Lord-Chaos
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Posts posted by Lord-Chaos
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I sold both my ATARI 2600 Vader and my ATARI 7800 for a few bucks a few years ago and now consoles are expensive on eBay so I got the 2600+. Thank god I didn't sell my 800 XL and disks, because there are Tons of routines and homebrew programs on these disks. Hope to show something soon, may also convert XL stuff to the 7800.
THIMO
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Hi,
this is Thimo aka Lord Chaos and I was absent from ATARI and retro gaming for many years. I recently Wenn home and my old ATARI 800 XL, a Speedy Floppy 1050, a 130 XE and a Mega Ste plus and old TV Arena still there and many disks, I was working on a 3D dungeon crawler back in the Day.
I will aquire new Power supplies soon and I hope That the computers still work.
Hope I can unearth the old stuff and my Sourcecodes.
Thimo
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I've added '.rar' as an allowable file type. Please try again.
Thanks,
..Al
Thanks,
here is the demo file.
Thimo
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Hello,
I've been away for about 5 or 6 years, not doing much for the ATARI. I gave up my business dealing with VCS and ATARI 8 Bit games on ebay and I'm now a "Fachinformatiker" and working in the IT.
I didn't do much for the ATARI 8 Bit in the past years, but I think it's time to start a new project.
I have ideas for several 1K minigames and for almost 2 decades I've been working on a 3D dungeon crawler like "Dungeon Master" or "Eye of the Beholder" on the ATARI 800 XL. My first versions were written in Turbo BASIC, but there are too many speed and memory issues, so I have written the 3D routine in Assembler.
The attached picture shows a version with character graphics and some DLIs.
What I'd need would be a graphics artist to draw some dungeon graphics sets and some monsters and items. I'm thinking about either using the ATARI's 256 color mode or multicolor character graphics with player overlay. The 256 color mode looks nice, but the resolution is not good, so it would be difficult to have small objects like keys lying on the ground
Multicolor graphics with player overlays would have a 4 times higher resolution, but less colors, but I think only then details like messages on the walls could be recognized.
I want the game to work on a standard 64kb machine, but enhanced memory should be supported.
I've tried to upload the engine demo, but I always get an "You aren't permitted to upload this kind of file" - error. The file is a .rar archive.
Thimo
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What I hate about many games that have been ported to the
800 are the 1-colored players.
I'm working on some stuff using players as overlays for
software sprites (Graphics 12), that way with GPRIOR=0
you can have objects with 6 colors. Combined players
and missiles are 10 pixels wide. Not as good as the
the C64's multicolor sprites, but better than single-colored
players.
The idea is to have 4 of these objects in a line. Vertical
multiplexing is simple on the ATARI and very colorful
games should be doable.
I will make a minigame using that technique first, I can't
do animations there, but it should be quite colorful.
This does also work in HiRes, although you have less
extra colors there. In theory, colorful HiRes sprites
are possible. Something like "Starquake" just with
colorful sprites.
LC
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Hey all,
I'm trying to dig up some information on the ST homebrew scene. Could anyone give me answers to the following questions?
What Media should new titles should come on. CD? Floppy?
What price range is normal for ST software?
Would people pay a few bucks more for a professional box and package?
Thanks in advance.
I'd say floppy. With Fcopy Pro, I'm able to get about 900K on a DD disk. HD
disk-drives are kind of rare, so I'd use DD disks. The program should be
HD-installable if a HD is available.
Keep in mind a good program doesn't need to be huge. The ST's advantage
is that many programs are small, but powerful. ST Calamus comes on 2 disks.
Much smaller than the Windows version, but still very useful. Same can be
said for games. Many of the classics fit on one double sided DD disk.
If you make games and if you have a good concept, you will probably not
make money with an ST version, but you could make a Windows version
or let someone port your game. Even on the PC with all its 3D games a
simple game can be successful. That's my idea. Make a fun game for
your platform of choice and port it to PC/MAC if you want to make money.
The limitations of the old platforms will keep your focus on the important
things, playability and fun.
I don't know if ST users would pay for a professional box, I'd say make
a limited edition. There are a few ST collectors out there. You could also
find someone to port an ST game to the AMIGA. It's even possible
to store both ST and AMIGA versions on 1 disk. It was done with Starglider 2
AFAIK.
LC
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This is my old scanner, bought in the 90s for the PC.
A Mustek 12000SP.
It's worthless by now, but since it's an SCSI scanner
I wonder if I can use it with the ST. It came with an
ISA SCSI-adaptor for the PC and drivers for the PC
and the Mac.
