sack-c0s

I think it really ought to be capable of most of the stuff an Amstrad CPC is capable of (although I acknowledge that referring to another British machine might not help, but you can google, look on youtube, etc.). the downside to the BBC is the TTL colour output, so colours either have Red,green or blue, or they don't. Back in the day Firetrack ( ) was considered one of the best games, and a good showcase of what the machine can do, but there is a hardcore of people developing new stuff.

To be fair if I made a list of games that started me on the slippery slope from wanting to write games as a kid that ended up with me being a gamedev right now I'm sure Timeslip would be somewhere near the top.

It's probably the biggest ballsache of a job to do even for modern machines. The amount of fun I've had in games where the physics has just exploded randomly due to inaccuracy...

Have you looked at how HAM works? It's not really suited to moving objects due to how colours are assigned. That said, you can cheat and get filled polygons for the price of a wireframe using these modes

Looking at more modern stuff I've been wondering about the possibility of something like Super Meat Boy. Ignoring the 2-button input for a minute (Mario style - one held to run, another to jump) I think it ought to be about possible, even if it is more like the warpzone levels rather than the main ones

This could make the compression issue a little easier: 101 tracks of source material coming in at around 30 seconds a song https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Music_for_Short_People

Wanted: Amiga Actually got: Acorn Archimedes but now I have all 3, so no worries

The only downside is that I could only like this once. That is some damn good work

The thing that bugs me about every time this conversation comes up is that if Commodore had pushed that bit further with the TED and gave it decent sprites then the plus/4 would've been the machine with almost all of the advantages that keep coming up on either side and we'd probably be discussing that instead.

I've attached the opening 3 patterns as a guide, but with caveats: 1) The notation follows the SID version I have, with the arpeggios in the right place, but the instruments are crappy for this tune and only there as a guide. 2) I haven't even tried to convert across the sync noise channel because when you play the notes standalone they make no sense whatsoever so I think they're completely useless outside of modulating channel 2 in the SID tune In the original tune the effect kicks in on the second pattern, with the second part of the sync sound effect on the third. These backing patterns carry the entire tune however, so if you get those sounding good then you only have the melody to worry about so tl;dr: just treat it as a guide to know where the notes go physician-pattern.zip

This one drove me mad trying to figure out how to do it on the bloody SID (even though it was a SID tune to start with). Ended up running a dissembler over the original tune and finding out that it was the sync bit on channel 3 so that the notes are modulated by the arpeggios on channel 2 Anybody have any theories on how you'd get something that sounds like the channel 2&3 sync effect that you hear between 8 and 30 seconds in on a pokey?

google actually does all of this in the search. I type '52 in hex' in the chrome address bar and i get the answer immediately

A cross-tracker with the playroutine running on the Atari with the editor on PC, so you get accurate sound and the comfort of PC-based editing. Probably asking a lot there though

the mastersytem also has a tile-mapped screen with X/Y flipping, so in addition to not having to write so much to the screen, you can probably avoid a lot of tile uploads by flipping existing tiles to get more usage out of them and avoid VRAM uploads. It's quite an underrated machine I think - it blows the NES away technically

if it's the SOC+Android approach I suspect then half the job for them is probably choosing the case, and the other half writing some kind of launcher to give a console frontend.

Weirdly enough that SOTB update was the reason I got a games job. I googled the studio, thought 'crap! they're just down the road from me... anyone else around here doing games?' Next hit down on google was hiring, so I went along for an interview.

I think I can get notation, instrument assignments and arpeggios out of the tables. Everything else is either painful to map across (such as slides), or SID-specific so it doesn't matter (like ADSR and waveforms). That said, ADSR timings are constant hardcoded values in silicon so I could just generate volume envelopes that match. If I'm honest I probably wouldn't though, because for me the one annoyance of the SID is the ADSR envelope. I'd have been happier with a pokey/YM-style per-channel volume control that you handled yourself in software because I find that more flexible.

The SID stuff seems to be heavily tied in to the code, so it's not as nicely separated as RMT seems to be. I've got a C++ class (that I wrote to export to another SID editor) which can extract all the data from a goattracker file, so maybe I can repack the pattern data in a RMT file and build the instruments again. A quick google shows that there's a dump of the RMT format layout here on the forum someplace

Well I think it's alright, but.... I think it would lend itself quite well to the pokey actually - it's mostly short notes, and you can tie 2 channels together to have more stable tuning for the longer lead sounds. I keep meaning to give it a try

Yeah.. You need to be a special kind of crazy to port Deus Ex. But that's enough about my coworkers

I'm a 36 year old game programmer, who is paid day in, day out to port large, commercial games between platforms, and I'm going to spell it out to you in the clearest terms: it. is. really. HARD. Do I mean that you should give up and not do it? Hell no - anything worth doing is bloody difficult, because everyone does easy stuff all the time. You just need to adjust your expectations and acknowledge that jumping into the code of a full commercial game that you don't even have the source code (and the associated comments) for is just asking for a rough ride. I get the c/c++ code from the original developers and even then it's a hard-fought battle to get it to fully work as expected. So how the hell can I even do it? Well the short, frank answer is 'I wrote a lot of crap games and code'. the long answer is 'I wrote a lot of crap code, followed by successively less crap code over a long period of time until I got to the point where I could do this'. For me 'A long period of time' means from my first barely-working light cycles clone in BASIC aged 6, through my teenage years, until today, so we're talking the best part of three decades where barely a day passed without me writing some kind of code or another. Admittedly I'm not the sharpest tool in the box, so I wouldn't rule out that someone could get from a standing start to doing what I do* considerably* quicker, but I think it's going to take more than a week and a few forum posts.

If I were encrypting something I'd be a complete and total b*stard and borrow a theory I read about on the ST. Sync to the VSYNC and use the raster scan position as part of the key. Let's see what happens when you freeze that

The practical problem isn't hardware - once you change the screen size you change the amount of lookahead and visible play space that the player has, which impacts on the level design. This is why I don't like MD->SNES conversions. They often just dump the mapdata in as-is on both version, but the SNES has a 256-wide visible area whilst the Megadrive/genesis has 320 pixels. You lose visibility of oncoming things on the SNES

That and inevitably the comment is embedded very close to the actual copy protection so you are effectively doing half the job for the cracker That said, I did once find a game whose protection was in a binary file called 'copyProtection'....

so Emkay... how's the port of Mayhem in Monsterland coming along? Seriously though - everyone wants a game, so it gets ported. Sometimes the A8 will do it better, sometimes the C64 will. In the odd screwed up occasion it'll be the ZX Spectrum. We can ebay every platform out there and have them all lined up on a shelf and miss out on *nothing*. Just let it go already...