing just as the next stage appears. But this has been suggested a couple of times now so I will change it.
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Oh well, it would have been nice to have been asked.
I was going to see if I could get the difficulty right in PAL mode.
And assuming I was successful ABBUC have missed out on a disk submission.
Anyway here's my mine which will support the Sega controller. Tunnels are normal by default (the wide option was for the 5200 non-centering stick). Also P is for Pause, R is for Reset. The rest is probably the same.
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The 5200 has 2 button joysticks as standard and I did not think it was a sophisticated enough game for the A8 nowadays.
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Moon Patrol redux
in Atari 8-Bit Computers
Posted
I once hooked one of these up http://www.hobbytronics.co.uk/usb-host-joystick to the joystick port and was initially ecstatic... until I looked at how long it took to read! I optimised to the point of breaking the i2c protocol (ignoring the occasional bad read) but still it was taking a good third of a frame to read everything.