sack-c0s

I'll admit to having not played it yet so I can't give a full judgement - but Airball doesn't look too bad to me, but it does seem to be getting a fair few mentions in the unplayable games thread. My question is (hopefully) simple:- what is it that makes people want to put Airball in an unplayable games thread? I've never done an isometric game before, but I've been toying with the idea of doing one (platform currently unknown - possibly for more modern platforms as well as 8-bit and I'm definitely not ruling out the Atari), so I'd like to get a bit of insight here.... If anyone wants to put forth what they like/hate about other isometric games (A8/spectrum/whatever platform) in terms of what particular games either do right or wrong I'm all ears...

Agreed - there's a lot of potential there though. You need to be careful converting Amiga music because often the samples are detuned (either by accident or to account for the limitations of the tracker) and the notation is then 'off' to compensate. The result is it sounds okay, but the notation isn't an accurate representation of what you are hearing. as for 'Rotz'... well.. at least it's a new take on the Rickroll pretty well done, although I don't really like the song so even if it was 110% perfect it still wouldn't grab me - not a criticism of the cover though. Have you tried robocop 3 yet? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FA4qyr729ag I thought it might be a bit on the challenging side, but then I heard the NES version. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z754_a_aAHA The C64 version is a better (just for the ringmod sounds at the beginning and the arpeggios are smoother), but suprisingly the NES soundchip pulls the lead off really nicely considering it only has 4 pulsewidths and no filters. Maybe the pokey can pull it off after all with some of the instruments kicking around in these experimental threads?

Acorn isn't ARM - ARM was a spinoff (I think a collaboration between Acorn and Apple) and this happened during Acorns lifespan. Acorn stopped doing computers/workstations and renamed as 'Element 14', before ending up as part of Broadcom.

budget games on 8-bits? I thought half of us *lived on them* until we found 'other sources'

Get a C64 *and* an Atari, but skip the Spectrum? yup - I can agree with that, just make sure if you get attack of the mutant camels you go for the Atari version...

I'd imagine a 48K spectrum would be more common for that kind of thing - there's a lot of rubber fetishists out there

You want specifications? Doesn't there enough books for music generating exist? And even the coding books for the A8 and the functionality of POKEY is clearly described. Compared to the C64, would you like to have a tracker, only supporting 2 channels and some random noise generating? Technical details of how a machine 'works' is one thing, the quirks that you can exploit are a whole other thing. The way you want it to work to get the results you are after is probably the most important thing, and that's the one that severely needs documenting. You can't write a good wordprocessor 'just by knowing how ASCII works', nor a good artist-friendly paint program 'because you know the pixel format of the machine'. You need to know the user as well as the machine, which is why I'm repeatedly asking these questions. I think at this point 'artist friendly' is what's going to bring in the results you so badly want. If everything you described there was good enough then you could just compose in an assembler and RMT would be overkill. But you say it isn't.

Let's see... MIDI likes it's drums on one channel when chip musicians like to combine the waveform with the bass and slot into gaps, so that expands the bass+drums into 2 channels. a 3/4 note arpeggio to give a chord often gets split into 3 channels. There's an arpeggio lead instrument (base note+octave), that would end up as 2 channels possibly. Automated converters don't like reassigning instruments to other channels, so different waveforms/instruments might end up on 2 or 3 channels even though they aren't playing simultaneously.. it adds up quite easily. MIDI can reassign instruments and play multiple instruments on the same channel, but a lot of converters make no attempt to optimise whatsoever. I'm starting to like this tune now so I might have a go at it. As for having multiple versions posted that's a good thing because different versions tend to highlight different aspects of the music so it gives you different views on how it could work. When I try and do an 8-bit cover I start with the original and everything else I can find - covers, dance remixes, people doing piano covers on youtube... everything helps.

stop complaining at write the tools, or maybe create a single wiki point of reference so that someone with the time can get the information and know what they are building perhaps? You complain about a lack of tools, but the tools coders are complaining about a lack of specification. Feel free to break the cycle when you are ready...

the Amiga version shown is rubbish - and there's no technical reason for that. Probably just ported the notation across from one of the other machines and slotted instruments into the player that aren't in tune.

