pwalters
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Posts posted by pwalters
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Thanks Al!
Let me know when/if you need anything from me to help this effort move forward?
And to everyone in this forum, thank you for your continued interest and help in getting this game released!
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The long and winding road to release almost seems appropriate for a game that sat in my storage room for nearly 40 years.
I've submitted the Arkyology manual to Al. We agreed some time ago that Atari age would do the official release. It's been sitting for some time now, but perhaps it'll get moving forward.
It might help if you could let Al know of your interest?
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This is very nice, Swami! I like where you are going with this. The picture is representative of the layout of the game, so it works well.
On the animal names, I like all three of your suggestions -- it is (or was supposed to be) an alligator.
I had lunch with David Crane at a CES show in '92, I was doing some work for Absolute Entertainment for a GameBoy cart. David was really down to earth and easy to talk to so I like calling the bird a 'Crane'.
How do the patches work? Is it something printed in the manual or is it an actual patch of some type?
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I've been conversing with Albert this morning and we would like to get this cartridge out early in 2020. Things are a little bit to hectic right at the moment with the Portland show coming up, and the holiday season.
To that end, Albert tells me the first thing we need is the verbiage for the manual on how to use and play the game.
With the high level of creativity and enthusiasm in this forum. I would like to try a little 'Crowd Sourcing' to get the manual text done.
I know many of you have seen/read prototypical game manuals a lot more recently and often than I have...
I've read through some and here are the basic sections that I've seen:
1. GAME NAME
2. Description teaser for what the game.
--- Example: Guide Noah through the Ark helping him feed and take care of the animals during the flood. Noah must navigate through 3 levels, avoiding obstacles such as birds, turtles, and alligators .. ( more descriptive text)
3. Game Play : Description of how the game is played, what the buttons do and why..
4. Controls <perhaps redundant as number 3 above kind of covers this?
5. Final advice and/or challenge : Example: 'Can you guide Noah through 40 days and nights?'
I'm positive this group can put collaboriatively put together a great manual!
Anyone care to start?
PS: Just a note that my lawyers had to pound into my thick skull years ago: The verbiage will be public domain. No royalties will be paid, and no copyrights will be inferred.
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Yes, I visit the forum every now and then. I've spent the past year working most waking hours developing a new company and its products, so haven't had time to do much else.
I very much want this to be released as a cartridge. It would be nice to see the final chapter of this game that was developed 36 years ago.
My attempts to make that happen with others have failed - which is why I released the ROM a year ago. I've contacted Albert again to see if he is willing to move forward. If not, in a few months I might have the time to put into it.
I'll try to post more frequent updates.
Thanks for your enthusiasm! One of the things I liked about developing games was the thrill I got when I'd see the game being played and enjoyed by others.
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Watch the bird's animation closely.... As the bird flies along there are at least 4 spots where Noah is safe standing up and with a little practice you can can even run right under the bird without slowing down.
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I'm just curious if those who have played this game much have figured out the trick to avoid the flying birds without ducking?
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In the ROM that I released, there is no serial number.
In the upcoming AtariAge cartridge release, they will be serialized.
There will also be 2 versions of the game on the released cartridge. The original 1983 version, and a new updated version that will have a number of extended features -- power-ups, speed boost, etc.
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Very cool!
Awesome you made you made your own RAM board for the 2600, was it inspired by Arcadia/Starpath's SuperCharger RAM board?
Well I had seen the 'SuperCharger' but it was seeing and playing with the Frob that got me going on it. I had bigger plans, but with the Atari crash, and with young children to feed I had to do other things. Worked at HoneyWell's large scale mainframe division for a few years.. I still laugh when I see Intel based PC's or Apple come up with a 'brand new way' to do things, when we were doing that and more in the '80s -- but that's another story.
In the late 80's I got back into game making. I had a large 65c816 project and wrote a C compiler just so the project would be easier to manage. I also built a full dev system for the 65c816 processor that was later used on Nintendo's SNES and sold it to developers. I based it on the 'Grammar Engine' ROM emulator, because they had built in a communications channel that allowed the development PC to communicate through a 'virtual' serial port in the ROM emulator to the cpu. The emulator also let the PC control reset, trigger IRQ and write data anywhere into the ROM emulators space. With the small monitor in the game code, you would get full breakpoints, dump all register values, single step through source code, snapshots, and real time modifications of data values. Sold it to a number of SNES game developers and development companies.
