Mr SQL
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Posts posted by Mr SQL
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33 minutes ago, CPUWIZ said:I am sure you say stuff like that to rile up all the people that have you on ignore. I am not fond of it and I am considering kicking you out of this conversation.
I really feel that way, what did you object to? You seem to be riling folks up to call names again who never wrote games in the 80's like Audacity.
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8 hours ago, Andrew Davie said:I don't particularly love the way Audacity is distanced from our community, basically lurking here for at least 5 years without any interaction at all and possibly benefiting from the sharing of code, tools and techniques that happens here.
They are experienced and only using legacy techniques so they did not lurk here to learn new programming methods.
What I actually see on AA are programmers going through their old code and dissembling it, to learn from them which benefits everyone.
AA is further enhanced by Audacity drawing more mainstream attention, so why not be inspired by their products genuine authenticity and refreshing sales figures?
Maybe one day the Activision superstars will allow AA to carry their new dream ware, in an elite section of the store.
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15 hours ago, CapitanClassic said:
In that case, as I said with NES Doom, the developer wrote a VGA to PPU display driver. If someone were to do something similar for Doom2600, they would have created a VGA to TIA display driver. It isn’t as if the game (Doom) being developed is a 2600 game, rather the video driver is a 2600 game development.From the perspective of the consumer, Doom2600 would still be a 2600 game. From the developers perspective, it is a game written in C, with a display driver written for the 2600.
This technical description fits many ARM games now; building a soft video driver may also be implemented using legacy technology as per my examples here which inspired the technique on the ARM.
The gameloop detaches from the TIA to effect a 5x speed increase in the 8-bit CPU's processing speed, it reconnects every other frame dropping the refresh rate from 60 Hz to 30 Hz to accomplish the driver.
6 minutes ago, kisrael said:Heh, yeah, I've been thinking about Random Terrain's saving of the "hula hoop" ad.
I don't think it means quite as much as RT takes from it ... I mean, if that were true in that way, why release the 5200?
Like in context, I think it's fighting against "one game, more or less" systems like SuperPong or whatever. Given how cheaply they threw the system, just enough to play Breakout and Tank games but luckily with enough flexibility to go beyond that - you can't really make the argument that they were designing for all the decades ahead.
Good point, marketing hyperbole is also a big factor in systems and software. The Activision teams authenticity has raised the difficulty in claiming ARM games are "just like the DPC coprocessor in Pitfall" or a legacy enhancement from the flyer like CBS RAM or Sara.
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13 hours ago, KaeruYojimbo said:You mean Tommy John.
(I wonder if Tommy Jones has had Tommy John Surgery?)
(Lastly, I realize you're trying to make a joke, but it's debatable whether TJS gives a pitcher any advantage. About 20% of pitchers who have it never return to the majors and various studies have returned mixed results as to whether those that do come back are "better.")
Tom Jones - No Hole In My Head (Official Video) - YouTube
Yes Tom Jones is awesome, probably why I mixed them up
I disagree about the studies because tendons have contractile properties unlike the ligament that is replaced. After about 5 years the transplanted tendon turns into a ligament losing it's contractile properties, but during that timeframe the players arm is much more powerful so I think it's a good analogy; ballplayers are even getting ARM enhancement in the minor leagues now.
16 hours ago, Keatah said:What would define the lifetime of the system? The time while it was in production?
Yes because that defines the system as retro. SillyVenture uses this metric so that 1 Mhz productions are truly 1 Mhz productions and therefore do not allow players to have ARM code in their Art show. Programs are an Art form, modern Art posed artistically as legacy retro Art is just more Art for everyone to enjoy.
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9 hours ago, kisrael said:So, more crayons in the box, but not like... an "airbrush" (or even fancy clip art collection) that a totally different platform with even fewer limitations might offer.
I guess it is this interesting middle ground, without TOO much fear of a "slippery slope". Like, just because some smart folks are cramming ENTIRE 90 minute MOVIES onto a cart - and in theory that means the atari can be used as arbitrary video screen - doesn't mean that's the inevitable endgame for the move towards enhanced carts.Compared to the 6502 the ARM is a modern platform for having onboard cache and niceties that can run Linux so a programmer running an Atari 2600 gameloop on the ARM is like a ballplayer with Tommy Jones Surgery. The ballplayers ARM still looks normal, but the added tendon really changes the game.
imo there's still room to explore the flexible architecture with contemporary expansion that was available during the lifetime of the system; it takes more time, but that's part of the fun!
9 hours ago, Karl G said:Or this one?
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8 hours ago, wongojack said:I was just thinking about this today. Can there be an FPGA replacement for the TIA? Is anyone working on this?
