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Jaynz

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Posts posted by Jaynz

  1. Posted

    In all reality, you could call this one 'done' at this point. Anything from here on out is just going to be gravy.

     

    As for the voices, you might be able to shave off a fraction of a second after "Astro Blaster" before the wav's final 'pop'. The other alternative is to see how badly lowering the sample rate of the wavs would effect the output. Right now it's perfect sound, which isn't small as we all know. It's a balancing game, though, would 1/2ing the sample rate still work and also allow you to get some of the other voice in, or would it sound too choppy for the 7800? It could go either way.

  3. Posted

    Almost bliss.. only thing I would change would be the attract greeting "Pilots needed in sector wars"... just AFTER the title screen loads. Hate to have the only sound off once.

     

    Sounds are great! Not really sure what to recommend about the voice - it doesn't FEEL like it's missing, really, but it would be a nice addition if at all possible.

    • Like 1

  6. Posted

    I got a question about the muncher AI. Do they use the same AI or do they have a more individual AI for each character?

    Same AI. If you watch the vids, it's pretty frequent that they'll 'trace' over one another for long stretches - indicating similar AI routines.

  8. Posted

    So essentially, you're saying you're happily trolling here! :grin:

    So long as he's happy... spread the joy! :P

     

    But, seriously, Jess if you don't even like the 7800 in the first place, your comments don't come off to well anyway.

  9. Posted

    Red > That will indeed help! The other thing I would need is the /official/ layout of the four mazes. I'm only getting screenshots of the first one.

     

    Pac > Possible, but your problem would be that so many cycles would be lost in the translation aspect that you would wind up with an O2 emulator running at 'one frame every few seconds' at best. There are tricks to speed up that issue, yes, but even the low-level code gets you four instructions emulated (on average) to every one on the O2. The 7800 just doesn't quite have the speed to soak that.

  10. Posted

    I'll definitely be watching this one. I loved playing KC on my cousin's O2 growing up. Do you intend to update the graphics to take advantage of the hardware? Similar to the graphical improvements that Imagic made to their games across platforms?

    The answer is.. "I don't know". That may sound like a cop-out but I'm not really sure what I can do yet or what all's going into it. I've gathered a ton of resources on the game, and just started looking over Bob's released code to see what I'm getting into. You'll have to understand that just getting KC Munchkin himself drawn on the screen will mark an accomplishment for me at this point. As time goes on, I'll be more comfortable making promises and projections. :)

    • Like 1

  13. Posted

    And there are millions more in other cheap ballblazer carts,ect. The POKEY chip is not

    in short stock by any means. It will NEVER dry up with the number of pieces homebrew

    fans will ever use.

    The problem is that you assume that the ONLY issue will be 'homebrew' usage against the supply, which is hardly going to be the case. The fact is that these chips are 30 years old and age is not that kind to microprocessors. Nevermind the number of people, even among game collectors, who will just 'toss out' carts that fail (even if the POKEY's are good) or just need to do spring cleaning. I mean, the number of 7800 carts 'out in the wild' in my area is just about ZERO, much less finding the right ones to strip, so the idea that the POKEY is in 'eternal supply' seems rather daft to me.

     

    I'm not confident about being completely reliant to an ever-dwindling, non-replaceable stock of chips.

    • Like 2

  14. Posted

    Bob, sorry if I sounded like I was unduly pressuring you. I KNEW those weren't the final sounds. I just meant that it made the game a little hard to play 'cause the damage it does to my delicate ears. ;)

     

    This. I'm hoping that the sound effects are close to the arcade not 2600 games like Megamania.

    The reason I picked those two sounds was because they're pretty close (though not exact) to the arcade game and already sound good on the 7800.

  15. Posted

    I didn't mean to open the flood doors on this one. I was just wondering if there were things already done that Bob could put in that would make the sound approach the arcade version a bit more without a ton of extra effort on his part. I was still geared for the port to be as accurate as reasonable...

  16. Posted

    I'm not entirely sure how to start this up except by saying "In the early part of 2014, I want to make KC Munchkin for the Atari 7800". Even though I am an experienced game developer, there is one amazing caveat to this - I haven't touched assembly programming in over 15 years now and I've never done Atari programming at all. This is going to be a major part-time learning exercise for me, but I want to give it a go, and also have this thread up not just to show progress, but maybe show what jumping into 7800 development is like. So every single step of this learning exercise will be on this thread!

     

    So why KC Munchkin? KC Munchkin has the dubious distinction of both making and breaking the Magnavox Odyssey2 console. It was an unusual but very well done Pac-Man clone that caused quite a few early gamers to have a brief flirtation with the system, before Atari declared that it was TOO good of a clone and got the game (the only truly successful Odyssey game out there) pulled from shelves. So it's a natural choice for nostalgic reasons.

     

    Secondly, I've made plenty of Pac-Man clones of my own over the years (though usually in C or Pascal), so I already know most of the gaming logic required. (How to turn this into ASM is a completely different story, of course.) It's also a fairly simple clone, with few bells and whistles other than the crude maze editor (which will be the biggest challenge, I predict) and a high-score table (yes, XM feature here). The basic formula of eating dots, running from monsters, clear the maze, is still present.

     

    KC Munchkin plays mostly like PacMan with the primary difference of the moving dots. There are only 12 of these dots (8 regular, 4 energizers) and they start off in the corners, then slowly move in the maze. The dots increase in speed as you eat more of them until they move at KC's own pace. The three monsters, for their part, are very similar to their Pac-man equivalents, though they don't have a monster-pen per se to move into. Lastly, there is a single square in the maze (where the monsters start) that 'rotates' its wall. That's basically the game in a nutshell.

     

    So.. next step... starting up the design and finding a good assembler package to work under Windows!

    • Like 16

  20. Posted

    Well.. anyway.. back to Qix. I did play a little bit with the logic on this one and I'm convinced that it CAN be done on a regular cart. What I'm running into now isn't so much the boundary-drawing issues, but the Qix itself, as a rainbow colored group of several lines constantly flipping about. It's not as bad as, say, Tempest, but there's the problem that each line has to bound detect with the drawn-in area as well as collision detect with the in-drawing characters. The 7800 could probably drop to four Qix lines to save on processing, but that bit remains a challenge.

  21. Posted

    I had to play a YouTube video of that for a reminder, Trebor. (I played the hell out of that game... 30 years ago...) I think the 'bling' explosion sound would be just WRONG for this - being way too different from AB to work, but a slightly higher version of the blaster sound would actually come close to the arcade. So, Asteroids' explosions and Megamania's blaster fire?

    • Like 1

  22. Posted

    I'm playing this under ProSystem and... a lot of my issues of the game are gone. Hits are smooth, collision detection vastly improved. Really would like different blaster and 'boom' sounds, though. The early 1980 Atari effects just GRATE on me.. The 'boom' sounds from Asteroids would be a lot closer to the arcade and a lot more pleasant to hear. :)

  25. Posted

    But it does require the AtariVox+, which is a pretty rare piece of hardware, isn't it? (This is the first I've actually heard of it, not to offend anyone at all, naturally.) Since this ROM pack is going to be pretty limited in space, I would prefer Bob's approach at present. If there somehow winds up room to optionally support it, I would say 'go for it'.

    Would have been a nice and understandable addition to the XM, of course...

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