The SNES used the 65c816 CPU. That CPU was designed by the Western Design Center and licensed to companies that wanted to use it such as Nintendo. WDC was founded by Bill Mensch and they were located about 2 miles from my house. I considered Bill Mensch a friend and I had worked with him off and on various projects since my early days at Enter-Tech. It was nice be able to drive over to WDC's offices and talk with the chip designers on its ins and outs.
Perhaps a little bit off topic as the tools were late 80's into the early 90's.
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Wow that is a really advanced devkit with the primary features of a modern IDE, did your 80's assembler feature macro support as well?
I find Tron more interesting but there is a debugger built into the emulator that many programmers like to use for the equivalent feature set you had in your expansive 80's setup.
When I first started at Tuni / Enter-Tech, my first project was the El Grande 5 card draw arcade machine. The tools they had available for development was a single EPROM programmer. El Grande was simply a mod off of a platform they licensed from a San Diego company. But to make changes I had to build by hand and then manually enter the binary code into the Data I/O EPROM programmer. Fortunately it wasn't too long until they bought the first Genrad/Futuredata.
Yes, it supported macros. Also it built object files, and had a linker -- not all would do that back then. I also did 2600 projects at home using a board I made that operated as a RAM cartridge. I'd build the code on my Atari 800 and load it into the RAM cartridge by pushing it out the 800's joystick ports It took 3 ports to have enough signals to manipulate the RAM cartridge. I had also built an EPROM programmer that was controlled through the 800's joystick ports, but the RAM cart was, of course, faster and easier.
The Genrad/FutureData system was really expensive -- $25k in 1982. That would be over $65k in today's dollars.
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I'm not seeing it. Got a snapshot (=) from Stella? The topmost glitch that I know about is the 2 green dots on the scanline that just precedes drawing the upper tubes (the gfx register is set to #$55 a little too soon).
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With Stella's video settings on 'default' the right half of the top line are showing as gray. During movement it fluctuates as well...http://www.atariage.com/forums/gallery_ips/gallery/album_1483/gallery_43582_1483_1700.png
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Current dev:
Been optimizing and trimming superfluous Romspace (over a page free in both banks now). Intermission roll still not fixed yet, tho.
For those who find the game a bit too challenging, I added a couple of options:
Bonus chances, earned after each feeding stage, are normally not allowed to go above 3. When the left difficulty switch is on B / Beginner, they will. The game will only display a maximum of 3, tho.
Alligators can be switched out when the right difficulty switch is on B / Beginner. They will only appear when this switch is on A / Expert.
Those options make the game considerably easier, so I put the boat in "water"
Also:
In addition to adding animation for the porcupine, setting the TV type to Color also corrects the day counter (reading 100-128 instead of 0-28).
Arky-Mod(fix_v3).bin seems to introduce an odd artifact at the top of the Ark when played in Stella. I see a gray line top of the Ark starting at about midway through the scan. It flickers a bit seemling based on movement?
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Does anyone know what tools Atari programmers had on their desks to write games back in those 2600 days? What computers and assemblers (maybe in-house emulators) were used? What sort of equipment there were in Atari labs - scopes, multimeters, logic analyzers? How software and hardware debugging were performed?
Just wondering
... I see this is quite an old thread, but I thought I would chip in here with what I used to develop 2600 games in the early '80s.
At work ( Enter-Tech LTD), we had two GenRad/FutureData dev systems. These were full ICE (In-circuit-simulator) devices. Here's a link to some info on these: https://pcmuseum.ca/details.asp?id=574
We took the 2600, cut it open, removed the CPU and placed a socket that converted the 28pin package to a standard 6502 40 pin header. The GenRad's ICE prob then was plugged directly into the 40 pin 6502 socket.
