Cafeman

Made a new trailer for the current build.

Here is an update on what's going on with this project. - I'm working with AA member livinabin on the manual text, he is working on the manual layout with some new artwork. - KEYS - I tweaked their colors (more precisely, lowered their brightness levels) and gave each key its own bitmap image. The keys will glow every few seconds which is still necessary to see them at times depending on what background color they are overtop. - Rankings - there are 16 rankings in total now - I added 2 more this past week. There are Bad Rankings and Good Rankings and a couple Special Rankings. For example, if you are eaten too much you will likely be ranked _________ . (this is true of the current demo rankings too). New ranking logic: If you kill ___ dragons in a game or more, you will likely be ranked _________. I think most people will fall into playing habits and tend to see the same couple of rankings all the time, and thus you'd have to mess around to see the others. Again, there are 16 in the game to find and you'll only see them all by playing as different Icons and accomplishing (or failing to accomplish) different things as represented by the end-game Stats. - Balancing - after all the testing I've been doing playing AdvII on my XEGS - I felt I made the game too easy. So I made the Advanced and Special levels a little harder ( similar to the settings of the 5200 version now, although not turned up quite as high) and I tweaked the rules for how you achieve the best 2 rankings so that it is more challenging. bottom line , to get the top 2 rankings you cannot be devoured , not even once. After you get used to the game a bit, it isn't hard to avoid getting devoured when on Beginner and Intermediate, usually. But it is challenging on Advanced/Special, especially if the dragons are chasing you and you have no sword. Run until they give up! - Glitches - it alarmed me that a new glitch started to occur after my rankings tweaks. I did not really understand how it was happening but somehow it was caused by a change in timing of execution of code. Description of glitch: the screen rolled when you beat the game, between the final castle screen and the rankings screen! I had never seen my game roll the screen before ( evidently it is easier to cause on 2600 games). It didn't roll on Altirra , so I had to examine the code, make a hypothesis, make the code change, load up my Atarimax cart, and play and beat a game on real hardware over and over - after 4 or 5 times, I fixed the problem! The Adventure II dragons are Frugle, Sithel, and Brundel. I need to play test the current code for a couple of days then will release a new DEMO version.

Xbox 360: Hydro Thunder Hurricane. 2 hours. Actually unlocked a new X boat on my nearly 10 year old save file. Virtua Fighter 5. 1 hour. Serious Sam HD. 1 hour. PS4: Injustice 2. 2 hours. Playing story mode. I don't have my head wrapped around the fighting controls yet. Great visuals.

Odds are overwhelmingly good that the human race will survive COVID-19. It's a bad virus, but compare against 1918 Spanish Flu - https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-pandemic-h1n1.html 50 million deaths worldwide - twice the number killed on WWI. 500 millsion infected by it - estimated 1/3 of the world's population at the time.

That isn't accurate, being based on the current 5200 games in the AA store,. Also, one is an enhanced A8 port (Zaxxon) and another being a actual Atari prototype from BITD (Xari Arena). (do these count as Homebrews for this list? not sure). Looking at this 2008 link - https://atariage.com/forums/topic/121698-is-there-a-complete-list-of-the-5200-homebrews-hacks-conversions-repros/ , which lists these 9 homebrews: Adventure II in AA store Beef Drop in AA store Castle Blast in AA store Castle Crisis in AA store Combat II Advanced (not counted yet - MeanHamster) Haunted House II 3-D (not counted yet - MeanHamster) Klax (not counted yet - MeanHamster) Koffi: Yellow Kopter in AA store Rent Wars (Not counted yet) Looking at Good Deal games' 5200 homebrews, the majority seem to be conversions from A8 games, thus not really "homebrews" .==> What number can we come up with?

I really love hooking up my Sega CD and playing it on a TV hooked up to a sound system. I have Model 1 Genesis and Model 1 Sega CD (underneath model), and I love to hook up the sounds system using the Genesis' headphones jack and a mixing cable. Hooking up this way, you have more control over the bg music volume vs game sounds, and there is noticeably more gain to the sound vs using the rear audio hookups alone. This alone makes the games more interesting than just playing them on a Raspberry PI hooked up to the same TV. Just give me Silpheed, Batman Returns, Terminator, Sonic, Amazing Spider-man, and Jurassic Park and I'm good for a couple nights. Cliffhanger is great due to its Avalanche levels. Oh the memories!

