orange808

April 15, 2022

Also, don't over engineer your solution. Many people think they want component output from one of the later DVD recorder units. You actually don't want that, because the comsumer products that did that perform poorly for video games. (At least the ones I own or owned in the past.)

Those recorder machines add **a lot of** latency and most also insist on converting all signals to "true" proper 480i interlaced video. It looks bad. Even worse, playing games on my DVD recorders has so much latency, it's actually.(sort of) interesting to see how long I can play a game without dying. When you can see and feel the delay, you know it's ridiculous. That huge processing time provides excellent comb filtering results (good for laserdisks), but the delay is unsuitable for video games. I never found a "component out" consumer "VCR" that didn't perform slow digital processing.

Don't overthink it. Just get a regular old VCR.

P.S. Don't bother trying to find a "fast" high quality video game friendly comb filter. It doesn't exist. High quality comb filters work by using a frame buffer. It's possible a community developed video scaler may someday offer a custom comb filtering solution, but it hasn't happened yet. I've been down that rabbit hole and I didn't find anything.

April 15, 2022

That's the thing. Most VCRs are discarded or branded "not working" because equipment related to handling and playing back tapes had failed. The tuners are durable and most discarded VCR units will be fine. Often, people will give you a broken one for free.

Regardless, I spent the time and money examining the options and my game room is rather "noisy" (from both power and interference). While others are welcome to invest their own time and money investigating (and your milage may vary), I found a VCR still works best. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

As for CRTs, you're right. A nice CRT consumer television will usually instantly deliver an instant clean looking signal with a direct connection to the Atari. That's my preferred method--especially for the 7800, because the mods don't really deliver dependably proper colors (or not the last time I looked into it, maybe that has been solved).

April 15, 2022

I have Blonder Tongue and MediaTek rack tuners. I have the Sony unit in the thread. I have an Extron closed circuit.

Get yourself a VCR. ?

April 15, 2022

Nah. You wasted your money on that tuner. Get a VCR. Your tuner appears to be a model for boats and recreational vehicles. The main design priority for those involves limiting illegal signal emissions, not picture quality or noise reduction.

VCR's were designed for frequent viewing in the home. In that environment, video quality matters. It's also where interference and noise was most likely. You are overthinking this entire thing.

Professional tuners are going to be rack-mountable gear from a broadcast or closed circuit environment (although there are lots of them from legacy security systems floating around). Regardless, I have one and it doesn't outperform a nice VCR. If anything, a VCR is often better at noise reduction than some pro gear, anyway.

I also have an Extron tuner meant for closed circuit installations, it also falls short of a VCR. Truthfully, nobody in the "business" and conference segment cares much for overall quality, it's really about durable machines that get something on the screen with minimum thought.

People watched television and recorded television from the tuners in their VCRs. The tuners were a huge priority. Video quality was king for consumer VCRs. Don't overthink it. Get a nice VCR.

You'll find that noise reduction is more important than ever, because the television signal bandwidth is no longer reserved for television signals.

April 14, 2022

12 minutes ago, DeafAtariFromKansas said:

I download and tried run this ROM until I noticed... this ROM is hacked.... game will be over too quick if you mess same item for few seconds.. see picture attached

That's probably related to the timing issues the readme mentioned.

April 13, 2022

Seems like it would be easier to make the rom bigger and "redundantly" place the kernel in more than bank. Each bank of data could be used for different stages or something like that.

Could also switch to bB DPC kernel.

April 13, 2022

Here's the thread:

There's a macro in there you will probably want.

April 12, 2022

Just for transparency, let's verify what we have verified.

else if (!strncmp(statement, "collision(player0,player1)\0", 26))
    {
	printf("	CXPPMM");
	bit = 7;
    }

Batari Basic will translate the collision keyword into assembler using the code I quoted. It is a call to CXPPMM.

Quote

CXPPMM (R) - Collision Latch P0-P1, M0-M1 (Bit 7,6) (Read only)

The TIA detects collisions between any of the 6 objects (the playfield and 5 moveable objects). There are 15 possible two-object collisions which are stored in 15 one bit latches.

Source:

https://problemkaputt.de/2k6specs.htm

So, if one of the virtual sprites is not "on" during a given frame, it will NOT detect it, because the Atari can only see a collision between P0 and P1. If you have declared a sprite and it isn't "on screen", the Atari hardware can't see a collision. The Atari only knows if it "draws" overlapping P0 and P1 sprites. As far as the Atari is concerned, if it isn't "drawn", it doesn't exist at all. So, mind that limitation.