SuperCharger Disk BASIC features a software only implementation to allow x,y addressable graphics and an x,y addressable camera with tile mapping and support for regular (unflipped) bitmap graphics. ANTIC style display lists are also supported allowing multiple camera zones like in the upcoming SillyVenture KC OS release.
The techniques pioneered for the soft blitter and ANTIC are the same as was later implemented for the tile mapped ARM games, however an FPGA replacement could allow entirely new functionality directly in the TIA while maintaining backward compatibility.
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4) Noise from the chip
Since it's making it through the circuit, the best shielding may be a sink like the coils or a shield with holes to absorb like a Faraday.
Maybe also try a ferrite block on your power cord, a nearby CF bulb can contribute to THD interference.
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^For anyone confused a homebrewer threw insults about my personality during a game review, and a game review is not a roast.
It's awesome folks write games like we did in the 80's but we didn't do that and some of us were busy doing a lot of other things.
I hope comments going forward during reviews are more friendly. I'll drop the subject now unless anyone has any questions about the game.
It was pretty cool and in development for several years, here's the rough original and the finished version from Gdansk.
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Interesting phenomena, my custom diffractive grating removed all interference like a Faraday cage, makes the PlusCart menu and the games display as clear as the UnoCart.
My Harmony model from 2011 has vertical interference lines which were resolved in later models, but only on some games that use more ARM overhead for the bank switching I imagine since it's not present on all games and on none of the 4K games.
See the four small coils around the PlusCart doing this trick above.
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On 8/14/2020 at 1:49 PM, jhd said:Back in 1988, I completed a Computers in Business course that include a module on programming with dBase III.
At the time, I was a big fan of text adventure games (known today as Interactive Fiction), and it always occurred to me that it may be possible to create something using the dBase programming language. I lacked both the time and the skill to develop something, so sadly, it never moved beyond the vague idea stage.
Has such a project ever been done?
Interesting idea! The early work I did writing Text Adventure Games linking multiple 2D and 3D arrays in memory and on disk storage helped me immensely with Database design and concept later on.
I also saw parallels in the Eliza inspired full text parser and the SEQUEL language design; before the name was changed to SQL, SEQUEL stood for Structured English Query language, with the idea being it was so high level the user could basically write the answer in "English" and the parser came up with all of the low level retrieval code transparently. Being relational calculus you still have to be word smith capable of complex sentence structure and grammatical syntax to program in it, but it's higher level for being relational and for being natural language like.
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On 4/8/2021 at 10:33 AM, DEBRO said:If we were developing games / products and distributing them in ziplock baggies like we did in the 80s...would that really be considered homebrew? AtariAge is the publisher for most of our work. Albert, produces these games with boxes (on occasion), shells, and manuals. Albert ensures the production is top notch in my opinion. Would that not remove the homebrew term from our work as well? Why are we not considered say indie developers? There are people or teams considered as indie developers that work from their home and produce digital content...no box etc. Why are they considered indie developers and not homebrew authors?
It seems to me we are all indie developers since we don't work specifically for the publisher and AtariAge (if we choose that route) happens to be our publisher.
What are your thoughts?
Indie developer bears the connotation that the programmer was commercially active writing games during the timeframe of the target platform.
Folks who wrote commercial games in the 80's like Audacity can't be considered homebrewers.
There should be a 3rd category for programmers who throw personal insults at other programmers in discussion or while their games are being reviewed, that's always a jealous homebrewer and never an Indie, Indies like other peoples work too
Close your mind miss the fun
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1 hour ago, vitoco said:Games designed for "special" controllers like paddles, light guns and even joysticks can loose some playablility if those are replaced by keyboards, mice and gamepads. The experience is not the same... Those "special" controllers were standard back in the days, an those allow you to do "physical" things that might be hard to replicate with current hardware in emulators, especially where reflex acts are important. It is not the same to use a numpad than a joystick for 8-way movements in coordination with the trigger button. It is not the same to rotate a wheel than to move the wrist over a mouse. The game and the game concept are designed in a way to be attractive, interesting, joyful and, over all, playable. Change the interface and the result could be half of the experience. Kaboom! does not feel the same when played with a joystick, a mouse or the keyboard instead of a paddle, and you probably won't score as much as in the original; I didn't.
For the contest, you must provide the instructions to successfully run the game as it was intended, including the preferred emulator when the real machine is not available. But with 146 different sets of instructions is nearly impossible to get them all, and some common configs are being used by the whole group of games for the same platform.
This contest started for Atari computers, and I've always made the asumption that the game would be played on real PAL Ataris. This is not true these days, as judges are from different countries worldwide, with different backgrounds and systems preferences, so emulation became the way to go for at least 90% of the systems for any judge. NTSC might be the default option and it could "break" the game timmings and the color palette. A8 developers would like Altirra to be the selected emulation software, but it is restricted to Windows machines and there are others outside, like the MiSTer, online webpages or some derivatives from MAME. Writing the game requirements in the game docs does not mean that it would be evaluated in that way.
