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Ryan Witmer

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Posts posted by Ryan Witmer

  1. Posted

    4 hours ago, Mitch said:

    There are only three carts with issues on the 2port. The reason is that they are making illegal references to the original bios.  The locations that they were refering to got changed in the 2port bios.

     

    Mitch

    This was the only other explanation I could think of, but I thought the PAL thing was more likely.  Some code did move around with the addition of the region check, so I can totally see this happening.  So it sounds like as long as I only touch the parts of the BIOS that you're supposed to touch, like the interrupt routines, all should be well.

  2. Posted

    Another topic came up mentioning this, and it's been bothering me for a long time so I'll throw this out there.

     

    Does anyone know specifically why some games are incompatible with the 2-port BIOS?  I'm asking this from the perspective of a programmer because I'm paranoid that I'll fall into whatever trap the incompatible games got stuck in.  I don't have a 2-port 5200 to test on, so this is of great importance to me.

     

    I've seen disassemblies of both BIOS variants and as far as I can tell, the only real difference with the 2-port is the addition of PAL detection code.  This code will lock the system in the case of a region mismatch and it's long been my hypothesis that the incompatible carts were being misidentified as PAL carts.

     

    So, what is it about the 2-port BIOS that causes some games to not work?

  3. Posted

    Wow.  This is one of those things where I just have to try to figure out what's going on.

     

    I'm guessing the starfield is done with two missiles.  The enemies appear to all be playfield, and the player ships might be all four player objects.  I reckon the player's shots are also using the players, and the enemy shots use the other missiles.  Is that about right?

  5. Posted

    1 hour ago, David Alexander said:

    In this episode of the Atari 5200 Podcast...

    Glen continues his relentless march to total domination of the Arcade 1UP world with a hardware update, Steve makes progress hotwiring non-native controllers to work on the 5200, David talks about his controller addiction problem, and Capt. Bob and Pete let loose a shameful and forbidden desire! (Intellivision?!?!?!)

    SCANDAL! SHAME! SECRETS! (And the fact that we wanted to cover the PRGE without taking away from our Ballblazer/Fractalus episode.)

    All this and MORE, on The Atari 5200 Podcast!


    Read more at https://theatari5200superpodcast.libsyn.com/#WS7dzMsoh1WEYJkW.99

     

    Super Fairy Princess?  SUPER FAIRY PRINCESS?!

    • Haha 1

  7. Posted

    It could be that the problem isn't the controllers, but the console itself.

     

    If a game tries to read a controller value from a port with no controller connected, a very large value is returned and this usually corresponds to a hard press to the right, or down on the other axis.  If something is wrong with the controller ports themselves and the controller can't be scanned, you would get this large value.

  9. Posted

    I absolutely love this game.  I think I mentioned to Bob at the show that this was one of my long-term "dream" projects for the 5200.  I was beaten to it, and I think I'd be hard pressed to do a better job than this.

     

    I think I've already put more time into this game than any other homebrew game I've purchased, excluding my own, of course.  This is good stuff.

    • Like 5

  10. Posted

    On 10/23/2019 at 6:52 AM, David Alexander said:

    Your not helping my Atari addiction. I am trying to keep to the 2600 and 5200 only, hearing about all the great homebrews for the 7800 will affect my sobriety ;)

    You might want to avoid Baby Pacman.  If I don't deliver Magical Fairy Force on time, Baby Pacman is the reason why.  I can't stop playing this thing.

    • Like 1

  15. Posted

    Got my copy of Baby Pacman, which I'm just ecstatic about.

     

    Saw some great demos there too.  For me, the "game of the booth" was Zoo Keeper.  People were swooning over Galagon, but I've never been a big Galaga fan, although I appreciate how impressive that version is.  Zoo Keeper was just amazing, and is a must buy for me when it comes out.

     

    Also, 7800 Arkanoid.  That looked and sounded way better than I expected it to, and the paddle support completely sold me on it.

    • Like 2

  18. Posted

    I'd like to add that the 5200 is, in my esteemed opinion, the best looking game console ever designed.  Even if you never play the thing, it's worth having one sitting out because it just looks so cool.

     

    I would say that it's also the only place to play RealSports Curling, but some ne'er-do-wells went and ported it to the Atari computers.

    • Like 4
    • Haha 1

  19. Posted

    56 minutes ago, -^CrossBow^- said:

    What emus does it work with? On Altirra it just comes up with the player select screen automatically moving between characters in the upper right. None of the controls seem to respond otherwise on Altirra at least

    I use Atari++ for my development, and I've also tested extensively on real hardware.  I've never tried any other emulator.

     

    What's probably happening is that you don't have controller 2 configured correctly.  The demo is strictly two-player.

  22. Posted

    Alright, this be my PRGE demo build.

     

    This is a weird build, considering my original plans.  I was going to do only two characters, but with all their gameplay details completed.  Instead I ended up with the full cast of eight characters, but with basically none of their gameplay details in there.  Oh well.

     

    There are two known bugs in this build.  The first is that the shots fired by the stars occasionally have a totally bizarre aiming behavior and just go off in the wrong direction.  I'm almost certainly going to rewrite this logic completely, so I'm not bothering to fix this one.

     

    The other bug is purely cosmetic.  Something causes the color table for the upper player's portrait image to get screwed up.  I've seen this before, and came up with ways to fix it that made no sense to me.  This current incarnation of the bug is much more rare, and so far I haven't been able to narrow down exactly what causes it.  Since it doesn't affect gameplay at all, I'm not going to waste any more time trying to correct it for this demo.

     

    For future reference, the ROM has the identifying string "PRGE 2019 demo" embedded 256 bytes from the end.

     

    I'm probably going to spend the weekend away from this project, since I've been pounding away at it for the last month to get it ready for PRGE.  Once I get back to work, I have lots to do!  Still targeting an early 2020 release.

     

    Enjoy the demo!

     

    fairy_force.bin

    • Like 3

  24. Posted

    I've seen threads like this in a few other system forums, so I thought I'd put one here.

     

    Who among the 5200 faithful is planning to be at this year's Portland Retro Gaming Expo?

     

    I'll be there on Saturday.  I'll probably get to the convention center around 11:30 and will be there pretty much the rest of the day.  I'll be wandering about shopping and periodically checking the AtariAge booth to make sure that nobody has broken my Magical Fairy Force demo.

     

    If you see the tall skinny guy in the Seattle Storm hat and the bright red Dig Dug Pooka t-shirt, that's me.  Feel free to grab me and make me tell you all about the effort that went into the RealSports Curling physics... or don't.

    • Like 2

  25. Posted

    It turns out I'm just not going to have enough time to get special attacks in for all the characters.  I've also been doing some thinking lately and I've got some interesting new ideas for how I want to handle these.  In light of this, I've decided to cut what little I had done on these for the PRGE demo.  All is not wasted though, as I've gotten the basic framework for the character attacks in place and have written some useful support functions.

     

    I'm going to spend this week addressing some bugs and doing some polish here and there.  I'm hoping to get a few primitive sound effects in there, if nothing else.

     

    So, here's what you can expect from the PRGE demo:

    8 selectable characters

    Trak-ball support

    A few things to shoot and get shot by

    A fully functioning 2 player mode

    Hopefully, no existing bugs

     

    I plan to have the demo ROM ready by Saturday, and will post it here so anyone that isn't attending PRGE can try it out.

    • Like 2
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