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sack-c0s

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Posts posted by sack-c0s

  1. Posted

    It is the problem of any thread using the "vs" (versus) word in title (check C64 versus Atari)

     

    People starts thinking that one of the two should win. But reality is that though I understand both Z80 and 6502, I prefer more Z80. And everyone here have their own preference.

     

    That's all folks! :)

     

    Now go in peace and write some good code.

     

    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

    • Like 1

  2. Posted

    So how come the Z80 shines on SMS but on Spectrum it all looks like regurgitated toe nails?

     

    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.

  5. Posted · Edited by sack-c0s

    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)

  6. Posted

    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?

    • Like 1

  7. Posted

    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 :)

  9. Posted

    Hmm, nothing special, just 128k RAM, XL/XE OS and Basic off, thats all.

     

     

     

    @STE: Oh, another provocation...?!? How nice to do that again in 2012... So you are trying to turn this in a C64 vs. Atari fight again. Maybe Albert should throw out and ban anyyone here trying or provoking to do that... we have already been there, we already did this, it led to nothing (than just another locked thread) and we don`t need this anymore. If you cannot live with this, just don`t visit this forum anymore...

     

    -Andreas Koch.

     

    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.

  10. Posted

    Btw: "The SID Chip" .

    This video shows 3 different of them.... 6 versions were known....

     

     

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WajuTeUXXi0

     

     

    The sounding type might not be that different, but it's enough difference to have a nice sound on the one chip, making the "tuning" odd on the other chip.

    Actually, that guy used some old tunes that didn't really use the "specials" of each chip version.

     

    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...

  11. Posted

    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...

    • Like 2

  12. Posted · Edited by sack-c0s

    Excuse me, sir. Seeing as how the V.P. is such a V.I.P., shouldn't we keep the P.C. on the Q.T.? 'Cause if it leaks to the V.C. he could end up M.I.A., and then we'd all be put out in K.P.

     

    NFI. RTFM.

     

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

  16. Posted

    EDIT: We should start a new thread. Its rather off-topic now.

     

    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...

  18. Posted

    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

  22. Posted

    God, I remember these, never able to shift one of these joysticks..

     

    atari_terminator_joystick.jpg

     

    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

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