sack-c0s

okay Emkay - explain precisely what you believe I have done wrong here, backed up by quotations from my posts. If you can't do that then just leave the thread.

Actually thinking about it the kind of ideas I have wandering around my mind probably aren't as original as I thought - I think mentally I'm possibly reimplementing a lot of elements of 'Bubble Dizzy' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kkw3TOJpWw4 Not entirely a bad thing though - although there's a lot of scope for improvement

Can we just delete emkays passive agression from this thread and keep the rest? It was going pretty well until he turned up again.

well I'd probably only waste them if you didn't

no worries - it's just a bunch of random ideas that may or may not ever be written by anyone ever, but there's no gun to anyones head to implement anything. people who bitch and moan like that are just sodding irritating

I'm not sure the original game is something I'd pursue - if it was something where the definitive version was on the C64/NES/whatever then maybe, but I don't think I've actually played a version that feels as right as the Atari 800 version of 'Kaboom!' so it's a bit of a stretch to improve on that and the Atari already has it. There looks like there could be some nice possibilities in Belljumper though. If you hooked up a second player and an option for platforms to collapse when you jumped on them then that combination would create quite a fun little game with lots of possibilities for maliciously screwing over the original player - something that's never going to stop being fun or maybe make them clouds so you sink through them the more times they're used to enforce progress over waiting around? or sidewinds as an extra obstacle? That's about 30 seconds of brainstorming from me - I'm sure people could think a little more carefully and improve on those

C64 version: Atari version: Don't get me wrong - I have a lot of love for the C64, but for some things you just need the Atari...

Nice - you've just solved the interface circuitry bit I was concerned about. Looks like you might've also sorted out the SIO side of things too, so I guess that leaves me to attempt the commodore serial bus instead

if you can flatten the memory out then any given 6502-based machine can run any others code, but then you have the issue of all the hardware writes and screen memory being in the wrong place. You might get lucky on the C64 and be able to configure a similar mode, but in this case that's not going to happen. Because the Atari is so flexible with various linear (well.. at least as far as a single line goes) modes and the fact you can repoint the graphics hardware to any address you want I'm guessing you just locate a block of system shim-layer code somewhere the original machine wouldn't touch (e.g because it's ROM) that sets up a DLI, fakes interrupts, translates keyboard input and writes it out to expected locations, etc. and manages the 'alien' code in a fairly transparent way. I've had commodore 16 stuff up and running on the Atari this way using this kind of technique

Maybe that should be made to work with the XEGS zapper - I'd guess people are getting a bit bored of bughunt by now

ahh - I was thinking it was on a pair-by-pair basis so was roughly like a 2BPP mode. Time to do a bit more reading on this...

I'm being an utter bloody idiot and missing a simpler answer, aren't I? If you have 1bpp with artificating like that, can't you just throw the same video data at a 2bpp screenmode, with the 4 colours set up to be representations of what they would artifact to on the Apple?

doesn't the apple renderer rely on artifacting that wouldn't occur on the A8 though? Or are you thinking of switching the graphics data over but just using the original render code?

Emkay - you aren't the victim, you are the problem. my last post regarding you was factually correct and if you feel hurt by that then I suppose that's what raw facts, laid out and backed up with evidence will do for a man if he doesn't like the picture it paints.

could be a good idea - the harsher sound of the pokey works pretty well for Galways style actually...

oh dear - it looks like bughunt is just everything that was wrong with Atari. Did some of the folks at the top think it was eternally 1980?

I have tried to get information out of him, and it's like getting blood out of a stone. All you get is more of his 'nobody will ever build my perfect tool' mentality - even when you ask direct questions about WHAT should be implemented in it and HOW. So you try and have a conversation whilst ignoring his presence and he stomps into the middle of it, claims his superiority and just pisses all over it. What I'm working on I'm pretty much back to discussing amongst a small group of people elsewhere to be honest - it's easier that way. On the technical front - I have toyed with converting code to an intermediate format from sources and then rewriting code for other chips as an experiement, but in this case I was just thinking of something to sanitise XASM/MERLIN/ACME/BBC BASIC sources so that I can pull shared logic from apple/c64/atari/BBC sources and build graphics frameworks around them. It'd still leave a lot of work to do, but at least it'd be the more interesting work, rather than a fun evening filtering DC.B/!byte/EQUB statements and fixing labels, ROL/ROR statements, macros, etc.

Sorry about the Emkay-based negativity there - I like a good technical discussion as much as the next low-level hardware-obsessed geek, regardless of which machine so long as it has an interesting chipset. It's just that he does rather grind you down after a few years of repeating the same kind of thing I'm beginning to think my next little project ought to be an assembler source file cleanser that can take esoteric source formats such as the PoP source and clean them up to work on more popular assemblers. It fits in around other things I'm working on at the moment and would probably be a useful thing to have...

I'd be more concerned about someone who considers themselves an authority when their last game was written back when I was a small child who could just about PRINT his name on the screen. I've learned *everything* in the time you've been kicking around whining that nobody does things according to your great plan. Quite literally everything. I've gone from that to an actual professional software engineer. We're talking the hours spent coding in the back bedroom, the education, the degree, actually finding a job, working through several products and the release of products that have an audience of literally millions of users. The funny thing is there's people in this thread who have done a bloody sight more than I have in the same time that put me to bloody shame! Now back to you again. what do you see? what have you done? Nothing. Nada. Sod all. Ni una puta cosa. So why don't you just break the bloody cycle, and get off peoples backs? You're just sounding more pathetic by the post.

..and ladies and gentlemen this is why we have a C64 version but no Atari version.

comm... oh sorry - wrong thread To be fair I think with a combination of using TVs and a monitor and the shape of pretty much every 8-bit machine I'm really surprised that we all don't resemble the hunchback of notre dame given the hours we've all put in. If you want ergonomics use an emulator - if you want the actual feel of the real machine in all its imperfect glory then by all means use one.

From only a passing skimread of the specs (spoken like a true driver engineer ) it certainly looks possible, and possibly easier than doing a commodore equivalent. software-wise I would possibly use RISC OS on the pi, as that way you get a GUI and filesystem, then you can just ignore it and hammer the machine natively to get the timings right (or at least you could in the 90s, I assume the 'ignoring the OS is as good as turning it off' approach still works and you can still reset the ARM vectors)

That's how I do copper programs on the Amiga, and how I'm doing it with some code I'm playing with at the moment on the A8

looking good

wow - Emkay pissed on this thread. Wasn't expecting that in the slightest...