For it's time it was a very advanced tool. Having an ICE that supported multiple hardware breakpoints, hardware timers so we could time how long it took to run blocks of code, and rapid build/test cycles was very useful.
The units had 2 8" floppy drives, and internally it had a RAM file system. In the morning we would load up the RFS with the code, compiler, editor etc. Then we could get very fast (for the time) compilation cycles.
We used these dev systems for all of our 6502 work on the Atari, the Moppet video arcade games, and the gambling Card game products.
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Do I get a patch? I got on a roll and achieved the score below using the original ROM, my Sunnyvale light sixer and new (fully upgraded) CX-40 joystick from Best Electronics.
I'm going to bed now.
I believe you now hold the all-time world record on Arkyology! Congratulations!
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Me too. Probably something that would have been fixed during final polishing.
Players want to fight the game, not the controls!
I designed the movement on and off the ladders. Getting on is easy, if Noah is standing within a few pixels of the ladder he will 'jump' onto the ladder by moving the joystick up or down.
Getting off the ladder is easy to do so on an original joystick or even with keyboard using stella if you move in the stick in diagonal directions. If so then he stops moving when he reaches the next platform (either upper or lower) he stops moving exactly at the jump off point whereupon you simply move the joystick in the direction of travel you want to go.
We didn't do the jump off the ladder while midway up/down it because Noah's head would disappear in the area of the animals and tubes.
Just an observation on the suggestion to mod it to be easier -- IMHO - If you play a mod to make a game easier then you aren't really playing the game.
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Sounds to me like it is impossible to do. Perhaps Pauls memory is failing him on that possibility. Or maybe it was possible at one point during programming but it was inadvertently altered while changes were made. Either way, I tried a few times, and got the feeling it was too difficult, if not impossible. And since I soon realized it was easier to lead the aligator away anyhow, that was the method I chose to stick with.
<snip>
I mean, even with having just one action screen, (but used twice mind you for 2 unique tasks) it still somehow manages to come off as an action/adventure game for me. A solid 8 with potential to have been a 9. And as a point of reference, here are some 2600 action/adventure games that I personally consider to be perfect 10s.
Jungle Hunt, Hero, Pitfall 2, Montezumas Revenge
Thats a heck of a neighborhood up there, so for 1 Atari game out of over 400 to be just below that is impressive. Paul had a winner on his hands. Its just unfortunate how the game industry was back then.
Haha, well my memory could very well be deteriorating with advancing age...
We wanted the alligator to be impossible to jump. I remember the first time I saw him get jumped, George was playing the game in one of our high-score competitions, and on one of the higher really difficult levels he jumped the alligator. Up until then we thought it was impossible. After that we all started trying it and eventually got to where we could do it in about 1 in 20 tries. I haven't dissected the pixel-by-pixel movements of the player vs alligator, but I do remember it being just barely possible.On the rating, wow! thanks! To be even mentioned in the same review with those titles is quite a compliment.
There were a number of things you mentioned we had planned, and some that we had implemented. Unfortunately we were stuck with 8k ROM and just couldn't fit it all in, so we had to cut. On the higher scoring, do you remember that quite a few games back then started simply adding an extra zero, or 2 (or just x100) at the end of the score so it looked higher? We didn't want to do that and thought it would be a better feeling if the player earned the higher score. Perhaps we were purists, but that's why the score isn't overly gratuitous. It's just a preference, but I do understand looking at a score of 100000 feels better than looking at 1000.
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Some Noah's Ark art is quite strange.
That's got to be one of the weirdest ones I've seen!
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Very impressive, it took some effort to get that far!
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Today I'm happy to announce that AtariAge will build and release the official Arkyology cartridge. As with other AtariAge releases, this will be a boxed release with professionally printed materials. A date has not been set, but I expect it will progress quickly.
Many thanks for your patience. It's been a 35 year journey that will soon be complete.
Paul
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Off to New Jersey for AVGC this weekend. Thank you for your kind words. I visit the forums often but have been juggling alot lately. Atariage is the main forum that I use for the classics. Between teaching, YouTube, and conventions on the road it has been busy for me.
