sack-c0s

for fecks sake... A newcomer turned up looking for advice and what he got was this thread, mostly derailed by Emkay pushing his personal agenda (which he personally can't be bothered to code) again, causing confusion. If I were coming into this thread to check answers to my question because I'd gotten the urge to code something I'd think 'sod this' and go do something else instead. Don't you get it yet Emkay? This is counterproductive. Even if I were some kind of deranged C64 fanboy who wanted to use every trick in the book to prevent people writing anything new for the Atari I couldn't do *half* the damage that you do by taking these threads off at your own skewed tangent.

The thing is I prefer the Z80 to the 6502, BUT I prefer 6502 *machines* to Z80 ones. the 6502 ended up in the more interesting machines

much better support hardware - the SMS graphics chip isn't that different from the one in the MSX and has it's own memory pool to avoid contention and cycle-stealing from the CPU. The speccy basically has a 2bits per pixel framebuffer and colour RAM and that's it.

Tempus: A great piece of advice right now if you want to learn is to Skip over any post made by Emkay because he's a bit special and goes off the deepend. Keep listening to the people whose posts appear around his and you'll find a great deal of useful stuff though.

i did a similar thing on the archimedes in school a desktop app with no window that waited a random time and played a sample of 'OI! Over here!', only loaded on as many different machines as possible. Annoyed teachers no end

I grew up on the C64, so the only difference between assembler and BASIC was the speed it ran at, so this one bit of advice is based on my experiences there. If you go the basic route pay particular attention to the PEEK and POKE instructions, as once you know how they work and can control things that way transitioning to assembler will be a lot easier because that's the closest to how you will be working in 6502 (or any assembly language for that matter)

The thing with the Atari Turrican test there is that Turrican seems to be build on the shoulders of Metroid, and the colour choice there has a very Metroid feel to it. So has anybody thought of doing a solid, playable metroid-esque game whilst others carry on searching for a means to do Turrican?

How is multitasking going to work out with the 6502 do you reckon? I can see this being less of an issue with the Z80, as you can just repoint the stack freely, and it doesn't have the concept of zeropage but the only way I can see of context switching with a 6502 is to physically back up from $01ff down to the stack pointer, and the designated area of the zeropage, which is a bit of a ballsache if I'm honest. I'm not ruling out the possibility that someone has thought up some nice clever trick to ease the problem though - and if they have I'd be interested to know

Now there's a bit of hardware we can all get enthusiastic about that wouldn't go under-utilised

I agree with him actually - if someone were to do a reasonable version of a game that ran on a stock 80s machine, and a slightly improved version that needed a massive memory expansion I'd rate the stock version coder a lot more. This is regardless of if the game runs on a 320k Atari, a C64+super CPU, some kind of Russian frankenspectrum... 80s game coders get a lot of stick for 'not being the best they could have been' and unfairly compared to people using 4 or 5x the RAM on a newly upgraded machine. There's also the fact we don't have a producer hovering over our desks demanding we have an entire arcade conversion at the duplicators in 3 weeks time. That's not to say I'm against these upgrades - if people are going to fit them there's no point in not coding for them and pushing them for every last cycle and byte. I'd just rather if people made comparisons they were made like-for-like. We can do better than the 80s coders, artists and musicians but we *are* building on their research and have far better tools.

it's not the tuning - that would only change between PAL/NTSC like pretty much all systems of the time. It's the filtering that's different. the 6581 (old SID) has a much harder filter than the 8580 (which appears to have 3 settings - 'off', 'on' and 'flatten everything'. The other problem is that the filtering relies on external resistors and capacitors which have the usual 5% tolerances, so even if you took 2 identical SID chips from the same batch these external factors would still make a big difference on the old SID. It's the same problem the A8 has with colours - but at least in the Atari case they put in an adjustable pot to allow you to compensate for it...

A mixed sound signal would be great if at all possible - the SID and the POKEY kind of complement each other and it'd be nice to hear what kind of music you'd end up with. Failing that - SID for music and POKEY for effects, because that would be each chip doing what they do best and if you didn't have a SID cart you'd still get effects ingame so it wouldn't be a total disappointment...

NFI. RTFM. (Translation - I'm not terribly sure, you may want to consult the documentation supplied.)

I think it's BBC basic (or ARMbasic if you've got a raspberry pi kicking around and RISC OS on a card)

maybe he's busy trying to find the optimised version of 10 on error goto 20 20 print "dixons is shit" 30 goto 20

I would assume it's just a really creative tech-tech routine http://codebase64.org/doku.php?id=magazines:chacking7#tech-tech_-_more_resolution_to_vertical_shift not been in with a debugger to see for certain though

possibly - but the topic does at least prove the point of these competitions. We got some new games to play and people are throwing around questions and ideas because they were inspired. If I can find someway to rebalance my home/work life I'd like to throw my hat in the ring for next year - but my track record is well known for that...

is it possible on the Atari? when I saw that colourful chessboard I was thinking the opposite - that someone had actually managed to pull off a nice Atari effect on the C64

I'm not against 3D - I just have a set of requirements for what I do: 1) I'd rather it not be a demo - there's plenty of 3D demos and I'd rather do a game 2) If I'm going to do a game I'd rather it be in a genre I like 3) It has to run at a playable, fun speed on the given hardware so given that I'd rather not do a wolfenstein clone, don't really like dungeon crawlers and star raiders is a bit of a classy act to follow I'm not sure what I would do given the constraints of 8-bit machines. I'm open to suggestions on that front though

So.. is 2nd place enough to convince people that the 'c64 crowd' do actually have a lot of love for the Atari after all, or do we have to win it next year?

I'm not sure the archimedes brings much to the table in terms of gaming on that machine to be honest, although the A3010 should be considered pretty important because the ARM250 was effectively the first ARM-based system-on-a-chip, which has evolved into the kind of platforms that most games are played on at the moment.

I've played with one of the Intel clovertrail-based tablets and I thought it was quite nice, but I might be a bit biased on that one given the dayjob

They should cross that design with the Cheetah Annhilator they used to give away with the C64 towards the end of its life. Then you'd have something that would look like a grenade and shatter into a spray of shrapnel after about 10 seconds

I thought it was going pretty well actually - nothing wrong with the odd sly joke so long as the intent of the original thread is respected - and I reckon it was. for the record I've only ever owned a couple of C64c machines and they've stood the test of time - it's disk drives I keep killing

holy shit! there's this bloke in the bible trying to impersonate me. -Adam.