adamantyr

Ah yes, stupid blunders... So around 1986 I think, I got a copy of Extended BASIC. I was 11 years old and I wanted to type in those neat games from the big 99'er book among others and see them go. But for some reason, any program with sprites tended to fail. I would get the error SUBPROGRAM NOT FOUND IN # over and over. It seemed to a problem with the COINC subprogram. Frustrated and angry I complained to my brother, my parents, etc. that obviously this stupid cartridge was broken. I figured games like Wizard's Lair must have worked because they didn't use the subprogram at all. So a year or so later, I convince them to let me order Triton's Super Extended BASIC from the catalog. Surely the bug would be fixed there! But no, same errors again... So now I was convinced something must be wrong with the console itself. It was rejecting the command, that was the ONLY explanation. Then one day, my good friend (who also had a TI) called me up and asked. "Hey... that one command that doesn't work. How are you spelling it?" I look. CONIC. I look at the manual. COINC. Crap. I'll say this for my younger self... I did own up to my mistake and tell my parents what happened. (They laughed their asses off.) Of course then after that, anytime I had programming issues the first question they'd ask is "Are you sure you're spelling everything correctly?"

I'm planning on going to the Portland Retro Gaming Expo in October as well. Hoping my game will be complete enough I could maybe have it running! That can be my retro meet-up for the year.

Greg has already said he can't do this alone. And that's fair; moving into a new home takes ALL your energy and focus. I know that all too well! I'd help out if I could, but If I was the host/organizer, I would want to do it a lot closer to home. Which I'm sure would eliminate most of the attendees there down in Oregon who would be disinclined to drive up north.

Star Trap by Databiotics was, in my opinion, pretty bad. It looked in promotion shots like a cool Star Wars arcade clone. In reality it's a static screen with only enemies moving and sound effects recycled from Parsec. On disk, I'd go with Doom of Mondular from Symbiotech. It sounded like an awesome CRPG based upon the entry in the Triton catalog, but it's a really crude Might and Magic clone (if that) which runs like total crap due to the horrific copy protection scheme that was used.

Hi, Does anyone have a copy of the original Seventh Link hint guide, or a scanned copy of it? It would have complete dungeon maps if it's the right book. Thanks, Adam

Nice graphics! I'm doing bitmap mode 16x16 and 32x32 monsters myself. I have 8x8's for travel mode, but they don't have a unique one per monster, just a general "green lizard" that can be a dragon, a lizard, etc. Right now I got about 60% of my monster graphics done. I have 170 16x16 patterns and 24 32x32 patterns.

When I was a kid, I used a regular desk for the TI. My dad actually built both me and my brother computer desks uniquely designed for our computer systems (TI-99/4a and the TRS-80 Color Computer) with spots for printers and whatnot. Right now theyr'e in storage at my parent's place, I am musing getting them at some point. (They have strict instructions NOT to junk them. They're large enough I would need a truck to haul them, and it's 200 miles away.) The problem is, I don't think they would work as well for me today, and the days of having a claustrophobic desk has passed. I was using a beautiful wood table for awhile for my TI set-up, but I had to stop because the weight of the machine and P.E. box started bowing the table in the middle. :/ It was never intended to be used as a desk anyway, it's not even a great table it seems. So I went to a local office supply place and found one of the raisable/lowerable desks, the kind software companies like Microsoft buy in bulk, and got one for $50. It has 1 1/4" thick surface and sturdy steel legs, so I know it can take the weight. So far it's working great!

That's because the Wikipedia entry for the TI-99/4a shows that image.

BTW I edited the wikipedia page to include this version. Let me know if I should change anything... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Lair_(1983_video_game)

I just picked up a Magnavox professional monitor on Craigslist for $100. Works great and in really great condition. They are out there! I actually have spares now to sell, if someone wanted to pick up in western WA. (I won't ship, too many things can go wrong.)

Legend of Tilda will also run on the unmodified console, I believe. He's been working very hard not to require a memory expansion for it. Doesn't Super Mario TI Bros requires the F18A? That's a mod.

Yeah, the TI one is fine, don't sweat it. It's the only one I heard that wasn't an errie perfect reproduction of the original! Do you have an idea yet of when the game will be complete? How far away is the finish line? Any major tasks left to do?