I was never sure why AtariMax and XEGS cart settings had different banking schemes but basically the code at 8000 and A000 are reversed between the two formats in the game's code. Using .ORG statement and IF ELSE statements. Are you saying the XEGS pcb allows only 32k RAM to work because the other 16K is still stored on ROM?

Nearly 10 years ago - my notes say October 2010. And I thought the game required 48K minimum. You'd think as the programmer I'd know, but I still treat this game as a 5200 in a lot of way - RAM to me is Zero Page and the rest - basically $0000-$3FFF. Then code starts at $4000-$BFFF same as 5200 version (basically 32K ROM) but with some extra banks - a bank for the AtariAge logo, a bank for the new FONT charset, a bank for the sounds engine and data ... Getting back to point I wonder if anyone's Atari has 32k RAM , as opposed to the usual 16K (the 400) or 48k (800) or 64k (XL/some XE's) sizes.

I chose some new Key designs from TIX. Each key is unique now. Moving on.

Well, I cant tell what screen or situation that could be based on the description, . You don't have to test if the big knight gets stuck at times, because he will. He is much larger than the square which the game was designed around. You either try to back off which he often can wiggle free, or hit revive button to go back to a checkpoint. He is actually the most challenging icon to use due to his big clunky size, but I enjoyed the sprite so much (from Ye Old Adventure II contest ) that I just had to include him! The fix I put in recently probably reduced the chances of Blue Knight getting stuck. Since he has 4 frames of animation, I have found that the different pixel placements help him to get free if he gets tangled up. The thing I could fix is if you can repeatedly get stuck in a certain situation and can't get free. A screenshot would be very helpful. If you watch the gameplay video from a few posts back, I got stuck changing screens with Helmet Knight, but I backed off to the prior screen and entered the new screen a few steps to the left where no log was. That isn't a glitch, it's part of the design of navigating the mazes and obstacles.

Yes. Once I finalize Key shapes and colors, I will post a new set of demos in all the formats.

Holy smokes! That's a lot of keys! I will have to review some of those new key designs. I think it would be visually interesting to have a unique key bitmap for each of the 4 keys. But the engine is hard coded to assume each key has the same bitmap. I have to be careful not to add too many cycles for override code to get each key to point to its own bitmap in RAM. AND i have to add code for the new data and load it into a free section of RAM. The draw sprites routine uses pointers into RAM hence I need to insert any new images into RAM for the engine to use. I already did all these steps to get the 1 new key bitmap in, as a test. I don't want to multiply using resources 2 more times, so I'll have to maybe recode a thing or two to be less hard coded and more efficient. Such a little thing , adding 3 new key images , but inserting into finished code can snowball into more work or problems than you might think!

I explored this genre years ago. I think the SOR series on SEGA Genesis is the absolute best, followed by Capcom Final Fight games. But there are scores of lesser games which are still fun.

I posted a video of the latest version. I play quickly through game 1. You can see the new Key cycling and bitmap.

There are power-ups in Adventure II. When you kill a dragon, or other things, you are sometimes awarded with SPEED as a powerup. Your color flashes right before the power-up wears off. Other power-ups are SHIELD and FLIGHT. Also, I edited my post before your question with a 2nd trial solution for distinguishing keys - a new bitmap for the yellow key. Check back 2 posts everyone.

I fixed the problem with getting stuck on Plants when you are Helmet Knight. On the subject of the color-cycling of keys ... I slowed it way down first of all. So each key holds its default color a lot longer, then a brief cycling / strobing within the same hue, then another 2- or 3- second wait, repeat. Its not as distracting as before IMHO and still offers some clues to what hue the yellow or green key is. Jury is still out on all this. I also experimented with just making the Yellow key double width .. I don't like it, personally: I also experimented with a different bitmap just for the Yellow Key. Maybe this will make it easier to distinguish? Comments? Maybe I should reverse the image for the Yellow key. Anybody want to draw me a new key bitmap within the same size limit?

I remember you could change the difficulty A B settings in real time on games like Megamania or Kaboom and others. You could visually see the difference -- missile were no longer guided, or buckets were now half sized. As long as it doesn't crash your game, there's nothing wrong with either approach of setting the modes in stone at game start, or allowing the change in real time. I was just wondering and curious how your code would handle that. Another option for City Defence could be A difficulty causes the missiles to drift left or right Yikes!

What happens if you change the difficulty A B switches mid-game?

I played my first game with the most recent ROM. (I've watched the game being played on ZPH though). Wave 10 about 10,500 points. At first I felt the game was too easy, but it does ramp up and keep the player on his toes! Nice work.

