SpiceWare

So excited that dad's already planned & booked everything through when we leave Portland on Monday. We're going to spend a day at the Grand Canyon on the way up, and arrive in Portland Wednesday night. They're still working out the route back, mom wants to see Napa Valley so we'll be making our way down to LA before heading east.

That's a bummer. Would it be possible to add Reviews (Newest/Oldest First) to the Sort By?

Took a bit of clicking but I found one of Ben's reviews (thank you!). Might be handy to have a Reviews listing in the store that shows reviews for all games with the most recent reviews first.

My folks are anxious to start planning our trip. Any idea on the time booth setup would start on Thursday?

cd-w was able to fix the CDF compatibility issue with my evil 7800, however this required a significant revision to the CDF driver which broke compatibility with Stella's CDF support so this build of Draconian does not work in Stella. I have submitted an update, so once the next release of Stella is available you'll be able to run this on your computer. Until then, use a Harmony Cart. Update: Stella 5.0.2 has been released. Besides the new CDF driver, this build also has a number of sound effect updates from iesposta. For Harmony or Stella (requires Stella 5.0.2 or newer) draconian_20170815.bin Since CDF is finalized, I'm once again posting source. The last time Draconian's source was posted was in 2014. draconian_20170815.zip Please reference Rules of the Game for what's been implemented and what's to come.

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Oh yeah, that's the stuff!

I'll be there, might get some help from my folks as well

Chris made a minor change to the driver so it now contains a CDF version number. I just finished updating Stella and it now uses that number to configure CDF emulation. This means the recent builds of Draconian will still run in the next release of Stella. The debugger will tell you which version you're running:

I'd misplaced the ferrite beads a while back, but recently found them so this offer is still available.

For Draconian, the addition of the FastJump feature made it possible to put in everything I thought I needed BUS for. BUS is still needed for kernels like the one used in RPG demo.

Yep - doing things on different frames is good advice. I have to do the same thing in Draconian even though the game logic is running on a 70 MHz ARM. My routine that decides when stations will fire starts off like this: for(s=FRAME&1;s<8;s+=2) FRAME is the frame counter, FRAME&1 will be 0 or 1 on alternating frames so that will process stations 0, 2, 4, 6 on even frames and 1, 3, 5, 7 on odd frames. As I finish the game (adding in logic for the Spy Ship) the chance for screen jitter/roll will increase, so I have a note there that I may need change the routine to this: for(s=FRAME&3;s<8;s+=4) which would halve the number of stations processed per frame: 0, 4 on one frame, 1, 5 on the next, 2, 6 the one after that, and finally 3, 7. If I do this I would also need to increase the odds that a station will fire. Worse case scenario would be changing the routine to use: S=FRAME&7 which would only trigger a new shot from 1 station per frame. Once again I'd need to increase the odds that a station fires to compensate.

I suppose it would have been possible to configure it so the RAM could be banked in, but we didn't design it that way.

Most likely. My current plan is: get the next batch of sound effects from iesposta in place implement Spy Ship/Red Alert - those are the final pieces for the gameplay logic create something on my web site so end-users can build and submit sectors. In September we'll have a vote or something for the most popular levels, which will end up as the Delta Quadrant optimize, optimize, optimize to make more space for the final digital samples. Thomas' plans to help with this, your help would be appreciated as well. While all that's going on I'll also be fine-tuning the difficulty ramp-up. Haven't worried to much about that yet as the Spy Ship is MIA.

FastJump is awesome. There's 57 kernels, 55 reposition kernels (11 for each object), 1 non-reposition kernel, and the score/radar/lives/formation kernel. That's just 1 of the 4 instances of SLEEP 4 in the entire game. Instead of sleeping, most of the kernels jump to another one in order to save ROM: Resp0Strobe23: ; 20 sta RESP0 ; 3 23 SLEEP 3 ; 3 26 lda #DS_SIZE ; 2 28 sta NUSIZ0 ; 3 31 <- changes player size FP028: lda #DS_COLOR ; 2 33 sta COLUP0 ; 3 36 FP033: lda #DS_HMP0 ; 2 38 sta HMP0 ; 3 41 FP038: lda #DS_HMP1 ; 2 43 sta HMP1 ; 3 46 FP043: lda #DS_GRP0 ; 2 48 sta GRP0 ; 3 51 <- for next scanline, VDELP0 on FP048: lda #DS_BALL ; 2 53 sta ENABL ; 3 56 <- for next scanline, VDELBL on FP053: sta HMBL ; 3 59 lda #DS_MISSILE0 ; 2 61 FP058: tax ; 2 63 stx HMM0 ; 3 66 FP063: lda #DS_MISSILE1 ; 2 68 tay ; 2 70 sty HMM1 ; 3 73 lda #DS_GRP1 ; 2 75 sta.w HMOVE ; 4 79/3 sta GRP1 ; 3 6 @0-21 DIGITAL_AUDIO ; 5 11 stx ENAM0 ; 3 14 @0-21 sty ENAM1 ; 3 17 @0-21 jmp FASTJMP ; 3 20 Resp0Strobe28: ; 20 lda #DS_SIZE ; 2 22 sta NUSIZ0 ; 3 25 <- changes player size sta RESP0 ; 3 28 jmp FP028 ; 3 31 Resp0Strobe33: ; 20 lda #DS_SIZE ; 2 22 sta NUSIZ0 ; 3 25 <- changes player size lda #DS_COLOR ; 2 27 sta COLUP0 ; 3 30 sta RESP0 ; 3 33 jmp FP033 ; 3 36

Sure, if I drew the shots using players instead of missiles, but the tradeoff would be a significant increase in flicker.

Welcome back!!! I decided to not reboot Draconian using BUS Stuffing due to problems with some systems, so cd-w and I created CDF. See the following Draconian blog entries for more detail: Overview of CDF - http://atariage.com/forums/blog/148/entry-13721-reboot-is-underway/ Addition of Fast Jump, basically JMP $0000 is redirected via a dedicated datastream - http://atariage.com/forums/blog/148/entry-13768-reboot-delayed/

Thanks, about what I expected as well.

Go for it. While everybody's told you multiple times why they are not going to do it, nobody's going to stop you from implementing and submitting Melody support to Stella. If you're not willing to do it yourself, then give it rest already before you end up on our Ignored User lists.

Somebody should post a photo of the build in reply #47 running on a flashback portable, it's a standard 4K ROM. Of course it's an older routine that doesn't create a full 128 pixel image like the newer one does.

I would set it up using CDF which works on real 2600s, 7800s, Stella, and Harmony carts. I'm not interested in limiting myself due to devices, like the Flashback units, that poorly emulate the 2600. I suspect the tricks used to get 32 characters per scanline wouldn't work on them anyway.

If somebody wants to do this I'm willing to create a template that you'd be able to drop the text into, though it'd be later this year after Draconian is finished. Could even set it up where you can put images within the text, such as the duck dragon for Adventure, though they'd be the same color as the text.

That surprised me, the SD slot and USB port used to be on a daughterboard plugged into a Melody board as seen in photo #3.

Yes, it's back together and seems to be working better. Been having an off-color issue when first powered up for a half year or so now. Once it warmed up the colors would be OK. I'd been putting off installing the kit, as I've been busy working on CDF and Draconian, but this weekend the color issue got worse so I decided I didn't want to put it off any longer.

I gently bent the legs. Standing up it's still shorter than the red things next to it.