Mr SQL
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Posts posted by Mr SQL
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Has anyone gotten the 2600 emulator to run on Rockbox?
Rockbox is an opensource replacement OS for popular audio players; I run it on an iAudio X5.
The development team put up a beta port a while ago that apparently was functional but I have no idea what happened to it...
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Regarding the upgrade...I appreciate that you're trying to give us the Newest, biggest, best, and everything, but a couple of things are kinda making this a bit of a bummer for me...
- The new login does not seem to register correctly with Opera's Password Manager.
- The new skin is really drab in an ugly Facebook sort of way... It looks very generic, and no longer has it's unique "look & feel".
- The site performs a good 30% slower, and does not feel as responsive as it used to, especially in threads with media links.
- Users might not want their username to be listed when they +1 a post
I'm sorry to complain, I know that you are doing a lot of work, and trying to make everything as good as it can be... Maybe, once the workload slows down, you can take a moment to look into these issues? Thanks!
X2 UnixCoffee! Excellent synopsis; atariage is a lot of fun for the great content and retro theme, but this version is actually a downgrade for the reasons you cited:
Instead of being able to rip through all of the rich content and read so many interesting things quickly, this version of the portal/board software just runs slowly, times out and freezes at odd moments; noticibly descreases the level of usability and functionality present in the previous version by being comparatively slow and akward.
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the SID was a subtractive analog synth
What defines analog synth? AFAIK its digital except for the filter.
Question already answered on previous page
the SID was a subtractive analog synth
What defines analog synth? AFAIK its digital except for the filter.
http://sid.kubarth.c...bob_yannes.html
Question already answered on previous page
Where?
It's interesting. People tell how unique the sound of SID is. But in fact there exist several different Releases and the capacitors made "every" C64 sound slightly different.
So I wouldn't stick too much with that arguementation, that SID sound isn't to recreate via software...
I'd say, its very easy, belonging to the architecture of the SID , how the waves were generated and how the capacitors work. Because it's all defined.
Yes, the original 6581 is thought to have the best sound by many; this was eventually replaced with a couple of other variations, but the sound is so unique that muscicians still seek to obtain the SidStation, an instrument built around the 6581 which is no longer being produced due to scarcity of the old chip:
http://www.elektron.se/products/sidstation
A few recording artists have been in the news for reusing various original SID tunes from the High Voltage Sid Collection (a collection of 40,000 SID tunes) and incorporating them into chart topping songs, sometimes paying royalties and sometimes just stealing them.
Here is an interesting link where you can listen to (R2,R4,R5) the 6581, 6582 and 8580 real SID chips and the SID via an emulator; this composition (Draxish) makes some of the differences very apparent:
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IMO you cannot compare the SID to Pokey; Pokey was a great chip but the SID was a subtractive analog synth - synth branched to pure digital after that and as a result even today's hardware cannot accurately reproduce what was possible with the SID, it's truly a unique sound!
In the 80's I programmed digitized speech and multiple voices via a DA converter with the Colour computer series (6809); it really dogged the CPU because it was directly driven. A really nice aspect of Pokey, the SID and even the sound chip in the 2600 was that there was very little overhead because these were all satellite accelerator chips - you set the registers on the satellite chip and the oscillators just turned on and stayed on until you changed them again
I think with the digitized samples there is comparable overhead even with these accelerator chips though because the CPU has to be directly involved to mediate the sample.
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RT,I tried Seaweed Assault this weekend with some friends - feels like SolarFox mixed with Frogger; excellent game, really cool elements - everyone enjoyed!
Thanks. Hopefully the game will be more enjoyable when I get done.Looking forward to trying the next release!
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This is another great 2600 game! The first Lunar Lander game I played scrolled on a teletype paper roll, have seen many since and this is easily the best Lunar Lander. Challenging too, tougher than it looks to land. Great job!
Thanks for your appreciation, in particular because it's from a good programmer!