If it is possible to use it and if there are drivers, I could
use it to make some b/w scans for Calamus. My inkjet
printer (Epson Stylus Color 800) works fine with the ST.
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You can change the HPOS registers on the fly to get a second copy of a given P/M.
There are problems/limitations.
DMA is one, especially if you have a hires mode going as well - plus you have the refresh cycles stolen which is a pain because the bulk of them occur during the first 2/3rds of the display area.
Then, there's the fact that you'll get the same image/colour unless you change the GRAF or colour register/s.
Hardware collision detection will be not as useful - you would have to do extra calculations to work out which "sprite" was affected.
So, taking things into consideration, you could probably get 3 or 4 replications happening on a scanline depending on what else is going on.
Problem is, you need a display kernal to do that - with the cycles you'd lose you'd (in most cases) be better off just doing software sprites.
There was a thread elsewhere in the A8 section sometime in the last year about documenting ANTIC DMA - it would be well worth digging it up to assist with calculations.
Is this possible without flickering? It's possible to
switch to GTIA mode in mid-scanline and it's also
possible to switch colors, but my last efforts
with players did always flicker.
I'm using players as "underlays" for software sprites,
that way multicolor sprites are possible, but 4 players/line
is a little bit limited.
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http://www.klov.com/game_detail.php?letter...mp;game_id=8328
Found a review about that game in one of my old 80s magazines
and the reviewers liked it. Looks somewhat Pengo-ish and it
has cats and I love cats.
Does anyone know that game? In Germany, arcades were for
adults only because of its "violent games" and so many games
are hard to find here. Even the cute games.
Is there any port to a home computers? This game looks like
an ST or AMIGA, even an A800 could do it.
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My problem always was, when it comes to making games, that
I can't draw.
Ok, I can do simple graphics like I used for my A800 minigames,
but I can't do professional graphics or even animations.
The only thing I can do is ripping gfx. There is an unfinished
ATARI 800 rpg which uses gfx ripped from ATARI ST Bard's
Tale in the 800s 256-color mode. Not sure if anyone ever
made an ATR of it.
The question is, are there still any artists left who can draw
ATARI 2600 or ATARI 800 gfx/animations or who could help
to convert 16 Bit/32 bit gfx to 2600 or ATARI 800, on the
A800 I prefer to use Graph2Font/Player Missile overlay gfx.
It would be nice to have someone to do some gfx/animations
or converting gfx on request.
I'm thinking about revisiting some old, abandoned projects
and maybe a minigame or two for the A800. I'm trying to
port some of my stuff to the VCS. The code isn't big, but
the gfx engines are entirely different.
LC
P.S. : Before I forget it, I can't compose either. Any XL
or even 2600 musicians out there? All I can do is samples.
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AmigaOS had more "modern" features than TOS (namely pre-emptive multitasking) but the GUI is a nightmare to navigate compared to GEM. The ST's simplicity made it the only computer that was actually easier to use (IMO at least) than the Mac.
I think the problem of AmigaOS was, that it was just too big for an A500 with 512K. It
really NEEDS a hard disk and a fast CPU. I didn't get into AmigaOS before I got my
A1200, 68030 and 1942 VGA monitor. OS 3.x is so much better, it can read PC/ST
disks , CrossDOS is already a part of it, I had to search for CrossDOS/MessyDOS on
the A500 first and on the A500 it was quite slow/unreliable. The 1.3 disk system with
its disk-validator sucks.
And upgrading an A500 is no fun either. It has only one
expansion port. The ST has a cart port and a port for a Megafile HD. The AMIGA doesn't.
A500 harddisks had to be attached to the expansion port and this took a lot of space.
I had it all. Turbocard 68020/14 Mhz, A570 CDrom, extra RAM, extra drives and
hard disk - it was no fun to use.It got better with the A600/1200 with its internal IDE
and external PCMCIA port, but it came too late.
What I like about the ST is, that it's easier to use and very reliable. I've used my
Mega STE for over ten years for all kind of business-related stuff. In that time, I had
multiple problems on my Windows PC. Hard disk crashes, failing PSUs , Windows bugs.
The STE never failed. Lost only one 10-year-old SM124 which was easy to replace. It
still has its old 48Mbyte hd, but its showing signs of old age by now.
A plain ST is better for working. The A500s 640*512*16 resolution is useless, because
it's flickering like hell. So you have only Medium Res for working on an A500. The A500's
disk drive is slow and LOUD. Some loaders do really torture the drive. The worst is,
that I have 3 A500s now and none of them has a fully working internal disk drive while
I never saw an ST with drive problems.