Anyway, I'd like to know what happens with the score of an entry that it couldn't be tested by some or all of the judges. I know that being a judge is a very difficult position, so I guess they have some criteria for such events. Well, they cannot be blamed if something goes wrong while trying to do their best. We are here to have fun!!!X2 the games are tremendous fun magnified by the fact they are written in 10 lines of BASIC across so many different systems!
I think the emu's all work pretty well and the controls are "close enough" with the exception of the light-gun hardware.
MiSTer is inspiring for pretty much being the real hardware recreated in a gate array.
Altirra is inspiring for including details like artifact color emulation, would be cool to see that ported to other emulators too.
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On 4/8/2021 at 2:37 AM, carlsson said:Hm, are you indicating that your BASIC games are so technically advanced that not even the latest crop of emulators properly run them, or are those simply tuned for CRT artifacts that normally don't show up if the emulator is set to perfect crisp pixels?
In some ways that is true with SuperBlitz because it was created with SuperCharger Disk BASIC. Depending on the graphics modes used a real CRT and the nonstandard video signal output are programmable in ways where the emulation fall short as they cannot emulate classic Television yet.
The inverse is also true however where the most popular emulator has become too technically advanced; older emu's like Z26 renders the games better by default when in full screen mode than the popular Stella emu in part because of new Television emulation technology.
To enjoy SuperBlitz in Stella like Z26, the default merge frame features including phosphor blending must be deactivated, these features blur the screen in SuperBlitz and degrade the illusion effects presented.
It may be easier to use a different emu than to find and fiddle with changing default settings in the Stella subsystem menus.
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17 hours ago, Albert said:Yes, let's please stick to that topic and if you want to discuss the pros and cons of using modern technology embedded into Atari 2600 cartridges, that subject alone is worthy of its own topic (and of course has been discussed many times before).
And @Andrew Davie, great post above.
..Al
The AtariAge store is broken can you fix it?
Those Activision games keep it real and the OG's aren't out to capitalize on the retro scene with games that aren't accepted by SillyVenture:
The SillyVenture Art show would welcome the Activision OG's modular approach, though they would not be able to fit as many scenarios.
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@Prizrak please add this ROM when you get a chance!
USA Demo is a code free audio visual ROM created with SuperCharger BASIC in Zero Code Mode.
The soundtrack for this demo is actually the same as the KC OS Demo without post processing resequencing the sequencer via the shadow registers.
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43 minutes ago, DrVenkman said:PS: #Protip - endless streams of barely-coherent non sequiturs don't really advance the conversation about the thread topic. Perhaps start a new one.
Just sharing ideas, can you please go onto another thread or complain to @Albert because I'd like to keep discuss them.
I think you must have mistook the technobabble posts for mine, I only talked about abstract tools for artists and programmers and I'm an OG.
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6 minutes ago, splendidnut said:Insult? What insult? Aren't we just joking around? Or do I need to apologize for hurting your feelings?
11 minutes ago, splendidnut said:I think Mr SQL is broken. He's not making a lot of sense. Could somebody fix him?
Well try responding to Andrew's ideas that way and see how the professor reacts
You don't have to apologize, but I think it's far more interesting to talk about the concept of an IDE with a programming mode that lets anyone be an artist and a programmer, and about what kind of dev kit the Activision OG's may be using.
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2 minutes ago, splendidnut said:I think Mr SQL is broken. He's not making a lot of sense. Could somebody fix him?
The idea is everyone can be an artist, I designed a development tool around that idea. I think you're idea is to throw insults at me for labeling the development tool, correct?
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11 minutes ago, TwentySixHundred said:The thing about bB is it's easy to throw a sprite on the screen and move it around. Not so easy to make something fun, which i think goes in conjunction to what Andrew was saying. The limitations of the system itself and bB has limitations of it's own that become apparent very quickly. So there still is a lot of thought process and strategy in game design. Isn't that the underlining factor that comes into play? We are all artist just using different methods to paint the picture. Some more advanced then others however if the gameplay is lacking then all the fancy technology means nothing right?
^Agree with this
21 minutes ago, TwentySixHundred said:That's why i agree, labeling a game 32bit, CDFJ, DPC+, SuperBank, Superchager BASIC or even bB is irrelevant.
7 minutes ago, fultonbot said:It totally agree with this as I see tools like bAtari and 7800 Basic and democratizers of creativity. However, I'm sure there are people who just want to see/prove technical feats of strength, and that's fine too.
^Disagree with the last sentence only as I designed SuperCharger BASIC to be very abstract for Script Kittens
The idea is the opposite @fultonbot
Because how else could we tell artists what the tools can do? Activision was clear they write their own exclusive OG tools so we don't know what their kit is like.