Thanks for reviewing the game -- I liked your comment "Who knew that Noah's Ark would be so dangerous"
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I did find these two articles. Nothing super-concrete. There are a couple big names with HomeComputer Software dropped in the second article. I used the quotes with "Sparrow Games" because I didn't know the exact name of the entity that was providing the game to Sparrow at-large. It sounds like HomeComputer Software developed games and Sparrow published and distributed them. How EnterTech would get involved is mysterious, but HSC may have wanted to farm out the task or Sparrow may have approached EnterTech directly. It's possible some other company was involved in a joint venture with Sparrow and other company was farming it out to EnterTech, but it's kind of complicated for a small-ish software spin-off at Sparrow. However, descriptions of The Music Machine game say it was published by HomeComputer Software, developed by Christian Software Development and distributed through Sparrow Distribution, so it's possible a whole other distribution-publisher-development branch existed from Sparrow in 1983.
Could also be this publishing company decided to try to move Arkyology independently in 1986, without Sparrow Distribution. The Chicago Tribune article mentioned way back in the beginning of the thread might give more insight, through a closer look, if anybody has a subscription.
Edit: BTW, I wonder what ever became of "Name that Hymn", not that I would be much good at it, and HomeComputer Software after this article? Video game crash for obvious, but it looks like Sparrow had at least three games they were marketing: Arkyology, David and Goliath and Name That Hymn. I also wonder if The Music Machine video game had been released yet, since there is no mention of it.
http://gdri.smspower.org/wiki/index.php/Blog:Change_of_Heart:_Secular_Developers_Turned_Christian (a 2015 blog article)
HomeComputer Software
Under a joint venture agreement, HomeComputer Software, creator of the obscure Super Micro handheld system, made several titles that were distributed by Christian record company Sparrow (or rather, Sparrow Distribution). These included the Family Bible Fun line for Atari 8-bit and Apple II computers and The Music Machine for the Atari 2600, which was based on a series of children's records. Name That Hymn and a 2600 game, Arkyology, were also announced. (The programmer of Arkyology appeared on the AtariAge forums, and a finished prototype was uncovered in 2015. The game was developed by a different company, Enter-Tech.)
From June 1983:
https://archive.org/stream/softalkv3n10jun1983#page/194/mode/2up/search/sparrow
HomeComputer Software (Sunnyvale, CA), developer of Family Bible Fun Games, has split off from parent company Personal Computer Management Corporation and established new headquarters in Sunnyvale. John Tedesco, Former PCMC vice president and founder, is now president of and director of marketing for HomeComputer Software. Daniel Shafer, creator of the Bible games, is executive vice-president in charge of production. Sparrow Records, a Canoga Park, California-based gospel record company, is marketing the Bible Fun series through Christian book stores nationwide as part of a joint venture in which HomeComputer Software will create additional games for exclusive distribution by Sparrow, beginning with Name That Hymn.
Very nice research there. I do recall there were several entities involved, and 'JohnTedesco' sounds very familiar. If he is the customer I recall - who appeared to be late 30's to early 40's, then he would be probably somewhere between 72 to 77 today.
I'm also trying to track down Tom Opfer (my direct supervisor), and/or Pat Reed as they both had much more dealing on the business side. I talked with Tom several times in the early to mid 90's but haven't since then.
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I'd like to chime in here. At this point, I'd dare to say that Stella (and 6502.ts) are very close to being perfect replicas of the VCS, and the remaining known issues in emulating the hardware are *very* specific edge cases. While there is always the possibility that a glitch is an emulation artifact, in almost 100% of the cases it is not.
In the case of this game, the "bugs" that people mention on this thread are the consequence of the incomplete startup code in bank 1, which I understand wasn't an issue during production as the logic on the cartridge would always power up in bank 0. This is arguably the consequence of the emulation not recreating the specific hardware your production boards would have used, but I'd like to stress that it is not an emulation glitch either --- if you'd burn EPROMs and build simple PCBs does that do not always start up in bank 0, you'd see exactly the same issues on real hardware
Not arguing any of that. An emulator has complete control over every aspect of the game so things like hardware ROM access timing aren't part of the equation. In fact in about 1998 or '99 I xfered the Arkyology binary from the Kontron dev system to my PC, and ran it on Stella to show my children (which is the only reason it survived till today). I remember it seemed to work pretty flawlessly and I saw no problems at the time other than the game play was slower than the cart in the 2600 was. Of course that was with a 266mhz Pentium 2 so it was impressive that it could run at a playable speed at all.