The ST has great text editors, Calamus is still great, inkjet printers like my Epson
Stylus Color work great without any drivers. It has the great Turbo Assembler,
which can also be used for writing 68K stuff on the AMIGA.
The AMIGA 500 is a good machine for games, the AMIGA has so many games that never made it
to the ST. Turrican III, Lionheart, Ambermoon (ST version never released) ,
Elfmania was quite good, too and I really like the music of many AMIGA games,
too bad that so many ST games did not support STE or MIDI.
But I must add that I really hate Windows. I prefer to use the Mega STE and the Amiga.Even
the ATARI 800 with the S.A.M. GUI or the C64 with GEOS is better. Windows can drive you
crazy.
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Hrrrm...
So it looks like the C-1 & A8 projects are doing just what I was getting at.
Goes to show the mother of invention works out of necessity.
What's the hold up on these projects? Financial or is it technical?
What would be really cool is a full 8 bit compatible on a single chip.
It's been done with the 2600 / nes etc.
Something that can interface with USB.
I still think something with a 6502 compatible instruction set, selectable, flashable os / i/o rom would rule. FPGA for the audio / video maybe would work.
Any board designers in here?
I think i'm probably just dreaming!
No reason to give up your ideas - it's always good
to have new ATARI hardware in the making. The more,
the better.
You could use the existing C-1 system to make an A800 core
which does not exist yet (as far as I know). Or you could
improve the idea, make it cheaper, better, easier to
build. AFAIK the C-1 is rather expensive and many
ATARI users can't afford an expensive system.
I'd really like an ATARI 800 on a chip that could be used
for an ATARI-800-in-a-joystick like the Flashback 2 or
this Commodore DTV joystick or on some sort of PC-card.
If done right, this could be a real "remake" of the classic
ATARI 800. I think it should be someting that could be
afforded by most of the ATARI users who can't spend
hundreds of dollars for new hardware.
LC
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Millipede
Ninja
One Man and his Droid
Powerdown
Quest for Quintana Roo
Rescue on Fractalus
Spellbound
Tomahawk
Universal Hero
Vegas Jackpot
Whirlinurd
Xagon
Yahtzee
Zone X
Yes, I'm cheating. I have all those games. Most of them
are on tapes, all that Mastertronic stuff.
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Is it possible to use a parallel ZIP drive with an ST
or will they work with PC's parallel ports only?
LC
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I guess this is either a game with no interest or maybe there aren't many Commodore collectors out there. 99 cents plus S&H, I hope it gets a bid so I can be rid of it. I want the game to go to a good home, I just don't want it.
"Boot Camp", it looks like the US version of "Combat School" to me. This isn't a bad game and
don't forget the great music by Martin Galway.
Advice : Advertise your auction on a Commodore group. The usenet-group comp.sys.cbm
is quite active. There's also alt.c64 and some marketplace group (you can crosspost).
If you can't sell the game, try European ebay sites. The C64 was quite popular in the UK
and Germany. Some games will sell for ridiculously high prices.
Thimo
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In my eyes f.e. the PAL color mixing is not more than a bug...
Which kind of "PAL color mixing"? The one with mode 9 and 10 = 256 colors? That's not a bug, it's a feature
Btw, that mixing is done in the PAL-decoder in the monitor. The Atari has nothing to do with it, you can use that kind of mixing on ANY system using a PAL video (RGB @ 50 Hz ain't PAL though, so no ST or Amiga).
(by the way: one extra note....did you know the C64 spoils cycles of its 2MHz clock?)
Depends on how many sprites you have turned on
This actually works on both the ATARI STE and the AMIGA, at least on PAL systems.
I once wrote a Mandelbrot fractal program using 8 x 8 = 64 colors on the STE (8 colors
and 8 greys) and 16*16 on the A500 (32 color mode, 16 colors, 16 x greys). Technically,
more colors where possible, but I just wanted "good combinations".
It works by placing 2 pixels besides each other horizontally, reducing the resolution to
160*200. There are some artifacting glitches, so it doesn't look perfect.
I have to look for the program.It was written in Omikron BASIC on the STE and AMOS on
the AMIGA, for both systems my PAL TV was used. No machine code was necessary.
LC
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Now I could say something... but I don't
Speak out loud: Atari rulez
It rulez because with a lot of trickery it can nearly do what a C64 can do without any tricks?
I wouldn't call that trickery.
Player/Missile overlays will work in plain BASIC without a single
byte of MC-code. In charmode, using GPRIOR, 17 colors are possible.
Players and missiles can be as high as the whole screen and you
can redefine the shape in every line.
You can't change player positions and colors from line to line, but cleverly
made pictures or games graphics won't need any DLIs.