I dunno - for those who feel the need to obsess over every last cycle, make the most of a limited amount of power and generally take pride in low-level code there's always GPU driver development. worked out nicely for me. It's not that the skills are irrelevant - you just need to figure out who needs 'em.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OK7pfLlsUQM I enjoyed that film, and I wasn't around in the 1930s. I assume 99% of the cinema weren't either. The thing with 'The Artist' is you need to see it in a cinema - the retro style and the experience of seeing it in that way is part of the overall feel of the thing and is why it works. Now if someone doesn't understand why you have a C64/Atari/Spectrum/Amiga/etc. set up aruond the house replace 'film' with 'game', 'silent movie' with your genre of choice, and 'cinema' with 'original hardware' and you get a pretty reasonable way of explaining things.

the tricky thing is 'can you plug the cheetah annihilator joystick that commodore used to bundle with machines into an Atari and play 2 different games with it?' My money is on 'No' - you'll find out why about 5 minutes into the first game when you have half a joystick in each hand...

my comment was more about web forums in general - not just related to Atari, or even computers for that matter. People just have this streak through them where they will just 'to hell with what you say - I'm doing this just because' and will do something because you say they can't or shouldn't. Funny thing is I know that it equally applies to me, and it's a big chunk of why I like 8/16-bit stuff because 'that's not possible - you won't ever manage that on $SOME_HARDWARE' tends to come up quite often and be a pretty good motivation for coding stuff

but it backfired and turned into a reasonable discussion about the relative pitfalls of all platforms in a reasonable way, with code to back it up and a collaboration. all FW proved is that people won't do what you intend. Maybe Albert could just rename AA 'flamepit that makes 4-chan look civilised' and retire from moderation as everyone behaves like an angel to prove a point?

Well, such games you can write in Atari Basic on the A8, really... Charmode movement is no big deal on the Atari. But, what you can hear is the 16 bit sound with faster updated sounds than 50Hz. I'm sure you know what's coming next... Come on - you don't even need to get your hands dirty with 6502 to prove that

conversation over - MrFish just won it

basically it's a fixed platform. That C64/Atari 800/48K spectrum is the self-same machine that you had last year/decade/in 1983. If the software is getting better it's because the people are getting better at it rather than throwing a faster CPU/GPU/more RAM at the problem and hoping it will go away. I just like that problem-solving element of it.

I am relaxed, or at least as relaxed and sane as anybody possibly can be after providing technical support for packard bell PCs for 2 1/2 years of their life - hence the joking . I do like the idea - I'm just starting to wonder now how much PC you could get into a broken commodore PET

10 REM goattracker sound player for the C64 20 SYS 4096 30 SYS 4099 40 FORA=0TO7:NEXT 50 GOTO 30 60 REM well that was easy enough

can we get SIO99 a BBC micro? pretty much a framebuffer strapped to a 6502 and the same kid of soundchip as an ST, but with an amazing BASIC. then we'll see how far he gets. And as far as moaning about technology and it 'being difficult' I don't think anyone really has the rights to bitch about recreating the output of the Radiophonic workshop given what they had to do to get those sounds and compose in the first place. Now if nobody minds I'm off to go scrape my carkeys down a pianoframe...

oh do sod off with the 'Commodore BASIC is crap' rant already - we *know*, we just couldn't care less.

Now that would definitely upgrade a Packard bell, although to be fair throwing a pocket calculator in there with dead batteries would be an upgrade to a PB so it's hard to find a scenario that wouldn't be considered an improvement.

Thinking about it some more (its been a long time since I coded on the ST) it probably does read/and/or/write at the left edge of the polygon raster line (if not 16 pixel aligned) then writes blocks of 16 pixels and then read/and/or/write to complete (if required). It's a 256 colour mode (I think) so it's going to be a byte per pixel. I've not done ARM for a while now, but I think I'd probably use byte writes to bring myself up to a word boundary, fill the registers with the colour and have an optimised STMIA R0!,{R1-Rn} unrolled section to fill the polygon which weighs in at N+1 cycles (N being the amount of registers written) to fill N+4 pixels, and then byte writes to finish the line off again. No read/modify stuff needed. That said I heard somewhere that Zarch just writes out single bytes in a loop to do its polygon filling so is running about 25% of the speed it ought to. I wasn't hinting at anything regarding mice on the Atari - I was just asking a very open question because I don't know *anything* in that regard - I assume there's some way of doing it but I was unsure if it was trivial to implement, a pain in the ass, if there's one standard mouse people use, or many, or if they are common/rare... Those kind of things were running through my mind. Maybe if we're looking for an Archimedes game to resurrect for the Atari 'Arcturus' might be worth a look? (The interlace effect is the video capture/youtube upload - it's doesn't draw alternate fields to keep the speed up) Maybe dropping the texturing and doing that for the A8 would be better? The game wasn't such a hassle to control* and the action a little gentler so it should be a little less harsh on the 6502 trying to deal with it. *That said, Zarch was how I first learned to use a mouse - I was flying that thing around before I was using a desktop.

I'm not so sure - what's the deal with connecting a mouse to the A8? In my mind it's probably the least confusing way to play Zarch