Shinju

Might have to get one for the ole DINA 2 in One! very cool, I was trying to chase a F18 down a few years ago!

I would love to help, I'll drop you my info via PM, I have plenty of SMS and Genesis controllers to try

Hey Tailchao, sorry for taking so long to get back to you on this, life happened and I got super busy. Anyway here we are. First Gen 7800 with Expansion port on the side, ghost button with 1 or 2 controllers plugged in (Serial AT8461015) Second 7800 (unsure of generation newer rev due to higher serial number) Ghost button issue with 1 or 2 controllers plugged in (Serial AT835221479) Third 7800 (unsure of generation) Ghost button issue with 1 controller after 20-30 min, works perfect with both controllers plugged in (Serial AT815163002) Also, I have a friend who bought this game and it works perfect on his non modified 7800 but on this composite modified console EVERY retail Atari 7800 game the console displays flawlessly, when Rikki & Vikki is inserted and turned on, blank screen, not even the Atari splash screen. I read that some who have composite/S-video modified systems seem to be fine, have you had anyone else report of issues with Composite only modified 7800s having issues? Anyway, hope the information helps you in anyway possible! Eagerly awaiting your next project!

I'll get that info for you later on this evening! Again, this game is Amazing, for those who are on the fence or just now seeing this and have a 7800 or want a 7800 I can think of no BETTER reason to buy one and get this game!

So with my main 7800 that has been gone through and recapped etc, with having 2 controllers plugged in I did not see any ghost button input at all, with the other 2 7800 that are 100% bone stock all original with both controllers plugged in they did see button 1 ghosting after about 20-30 min of game play. With that said, its possible that if others are seeing this that these systems might need tune up/recap etc, TailChao does your super cart draw more current then a normal 7800 production 7800 cart? I have never seen any ghost button issues before even with homebrew carts. I have no problem keeping the other controller plugged in to play this at all, no complaints here just want to bring this to your attention! I will say this again, damn amazing game, I was playing this for 2 hours and finally had to force myself to put it down to go to bed, the level layouts and puzzles are fun, the graphics are mind blowing, bosses are HARD AS Nails, (Dark Souls of the 7800 if you will) before I forced myself to quit I was on the bubble cave area and the detail on the shrinking and expanding bubbles was a nice touch, even the lava zone had some nice little fx going on. Solid! I am looking forward to your next release, you guys knocked another one out of the park!

Will do, when I hit this issue I only have one controller plugged in at any given time. I'll report back on my findings. Thanks for responding, I know this old tech is grumpy and the 7800 is not immune to its own quirks

Hey there! I got mine a couple days ago and Wow, was like 1986 all over again opening up brand new 7800 game! Production quality is top notch, not a single detail was missed in both the box, manual cart and the game its self! 10/10! Main reason why i am posting is because I think I found a bug or I might have a bad copy, at first I thought it was my 7800 but this has happened now on 3 different systems and the chances all 3 are going bad is pretty small, Anyway after about a 20-30 min or so of game play button one becomes stuck on and Rikki and Vikki auto pick up blocks making the game impossible to play as one needs to pick up and place/drop blocks strategically to advance to the next level, I first saw this when I was halfway though the 2nd zone and trying to pass the level were you have to stack the blocks into a bridge over the spikes to get the key, every time I just walked up to a block it would auto pick up and no button press was needed, this would cause me to die as walking over the block bridge Rikki would just pick up the block automatically. No matter what block was around Rikki would just pick up as he got close enough. if I power cycle the game it will go back to normal were the player has to pick up the by pressing the button to pick up the blocks, but after a short time the issue would come back and Rikki would just auto pick up blocks when getting near them. I tried other 7800 games that utilize both buttons and those games are fine the buttons function as they should. I have tried 3 7800 consoles, 3 controllers, 1 normal joystick and 2 of my euro 7800 nes style controllers. Anyone else seen this? Again, this game is top shelf and stunning, 11 year old jeremy would have had his mind blown if this was released in the systems shelf life, I saved up my allowance to by my 7800 and games back in the day, much love for this underdog system!