There was one time I preferred 30fps over 60fps, on Working Designs' Sega Ages Outrun game for Saturn. It is 30fps by default and it a perfect port. But you can unlock smooth mode which is obviously a super-smooth 60fps! But the 60fps refresh rate actually makes the racing action appear slower somehow and is 'too much' ! I prefer the original 30fps for that game. I'm not a frame-rate snob at all though. I've found that after a few minutes, my eyes and mind adjust to older games with slower refresh rates and its still fun. But for a racing game, sub-30 is not good and I've seen that a lot, it kind of ruins the effect. The weirdest modern-day effect I've seen a few times, and I've only seen this on my newer PS4 games, is when textures pop-in late. Star Wars: Fallen Order has a few late loads of textures and geometry and it is weird. Reminds me of Dreamcast Shenmue's street passerby fading in and out. I thought with the power , speed and memory of modern systems that the devs could prevent these types of things. But nope.

leech, for the XE version, tap the button briefly to flip the direction of a held item. Hold the button for a moment to drop it. 1-button control. Once you get used to it, it is just as effective as the 5200's 2-button controls.

It has been 1 month since I posted the release candidate demo for Adventure II XE. If there is any other constructive feedback before I call it final, now is the time to speak up! There have been well over 100 downloads of each of the various demo file formats, but only a handful of comments. So either people really didn't play it much, or everything is fine. Question 1 - did anybody play Dark Mode? Comments? Question 2 - did anybody get all 3 dots and find the secret screen? Comments? Question 3 - anybody familiar with the 5200 version and have comments about this enhanced port? Just wondering. My next plan of action -- I'm going to look into addressing these things based on feedback: 1. Distinguishing Keys (mostly yellow vs green) - I will either make the Yellow/Gold key to use an Orange hue (I'll see how it looks first), and /or I might just make the yellow key it's own graphical image/bitmap. I'm not sure if I want to keep the color cycling of the keys or not. I made the keys "glow" or "pulsate" so I could clearly tell which key it was (I've described this problem a few posts back). I might slow down the cycle or eliminate it altogether, but if we can't easily distinguish the key colors on various screens, I'll have to leave it in , in some way. I've only heard 1 person comment on this so far. ==> 03/07/2020 10:30 PM - see a few posts down. I slowed down the KEY color-cycling, and also gave each of the 4 keys their own unique bitmap. Perhaps i dont need the keys to cycle colors anymore. 2. PAL -- I will look into making a PAL -specific version, with modified colors and I might speed up the music a bit to sound better in 50Hz PAL. (vs 60Hz NTSC). 3. Collision issue / getting stuck at bottom of a Kingdom1 plant - I can duplicate this too so I'll fix it. I believe I've only seen it happen with the Helmet Knight icon, due to his helmet tassle/graphics and having both left/right images - when he is bounced back after a collision, I think the engine reverse the image too, causing you to get stuck in the graphics more easily. ==> 03/05/2020 9:30 PM - FIXED! thanks all, c(_)

That’s how I am actually. HZD is 30 FPS, but is mostly a very stable 30 and that is fine by me! But 60 would have been jaw dropping.

On that note, I played Sonic Mania Plus on PS4 quite a bit in February and continuing on to this week. I've owned it over a year but really didn't master it or fully explore it until now. Sonic Mania is awesome. I beat the main game with all the Chaos Emeralds, which wasn't a cakewalk either. Then I kept replaying that cleared save file , mostly in Green Hill Zone over and over, trying to beat more Blue Spheres stages. I also played through 2 rounds of Encore mode, with the double-characters which you can switch on-the-fly, and the new pinball bonus rounds where you can get lost characters back. It is a nice "encore" and reworking of the stages. Playing as Ray and Mighty feels fresh. So I think I'm starting to move on from SM now, but wanted to extol its virtues one more time! I also have started playing Shenmue III again - the DLC. I found all the Bailu Chan figures, some were quite cleverly hidden, even with a proximity radar some are hard to spot until you find the right placement an angle for Ryo. These help to power-up Ryo for the Battle Rally DLC, where you run checkpoint-to-checkpoint to a Goal, monitoring your time as you try to quickly defeat different opponents. At first I was bewildered, but it got quite fun. You can run past some enemies and not fight them, of course your score will be pathetic if you do that too much, and the object of each race is highest score. I've unlocked and played through all the rounds. Curiously, the Verdant Bridge race has crashed my PS4 twice. I've never seen the PS4 crash before (it just reboots).