I posted a small demo program a few years ago showing these 17
colors. It's a BASIC program without any ML code.
LC
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These tunes are great. I recognise "First Samurai" ,
"James Pond 2", "R-Type AMIGA intro", "Last Ninja 2
Central Park", I think one of the songs is "Space Crusade"
and another called "Leander" as mod, and "Goldrunner"
="Human Race".
Great stuff. If anybody needs MODs to convert, I have
a lot of them, the MODs Anthology collection has 10000
of them, although some are more than 4 channel and
I have quite a lot C64 conversions as MODs or Midis.
Can anyone adapt this one? This is Martin Galway's
"Comic Bakery" title song. It's an AMIGA MOD.
This is one of my favourite C64 tunes.
Thimo
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I have a Mega STE, 2MB, TOS 2.05 and 1.44MB drive (that means around 1.7MB formatted with FcopyPro).
HD is still the original 48MB one. Most of the data is compressed, I use a resident program to compress stuff
and the ATOMIK cruncher for executables.
Nice machine and still working after almost 13 years (bought in 1994, pre-owned).
LC
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I was looking around in the 8-bit section and came accross this:
http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=88809
Seems like a really hot topic!
I'm sure something like this could be done.
What do you guys think?
-Rick
The ATARI ST has Rogue by Epyx and a few roguelikes, Larn, Hack and Nethack, probably more.
Rogue by Epyx has a graphical interface, most roguelikes use ASCII characters only, but are incredibly complex.
There is a graphical version of Nethack which looks similar to Epyx' Rogue. Nethack is far more complex than
Diablo. For example, you can polymorph yourself into a monster or you can polymorph your pet. There are
hundreds of creatures and thousands of items, good and bad (cursed) ones.
Technically, the ST could do a 3D isometric Diablo-like game, there are a lot of isometric games like Cadaver.
Lord Chaos
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I still have a complete Spellbreaker for ATARI ST,
with instructions, the deck of cards, reference card
etc. , original Infocom release, tested and ok.
I can sell it for $15, shipping is $10 (air mail)
I can also offer "Jewels of Darkness" for ST by
Level 9, shrinkwrapped, new, for $5. This version
has an additional German manual.
Also for ST
Bloodwych Data Disk
Captive
Thimo
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I have 30 copies of Tempest 2000 for PC, DOS version, but
it will work on Windows 98 machines, too (XP not tested).
This is a PC game, but it is an ATARI product.
I can give them away for free, CDs + inlays, no jewel cases
because of the weight, weight must be under 1Kg.
Shipping is 10,05 Euros worldwide or 8,05 Euros in Europe.
If you're interested, please contact me.
Thimo
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I bought my 1040 STE in 1990, because I wanted a system to program, but
also with good sound and gfx, my brother had an AMIGA 500 and although
sound and gfx are great, working with an A500 isn't fun (it can drive you
crazy with its slow und unreliable disk system).
I was really disappointed that almost no STE games were released. Stardust
and Obsession are as good or better than most of the AMIGA games,
but I was so disappointing to have games with bad scrolling and
music that was a lot worse than my XL's POKEY sound on a machine
that was so much better.
I wonder what would have happened if the STE came earlier?
More games like Stardust and Obsession? Psygnosis games
like Beast or Blood Money with the AMIGA intros and digisound?
At least some more STE - enhanced games with extra features
on STEs like Wings of Death or Lethal Xcess?
It's too bad that the world never saw more STE games, the machine
had more potential than the ST, some STE demos show that.
Thimo
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Thanks for the tip krupkaj.
The "original" English standalone release seems to have problems under Steem. So it is likely that is not STe compatible.
The compendium release (mercenary+second city bundled in a single disk) seems to run fine under Steem. At least I can take that elevator without any crash.
But again, if you could post a Pasti image then we might be more helpful.
I tried the game again, went to the elevator at 9/06 and this time it did not crash on the STE.
It's possible that it was just a bug, garbage in memory, because I tested some other games
before. Or something else. It looks like that both Mercenary and The Second City work on
the STE. Now I have to try the sequeles , Damocles, the Mission Disk and Mercenary III.
LC
P.S. I wish there was a modern remake of that game. I don't like 3D games that much,
but Mercenary was great for its time. They just shouldn't turn it into a shooter. I'd
prefer something System Shock -like.
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Why did you buy the 2600+?
in Atari 2600+
Posted
I also bought the 2600+ , because I want to develop games for the 2600 and the 7800.I've been working on a 3D dungeon crawler for the ATARI 800 XL for a long time and IT should also be doable for the 7800.Stay tuned.
Thimo