playsoft

The plan is to add some more attack patterns then reassess what to do next. Originally it was to be a disk based 8-bit game but now that it's on a 512K cart almost anything is possible - but I have to balance that against what I can get done in my spare time.

Great to see it running on real h/w thank you!

This is another of my old magazine games converted for the 5200. floyd5200.bin A.N.A.L.O.G. COMPUTING Issue 53 April 1987 FLOYD THE DROID GOES BLASTIN' A brave gladiator droid fights the mutants for our descendants' amusement. This game is set not too far into our future (some time around the year 2048). A new form of entertainment has developed, based loosely on the ancient "sport" of gladiator fighting. In the center of the arena a single droid stands alone, armed with an infinite supply of photon missiles and a protective shield dependent upon the droid's own strength. This is Floyd. All around him, multitudes of ghastly mutated life forms move vertically and horizontally across the arena at near- lightning speed. When these reach one side of the arena, they're transported to some new location-and their trail of terror continues. It is Floyd's objective to exterminate these progressively increasing waves of foul creatures, by either blasting each one with a photon missile (up to four missiles can be fired at anyone time), or by coming into contact with a creature, destroying it with his protective shield. This, unfortunately, results in the droid's strength diminishing. If it's reduced to zero, Floyd's destruction results. However, also whizzing around the arena are lonely hearts, which, when collected by the droid, yield an increase in his strength. (Note that shooting the lonely hearts has no effect on Floyd's stamina.) This then sets the scenario for Floyd the Droid Goes Blastin' - with the player controlling Floyd. Listing 1 is the BASIC data used to create your copy of Floyd the Droid Goes Blastin'. Please refer to M/L Editor on page 11 for typing instructions. Playing. Your START key will begin the game. If you want to pause the action, hit OPTION. A second press of OPTION continues the game. The droid is controlled via a joystick connected to port 1. Moving the joystick in the particular direction results in Floyd's moving that way. Pressing the trigger and moving the joystick in the appropriate direction will fire a photon missile. You begin the game at level 1, with a strength of 10. For every alien with which you come into contact, you lose a strength point. Every lonely heart you collect gains you two strength points. For every creature you help Floyd destroy, your score is incremented by 1, and when all the creatures are annihilated, you advance to the next level. (Level 1 begins with one creature, level 2 with two creatures, and so on.) The game is over when your strength is reduced to zero. If your score is high enough, you'll be able to enter your name (up to eight characters), at the appropriate position on the high-score table. To enter your name, move the joystick left and right to move the cursor. Moving the joystick up and down will alter the character under the cursor. When you've finished entering your name, press the trigger to leave the high-score table. Floyd is waiting for your help. Enjoy the blasting!

I used it for my two recent ports thank you.

gb5200.bin This is a work in progress demo of GTIABlast! ported to the 5200. It is a 512K image for the Atarimax Ultimate SD cart. It doesn't use all that memory at the moment, but it will eventually. Aking asked if I'd considered porting to the 5200. I had not but it fitted in nicely with the direction the 8-bit development was going. In this demo Harvey has improved the GTIA 9, 10 and 11 levels from the 8-bit version, added a new GTIA 9 level and a whole bunch of new sprite designs. Thanks again to Aking for all the testing. A 5200 version of the GTIA 9 background designer will be made available soon for anyone wanting to make their own demo.

Thanks to Aking for cajoling me into porting one of my old Page 6 games to the 5200 - and for testing it. Unfortunately I have not kept any of my 8-bit stuff from back then, but this was a short program and I was able to port via disassembly. hb5200.bin PAGE 6 PUBLISHING'S NEW ATARI USER issue 46 Oct/Nov 1990 HOT BLOCKS is a version of one of the most successful games released on the ST, a simple yet utterly addictive game in which you direct different shaped blocks falling from the top of the screen so that they form completed lines at the bottom with no gaps. Every time a complete line is made, it is removed and all the other uncompleted lines are moved down. The game is over when the screen is full up with uncompleted lines. Falling blocks can be moved left and right by moving the joystick accordingly. They can also be rotated round by pressing the the trigger. It is possible to drop the block immediately by pulling the joystick down. Points are scored for every block which is used. The game advances onto harder (faster!) levels when the appropriate number of completed lines are formed. CONTROLS Blocks are controlled by a joystick in port 1 Press START or trigger to begin at level 5 Keys 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, begin at the specified level S key toggles sound on or off Spacebar pauses/resumes game ESC aborts a game For the 5200: # toggles sound, reset aborts and pause pauses!

