DZ-Jay

Thanks! That's an awesome score.

If you'd like, I can try reposting the images, since I seem to be the only one who can see them. -dZ.

For the record, I'm in for both. -dZ.

UPDATE: I see in the debugger that writes to the STIC are not dropped. I also noticed that it only happens when the player changes position from rest: whenever my avatar is idle and I press a new direction, the glare skips one frame. It may be related to starting the animation state. Perhaps someone can test on an LTO Flash! on the hardware, just to see if its an artefact of jzIntv.

Hi, @cmadruga, I also forgot to mention something else I noticed: the "glare" effect on the outside windows flickers wildly, which gets distracting. I suppose you are trying to multiplex MOBs. Putting aside that I am not really a fan of that effect on the Intellivision, it wouldn't be too bad except that it seems to miss certain frames making it doubly distracting. You may need to review your core engine to see if the STIC updates are being dropped for some reason, or skipped. Hehe, no worries. I thought it was something mentioned in the guide that I missed. -dZ.

Oh, wait, I just realized that the bullet counter includes a clip counter as well. I didn't pay attention to that. Sorry. DOH! :facepalm: That's probably what happened. I'll play again and try to pay attention. Are there Ammo clips already in the game or do you mean that you will add them later? -dZ.

It's weird because that works for me whenever I do it (or at least I haven't heard anybody complaining of missing images). A screenshot from PaleMoon (which does not show the images), suggests that they are being rendered as their MIME content in Base64 some weird source URI: Perhaps the format or type in the clipboard on your PC was missclassified during import. You may need to attach them -- or maybe try again, copying the images from another source program in order to coerce a standard format, like PNG or JPEG. -dZ.

Well, admittedly, my browser is called InterWeb, a variant of Mozilla, custom built for older Mac OS X versions. Essentially, I use it to access the "modern Web" from Mac OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.6), which has been locked out by almost the entire WWW when they switched to TLS 1.2 a few years ago. I guess it works better than I expected: the LTO Flash! pictures look great. -dZ. UPDATE: Confirmed that PaleMoon (from an old fork of Firefox build for old machines) does not show the images.

I can see the on my PC browser (Mozilla variant), but not in my iPad (Safari).

For the curious programmer, here's an example program that illustrates how to use the tracker from IntyBASIC. It has some boiler-plate created by the IntyBASIC SDK, so you can ignore the "title.bas" part and additional comments. Notice that it is very easy to do and the "bas-interface.bas" does much of the work for you. Do not be intimidated by the length -- it's got much more comments than code, to describe what it is doing.

That is an interesting and funny story. Thanks for sharing it, Mr. Rolfe! As they say, se non è vero, è ben trovato. -dZ.

😎 P.S. That's some impressive cartridge-porn collection you have there! 😱

Thanks! Sounds good! Hmmm ... I didn't know you were actually keeping a list. Can I be added as well? Thanks! -dZ.

Yes, but I wasn't sure where the clip came from. All I noticed was that I was running out of bullets, then later I was still shooting and had even more bullets. I'll have to be more observant in the future. :) I found the Health boxes, but where do you get ammo clips? -dZ.

I saw my bullet count go to zero at some point. Then on the next room, I continued firing at the next monsters. The counter was greater than zero again. I'll see if I can reproduce it, but I know I didn't run out of bullets even though I kept the trigger going without stopping whenever I saw the enemies.

No, I just quote the word. *shrug* Well then, why are the doors smaller than the sprites? It's your game. You can take the feedback or not, as you like. I will say that it diminishes the overall professionalism of the game when there are clipping problems and when the sprites' scales do not really match the props in the background. I got that the "camera changed perspectives." However, it doesn't really come through like that. It actually looks more like an oversight. Just my opinion, of course, but don't be surprised if others will feel the same and only mention that it's confusing. An auto-map is nice, but that's not really the problem I was pointing out. -dZ.

I understand. I made the suggestion for future runs: if you are play-testing a game that could have some unknown or rare bug, then it helps if you are pro-active in running the game with the debugger every time. That way, if it ever happens, you can trap the error in the act. :) That's a good point, the same happened to me. I just shot continuously until they died. It seems I had unlimited bullets, but I thought that was done on purpose during testing.

