Retrospect

Haha .... yeah I should be calling it that! ......... I've been tinkering again ..... and this time, I have come up with a game that will drive whoever plays it utterly bonkers .... TEDDY has you attempting to steal teddy bears from a factory, you have to press SPACE to catapult the teddybear from the moving conveyor belt through a gap in the roof! ... This game is monotonous and hard but it does use a couple of XB256 features: Scrolling by pixels for the conveyor belt, scrolls 2 pixels per time two different ways with animated sprites for the conveyor belt wheels Use of the Soundlist Player thingy ... and it works very well! It's a bit complicated to follow but I got it in the end and the game has a continuous (short) soundtrack that plays uninterrupted in the background. Runs in XB ! Give it a whirl and tell me how annoyed you got. TEDDY.zip

I've come up with this , its very much just a prototype thing at the moment, badly put together , none of the sounds start or shut off when they should and the player won't die if he touches the enemy submarine cruisers.... But .... you can fire at the subs and you can crash into the ground. 8 layers of parallax scrolling is used (or was it 7 .... ) SUBTEST.zip Classic99 27_04_2016 22_08_30.mp4

Just a little update - nothing to show yet but here's my plan so far: 16 Levels of play. Each level has 8 submarine types that attack solo one after the other At the end of each level , you must dodge rising mines in the water that blow up on the surface At the start of level 4 is a real badass submarine that tries to kill you by firing up at you. It will appear randomly from then on throughout the game. (MAYBE) Inbetween different enemies is a warning on the screen with a sonar noise (except the mine dodging one that will have a hooter)

Cheers Vorticon. Yes, I am definately not through with this project yet, at the moment, it's in a playable state, let's say that .... There's things I'd like to add to it, those that you mention, regarding the randomness, that's going to be put in ... I also want the submarine to be able to fire back at the player ship. Random starting location and speed is a great idea. That's very do-able. I think that could be something that could involve different levels ... the harder the level, the closer it gets to you. At the moment the submarine progresses 16 pixels upwards when it reaches the end of the screen, if I change that to 8 pixels it means we have a lot more room to play with and can do the random column appearances more effectively (you wouldn't want it right underneath you , for instance) There was one thing I wanted to do this afternoon but I think it might slow down the scrolling of the sea too much, and that is to have little bubbles coming out of the back of the submarine. That may, or may not happen I don't know yet. The collision detection at the moment is awful. I've gotten past 1000 points and the damn thing let me down. I think it happens when the sprites are travelling past motion value 20 and the fact that the front end of the sub seems to be not checked as much (which is weird because the CALL COINC is there for both front and back) ... I'll look into that. I still have about 10K of programming memory left. What to do with that 10K .... I think one possibility is a level where you have to salvage documents from the downed vessels ... whilst avoiding sharks and pirahna fish. (It would give it an element of Blackbeards Treasure). I also want to look into putting an intro tune onto the title screen (thats where the sound list player comes into it)

Cheers Ksarul & Rasmus. It's based on an old type-in game from Computer & Video Games, the one from Firefly, "Substrike" Substrike was 4K in size and worked in XB on a stock console, though As I was writing Subhunt, I found myself developing new tricks - like when the submarine or player ship blows up at the bottom, we have to keep using the scroll routine else the sea stands still. One improvement I'm going to do, before I'm finally done with it, is make the submarine fire a shot at you on the column before last towards the sea surface. Player can try to avoid that shot but will always get shot if and when the sub reaches the top anyhow, just to add a bit more difficulty to it. I love the pixel scroll routines in XB256 they are awesome. A mistake I was making at first, when I first tried my hand at this, was using a set of incrementing variables to count up so far before it goes to a scroll routine, when I actually read the book and found how it really works, that's simply not necessary. Up to five instances of scroll can be addressed in any single CALL LINK command. So with that, the sea scroll was easy 'cos as far as I remember I only had four layers scrolling. Or was there five ....

SUB256.zip SUBHUNT-256 Load in Extended Basic (32K only) Use keys S and D for left and right, Space to fire missile P to pause / unpause Blow up the submarine before it reaches the surface and shoots you! Each time a submarine reaches the end of the screen it reappears at the other side, further up, and travelling faster. Score is calculated on distance of sub when shot Features: Parallax scrolling of sea 8 submarine types (random) Pause / Unpause Score & High score

That is extremely impressive!

Yesterday I saw a TI cassette cable on Ebay and I'm sure there's some old tape player/recorders that will suit the TI on there too. Nip onto Ebay and buy the cable at least, before someone else does!

