TheMole

Ah, cool, gave me chance to check out your animation as well. Looks neat!

Is the 2MB cart supported in MESS or js99er? If so, which PCB type should I use in the layout.xml file?

Oh yeah, I know the source is grayscale. But it probably wouldn't suffer much when reduced to pure monochrome. I just love the fact that it's sort of a Homebrew staple when it comes to FMV on retro consoles and it'd be neat to see how the TI stacks up against other systems . The fact that you've managed to do 4-bit PCM at the same time is pretty neat and I haven't seen this on other early era systems, where they typically choose to use a PSG rendition instead! As far as compression is concerned, there'd probably not a lot of room for complex algorithms if we want to keep a nice framerate (the higher the better, and if dropping color means we could double it to 16 fps, that'd be most impressive). I think a simple RLE scheme could work quite well with a true monochrome/shadow art source like Bad Apple, or perhaps something vector quantization based ala cinepak to generate a codebook. That last one would probably need an entirely different rendering method though (updating the nametable every frame, while streaming smaller updates to the pattern table).

That's just all kinds of awesome! I almost didn't notice this 'cause it's buried in this 512k cart thread. Luckily I'm subscribed to Tursi's youtube channel. Anyway, so do I understand it correctly that if you could do a video in pure B/W, you could get an even higher framerate? I think I've already mentioned this somewhere on the forum, but I really wonder how good Bad Apple would look using this approach: Looking forward to those tools!

I don't think these were ever officially released in cartridge form, but Thorn Emi's River Rescue and Computer Wars were in my opinion some of the best looking and playing games on the system. Also, Sega's Buck Rogers and Data East's Treasure Island at least feel a bit better than the rest. I do agree that Frogger, Midnight Mason and Burgertime deserve an honorable mention as well.

I thought we decided to use this forum for all development related discussions (hardware and software), and leave the other forum for the "ebay is spensive!!" and "perty pittures" type threads? I wasn't in favor of a split first, but I do have to say that I actually like that I can gloss over the chit-chat and the fact that we now have a place where we can focus on the technical stuff. Also, not sure if this is due to the split in the forums, but we have seen quite some new blood over the last couple of days/weeks.

Hailing from the country that perhaps has the strongest claim to having invented the deep fried potato sticks that are mistakenly called "French Fries" across the big pond and "Chips" across the little pond, I think my voice should carry some weight in this discussion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_fries#Belgium). So, y'all better believe me when I say that there is only one condiment worthy of accompanying these glorious salty conveyors of the marvelous taste that is oxen grease fried potato starch, and that is mayonnaise. That is all...

I'm a sucker for side scrolling platformers, so I was really enamoured with Jungle Hunt when it first came out. I have to clarify that I've had two distinct era's of 99'er gaming experiences back in the day. When my dad first bought the system, for the first couple of years we basically had Invaders, Parsec and Car Wars. Oh, and one disk with Extended Basic games from the local user group on them. I loved Parsec and Car Wars, while my parents preferred Invaders. A little bit later on my dad bought the EA package, which came with Tombstone City but I didn't really cared for that. Then we moved, and the whole shebang was packed away for maybe two or three years. In the mean time I got my gaming fix from my Uncle's C64 and my Sega Master System, which both opened up a whole new type of games (I loved Ghostbusters, Pit Stop II, Karateka, ... on the C64. I adored Alex Kidd, Sonic, ... and World Grand Prix on my Master System). After those two or three years, I finally unpacked the TI and bought a second system and a bunch of games from a friend who was moving on the PC for gaming. By then, I'd been used to the smooth scrolling, colorful graphics of other systems and very few games on the TI came close to what I saw on the C64 or SMS. That's roughly when I discovered the Atarisoft games, and they were least some of the more fast paced action games with reasonable graphics. Together with maybe River Raid, Buck Rogers and Computer Wars, the Atarisoft kept my love for the TI's games alive for at least of couple of years longer .

Why would you need a mixer on the sound card, when it would be perfectly possible to do this in software? I agree that two sound chips do not a stereo system make, per sé. But I do think it can be used to create stereo sounds, if programmed specifically to do so and output to two different channels, without the need for a hardware mixer with panning controls.