Hi, @cmadruga, I played the latest "alpha" version and I have a few comments, which I hope are useful. First, let me tell you that I like the atmosphere of the game so far. You have captured it well with the music and the graphics. Personally, I am not a fan of that style of graphics, where colour boundaries are loosely applied (it reminds me of lesser machines, like the ZX Spectrum), but overall, the game looks fine. Also, although the game played well, I found a few trivial bugs. First, regarding the graphics: The sprites do not seem to match the scale of the background. Everything looks fine, but the enemies and player sprites appear to be too big for it. Not only is it a bit visually distracting, it causes "clipping" problems when the player approaches doors at an angle. For instance, in both the images below, my player can walk right through the walls. This may seem inconsequential, but it adds to the "polish" of the game. My suggestion is to make the sprites slightly smaller, perhaps just by a few pixels. Nothing says that your sprites must span the full height of a MOB. Second, regarding navigation and room orientation: It seems very strange that sometimes you enter a room from the bottom, but it doesn't have a commensurate exit in that direction. There are quite a few places where I exit a room from one side, only to arrive at a room that has exits on opposite ends. This tends to be disorienting -- but not in the good "I'm-in-a-spooky-and-creepy-game" way, but in a frustrating "I-think-the-programmer-needs-a-map" way. The below illustrate examples of this: Exit through the bottom, but entered from the left: Exit through the top, but entered from the right: It almost feels like a cartoon scene. My suggestion, build your map in a coherent way that follows the same rules all throughout. Third, on passing through "open walls": There are rooms in which the background graphics suggest that a wall is completely open, not just a door; yet you cannot cross it at any point, but must still align to a specific region. Because the "open wall" has no features, there is no direct way to identify the actual walkable region. Below are some examples of "open walls" that block my access until I moved to a correct spot to pass it. In both these cases, the location where the sprite is standing is blocked, yet the graphics do not suggest any obvious obstacle. My suggestion, either make a distinction in your game mechanics to account for a fully open wall, or modify the graphics to visually cue the player about the narrow passage. Fourth, sound effects: The sound effects are fine, and I like the gun shot sound -- but it unfortunately does not match the visuals, which look more like a flashing machine gun, or some sort of repeating shot. My suggestion is to either alter the visuals to avoid the rapid flashing, or add a bit of "stutter" to the initial attack of the sound effect to make it sound a bit more like a machine gun. It doesn't have to sustain the sound long, just do like a quick-fire "ptrrrr!" A bug that I found was in a specific room, where the elevator door does not get drawn. The elevator works fine, and I am able to go in and out of it, and the door is animated as well when it arrives; but in its "closed" state, there is no door. Here's an illustration of my player waiting for the door-less elevator to arrive. I only noticed it in that specific elevator. Just a comment on the dialog. Most of it is fine, but there was one instance that I thought was a bit too "casual," in the "Research Bulletin": The phrase "way beyond," strikes me as a colloquial slang construction, which I do not think a research scientist would use in a bulletin. Perhaps something a bit less folksy would be "Our specimens have strength beyond all expectations!" which takes the same amount of characters. That is it for now. I will continue exploring the Pandora ship to see what else I can find. Great job so far! I think this game has some excellent potential. -dZ.

If you feel brave, enable the debugger, then issue the command "h" (CPU History) at the debugger prompt, and run the game. If it crashes again by sending the CPU into the weeds, issue the command "d" to dump the CPU history to that point. Providing the ".hst" file here could allow someone to trace what happened at the moment of crashing. -dZ.

Awww shoot! I forgot Night Stalker!! Dracula Microsurgeon Star Strike Astrosmash B-17 Bomber Bomb Squad AD&D BurgerTime Utopia Loco-Motion He-Man Atlantis Work Whomper Christmas Carol Night Stalker Oh, crap! Hover Force, of course!!! Dracula Microsurgeon Star Strike Astrosmash B-17 Bomber Bomb Squad AD&D BurgerTime Utopia Loco-Motion He-Man Atlantis Work Whomper Christmas Carol Night Stalker Hover Force That's it, I swear. That's my Top 10 of the original 125 Intellivision Games. Man, I really suck at this. -dZ.

My Top 10, in no particular order: my favourite Intellivision games from the classic set -- the ones I remember playing over and over when I was a child, along with some joyful discoveries I made later in life: Dracula Microsurgeon Star Strike Astrosmash B-17 Bomber Bomb Squad Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (Cloudy Mountain) BurgerTime Utopia Loco-Motion Masters Of The Universe: The Power Of He-Man Triple Action: Biplanes Atlantis Worm Whomper Shark! Shark! Christmas Carol I tried to keep it at 10, but I failed miserably. Any of the above, I would be more than happy to play again today. However, if I really have to narrow it down to 10, then ... Dracula Microsurgeon Star Strike Astrosmash B-17 Bomber Bomb Squad AD&D BurgerTime Utopia Loco-Motion He-Man Atlantis Worm Whomper Shark! Shark! Christmas Carol Damn. Missed again. Let me try again, this time, I'll only include my top-rated favourites, the ones I would enjoy playing right now: Dracula Microsurgeon Star Strike Astrosmash B-17 Bomber Bomb Squad AD&D BurgerTime Utopia Loco-Motion He-Man Atlantis Work Whomper Christmas Carol Wow, I'm really bad at this. OK. That's it. I give up. My Top 10 of the original 125 Intellivision Games includes 14 games, one of which is a modern homebrew. Oh well. -dZ.

Hi, Joe, Thanks for confirming this. I may have missed it if it was mentioned already, but since there are no hardware differences, what then makes it a "Special Edition"? Is it that it includes new features in the on-line launcher or special games? -dZ.

By the way, I used the information on this page as a guide in recreating the TR-808 sounds. Like @DragonGrafx-16 suggested, the sounds are rather simple. However, they used different waveform oscillators and filters, which are not available in the Intellivision PSG. So these are mere approximations, but they are pretty cool, and much better than the typical sounds used for drums in old consoles like the Intellivision. -dZ.

Yes, that's true; but you also need to know how to use them. The cool part is that the tracker allows you to define the drum sounds as instruments and then you can just use them in any song by creating patterns for them. This particular tracker supports 2 drum channels. The sample drum track in the post uses a third channel for the deep bass tone of the 808 kick. -dZ.

Yes, with the right tracker software. I just released an updated version of the Intellivision Music Tracker, which allows Intellivision programmers to play specially-crafted music files in their games. The song format is similar to the classic "XM" module from Fast Tracker II, but with all instruments synthesized in software. It also includes facilities to synthesize drum sounds to accompany your tracks. I included in this new distribution some very cool sample songs and a library of useful envelopes, effects, and drum sounds to use in your own songs. The software also comes with full documentation. If you are interested, check out the main topic thread in the Intellivision Programming forum: So ... want to hear the Intellivision play drums? Check out this kick-ass drum track I created to showcase the new drum sounds I created for the tracker: drums-demo-808.mp3 The drums are based on the sounds of the classic Roland TR-808 drum machine. I call the track, "Funk My Drum Machine." Not too bad for a sound chip with only square wave tones and no filters whatsoever. Enjoy! -dZ.