Wrathchild
-
Content Count
2,924 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Posts posted by Wrathchild
-
-
(This topic missed the Forum migration, so I'm reposting it
)FYI - A new FlashCart image of this game is available on Classic's forums:
http://www.atarimax.com/flashcart/forum/viewtopic.php?t=243
At the request of Nir Dary, I've also produced an image for the Switchable XEGS cartridge model.
Seems to work OK in A800WinPlus, but please feedback if you find otherwise.
Anyone need a MegaCart version too?
Enjoy,
Mark
(original XEGS image removed)
-
Are the sources to "Black" (or is it Blark?) or Ars Mori (by Tristesse) available anywhere - that's some impressive stuff
I found these on a demo compilation DEMOS014.ATR
Thanks, Mark
-
-
Amazingly, I've dug up the old code
Doesn't appear to drive much itself - just reads for the A8 side.
But worth a look
-
Think back (and find the thread
) for the W.C.Leaderboard work I did.I think a good trick here is to use colour 3 as the background. This then
makes the usual background colour available for the foreground (?!)
The borders can then be made by overlaying the missiles, so you lose
in that respect. Conclusion - don't always go for black as the obvious
background colour.
Think further back and the Barbarian work shows that, with careful
design of the player's software sprite, the animation frame resolves
itself on char (4 pixel) boundries.
Food for thought.
Regards,
Mark
-
Remember, now we have the luxury of large bank switchable carts,
images can be pre-created at multiple X/Y positions and then the
correct image extracted directly when required, cutting out the need
for large numbers of shifts preparing the sprites.
-
Hi,
When I used to develop on an STE, cross-assembling for the A8,
I had a parallel cable which split into two joystick connectors.
On the XL you'd load a 'bootstrap' loader from disk, then this
would sit and wait for instructions to come down the cable.
Using the 4 bits of each port to make an 8-bit value and the
triggers for handshaking, transfer rates were quite good.
All that you needed to do on the ST was to 'print' the binary
you wanted to send. Pretty neat.
I did also manage as well connect an XL and a C64 together via
a single joystick extender cable with an female-2-female adapter
on one end. using a reset cartridge I had to type in the hex code
for the 'send' routine somewhere into the C64 memory and then
run it. This way I managed to get across the memory for some
'screens', e.g. "The Sentinel" loader screen - so that I could then
play with the data on the Atari. There must have been an easier way?!
Best wishes,
Mark
-
Oops, that should have said:
Hence if you start with the original
Gauntlet, you can't put the Deeper Dungeons disk in
between levels.
-
I think they maybe be cheating a bit with this,
maybe there's 128 levels and these can be
mirrored and flips to produce 4 versions of each?
I'll fool around in the emulator to find out.
1 side of disk (minus the 'flip disc' message code)
doesn't give enough space for 512 levels.
AFAICT, there are no levels on side 1.
A check is done by loading the 1 first sector and
then the second sector one byte on from the first.
The last byte of the second sector needs to be $FF
and then first byte of the first sector gives the
level disk 'id'. Hence if you start with the original
Gauntlet, you can put the Deeper Dungeons disk in
between levels.
I don't think the game ends. When the players die
the engine just waits for someone to rejoin?
Regards,
Mark
-
Does anyone know how many levels there are in the Atari version of Gauntlet?
Looking at the code & second disk shows that each level takes 4 sectors with level 1 starting on sector 4.
I think maybe its 118 levels as there appears to be a program starting at sector 486, though I haven't checked out what that code is for yet.
Also there is a check between the level and the value 118 in the post level loading code which maybe used to do something like mirror the levels, again I haven't check yet.
Thanks,
Mark
-
Sheddy would be well placed to comment if such an engine is possible?!
Would a simple (basic) gr.10 screen suffice? 9 colours and 80 pixels wide
would make shifting data a bit quicker (less of it) and if things were
fast moving then the lack of detail would not matter so much, although
player/missiles could be used to enhance the display.
Mark.
-
I've added rough Flash cart image support to this release. A basic test with my Eidolon image appears to function OK. FYI : the exe attached was built using VC++6 & DX8.1 SDK. Source diffs can be supplied to whoever wants them.
These are the comments for the two carts:
AtariMax 1 Mb Flash cartridge - This bank-switched cartridge occupies 8 KB of address space between $A000 and $BFFF. The cartridge memory is divided into 16 banks, 8 KB each. The 4 lowest bits of the address written to $D500-$D50F select the bank mapped to $A000-$BFFF. Writing to $D510-$D51F disables the cartridge and any write to $D520-$D5FF is ignored.
AtariMax 8 Mb Flash cartridge - This bank-switched cartridge occupies 8 KB of address space between $A000 and $BFFF. The cartridge memory is divided into 128 banks, 8 KB each. The seven lowest bits of the address written to $D500-$D57F select the bank mapped to $A000-$BFFF, bit 7 disables the cartridge."
The two models differed in that the default bank for the 128KB cart is the first bank (0) wheras the 1024KB cart defaults to the last bank (127).
However, its highly probably that I've got something wrong, however this
now lets me easily debug a current task of mine - putting "Gauntlet"
into a 256KB flash chip (that can be run in an 8Mb cart).
Regards,
Mark
-
From a developers point of view, I still find the single breakpointvery restricting, I think the facility for multiple breakpoints, each
with an enabled/disabled status, should be included.
Later, perhaps some 'break on condition' rules would be useful.
E.g. run until register/contents of memory address = value
Looking at the help file and source code, all of this is there already!