Paid in full! Exciting, cannot wait to dive into this!

Amazing, I have been following this silently, this just goes to show what the 7800 could have done if it had the proper dev and production time behind it. The 7800 already had the best Commando home port and in my opinion the best 8bit port of Xenophobe and Ballblazer (minus the cool intro the 800 version had). Day one purchase for me, would be a great addition to my complete NTSC 7800 set! Well done to who all was involved I cannot wait to play this masterpiece!

Awesome updates, excited to see this continuing!

This is awesome Curt! So excited, I was one of the last to get in on this back in 2013 when you put the last 10 on a Amazon link on the XM Build page! Got my order number ready when its needed! So glad I stuck with this project and didn't cancel the pre-order, even it if never did end up releasing the 100 buy in for the chance to see something cool for the 7800 like this would have been worth it regardless development costs money and you defiantly earned it and more , heh to be honest I forgot/spaced a couple times until PRGE came around and Albert had one on display at the AA booth and I remembered... OH YEAH this cool thing! -j

David found me by an old post about an Interton VC-4000 German made console, he offered me one at a good price over the course of a couple of weeks of back and forth (I was on Vacation) we came to an agreement and now I own the Interton. Dave is a great seller, kept is work, packed well and was always available to respond to questions. Thanks again for the deal, I'll PM you once the console is modified

I am really surprised by the slide show dungeon movement with the power of the lynx being able to do 3D pretty well, like Xybots/luchsenstein for example. Game looks true to form though, I enjoyed it on the Sega CD and the SNES.

Awesome, looks great!

Not current on my Jag protos but if this ever gets uncovered and is close to code complete, the Apeshit name needs to remain. Looks like a fun little platformer too!

Gotcha, I have been following both threads pretty loosely so I was not aware! But still!

The whole, shoulda, woulda, coulda, needs this and that needs to be saved for a new thread when and if the owners of this decide to release the source code and allow others to hack it up and make it better and or add new features can go nuts! I get the desire to dig for reasons as to why devs did this that and the other but lets just let these guys release this game in its as natural as it could be released state and enjoy and be thankful that they are taking the time to do so. Quite a few Proto owners are not as open and not willing to share their finds, lets be thankful for the ones who like to share with the community and be fortunate to be able to play these lost games. Not trying to white knight anything just see a lot of chit chat here about lets make it better NOW before we even get to sample it first! /off the soapbox!

Eh, I have faith, I invested in this 5 years ago or so and I have lost more money on way more silly things then this. When and if the XM ever gets released its going to be well worth the wait.

Heh, what retro game isn't released with out some sort of glitches! Adds character and from what I watched its pretty minimal and not bad at all!

Wow, that looks and plays great, Even the TIA sounds are not all that horrible as compaired to other 7800 TIA sound based games. 7800 with games like this would have held its own agenst the Nes and SMS for sure!

In for a NTSC copy for sure, excellent addition to my 7800 set! Thank you for making this possible and sharing it with the community too!

Funny how things turn out the way you never intended them to be! But yes, this has gone off course pretty far now. I still stand by my earlier statement that the TG-16 was the underdog console!