I have created a MegaCart image which runs ok in Altirra in 5200 mode, do I need to do something to let the Ultimate SD cart know it's MegaCart format? Edit: does it just need a CART header (now added)? Edit again: I think the issue is that MegaCart means something different in these two cases (Altirra and the 5200 SD cart). On Altirra/A800Win etc... Type 31: MegaCart 512 KB cartridge A bank-switched cartridge that occupies 16 KB of address space between $8000 and $BFFF. It is controlled by a byte written to $D500-$D5FF. Five lowest bits select one of 32 available banks, bit 7 disables the cartridge. But the SD cart says... MEGA-CART Bank-switched ROM images up to 512KB (M.U.L.E, etc) For this ROM to work on Altirra you need to select the 5200 64K Cartridge (32K banks) option. So they are different formats and I need to modify the code from 16K banks to 32K banks.

I am committed to GTIABlast! for the time being, after that who knows. I've not kept anything from the 8-bit days, so this is all starting from scratch for me. Floyd was published by Bug Byte after ANALOG failed to pay the prize money for the ST programming competition. I'd heard they'd gone bankrupt although when I google I see it continued to be published (different publisher though) and they even printed another of my programs (which I can only assume was a deal with Page 6, I knew nothing about this until a few months ago). Anyway Bug Byte wanted to release the 8-bit version as well as the ST version. I can't remember exactly, I think they paid around £200 for the 8-bit version.

There is a version on atarimania which seems to work ok - and it autoboots from D1 (you need BASIC cartridge installed). http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-400-800-xl-xe-dr-who-adventure_16975.html

Swapping out the OS brings the change in earlier but also gives consistent positioning on the NTSC 800XL and PAL 130XE which I don't think I had before - according to my notes I had a slight (1 char) difference there.

Thank you for the explanation of the jitter, what I saw initially makes sense now. I already have the timer as the only IRQ, but I'd not swapped out the OS - I will try and see if that gives a more consistent zone on the XL/XE. I tried on another emulator and that was completely out, so this is not practical at all really.

Not nearly as impressive as the example above, but for starting out this might be useful. Has anyone had any success using a Pokey timer, so that it doesn't hog so much cpu time? I've had a play around with this tonight and this seems about as good as I can get it. test.s test.xex I've sync'd the timer up to the display and used a display list interrupt at the top and bottom of the display to enable and disable the Pokey interrupt. As you can see, there is some jitter. Originally I wasn't printing any characters, I just left the program in a tight loop doing nothing and there was no jitter... but obviously the point of this is to be able to do other things with the cpu! Is there anything I can do to improve this? I did try disguising the jitter by setting the colour registers to match and also using characters in the jitter area which look the same in both modes. This is the HIDE_JITTER option in the source code (which is ca65). I did get some variation as to which characters I had to disguise. In Altirra (PAL & NTSC) it is character columns 23..27, my 400 (PAL) 24..29, my 130XE (PAL) 26..31 and my 800XL (NTSC) 25..30. Since I don't have two machines the same, I don't know if this is variation in components or machines. So I covered all bases and did characters 23..31. hide.xex In Altirra there is some jitter on the right edge of the screen which is not present on any of my machines, but I think this is down to change getting in earlier.

GTIABlast! mode 10 and 11 demos. These are more Harvey's work than mine since there weren't many software changes involved. I was not convinced that 11 was going to be worthwhile but it is looking promising. gb10aug13.xex gb11aug13.xex

That sounds like a good trip and fond memories. I never made it to Red Rat or Page 6 and I live here! Wish I had of done now.