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Mr SQL: I agree KC Munchkin was an excellent O2 game! One of my fav's! I too think they should of lost in court cos KCM had tons of different elements to make the game interesting...moving mazes, dark mode, creating your own mazes, etc. Also there were only approx 12 dot's on the screen that floated around the maze as opposed to pacman's boring stationary dots.
I thought Jr. Pac made a souped up version of Pac man?
Mark,
yes KC was hands down a better game, I'm amazed the author fit all of that into 4k.
Agree the pacJr version was excellent, but the cart was 16k with the SARA chip! MsPac at 8k was also an excellent port and IMO had even better playability than the 5200 or 7800 versions. What I'm wondering though is weather a better 4k rendition of a similar game was ever produced for the 2600.
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This is another great 2600 game! The first Lunar Lander game I played scrolled on a teletype paper roll, have seen many since and this is easily the best Lunar Lander. Challenging too, tougher than it looks to land. Great job!
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RT,
I tried Seaweed Assault this weekend with some friends - feels like SolarFox mixed with Frogger; excellent game, really cool elements - everyone enjoyed!
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Here is a link that has scanned images of our 80's Rainbow ads that include the CityScape game I ported to the 2600 last weekWow, I remember reading those ads when I was a kid! Very cool. I loved RAINBOW, and would read it cover to cover, including the ads. (Well, maybe I didn't read through the accounting programs that closely...)
By the way, I notice that CityScape isn't on L. Curtis Boyle's list of CoCo games. He also hosts some games for download, as long as he has the creator's permission. I don't know if you might want to explore that, but even if you'd rather not, it'd still be great to have some screenshots and a game description up there.
Either way I look forward to checking out the VCS port!
Oh, in response to the title question: E.T., by a wide margin. I've never thought it was a bad game, really, just misunderstood. Pac-Man is a terrible port but, back in the day, was tolerable if you didn't know the original. In any event, neither one is nearly as bad as Sssnake!
goldenband,
agree Rainbow was a really cool mag, I enjoyed reading it cover to cover too
I actually uploaded the disk images to one of the game grids (CoCo sites) about 5 years ago as a few users were looking for that game (Briza and Gambit if you know them).
Chris++,
I've downloaded and have been playing Fork, great game! Wonderful writing style and colourful descriptions, it feels very Zorkish!
OK back to ET and pac-man; here's a question I always wondered about. Was 4k really too little to allow the pac-man sprite to eat upwards and downwards instead of just left to right? It's a minor detail but it reminds me of the LCD and LED tiny set top pac games that had image to image limitations because they were activating pre-defined patterns and there wasn't physically room for 4.
KC Munchman really impressed me on the Oddysey2 because there's no way that cart was over 4k yet the animation, the action and the game were 10x better. It didn't seem fair that they lost in court the second time around and had to pull the game. It was only vaugely like pac-man and had an array of original elements. Now Alien on the other hand was a straight pac-clone.
I've seen better iterations released for the 2600 beyond 4k; does there exist a 4k version better than the initial release? Price was probably also a consideration in bundling a 4k ROM with the system rather than an 8K cart with a SARA chip.
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How cool! You invented some pretty innovative stuff. And I notice that you're a fellow text-adventure writer (and a "platinum"-selling author, to boot). I've been fascinated with Inform 7 (still rather LISP-based, but modular) over the past couple of years.
Something based on The Parlog Building would certainly be interesting...
Any plans to make CityScape available on AA? (Or have I missed something...?)
Thanks Chris++! Yes I've shared CityScape right here:
http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/187460-cityscape-new-2600-game/page__gopid__2366988
Inform looks pretty cool, like a Zork engine. I'm a big fan of Interactive Fiction, what platform or emulator are your IA games for? I'd like to take a look if you have a link!
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I definitely give it a big thumbs up! Particularly like the sound effects, excellently chosen! Great first effort!
Curious Sofa,
Thank you, I'm glad you like it!
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I am only sharing my thoughts and where I get my perspective from.
Awesome; understood. So, are you going to finally spill the beans on which released/magazine-published games you wrote?