I suppose those of us who develop classify a 'bug' as an error, in design or implementation especially if it doesn't meet the design specifications. Where a user that just wants to play the game calls a 'bug' anything that interferes with game play?
My grandchildren have also played it but they got bored very quickly and went back to their tablets and phones...
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Interesting discussion going on about Sparrow... Unfortunately I wasn't on the business side of things so I can't give a definitive account on that.
Here's what I know.... along with some of the technical side that also played into the overall saga:
I don't recall the name of the company we were developing for. 'Sparrow' rings a bell, but I just can't be definitive as I don't recall. There was one individual -- whose name I cannot recall -- who was the 'customer'. He was driving the project as the customer and he was to take delivery of both Arkyology and David and Goliath. He spoke of his 'ministry' and who the targeted demographic was to be for this game -- which was mid teenage years (part of why the game play is on the challenging side). I do recall that there were problems with payment from our customer. At one point he told me that he had personally mortgaged his house to try to pay for the projects. This was is part of why Arkyology was not released and David and Goliath wasn't finished back then - and also why the copyright stayed with Enter-Tech, and eventually to me when I purchased it at their bankruptcy auction. It wasn't until after Enter-Tech was gone, that the original customer started up trying to make the ROM again, and contacted me.
The customer ended up not having the funds to move forward with the mask as it was quite expensive at $40k. The game was designed for a specific manufacturer's F8 masked ROM - not today's laissez-fair home brewed circuit boards. As such there were specific functionalities that we counted on. Such as guaranteed startup in bank 0, guaranteed timing on bank switching. One other thing that gave it faster timing was inside the ROM, the -CE was always on and -OE was what was toggled on a memory fetch cycle. (This is an old trick on the 6502 and later 65816 to get 20ns or so faster response from the ROM).
They were playing it with a hand-built F8 board. Propagation delays were non-standard, startup was not guaranteed in bank 0, and their board was a little heat sensitive meaning when it was cold the game would get a bit flaky. The problems they saw in their hand-built board disappeared with a short blast from a heat gun - which indicated they had a marginally too tight timing in their circuit.
Most, if not all of the 'bugs' I'm reading about here in the forum are what I would term 'modern' problems. Play on emulators, or newer Atari platforms either didn't exist, or were never the target have not a reasonable expectation of working 100%. I can tell you there were literally thousands of hours of play testing on our end. While the game was developed using an Kontron/Futredata In-Curcuit-Emulator, we also built our own 'f8' type board that was very close in timing to the masked ROM's specs that we were targeting.
One of the advantages of the Kontron was it had metering capabilities that were very nice to use in building a 2600 game. One was you could set it up to count -- in real time while running -- timing from a starting trigger point to and end point in the software. This allowed us to pretty easily get exact timing on the video loop.
--edited for clarity
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Paul,
The original & unmodified Arkyology rom data is officially documented & safeguarded. And the purists like myself, have used that original file that you uploaded on here to build our own personal cartridges.
Any & all modifications that may be done to it over the years will never replace it as such.
And even if you would have released it officially through a small production cartridge run, the rom data would still eventually become public & would still be hacked & disected & modified a thousand times over.
Hey,
Thank you for you comments, I appreciate seeing them -- and this goes to all the others who have commented as well.
Honestly I think the mods are pretty cool. I'm not against them at all. Also, I knew it was inevitable that there would be hacks, mods, and what have you out there.
I just think that releasing them with the same name really could cause confusion and muddy the waters so to speak.
So my train of thought is to ask those who do release mods to change the name of their release in a way that notes it's a mod. And yes, there is no way to enforce it and anything could happen and this would merely be a request.
Thanks!
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Arkyology - New prototype discovered - Finished Game!
in Atari 2600
Posted
I like it! Very well done!