Borrowed this from a site, its pretty much what I was going to say in retort. Again, I like both equally, hard to pick one over the other when they both have excellent games to offer, import or domestic. SMS: Palette is made from RGB values. 2bit per element. NES: Palette is based on Luma/chroma. Some colors are better/blend better on the NES. Some on the NES. NES also has higher luma control. For each R/G/B element per screen. Technically, it's like a total of 400+ colors, but really ever used. Too bad that they didn't. So besides some redundant colors, you have around 52-56 on the NES. Less colors for the master palette, but better overall IMO. Winner: Hmm..I'd say NES. SMS: Can have up to sixteen colors in a single 8x8 tile and another 15 for a single 8x8/8x16 sprite. NES: Has 4 colors per 16x16 metatile (a tile is 8x8, but color is fixed for a block of four). Sprites have 3 colors per 8x8 or 8x16. The NES gets around the problem by having four subpalettes of 4 colors for a tile to choose from. Sprites have their own four subpalettes of 4 colors, but the first color is always ignored/not shown. Max colors on screen for NES is 26. Max colors onscreen for SMS is 31. It looks close, but SMS can show more detail in color in a smaller space/area. Winner: SMS clearly wins with its high color counter per tile/sprite cell. SMS: Has tilemap screen size slightly larger than the screen. Somewhat limiting. Has tile flipping (saves some vram for some types of patterns). NES: Has a tilemap 4 times the screen size. But there's only enough ram on the system for 1/2 that. Still larger than SMS. Makes for smoother and/or easier scrolling map routines. Carts were able to mirror (you can pick between horizontal or vertical mirroring) the missing map memory so that it "wraps" correctly, or the cart could include the extra needed VRAM to make use of all four tilemap sections. Through some exploit, MMC5 mapper was able to hack the tilemap in realtime to provide the NES with 8x8 palette blocking. It increased the tile graphics. I think only a few games took advantage of this. Winner: NES is the definite winner. SMS: Has 16k of vram. A nice chunk of vram until you realize that the tiles and sprites take up twice the memory on SMS vs NES. So it puts it the same. NES: The real strength of the NES is that all video memory is on the cart. There is no VRAM for tiles or sprites on the system itself. So it be VRAM or it can be VROM. And since it's on the cart, you can mappers to quickly switch out vram or vrom. Depending on the mapper, you can do fine/small swapping to larger/whole banks, or in variable sized chunks. It can swap on/out up to all of vram in a matter of a handful of cycles. In comparison, the SMS has to slowly update it's small setup of vram. Hell, it can even swap in/out tiles/sprites faster than any of the 16bit systems. And it can do it mid screen too. Winner: NES is the strong/clear winner here. SMS: Sprite size is 8x8 or 8x16. Sprite table holds a max of 64 sprites. Can only show 8 sprites per scanline. Doesn't support horizontal and/or vertical "flipping". Has horizontal sprite zooming (double pixels), but it's broken and only works for the first 4 sprites. SMS has to manual update the sprite table. NES: Sprite size is 8x8 or 8x16. Sprite table holds a max of 64 sprites. Can only show 8 sprites per scanline. Does support horizontal and/or vertical "flipping". NES has a fast sprite DMA that reads from on board ram to vram. Winner. NES for the flipping options and sprite dma. Otherwise, no different for onscreen or per scanline (flicker/blankout). BUT.. if you count that the SMS can do software sprites much better than NES because of the high color count per cell, albeit choppy animation/movement, then the SMS clearly gets the win. Golden Axe on SMS being one example. SMS software sprites have a down side that they are choppy and take cpu resource to overlay, and can take several frames to update. They also consume more vram unique tiles which means less detail for the background. SMS: Ram. Stock SMS has 8k of on board ram. This is decent but also necessary because 4bit tiles/sprites take up more space and need to be compressed (also decompressed to ram). More memory is also easier for map routines. More is mappable via external cart. NES: Ram. Stock NES has only 2k of ram. That's pretty tight for things. A lot of games had expanded ram on the cart. Sometimes this was accompanied by a battery for also saving games. Winner: SMS, but this becomes a null issue once ram is accompanied on the cart. SMS: SMS has a register to keep a section of the tile map fixed for a "status window". Stock SMS also has horizontal interrupts. Can make some nice parallax effects out of the box. NES: NES uses sprite 0 active method to achieve the same thing as the SMS's static status window. It's not as efficient and wastes some code as you having to poll the status register. A stock NES has not scanline interrupts. Later mappers added this though. MMC3 mapper is a popular one that supports it. Winner: SMS for stock setup. Both are equal though, once an NES is setup with the correct mapper. SMS: 8bit z80 processor running at 3.58mhz. Twice clock speed as the NES. NES: 8bit 6502 processor running at 1.79mhz. Half the clock rate of the SMS. The devil is in the details, while half the speed, the instructions are much faster on the 6502. Not to mention some nice instructions and address modes that don't exist on the z80. Winner: Hmm. I'd have to give this to the NES. Having coded for both, 6502 code tends to give better results with optimization. But the performance difference isn't huge relative to the different clock rates. SMS: Sound. Stock system has 3 tones channels and 1 noise channel. The tone channels have a fixed waveform. Standard square. Basic as you can get. Noise channel is limited in setup. Standard volume at 4bit non linear. No other hardware features. NES: Sound. Stock system has 2 lead channels, 1 triangle/bass channel, 1 noise channel, 1 sample channel. Both leads channel have be individually assigned 1 or 4 waveforms (variations of square waves). Triangle channel is used for bass lines, but has not volume control and frequency is 1/2 range of lead channels. Noise channel has volume control and 16 ranges of frequencies to pick. Sample channel is either DPCM at 1bit delta for a max of 6bit output or a direct write at 7bit raw PCM. Has no volume control. In DPCM mode, it feeds itself and after reading 4k will generate an interrupt for the CPU to change the bank (for longer samples). Very impressive for 1983. Almost no games take advantage of this channel pre SMB3 and not many afterwards. SMB3 steel drum sample uses this channel. NES also has hardware note length, hardware decay volume envelope, and hardware repeating sweep envelope. Winner: For stock setup, clearly the NES. Japanese SMS has the (very limit) FM addon chip. But on the same token, Japanese FC had lots of mappers that added additional sound channels. Some as many as 8-10 more channels, including a game that used a FM addon chip similar to the SMS one. Besides color count/detail, NES beats out the SMS in all other hardware. Strange considering the SMS came out 2 years later. The NES might require mappers in some instances, but the whole design of the original famicom included mapper integration. But judging from the games on both systems, especially the good ones, there isn't much real world difference. Heck, even with SMS's (choppy) software sprites - some games clearly look ahead of the NES. Space Harrier, R-Type, Golden Axe. I'm sure other can point out more examples. I personally don't care for the choppiness of the software sprites though. 60fps of real sprites is just better, not to mention 60fps gameplay.