I'll do that, run it in a separate browser, to be honest I never thought of that, cheers

Rasmus .... I have a feature request for JS99er ... would it be possible to make JS99er run in the background, for example, if we are pasting text into the emulator, we could open up another browser and read on here or go to youtube? As it is, it pauses whenever I try this.

Yeah, as far as I know, this emulator was sat there from like 2002 doing nothing, not getting any updates, and it's only really been the last couple of years it's been looked at by the owner. He's a good guy and tried helping me all he could to get it running but I wasn't lucky enough to get it to work with any games. Is there even an F18 mode on it?

Perfect! (on chromebook, probably is ok for all other computers too)

Hi Rasmus, I've tried the copy/paste on JS99er, two different computers, a linux, and chromebook, both paste but do not recognise where the ENTER key was pressed so it does it all in one line..... i do not know yet whether it does this with Windows machines. Regards, Joe.

lol ... i once tried to get mess running on a single-core netbook with about 1.6ghz of main power. Of course, it didn't have any graphical prowess either. When the 4a booted under that, it was the longest, most choked beeeep I've heard in my life. It runs pretty good with dual-core 2.1GHz though. Just.

Hello all. I write with the idea of a TI99 modified with internal 32K RAM, on the 16-BIT bus instead of the 8. My question : Is it then possible, to have a stand-alone 32K console with just a cassette recorder, and have the ability to load/save assembly onto cassette ? This would mean a lot to people who buy a modded console but don't want to fuss with CF7 cards or a PEB. I would think , order a 32K console from someone willing to do it on the 16-bit bus, (marc hull maybe?) ... and then see matthew haggarty about getting hold of an F18A. It would be a piece of cake for someone to convert a lot of disks to WAV and then produce a tape. Hope this is possible!

....... Wasn't Parsec written in GPL , with a routine in PAD ram for the scroll?

Great American Cross Country Road Race, I would love to see on the TI. The SN-whatever-number sound chip has a good buzzer effect for the engine, and it might not even take an F18a to get the graphics somewhat similar. Of course, I couldn't do it. But it's a nice idea.

Hi Toucan, thanks for a very detailed response ... wow I love those MB articles ..... That 99/4 system along with the MB should have wiped the floor with the competition. What they had there, with the MB thing , was very akin to what we have now, with Xbox's and the add-ons, etc ... I note it stated that Milton Bradley actually made the 9918 graphics chip ... thats cool. I've seen a few different concept machines in pictures, a 99/4 with Infra-Red capability was one of them (wander why they took that out at the last minute?) .... but the main thing that got me was the article stating the MB1 was to have the 9900 ... maybe as you say this was a mistake because the prototype had the 9985. Which is what TI were tussling with trying to get to work before going with the 9900. Very interesting reading, thankyou!

When I read the "Toucan's Trivia" on the MBX GameVision Demonstration Cartridge, I found a version of TI99 history that for me, doesn't seem to add up when you read some other articles about the what-happened-and-why scenario. Here, it states the MB1 was in development (which became the 99/4) and it was to have the 9900 CPU from the get-go ? Scroll to the bottom to read the Trivia. http://videogamehouse.net/gamemain/cartsfh/gamevisiondemo/

Well, oddly, quite a few will have sold in the UK, we got the TI fairly late, I think it was 1981 when they shipped. We got the 99/4 with internal speaker and volume slider, as our TV's couldn't pick up the sound signal with the modulator they were shipping. 994a came here in '82 I think, so there should be some UK models kicking around. Always check Evil-Bay though, as there is a US spec 99/4 with solid state badge right here. If I could afford to do it, and had the know how, I would love to own a modded 99/4 that could play Parsec and all the Rasmus games. For some reason I dunno I like the 99/4. http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Vintage-Texas-Instruments-TI-99-4-Computer-With-Power-Supply-Rare-USED-/252265432244?hash=item3abc3104b4:g:Y5gAAOSwT~9WjFKJ

I know you said before, English isn't your native language...... I always thought your native language was Extended Basic.

That's the one! .... wow mate, that was quick, you are star man. Thankyou.

Did anyone type in "Dive Bomb" from issue 34, or is that game on a file somewhere?

I asked this question about two years ago and it was said at the time that the GROM's would refuse to acknowledge the F18A because the original chip hadn't 'checked in' I'm not sure whether this IS truly the case or not - because if it all goes plain sailing - there will be videos of 99/4's playing Parsec and that would be awesome!

Cheers budz .... I've just been sat playing Texan Dealer for about 5 minutes..... It's in dire need of a re-write .... I might have a bash at an updated version in a bit. I loved the dopewars game , one I had was for Atari ST and then the DOS original.