I know this is going to be an unpopular opinion, but fuck'm and do it anyway. *edit* Actually, I shouldn't say "fuck'm". Reading between the lines, it sounds like they are not asking you to stop but are simply stopping short of giving you official permission to go ahead. They're probably just stuck between their lawyers and their love of the retro gaming community. Having said that: I still say do it anyway.

It doesn't go as far as some of the things you're talking about here, but the next revision of the F18A firmware will have support for VGA scanlines. See this post: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/233247-vga-vintage-scanline-generator/?p=3146462 Note that I think that is going to convince you it's worth the extra 30-odd bucks, but I thought I'd point it out anyway .

For what it's worth, I never cared about the aspect ratio of the pixels, I only cared about maximizing my screen real estate. I used a philips monitor that, as you point out, had h-width and v-height controls and always calibrated the picture to take up as much screen real estate as possible without losing rows/columns to overscan. I guess that means I've always had square pixels (4:3 ratio resolution filling up a 4:3 ratio screen) on my PAL console, and I assume that at least those of us who were using crt monitors back in the day must've done something similar. Heck, I can remember doing this for all my computers over the years, from old 8-bitters to more 'recent' PC's with VGA monitors.

Best post on this topic, ever.

Hmmm, not sure about that one. You of all people seem to have a knack for creating elegant, modern looking graphics with the limitations of our poor old 9918a. I wasn't around yet, way back when you were making all those demos, but I've always thought that they were some of the nicest looking things I've seen on the TI.

I think you might be misjudging the scale. This thing has 18 fingers on the connector (like the cartridge port), the side port needs 22. *edit* per side, that is...

As-in hardware assisted scaling for software sprites? Very, very cool!

So I've been looking at how I can plug this into my raycaster. If I see it correctly, you would expect the engine to call DSPSCR after 64 columns have been cast into a structure somewhere in memory pointed at by r0? Can you tell me how this structure must be defined? I think it might be something like this: typedef struct { unsigned char top, height, color; } coldef; unsigned coldef* slices[64]; And then when calling DSPSCR, I'd need to make sure r0 contains the address of slices. Or am I completely off base?

Not sure what you mean by ELF support. When compiling and linking something with gcc, you end up with an ELF binary. Before you can run it on a TI, whether that be cartridge or disk, you need to run it through elf2cart.exe or elf2ea5 respectively. Those tools basically strip the elf header, does endianness conversion if needed and copies the sections to the right locations. You end up with a TI native binary that can be put on cart of disk, so the TI doesn't know this ever was an ELF file and as such has no "ELF support" itself. Of course, since gcc spits out ELF binaries you could say it "adds ELF support", but since it's just an intermediary format I'm not sure that's what you meant.

Looks good! And thanks for making this cross-platform for us Mac snobs and Linux geeks !!

Can you post the steps you're using, and the error message you're getting? I'm sure it's something that's easily fixed.

Those sound effects are very nicely done. Beyond Rasmus' games and some exceptions there are very little games that do sound well and a lot of them resort to the same tired old, flat sounding bleeps and bloops. Please post as much as you can as you make progress, I love following these development diaries!

Ok, makes sense. Just wanted to make sure I understood it right.

Yeah, that was the original plan. But then sometimes99er came up with the idea of using bitmap mode via the color table for improved vertical resolution. Although much prettier, I never found a way of making that fast enough for real world use (given the need to push 4k to the VDP every frame). In the end I ended up doing the nametable version with the idea of supporting 4x2 via pattern definitions, but apparently never got to it.

Nope, I'm lying... I just looked at it again, and it is indeed 8x2...

Thanks, although it's actually 4x2 . I agree on the color choice, it doesn't really look all that perty but I just wanted to test two different colored walls with two shades each and a different colored floor/ceiling. In a game I would probably try to emulate a sort of green-screen scanline sort of look to hide the low fidelity nature of the graphics in the artistic choice (we have three shades of green + black and perhaps white, should give plenty of room for neat looking 3D). I haven't looked at this in ages though, and doubt if I can make it fast enough for my tastes and needs...