I thought SMS had a pretty superior color pallet then the NES. Just look at these 2 examples. Sure some of the early games for both systems were pretty primitive but I felt SEGA had the edge on graphics vs the NES, just like the NES had the advantage over the SMS PGM sounds and even in most cases with the SEGA FM Audio expansion active, NES with the Sunsoft FX, VRC6 and 7 expansions (Lagrange Point) really showed what the NES could do audio wise. I like both, I have full NTSC-U sets for Both (minus SE for NES) and I play them both about the same. SMS Solomon Key NES Solomon Key Adventure Island / Wonder Boy

Sega Master Systems demise was mostly due to Tonka being piss poor about marketing and Nintendo having a kung fu grip on 3rd party producers making games for other systems here in the states and japan. SMS in Europe did not have those restrictions and that is why the SMS euro title line up is almost x2 of what we had here in the states and loads of 3rd party games too. For me being in my 40's I saw both NES and SMS in our local retail stores hell even kiosk for both NES and SMS right next to one another. I have not read though all 5 pages, but for me the most underdog and underrated console here in the states would have to be TurboGrafx-16. NEC had ZERO foothold in the game industry console market here in the states when they released it, no one really noticed. TG16 has a super small library of Hucard games, and an even smaller CD-Rom library here in the states, Japan and PC-Engine was huge, hundreds of HuCard titles and almost as many CD-Rom based games too. NEC/TG16 also suffered from Nintendo and their super tight policy on signed with NOA/NOJ 3rd pary producers/devs making games for other consoles, quite a few of the TG-16 games were Hudson or Victor Industries as well as a few other smaller dev houses, very few games made here in the states big name producers. TurboGrafx-16 games are pretty uncommon to find in the wild today, I used to see them quite a bit but over the last 5-6 years outside of retro game expo's and local buy sell trade retro groups I never see much Turbo games anymore.