Chilly Willy

Okay, I take it back. I played Metalhead and paid attention when I got close to buildings, especially at angles. It's using polygons - probably quads. In that case, I'm fairly impressed by the speed, but it would have probably been faster with less pop-up if they had used raycasting instead. The game certainly didn't need to be 3D polys.

I don't see it - looks like standard Wolf style raycasting to me... maybe RotT rendering. I don't see anything that screams affine texture warping... perhaps you can suggest a screengrab that demonstrates affine warping.

Maybe after he eats the large pill. That would DEFINITELY make the ghosts turn tail and run!

What you are talking about is sector interleave, and is set when the disk is FORMATTED, not when sectors are written. Once the track is formatted, the order of the sectors is now fixed. So you need a new format routine to change the sector interleave, but the format is part of the disk drive bios, not part of the SIO. You would need to reprogram the disk drive to change that... or write a PC program to format tracks with the proper sector size, count, and the interleave you wish. PC floppy controllers are capable or reading/writing/formatting disks in an Atari compatible manner, but you need to do your own program for that.

Metalhead IS texture mapped, it's just 2.5D raycast texture mapping instead of 3D polygonal texture mapping. I rather like Metalhead. It's fairly simple, but most of the first gen 32X titles are as well. If only we'd have gotten some 2nd gen 32X titles... I've never played Iron Soldier, so I can't compare them. I'll try to play it some time and see how I like it.

Payment sent - and I got mine in the mail! It works fine and looks great. You really went all-out on these.

The ones with two cables only use the second cable in pass-through mode to allow for two controllers to pass through from the same multitap. You don't need to use the second cable otherwise. I commonly run my two cable tap with only one cable plugged in.

The 68000 is rather like the Z80 in that instructions take multiple clock cycles. The standard no-wait read and write bus cycles take four clocks per word, so 8 clocks per long is just what you would expect. You can make the bus cycle longer by not asserting /DTACK by the second clock cycle, but 4 clocks is the shortest you can go. The Amiga took advantage of that to use the first two clock cycles for the custom chip ram accesses, and the second two cycles for the 68000 (or custom chips if needed). It's rather like some of the 8-bit systems that interleaved the CPU and custom chip accesses. Not all 68000 instructions are multiples of 4 (they are all multiples of 2), so if a 68000 read or write to chip ram started on the wrong timing boundary, the custom chips would hold off /DTACK for 2 clocks automatically. That made it slightly more difficult to get cycle timing perfect. You were better off making a custom COPPER list than trying to use cycle-timed 68000 code for raster effects.

There is a "standard" for custom PCBs to fit the standard SEGA cart case. If you use that PCB layout, it won't fit in an EA cart. There's no layout for a PCB to fit the EA cart case, either.

Hehe - reminds me of a funny story from an old boss who started out on the C64. They really didn't have a track 0 sensor, so when you sent a step pulse, the head would slam against the head stop and make noise. So he wrote a music player that sent step pulses to the drive at various intervals to make the drive play music. The biggest problem was that running it for too long made the head go out of alignment.

I got lucky and found a BBA right as I had the spare cash for it. It cost more than EVERYTHING ELSE I'd bought that was DC related... the DC, a VGA adapter box, a SEGA DC keyboard and mouse, two regular controllers with VMUs and one vibration pack, EIGHT six-button controllers, four more VMUs, and four vibration packs. If you're wondering, I bought the DC, VGA box, mouse and keyoard, and two controllers with VMUs and one vibration pack when I made my port of Doom for the DC (has vibration and networking support!). I got the eight six-button controllers later because I need four for testing of a program I'm (slowly) working on for the DC, and a lot (on ebay) of eight six-button controllers was actually cheaper than four individual six-button controllers. I also got the four extra VMUs and vibration packs to use in the four six-button controllers in the game. Anywho, I'd love to see a DC to Jaguar controller adapter... got plenty of controllers to test with.