Chris++,
Absolutely, the magazines I wrote for catered to the 6809 (Tandy Colour, Dragon, Prologica), they included Dynamic Colour News, CoCo-Ads and Rainbow which was a 300 page glossy mag with the largest subscriber base of the bunch; I also wrote games for their parent company, Falsoft and some other software houses that advertised in the mags and began advertising directly in Rainbow under my own software label as well. Here is a link that has scanned images of our 80's Rainbow ads that include the CityScape game I ported to the 2600 last week
http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/software/TANDY/COCO/BESTBBS/
I was thinking of either doing something entirely new for the 2600 next or porting another of my old games
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I disagree; I'm certainly glad E.T. was released, and I think it's one of the most innovative adventure games of the early console era. I spent many enjoyable hours playing it in the early '80s (I always read the manual as part of the experience of getting a new game, so I understood it and knew what to do, even as a ten-year-old), and thanks to the strong random elements, I still enjoy it to this day -- unlike most of the repetitious but high-reputation titles, such as Space Invaders, certainly Pac-Man, etc.
Further, as goodness vs. badness is subjective, one can't "know" that something is bad; only a fact can be "known," rather than something that's purely opinion-based. Try substituting "think" or even "believe." Just some friendly writing advice.
Cool Flynn avatar.
Thanks Chris++,
all good points, particularly your enjoyable experience with the game. You're absolutely right it is subjective - point well taken. I am only sharing my thoughts and where I get my perspective from.
I also have to admit I probably haven't given ET a fair try (another good point); like Chuck, I have only tried to play it in an emulator a few times without the manual.
I'm also biased towards action games though I did find some adventure games (adventure of course, Zork, the Ultima series, Gauntlet and it's predecessor [what was it called?]) to be really good games.
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Here's a new build with the bug fixed that Yart had found and absolutely no flicker on any game screens
It's also tuned to be a little tougher. We just played it for a couple of hours with no crashes and having to reload. Comments on this build were that the different screens started to feel like colour therapy with a hypnotic pleasing effect, and that the cities looked martian
RT thanks for the info on the debug screenflash, that's a great utility!
Just played a couple of rounds on the good ol 2600. Fun game, first time I've played it honestly, but it was challenging in a variety of ways. may I make a suggest? Don't have a ship on the bottom following you, make it so you have two or three on the bottom that are stationary but still shoot at you . . . just an idea.
Good job!
Thanks disjaukifa!
That's a cool idea, maybe I will revise it to have more ground ships in subsequent screens or have it alternate; agree they would have to be stationary if there was more than one.
I was also thinking of writing another video game with the new compilers beyond-semigraphic abilities but still keeping the focus on gameplay.
Very cool you played it on the real hardware btw
Hey man,
While graphics are nice and everything, I would focus more on game play. The game you have so far with great, a couple of improvements here and there and you've got yourself a really winner here. By all means make more games no one will complain about that
, but I'm just saying get this one hammered out and finished!!! If you need me to do more testing on real hardware just let me know
Thanks, I would definitely like you to test the next build! Let me know if you have any more ideas (anyone else too). Agree 100% on gameplay being paramount.
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The Batari compiler produces an .asm output file which does a really good job of showing you how your code is translated into assembly; that is a great way to learn along with a good book on the basics of Assembly to help explain what is going on.
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Good thread! I don't think you can compare these games. Pac-man wasn't the greatest port for the 2600 but it was still an action game and highly playable.
Spielberg had the sense to specifically ask for that kind of action game instead of the ET prototype Warshaw showed him; he knew it was bad.
A great developer can sometimes make an awful game so this doesn't necessarily reflect on Warshaw (just look at Yars Revenge, he wrote that too) but in all fairness the ET game should have never been released.
In the mid 80's I wrote machine language games (6809) that were good enough I was usually able to freelance them to various software houses and then began to advertise and sell them directly under my own label. But not all the games were good, some were just OK and some were pretty bad. The worst I could usually salvage by selling to one of the computer magazines. One time I wrote a game "Danger Park" that was so bad that it (thankfully) stayed in complete obscurity - no one wanted it, not even the mags. This is what should have happened with ET.
