pwalters

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

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!

Hey Hizzy, I agree that any and all issues that make it more stable should be implemented. What I'm concerned about are changes to the graphics (Porcupine leg animation), and Noah's movement on and off the ladders -- if changed should be issued with a different name. Maybe something like M-Arky, or Arky-Mod or something just to indicate it's been changed from the original intent. Edit: Specifically I feel that this piece of history should be preserved as it was intended without confusion as to what version floating around is an aesthetic or game play mod. However, I'm very interested in the viewpoints of the community on this. Thanks!

I've been watching with interest your work in making Arkyology better suited for platforms that didn't exist when the game was originally made. I am however concerned that modern modifications, specifically that impact game appearance and functional play dynamics will cause confusion and inconsistent user experience with multiple ROMs floating around with differing game play. So in the interest of preventing confusion and trying to preserve the original intents, I would ask the following. 1. Modifications to the game that change any of the object's appearances or game play dynamics (such as climbing on and off the ladders, animal's animations, etc) SHOULD be released with a different name. Specifically should not use Arkyology, or the Arkology from your post. 2. Changes that stabilize the screen, or help it be more reliable on other platforms should also be noted as modifications, and not use the original name. I would very much like feedback from the AtariAge community on this.... I'm not sure if other games have faced this type of an issue before, but I do feel strongly, after holding this for 35 years, that the original should be the only version out there that uses the original name - Arkyology. Please post your thoughts on this, as it is an important point when it comes to preserving the history.... Perhaps we could even come up with a naming convention to follow in a situation like this? Thanks in advance, and I look forward to seeing your comments..

Wow, I'm impressed with all this creativity! I like the effort making the box.

On most days while developing the game, George, Rick and I used to have a competition to see who could get the highest score. I think this pushed us into feeling the game was too easy and we tightened up the difficulty. My criticism of the game is I think we made the difficulty increase too quickly. I think it should have ramped up slower.

On the difficulty, while the game was designed to be sold through the ministry, it was targeted at teens and above in difficulty levels. Granted, getting on and off the ladders do behave differently than most other games. I really wavered on this and was ready to change it several times. Here's how I designed that part - When getting on a ladder, anytime Noah's feet are on the black area he will 'jump' onto the ladder if you push up or down. When getting off a ladder it is designed for the player to push the joystick in a diagonal direction while moving up or down. Meaning of you are going up and want to go left at the top, then push the joystick in the upper-left direction so both of those inputs are active. When Noah gets to the top, he will automatically stop whereupon you simply move the joystick fully in the direction of travel. This game was also designed to favor patience. Hide in the 'tube' part of the ladder where no part of Noah is visible and wait until is is favorable conditions to jump out and hit the stall you are after. Hang out mostly on the far right or left side as the bird and turtle will always appear from the farthest side from you - giving you the most time to react. I'm sure gamers on this forum have figured this out pretty quickly, but it can be frustrating the first few times its played.

Yes, as I recall the head (wish I could remember his name) had mortgaged his house to pay for the development of these games. It's a long story not relevant to this forum, but he and I had a conversation about faith one time over lunch. As a young adult I was struggling with some faith based issues, and it really struck me how kind, caring and non judgmental he was in our discussion. That was new to me and I still appreciate his words. I've tried searching for any link to him and any of the other principals that I remember, but haven't found anything. He wasn't 'Billy Ray Hearn' who is listed on Wikipedia as the founder of 'Sparrow Records'. I had one contact with him a few years later. The hardware engineer from the Unitronix project (odd coincidence I thought at the time) was working with him to release Arkyology -- this was probably 1986(?) as I had the equipment and source code from the EnterTech bankruptcy auction. They had some concerns about the timing when it ran in their prototype hardware cartridge. That was the last contact I had with any of the principals and the last time I heard about Arkyology outside of my copy.

That's a very nicely restored TugBoat.. haven't seen one that clean in a very long time.... Watching it brings back the memories of when we developed that game.. Desert Race was on the same platform, pretty much identical to TugBoat but the graphics were changed and the course was modified a bit.