Periodic noise is just a buzz noise, more regular than a white noise. It doesn't actually go lower in tone. The TI sound chip is pretty good but it's hamstrung on base notes because of the 3mhz clock. Because the frequency divider is faster, it pushes the tones up to higher octaves. The same sound chip in a 1mhz architecture would be able to go about 2 octaves lower easily.

Wow, that sounds fantastic! You recreated the sounds nearly perfectly! The only one that was off was the dungeon doors, they're a little lower base than the native TI sound chip can do due to the 3mhz clock.

Stock, I'm not a hardware guy. I had my membrane keyboard replaced with a mechanical several years ago, but as was stated, those don't count. More of a repair than anything... I do have two modded P.E. Boxes with quiet fans though.

#37 received on Friday! High score so far is 18,197. Part me me wants a TARDIS so I could go back 30 years and blow me and my brothers mind away with it.

Yeah, I like the socializing aspect of it as well. My game won't be done by then, but I'll be able to demo combat and stuff.

I liked the Oak Tree! I even took my GF and her daughter there on our way back from Rose City Comic Con. And there are close by hotels that are inexpensive too. Adam

It's cool, that's a bunch of stuff going on you definitely should focus on. I'm sorry about your FIL, I hope he makes a full recovery! I'm cool with Vancouver again. I'm not that keen on Beaverton, but I could probably make that too. I'll also add that if we have to push Fest West back a month or two in order to accommodate I'm all right with that.

SAMS has no real "platform" on the TI, any application written for it has to roll their own loaders and manage paging itself. For example, my CRPG is a 144k program binary, 72K of which is program "modules" of 12K each. One module always resides in memory in the lower 24K block, the upper 24K is switched to whatever module is needed. The lower 8K block is used for data access and is switched frequently as needed. Loading all this required writing a custom loader which opens to the binary and reads it in 8K chunks which are then copied to the CPU RAM page needed. It takes about a minute or so to load the game from TIPI, faster in Classic99. Art Green's old AEMS assembler offered a linking loader design that could load object code into pages, but I'm not sure the design was ever fully worked out. Consider that if you wrote all your code into 4K module chunks loaded generically into a SAMS card (you don't have fixed pages for anything), that would mean maintaining a list somewhere of modules and their page assignments, which could get messy very quickly. Especially if one module is dependent upon another one being in memory at the time. I'd much rather write my games than focus on designing a framework to drive them on.

Before this year is over you'll be able to play my CRPG too!

Okay so you ARE blasting bitmap then. What exactly are the name tables? There is the pattern table, the color table, the screen table, sprite pattern table and sprite attribute table. Regardless, the first thing I would do is make sure my screen table is right next to the pattern table at >1800. Then I would have a 2.75k buffer in CPU and make sure all my changes are there. I'd then use 16 bit registers in scratch pad and put the VDP ports IN registers for maximum speed and just write the 2.75k in one linear write.

What exactly are you writing to VDP? Can you share some code?

I honestly wouldn't worry about vertical sync issues until you observe them. Until you're trying to blast bitmap graphics in real-time you don't really have an issue with this in assembly. (Coming from Basic and Extended BASIC it's easy to think "But sprites and graphics are SLOW!") Your best method of handling the VDP is to treat it like an output device, like a printer. Don't try and figure out WHAT you're writing in the midst of writing to VDP. Use buffers in CPU and pre-calculate so you can just blast it all out in one large block without stopping. You can also use a alternate screen in VDP and do swaps with a single VDP register change.

Yeah, items in ToD have their characteristics copied with them, so if it read past the buffer it's probably picking up a "32" consistently from a memory area beyond that. Come to think of it... ToD must be using VDP memory to store item and room data, it's the only place with enough RAM on a base console. Using Classic99's debugger you could probably find in memory where it's storing all of it and discern the data structure. In my own CRPG, I use two bytes for all items; a category and a # assignment. If the top bit of the # is set, it's an unknown item of it's type. All other data (damage, hit, protection, etc.) is stored in data tables that are referenced. This means you can't have honing stones or similar effects that change your item's abilities, as I'd have to store the entire structure for an item (16 bytes) everywhere.