I was thinking about that... use the reload display address function to start with a new screen when multiple screens are visible. I just said I didn't expect it, not that it wasn't possible. But if you add it in, I won't complain any!

Ah yes, the Amiga method of handling desktops (which they called screens). The Amiga started with a "workbench" screen that anybody could open windows on. Apps could have a private screen by opening it directly. Then in 2.0 KS, Amiga added the ability to allow apps to open public screens that apps could use in place of workbench. The Amiga used a couple widgets in the top left of the menu bar to allow flipping screens, and you could also drag down screens to see the ones behind it (I don't expect THAT on the Atari ). You could also press a couple keyboard combos to flip screens or bring the workbench to the front.

In many games, beyond a certain point the main limit is the processing of independent entities. A great example of that are the Bethesda games - Oblivion, Fallout 3/NV, and Skyrim. Assuming you aren't trying to do graphics beyond what your PC can handle, the MAJOR slowdown is directly proportional to the number of NPCs in the loaded cells. So something like Populated Cities, which more than doubles the number of NPCs in Whiterun and other Skyrim cities, will make my PC bog down where using a high-res texture replacement and a higher res screen mode just drops the frame rate slightly. For an older example, Doom is a good one. The difference between kiddy mode and nightmare is the number of bad guys. Most people found that their console/older pc slowed WAY down in nightmare mode, but it wasn't from DRAWING all the bad guys, but rather doing the bad guy "ai" logic. That was particularly the case for console ports of Doom.

I used Devpac for all my Amiga programming. 100% assembly was were it was at in until sometime around the mid to late 90s. I don't think I wrote anything in C until about 97 or 98. Devpac has the most awesome debugger built in. It was easy to just walk through your code. I actually had two versions of Devpac: the regular one, and one I hacked myself to support the 68060.

Are those files associated with an older version, or a newer version of the triangle drawing code? Check the readmes that come with it.

Atari changed the names... in my triangle demo arc (from the Jaguar Source Code Collection), the names are n3d.h and n3dintern.h. I don't know which is older, but you can PM for a copy of the arc, or you could just try to use the two files. Note that the names of structures in the files use N3D in front, like N3DOBJECT. EDIT: The readmes give the date as April 25, 1995.

Wow - that was some CLEAN coding! I aspire to code as cleanly myself. I might not always comment as much as I should, but I prefer clean, easy to read code over what was seen in that Bubsy code.

The first computer board I designed, my employer required me to make them all myself. At least they paid for the parts. We eventually found a board house that would also solder all the parts for less than the first place wanted for just the boards. I was never so glad... I didn't want to solder another thing ever again.

Your position is custom cables for just what you need - a custom video cable, a custom link cable... if you just need one or two cables and they are readily available, that's a good position. This board takes the position of one custom board, and ALL cables are standard. You'll never not find a cable since they're standard and cheap. If you want more of the outputs, or if you can't find a cable (at all or at a decent price), this board may be better. Maybe. At least it gives you another choice instead of being forced into custom cables.

It gives composite, svideo, rgb, audio, and network linking all in one board. It covers a lot of cases where people want different things, and no need for custom cables.

Still have my original A400, my brother's A400 (modded to allow switching the cart on/off), his old 800XL, along with every other computer I've ever gotten. Apples, Amigas, Macs, PCs, C64s... some I bought later in life real cheap, like the Apple IIc+ and the C64.

With at least two players, you can drive the prices up. This is especially important in the last round. Prices are set at the last value sold at in the previous round. In the final round, have one player with at least one unit sell, and have a player with money buy. Drive the price as high as you can before time runs out, and the final scores will be much greater. Especially if you stockpile on the last few rounds. Of course, doing that carries the risk that you'll fail for some reason... pirates, quake, etc. But you can't touch the scores otherwise. Yep. If they're into chess or the like, Archon I and II are the games to go with.

I'll take what I can get. I wasn't planning on doing a lot of multitasking on it. That will have to wait until I can get a memory expansion... maybe a 130XE as well.

One of the best multiplayer games for the A8 is MULE.