The virtual sprite collision is handled on the ARM side by this code snippet:

case 20: // collision check
    {
      // takes virtual sprite, returns coll
      // syntax: sprite[1], sprite[2] (missiles, ball not yet, pf done another way)
      // draw sprites in virtual area
      C_function[3]=0;
      temp2=0;
      for (i=RIOT[player0y+C_function2];i<RIOT[player0y+C_function2]+RIOT[player0height+C_function2];++i) 
      {
        if ((i>=RIOT[player0y+C_function1]) && (i<RIOT[player0y+C_function1]+RIOT[player0height+C_function1]))
	{
          temp3=RIOT[player0x+C_function2]-RIOT[player0x+C_function1]+7; //-7 to +7 -> 0 to 14
          if (temp3<15)
	  {
            temp2=((flashdata[(RIOT[player0pointerhi+C_function2*2]<<8)+RIOT[player0pointerlo+C_function2*2]+i-RIOT[player0y+C_function2]])<<7)
                & ((flashdata[(RIOT[player0pointerhi+C_function1*2]<<8)+RIOT[player0pointerlo+C_function1*2]+i-RIOT[player0y+C_function1]])<<temp3);
	  }
	  if (temp2) 
	  {
	    C_function[3]=255;
	    return;
	  }
	}
      }
      return;

As you can see, the collisions are handled one at a time.

April 12, 2022

2 hours ago, mr_me said:

Games can be patched. They don't want in-game purchases or people to have to pay extra once they bought the game. Problems with an Amico game can be patched after release.

Thanks for clearing that up. I admit only a passing general curiosity about the platform, so there's a lot of things I won't understand. My apologies for sounding over critical, but I believe anyone making a game (that isn't moonlighting) requires gambling valuable time and money, so it requires some critical analysis.

Personally, I would still worry about a path to profitability without some form of upselling, but that's all above my pay grade. And, everything may be fluid. Things change.

Best of luck to the company.

April 12, 2022

Well, I thought about going through all the things Intellivision did that put off game devs, but I'd almost have to write a book. I can't hit all the topics.

First of all, the developer portal was tardy and they should have had devs working with cell phones paired to a simulator early on--especially given the company wanted exclusive titles. High quality games take well over a year to develop (probably two)--and it's virtually impossible to make a good game (that even meets high quality NES era standards) without time and a team. I also got mixed messages on rather or not INTV wanted any games with substance. One moment we're talking Earthworm Jim and a Fox N Forests port, the next moment I hear the games have to be "simple". Apparently, a bad Armor Ambush rehash thing and cornhole are killer apps in the 2020's? You're kidding me, right?

Everyone and their damn dog thinks they can make a game these days. They're wrong. Everyone can make shovelware. We have a term for it and there's a reason why.

Speaking of development, time, and team, how the heck were any of us going to jump in and pay bills with a ten dollar price cap and only $5 gross per unit? Don't care if that changed or not. The damage was done. INTV needed devs to get in when this thing was in the cradle. No, not some kid playing around with Unity in his bedroom after school for giggles (with stolen assets). I mean real devs. I can't figure out how anybody could have planned anything that was properly ambitious. Who could/can afford to make an exclusive with any ambition? Nobody.

That leads me into those pompous development commandments. I'd need to be salaried to tolerate something like that while I'm working--and I'd still be making fun of the commandments behind your back. I just can't help it. ?The tone of the guidelines are so over the top and hamfisted, not to mention the misguided ideas the "commandments" present, I don't have the words to describe it. Let's just say it put me off.

Asking for all simple games on a console in the 2020's is the road to ruin. OUYA already speculated that people really wanted to put their phones down and gather in front of a television with a controller for casual gaming. OUYA was wrong about that. Nothing has changed since, has it? Guess what? People really do want to play casual games on the train or in bed--and they are perfectly content to do it on a mobile. Do they miss sitting in front of the television? I don't think so. Another thing, too: OUYA thought they could entertain people with cheap shovelware from hobbyists; it didn't work for them, why would it work for Intellivision?

Still talking OUYA, it actually shipped to retail at $99 (and they managed to get the controller into a tolerable state). I can't see how a waggle controller, lights, and a dial will make the Amico worth the asking price. How will the machine get a decent install base? It won't.

From the very beginning, it seems like this entire platform was mostly for hobby devs--and those hobbyists were asked to jump through a lot of silly obtuse hoops along the way. For what? If I had to boil down the entire dev proposition to one sentence, I have always heard: "you aren't going to make any money".

They were making $700 machines for devs that didn't care if they made money? That's bonkers. What kind of results will you get?

Speaking of hobby development: if Intellivision follows through with their QA, how many of these games (that may be submitted) will meet standards? Do they even have anyone left in the office to test software for all their target localizations? Do they have a proper QA checklist document and a process for approval for the store? Let's hope they don't talk to devs the way the commandments read or with the tone I heard from Tommy. Most of us won't put up with that kind of shit.

I hear they don't want games patched, right? Amico is connected to the network, but we can't push patches? Really?? Why doesn't anything about this machine make sense? If you're arbitrarily limiting patches from your store, you have an obligation to your customers to handle the additional QA (in house) to guarantee quality. Games are the entire point and the experience (right or wrong) always reflects on the hardware manufacturer and store host. You can say it wasn't your fault, but perception is reality--and perception is everything.

Why would Intellivision want to make everything more difficult than it needs to be? I understood why I got hammered trying to get approval for mobile storefronts years ago, when mobile bandwidth was extremely expensive. That made perfect sense. Carriers and users paid for that bandwidth and we had to get it right the first time. I couldn't have users downloading their app multiple times--and there was no mechanism for patching software on those devices. But... On a console, at home, on wifi, and in 2022? Not so much.