I imagine the executives who approved and released ET did not like video games or even play them themselves; not a good disconnect when all they had to do was play the game to see how bad it was. People returned ET in masse for a reason; nobody returned pac-man because it was fun to play (granted not as fun the 8K sequel or KC Munchman).
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Here's a new build with the bug fixed that Yart had found and absolutely no flicker on any game screens
It's also tuned to be a little tougher. We just played it for a couple of hours with no crashes and having to reload. Comments on this build were that the different screens started to feel like colour therapy with a hypnotic pleasing effect, and that the cities looked martian
RT thanks for the info on the debug screenflash, that's a great utility!
Just played a couple of rounds on the good ol 2600. Fun game, first time I've played it honestly, but it was challenging in a variety of ways. may I make a suggest? Don't have a ship on the bottom following you, make it so you have two or three on the bottom that are stationary but still shoot at you . . . just an idea.
Good job!
Thanks disjaukifa!
That's a cool idea, maybe I will revise it to have more ground ships in subsequent screens or have it alternate; agree they would have to be stationary if there was more than one.
I was also thinking of writing another video game with the new compilers beyond-semigraphic abilities but still keeping the focus on gameplay.
Very cool you played it on the real hardware btw
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Here's a new build with the bug fixed that Yart had found and absolutely no flicker on any game screens
It's also tuned to be a little tougher. We just played it for a couple of hours with no crashes and having to reload. Comments on this build were that the different screens started to feel like colour therapy with a hypnotic pleasing effect, and that the cities looked martian
RT thanks for the info on the debug screenflash, that's a great utility!
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I downloaded and tried the rebuild, it seems a little smoother than the first iteration.
I am still having a blast with this! Mr SQL you rock!
Cool, thanks jsmith!
In case you want to know, it's still going over 262.
RT,
thanks, I tried the timing check you described with Stella. With the rebuild I had pulled out a loop that called pfreadpixel 30x with a single call, but I also pulled two band-aid calls to drawscreen during the iteration so perhaps I should put one back.
What's odd to me is the intermittance; many screens are rock solid and don't flicker even with the old build. Perhaps the luminance of the cityscape is a factor?
Yart,
the bug you found could also be involved. I'll fix that and we'll see what happens
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Very nice. I like the sounds. It's fun to play, but just needs some type of scoring and lives counter.
Thanks Kevin! IMO scoring and lives can potential detract from the action. Try this rebuild, the enemy is a bit more lively but it might be too tough. My friends had trouble getting through more than a couple of levels in a row.
Very nice game!
It's already lots of fun to play, i especially like the boost and the enemy.
I think it would be even more fun with limited lives and a score. This could become a great game with some more fine tuning IMO.
Thanks Impaler! The rebuild may be a bit better tuned (or worse)
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PD,
Here's the source I promised to post.
RT,
I fixed the occasional raster scan bug you alluded too; not sure which version plays slightly better though, this one may be a tad harder
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Seriously fun. I just downloaded it to my phone. Thanks so much for sharing this with us!
You're welcome JS, I'm glad you like it!
This is awesome and addictive. I had to be pulled away from it.
This needs to be on cart.
Thanks Yart, that's a great compliment!
Has anyone tried it on a real 2600 yet?
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...Also curious if anyone knows if there exists a port of the original Vic-20 Blitz game ( it was like this game is on the first screen).There was an unfinished port of Blitz by SeaGtGruff.
Good job with your game - a great first effort!
RevEng,
thank you, it was a ton of fun writing it and development went really fast - built it over the weekend. Batari Basic is really RAD for building 2600 games!
SeaGtGruff's Blitz cover looks pretty cool and is very close to the vic-20 version. It's functional too, I was just playing it.
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This looks pretty cool; I'm curious how they replicated the SID? No one is producing a chip with analogue filters like the 6581; bet the sound must be off a bit due to the digital emulation when the filters are used.