ZylonBane

It would be nice if there was some way, perhaps even hidden, to change the palette's purple color to red. Purple swarmers just look odd to me. Also, any chance of getting the "firework" explosions and warp-in effects? Even the ColecoVision and NES versions managed to squeeze those in.

Please, if you transplanted BattleSphere into the realm of PC gaming, it would be utterly steamrolled by 20 years worth of far superior space combat sims. Besides which, you say "ported" as if that would be any less an effort than rewriting the game almost from scratch. BattleSphere's code is intimately tied to the Jaguar's weird architecture to get the performance it does. Making a PC port would likely be pretty damn non-trivial. As for the developer drama, we're talking about a team who thought naming a company "Scatologic" was a good idea, among the many other infantile puns that made it into their products. They may have been talented, but they clearly had some maturity issues that didn't play out well in the long run.

Yeah, I know. I was using that as an extreme example. I'm talking about how often the sound changes, not the pitch frequency. Robotron's sound hardware/software generates 894750 samples per second, which means it can, and does, produce extremely smooth and fast pitch glides that an Atari game, only updating the sound registers 60 times per second in the VBLANK, simply can't match.

I'd say the biggest challenge with authentic-sounding Defender FX is that many of the effects use fast pitch glides. When you try to reproduce those at only 60Hz, they come across very "bloopy". The Atari 8-bit and 7800 versions of Robotron demonstrate this problem. But even updating every scan line, the crap frequency resolution of TIA might mean that it's impossible for those glides to sound right. So... maybe a need for POKEY after all, just for the frequency resolution? Or maybe not. If you dedicated both audio channels to each sound effect, and updated multiple times per frame, you could probably get some novel sounds out of TIA. Maybe use some tremolo to fake the missing frequency res.

Why do you say that? Since Defender only ever plays literally one sound at a time, and the sounds are all just various white noise effects and abstract bleeps, I'd think TIA would be up to it. The 2600 version of Defender II sounded pretty decent, though certainly with room for improvement.

Ahem... https://github.com/mwenge/defender/tree/master/src So are you planning on replicating the original's monophonic sound? Going monophonic might allow richer sound effects by using both TIA channels to construct each sound.

I've never, ever heard console generations referred to as "waves". Also that first video link is missing the chapter marks for Donkey Kong, Mario Bros., and Ms. Pac-Man. And the entire thing is using a bad palette for the 7800. The platforms in Joust are supposed to be brown, not green.

So you're sticking with that harsh buzzsaw sound for the player shot? All the other sound effects are so spot-on, the current shot sound comes across as really out of place. Surely TIA can manage a softer white noise distortion that, even if not very close to the arcade, would at least be more pleasant to listen to.

So given the scheme the arcade version uses: - Landers: orange/green - Mutants: flashing/green - Baiters: green - Bombers: purple - Pods: flashing - Swarmers: red/orange - Humanoids: grey Have you considered halving the vertical resolution of the scanner dots? The dots are already two scanlines high, so it wouldn't be a hugely noticeable change. Additionally, and if you're willing to accept 20Hz flicker, you could drop the color depth of the scanner dots down to one bit per pixel, then alternate drawing the dots in red, green, and white. This would allow using the color scheme from the Atari 800 version of Defender: - Landers: green - Mutants: alternating red/green - Baiters: alternating green/white - Bombers: alternating white/red - Pods: alternating red/white/green - Swarmers: red - Humanoids: white It would be flickery and ugly, but it would get you a scanner just under 128 bytes. Or, if you have the RAM for 2 bits per pixel and only want 30Hz flicker, and can do per-scanline palette changes, this allows exploiting the fact that there are only 6 enemy types, allowing each enemy to be given its own palette color. (palette color 0 assumed below to always be black) Odd frames: draw landers (color 1), mutants (color 2), and baiters (color 3). - Odd scanlines palette: orange, flashing, green - Even scanlines palette: green, green, green Even frames: draw bombers (color 1), pods (color 2), and swarmers (color 3). - Odd scanlines palette: purple, flashing, red - Even scanlines palette: purple, flashing, orange Humanoids draw every frame using color 1 or 3. High-speed enemies like baiters could also be drawn every frame, to make the scanner appear more responsive. If CPU time for stuffing the palette is a concern, the above could be shuffled around to minimize the number of colors that need changing per scanline. Swarmers could be made solid red, yadda yadda. And if per-scanline stuffing isn't an option at all, the affected enemies (really only landers and mutants) could blink between their two colors. Though given all the flickering already going on, it would probably be better to just give them their own unique colors.

Please rephrase your question using multiple sentences.

That's not what OEM means.

What's so funny?

You... you DO realize that writing a new game from scratch would be easier than trying to smash together two existing games, yes?

Thinking about those UK 8-bit micros reminded me of this old classic:

It's almost as if some sort of cause-effect phenomena manifested itself.

That would waste RAM on two lists. You want a Fisher-Yates shuffle, which can randomize a list in-place. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher–Yates_shuffle

What you're saying sounds like you could write a 2600 game that generates a 120 FPS display (on a CRT) by only outputting, say, 100 lines per field. This seems... unlikely.

This thread is over eight years old. How did you even find it? And you know it's a joke thread, right?

Uhh, more like more color, better animation, better controls, more detailed sprites, much more environmental detail, and actual cooperative multiplayer.

Don't drink and post, kids.

Is the soundtrack CD a reprint of the one that used to be available from Will Davis via MP3.com, or was it ripped from the game?

Great, now we're never going to find out why the 7800 is uniquely superior at 3D.

You're never, ever, no matter how many times you're asked, going to cite some actual documented hardware feature that makes the 7800 better at 3D, are you?

Neither the 5200 nor the 7800 video hardware have any "3D" features. So any 3D-looking games, either faked with scaled sprites or brute-forced by drawing to a frame buffer, are going to use mostly platform-agnostic techniques. So yes, but no more so than literally any other platform or environment that supports a frame buffer.

Exactly which aspect of the 7800's "very unique architecture" do you believe was exploited in F-18 Hornet? F-18 runs faster on the 7800 than the C64 because the 7800 version is rendering the 3D view at half the vertical resolution, in a smaller viewport, on a CPU that's about 50% faster. Simple as that.