Assuming the moderation of this conversation around here has actually changed, my post won't mysteriously disappear, and we can speak honestly: why would anyone expect much of anything from the INTV development environment?

April 10, 2022

The hardware collision will be toggled when the player0 and player1 sprites overlap. So, when you check that, you're checking to see if player0 and player1 overlap. Sounds obvious, but it's important to make that clear.

We know that player1 is being repositioned during the kernel, but it is also "flickering" sprites that share a scanline. Sometimes, some virtual sprites are "off".

There will be frames that the Atari hardware collision detection can't "see" some virtual sprites (because some virtual sprites are "off"). So, mind the fact that checking "player0 and player1" collision won't always be a complete collision check for all virtual sprites in a given individual frame.

The virtual sprite ("vsprite") collision detection into bB DPC+ is pixel perfect collision that works every frame in software. The raw sprite data for shared (vertical position) scanlines are bit shifted (to adjust for their horizontal position) before a "logical AND" (to find out if two vsprites overlap). This is done with two vsprites at a time.

In my opinion, there's no easy or practical way for bB DPC+ on the Harmony hardware to do what you want. The entire Atari sprite "state" of each scanline isn't something bB calculates and holds in RAM. We don't have an easy way to look up multiple sprites at once, logical OR them together, and apply a logical AND. Maybe it can be done, but it would be prohibitively time consume/expensive.

You need more horsepower. For instance, this kind of check would trivial using ACE C++.

April 10, 2022

I wonder if there's some unnecessary "rogue" deinterlacing going on in your video chain. Maybe try feeding 720p to the capture card to avoid "automatic" detection of interlaced video? Also, is the 'Tink5x the only video processor you have on hand?

April 8, 2022

4 hours ago, mr_me said:

My expertise has nothing to do with it.

You should reconsider that.

April 7, 2022

I know it's a joystick, but I can't shake the feeling I've done something to offend that couch.

April 5, 2022

March 26, 2022

Of course.

I didn't look closely at the kernel, but we can safely assume that the P0 sprite information and the state of the ball for the next scanline are: being "preloaded" while the current scanline is being "drawn". VDELxx holds the "new" values in a latch and the updates are "released" (to simultaneously update the state of P1, P0, and the ball) when GRP1 is updated. So, the ball and player 0 updates are being loaded early and updates are delayed until player1 is updated.

As a result, when you turn off VDELxx, the ball and player0 are immediately updated midscanline--instead of waiting for player1 to be updated.

March 25, 2022

Probably related to VDELxx.

March 21, 2022

Steam is trying to get onto Chromebooks to eventually offer a way to host indie games on an inexpensive machine. That could maybe turn into something. No need for a new console.

March 20, 2022

At this point, I am willing to accept that Intellivision had resolved to make their machine and leave it at that. All the comments and jokes have been made. There's nothing new to say, is there? It's all been said and done.

They wanted to do it and that's the end of it, okay?

With that said, investments were probably very difficult to secure for Intellivision. I think the feature creep and branch offices were partially (or mostly) about satifying investors--and eventually get the machine to market.

Yes. It's dead easy to criticize. I get it.

That doesn't change the realities for Intellivision, does it? They were determined to make their machine. That came with some big challenges. They weren't doing this as a hobby thing. Real jobs pay living wages at market value, folks. Of course it's expensive.

Discussing the business plan from our perspective doesn't really help. They were determined. That's all there is to it. After we accept that, it's easier to understand why their finances are a little messy. Intellvision didn't have much leverage with investors.

If this is a calm postmortem discussion, we have to accept all the realities they faced along the way. There was no easy way to get leverage and find money.

Mattel's original development on the first machine has nothing to do with this. Intellivision is essentially an indie startup. Mattel had tons of money and slack to dev their machine. Stockholders weren't hovering over the execs about the Intellivision project; it had all the time and oxygen it needed. We also now know, Atari cut costs and stopped spamming the silicon houses, so Mattel was able to get their machine manufactured. Everything worked out and Mattel had lots of time/money to invest. Not so for this indie startup Intellvision.

Mistakes were made. I cant wait to read the book.

March 19, 2022

I thought this video was pretty interesting. It's all speculation, but it's good to hear some educated guesses about the future of the machine and company. I feel bad for employees of the company and fans that really wanted the machine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpPRxHJMtvI

March 12, 2022

As I sit here playing Man Goes Down (as I occasionally have for almost 20 years now), I wonder if there needs to be a Hall of Fame catagory with multiple annual recognitions and a couple new inductees per year? Nominations would be tricky, but it stinks that older games or close competitions leave some excellent software without an award.

March 11, 2022

You're onto something with this idea.

March 3, 2022

Don't miss Man Goes Down. An absolute gem.

February 14, 2022

When I said we didn't need more categories, I wasn't throwing shade at deserving winners that got awards in the current framework. I'll see myself out.