Simply type 'B ?' in the monitor for details.
Regards,
Mark
-
My flatmate and I used to have many great games on my STE whilst I was at uniwe played KO2 for years every saturday...
Curling the ball in from a corner kick was often a simply way of getting some goals on the scoreboardthere was a nice KO2 100% goal when you played from down to up...never played sensible soccer... is it good?After you got used the difference in after-touch control, it was nicer in many ways to KO2 but didn't quite have its fast pace.
Mark
-
Hi,
Other than it not yet supporting flash cart images, I'm happy.
Seeing as that's not yet in atari800-1.3.5 I can see why.
Revised aims will be to add the import CC65 produced labels,
which seeing as they've already added X-ASM label handling
shouldn't be too much trouble. Good to see file tracing there :wink:
From a developers point of view, I still find the single breakpoint
very restricting, I think the facility for multiple breakpoints, each
with an enabled/disabled status, should be included.
Later, perhaps some 'break on condition' rules would be useful.
E.g. run until register/contents of memory address = value
Regards,
Mark
-
Already converted, the picture doubles the x-pixels to show what it would look like on the A8. It was SS, I fired up KO2 on WinSTon to confirm. Tip: Old joysticks are better then joypads - I couldn't get into the game at all! Bit like Arsenal reallyit looks like sensible soccer... are the sprites already converted or are these the 16bit sprites?
Cheers, Mark
-
Way way back...
IIRC, Harlequin (Steve aka JetBootJack and others) did want to produce KickOff.
I was asked if I'd like to have a go (having produced the Speedball scroller - albeit a slow scroller
).As I was too busy at university I never got around to producing anything.
Though I did speak to Steve Screech a little bit about it when he was
on the Anco stand at one of those UK computer fairs at Wembley one year.
Anyway, one thing I did do was to take the men from KO2 or
Sensible Soccer (I can't recall) and produce A8 equivalents of them.
Here's a piccy and the data statements if anyone feels like
trying to animate them.
The colour palette is:0 - green - pitch
1 - red - Team 1 Skin/Team 2 Shirt
2 - white - Team 1 Shirt/Team 2 Skin and Ball
3 - black - hair, shadows, shorts
I think the A8 could do with a great soccer game!
The Zeppelin one was painful to play!
Enjoy,
Mark
-
1
-
-
Don't forget, especially flash cart owners, that images
of the ROM converted Atari 8-bit versions (sorry 5200 owners)
were available on these threads.
The Eidolon
http://www.atariage.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=41564
Koronis Rift
http://www.atariage.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=42731
I can't recall anyone wanting to produce these commercially,
guess we could as the Lucasarts people if they'd mind?
Regards,
Mark
-
Mostly CA65&LD65 (the assembler/linker that comes with the CC65 suite).
The control you can get when using your own loader configuration
files is very useful - e.g. for building cartridge images.
-
Great progress, well worth the wait!
I'd recommend looking at continuing with a bank-switched
cartridge model for development, required data (music, graphics
and even game code etc) need only be switched in when required,
leaving quite a lot of RAM left for the game (e.g. display).
The overheads are minimal and benefits are that we
all won't need a 130XE or modified XL. Plus development
can still be done on the common emulators.
Regards,
Mark
Question: Will the backdrop get all those little animations?
-
I always loved Captive
-
Yes thanks, I'm using an internal drive but booting the soft-rom from floppy/SIO2PC. I really need to get around to burning (or buying) a replacement MyIDE ROM as that should solve the problems with the I/O redirection, e.g. Multi-boot Menu disks with 2-part games on the menus can't load the second part. Other than that it does make a great setup and you new menu software is a great tool!Does that answer your question?Does anyone have experience of the ROM? does it fix those problems?
Also, what are peoples experiences of using the HD only, i.e. no 1050 or SIO2PC mounted D1:? Does the HD boot up directly? What would you put on the bootable partition? Just all your myIDE tools I'd guess, or perhaps a menu system.
Can someone look at my other questions on the 'best DOS thread'?
http://www.atariage.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=64417
Regards,
Mark
-
Hi Shawn,
With regards to using the myIDE method of selecting a disk image (Ctrl-Shift-n), presumably this refer only to the first 9 images on the drive. Does your image menu allow you to 'swap' already uploaded disk images into those positions?
Regards,
Mark
-
I don't think this too possible without some clever remapping algorithm,
most of my 2.5" HD IDE drives have different numbers of sectors, cylinders and heads and so how the data is layed out/extracted would differ between them.
Like us on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
AtariAge on Instagram
Watch us on YouTube
Chat on Discord
Play 'Gauntlet' on a 1Mb Flash Cart
in Atari 8-Bit Computers
Posted
I'm getting a crash too in 3.1+ - although when the cart is attached it goes straight to self test, but when you close and open the emulator again then the garbage happens, followed by the crash. No Mindscape title is shown though.
The new MegaCart image works in 3.1+, again the emulator has to be closed and re-open for it to take start correctly. Both images work OK in the 4.0 emulator. I'll have to delve further - probably to do with which bank is loaded first when a coldstart is done. For XEGS $A000->$BFFF is always bank 15 (of $0->$F) so shouldn't have a problem there, and the MegaCart sets Bank 0 (of $0->$7) for the 16K between $8000->$BFFF. Are you using Steve's Flash enhanced 3.1+ emulator? I think I recall experiencing weird reset behaviour with that, I'll need to find the original 3.1 to compare.
Regards,
Mark
G_mega.zip