Hello Supergun, thank you for your kind words. Please know that I have no ill feelings toward Whiz, I wish him all the best and I will not now, or ever denigrate him. I also certainly don't want anyone to feel they need to take a side. This is merely a business disagreement that will be resolved and efforts in that direction are in the works. I have been hands-off on building the cartridge as I am seriously busy running a couple of companies and now starting a third. I had always planned on releasing the ROM binary, but wanted to do that after the cartridge came out. It's been just about 3 years since the creation of the cartridge started. I felt that was more than enough time and decided to go ahead and release the ROM binary to the community -- which does not preclude a cartridge. As original developer and copyright holder, that was within my right to do so. In retrospect it would have been kinder if I had forewarned Whiz instead of surprising him -- so my bad there. Whiz will not be left holding the bag, in the past I've offered to buy out the boards he's made, and that offer still stands. There will be a resolution and a boxed cartridge will be available one way or another. In the mean time, it thrills me to see so people enjoying the game that I've been holding for 35 years.

One of the 'tricks' I had to implement on this game is the 'tubes' at the top of the ladders. I'm using the same 'Player' object for both the left set of 2 and the right set of 2.. just redeploying that object twice on the same scan line. I wonder if that's causing the problem on the 'Portable' ?

Yeah, we had an association with a British company (I'll have to look up the name) that made coin-op boards/games that were interchangeable. Rick Harris was lead on working with them and supporting their coin-op games here in the USA. I never worked on that part much. I thought Dazzler was the best, the others were pretty much knock-offs of other popular games. The IP for these coin-op games was not owned by EnterTech. (I believe this was talked about early in this thread). The three of us, George, Rick, Barb and I all worked on the Unitronics version of these games. Andy was a part-time contributor to the software side. He was a EE and worked on the Hardware side mostly.

I didn't keep the physical tapes, but we had a device that we used to make a tape from a binary image.

Yes they were all finished. The Unitronics people switched gears for the Nth time and wanted to make their own computer system -- which would have been similar to the Commodore -- so the games were never released. I had the source code for *all* of the Enter-Tech games, hardware, and development systems up unto the spring of 2002. A major life change and I threw out everything from that era. The only game that survived is the Arkyology binary.

Yes, the binary I released was the final version we developed in 1983 at Enter-Tech. There have been no modifications or changes to it since then. On the developer names, I would like mine first since I was the lead on this game and preserved it all these years, as well as being the current copyright holder (or closest thing to it). I purchased the rights to all the games made by Enter-Tech at their bankruptcy auction in 1985 (well I'd have to look it up but it was either late 1985, or early 1986). I know there was one other gent who used to work there that asserts he bought the rights to the Poker games we developed while at Enter-Tech for $1 just before the shutdown. This may be so, but it really doesn't matter after all these years.

I vaguely recall having a discussion on the startup bank way back then... and the specs for the masked ROM that was to be used in manufacturing guaranteed the startup bank to be 0... Funny how all these years later it popped up as an issue. Thanks for quickly releasing a patched version!

I would buy one too, especially if the graphic design was good.... would be nice to see one finally

"$79.99 BIN [email protected]@K, ULTRA [email protected]##$$!!" Haha, gotta love it!

Yeah it gets pretty tough. Sometimes you have to hide in the 'tube' at the top of each set of stairs, until the coast is clear. A quick question, what type of console are you running this on?

Very Cool! I'm happy to see it getting played! It looks like you got through a few levels to ... how far did you get?

I'm certainly not happy with how this went either. Not all relationships work. Ours had serious communication problems. In retrospect, I believe a couple of phone calls wold have saved it, but that wasn't possible. In response to your comment on sharing the costs, a while ago I offered to buy the prepped boards and just wanted to be quoted a price for them. Even though that offer was a while back, it still stands. Releasing the ROM binary however, doesn't preclude a future cartridge. It might make the cartridge less valuable for sure, but it's still a possibility.

This binary is the original 1983 version with no modifications.

Interesting viewpoint. I choose not to engage in mutually hurling recriminations. I'd rather just move on from our failed working relationship.

It's been a while since this thread was opened. I originally wanted Arkyology released as a cartridge after all this time. After several years trying, I've decided to just release Arkyology here as a ROM file, and let it out into the world. It's been many years since I, George Hefner, Rick Harris, and Barb Ultis designed and created this game. Those were fun times. I didn't realize at the time what a special era we were in, and how enduring the legacy would be. So without further reminiscing, please find attached to this post, the Arkyology game image. This game is 8k in size and requires the F8 cartridge in order to run. Enjoy! Paul Walters --edited for clarity ARKYOLOG.BIN

Hey Thomas, thanks for the offer, but there are no technical problems. Just too many other things taking attention away from this....