I had an interesting discussion with @batari on the homebrew development forum regarding the creation of a new mode of "codeless programming tools" for everyone.
SuperCharger BASIC has a codeless mode where everybody is an Artist and everyone is a programmer even the Idea Guy in this special mode you can create AUDIO VISUALS on the Atari even if you think you don't know how to code.
This mode is interesting, leveraging hidden coding talents non programmers have, and I think we may see some incredibly talented artists harness this mode with raw talent that inspires other programmers at different levels, including even the ARM chip artists!
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12 minutes ago, TwentySixHundred said:Thanks @Andrew Davie for clearing up the technical side of how ARM assist works, in an easy to understand way. Makes a lot more sense now as i had no idea about "blinding" the 6507 along with many other technicalities you pointed out. Very impressive stuff indeed and i fully agree with your last statement about categorizing the art form we all enjoy as developers. Really couldn't have said it any better, as we all have limitations and hurdles to overcome, no matter what artistic endeavor we choose. To say one is better then the other is ridiculous imo. I guess most GP just see the final product and judge based off what they see rather then actually understanding the inner workings or methods used. Probably the most well written comment of this entire thread to be honest 👍
X2 @Andrew Davie's description is excellent but it sounds like a description of a category to avoid comparing them.
The example I posted was from SuperCharger BASIC which has a different design goal than batari BASIC in that it's not meant to be a stepping stone to Assembly.
With this BASIC you can "blind the 6507" as described for multiple frames or via Display Lists like the Atari 400/800.
Even a script kittens can make awesome modular games like the Activision OG's
or scrolling games like the ARM chip and demo scene.
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1 hour ago, splendidnut said:So you don't like T-shirts with words on them? Or name tags?
Sure
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23 minutes ago, TwentySixHundred said:I don't know if you can really call them 32-bit games when the same code needs to run through an 8-bit BUS. Im not exactly sure how CDFJ works however from my understanding i always assumed it would pre-calculate instruction code, to then be executed by the 6507. I always looked at it like prepping food before cooking, it just makes the actual cook/throw together time quicker. Although the stove top and time in the pan is still running the same heat.
AFAIK there is no way to directly bypass the 6507's BUS and tap directly into the TIA. Probably why BUS stuffing gets attention and desired. Although i could be completely wrong about this... So from what i have been told about bit architecture of computers, is the systems bits are usually determined by the BUS rather than how many bits the CPU may have. Basically why the Genesis is classed an 16-bit system even though it uses the debatable 68000.
It's independent of the bus architecture, a modern processor takes this even further by providing onboard RAM that allows us to run the games right on the CPU.
There are ways to directly bypass the 6507's BUS and the rest of the hardware to tap directly into the TIA through clever programming; this technique is one example.
1 minute ago, splendidnut said:OR can we ALL agree to enjoy these games that we like for what they are?
If the games run on the CPU they are 32-bit so a sign would be helpful; I think signs on games are cool just not on people
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22 hours ago, AtariLeaf said:Exactly but if I'm being honest, audacity has a way to go to beat Champ or spiceware for the best homebrew games 😁
It's generally Apples to Oranges comparing 8-bit games to 32-bit games, even 4K games compared to 16K games with the same processor are a different paradigm.
When an 8-bit game does compare to a 32-bit game through innovation the reviewer just holds up signs
I think it might be more sensible to put signs on the 32-bit releases indicating they are "32-bit productions on 8-bit hardware".
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8 hours ago, Stephen said:On a tangentially related note: Was BattleSphere for the Jaguar a homebrew? Although it was planned to be an official release, it came out after Atari died. The coders were professionals with fulltime day jobs. But, they worked on the game at home, in the evenings, etc. From a quality standpoint, the cart shell, box, manual, and even the game was definitely up to par with any of the top official releases.
Very professional release like Activision because of the quality of the game leveraging all three processors.
8 hours ago, ZeroPage Homebrew said:Good question. We've never had to run into that situation with a title for the Atari Homebrew Awards yet. I don't immediately have a gut feeling where that would fall since it would have its feet in both camps.
- James
You have because my company The Saint John Gallery became RelationalFramework like Borland became Inprise.
I thought you held up signs throwing personal insults at me reviewing my software as a publicity stunt for the AtariAge homebrew store
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Ex-Activision Designers Launch Retro Game Publisher Audacity Games™
in Atari 2600
Posted
This looks personal, why not share your opinion on the Activision team? I feel that way because I wrote games in the 80's.
Fair opinion. I'm partial to the Activision team and any of the old programmers coming back to write games again, like Scott did. Activision has ruffled a few feathers with newer programmers and that's unfortunate, they should try to articulate an opinion instead of throwing insults.