Thanks - I am really pleased with how it is coming along. By the way, if anyone comes up with some good designs using the editor, please let me know if you'd like to contribute them for use in the project. Can only offer a credit in the program somewhere in return.

Pleased to hear you enjoyed it. They were all programmed for my own enjoyment and that Les put them in the magazine was a bonus (I never really knew whether that was just a means of filling the pages!). I never really got any feedback, one letter (from Harvey, that's how we first made contact) although I did get a Reader's Award for Munchy Madness --- and Les really got me with that. I received a letter in the post saying I'd won and that "they'd like to invite me to Atari HQ in Sunnyvale to receive the award" - that was as much as I read and I remember shouting upstairs to my mum - "guess what I've won". At that point I read a bit further... "but unfortunately we can't afford that"... so no Sunnyvale, think it was one of the computer shows in London instead. I never made it to their offices but would always say hello at the shows.

If anyone fancies playing around with it, the GTIA 9 Background Designer used to generate the GTIABlast! demo is available at http://www.playsoft..../gtiablast.html Similar to the player editor (http://www.playsoft....tari_index.html) you can run it in a browser or as a standalone Adobe AIR application. There are instructions and a few example files - the public demo designs, some alternative sprites and an info bar. Basically it is a GTIA 9 combined character/map editor with some basic character animation facilities and the ability to generate a demo executable. It is written for a widescreen monitor but I've tested at 1024x768 and it is not too bad from a browser window in full screen mode - you only need to scroll to reach some of the inverse characters. Paul

Yes that was Hot Blocks! I'd moved on to programming the ST at that time but was missing the 8-bit so returned for one last program.

I know nothing about FPGA programming but this seems like incredible progress in such a short time. It would be wonderful to have new 8-bit hardware. Paul

Thank you both. It was nice to see the Pogotron artwork, I will print that out and hope to pick up an original on ebay one day.

José, That was Harvey Kong Tin and Andrew Bradfield, both from New Zealand. They developed two games together which were released by Red Rat Software, LaserHawk and HawkQuest, both helicopter games. If it was a multi-disk game you had then it was the fantastic Hawkquest. Sadly Andrew passed away too young, you can read about Andrew and the games here. Harvey has a lot of videos of the games on youtube, also some of Andrew's earlier programs which were recently uncovered. I had a number of programs published in Page 6 and it was through the magazine that I got in contact with Harvey. Yes, slightly embarrassing now but Sprong was mine - written during a summer holiday instead of getting a holiday job. It was originally published by Bignose Software, then taken up by Red Rat. At some point I was asked to change the name to Pogotron as another company were going to market it but that was the last I ever heard about it. So if anyone has a copy they'd like to sell to me... Paul

Harvey lives in New Zealand but he did visit the UK before I knew him. I think he was over here for about 10 months and he stayed in Hull!

Never knew what to call them, now they have been named!

The only thing I can take any credit for with the music is a converter which takes a midi file and turns it into simple data for the 8-bit. The project will need a musician but it may not be the best platform to attract any interest. I am reluctant to pull in a tracker as I'm trying to minimise cpu cycles and it's 15kHz since I use a Pokey timer for the sprites. Noted. I personally prefer to have the horizontal movement present than not to have it, but the thing to do is to make it selectable. I don't think you can put out demos if you want to enter the competition. As this is going to be a long term project, I didn't really want that restriction. It definitely won't be finished this year... probably not next year either. Great minds... and I thought I was doing something sort of original... I would not recommend that anyone bother to download it, as it's only a magazine game and pretty horrible by today's standards, but here I did the ships in GTIA 9 with ANTIC 2 underneath. Does anyone have the APX GTIA Demonstration diskette? I am sure I remember a 400/800 running a demo in a shop with a GTIA 9 digitised picture of Miss Piggy. I would really like to see it again but I can't find it anywhere. I have seen mention of the APX disk so I wonder if it's on there?

I don't know if you remember my little demo in the 2013 New Years disk, but here is an update. Harvey has joined me on the project and it is starting to take shape now. Still a long way to go but it is looking promising. Paul gbjuly13.xex