skywaffle

Intellivania is as good as done and just waiting on artwork for the box. Super Mario Bros. seems like the most realistic one that could become finished afterwards, there is quite a bit done, although there is tons of polish needed, and music to create. I haven't been investing as much time into programming lately, so progress has been a little slow on that. The other game concepts I still toy with on occasion, but that 42kb size limit is an obstacle when you get into things like the Final Fantasy type game, or Megaman 2. Super Mario Bros has worked nicely with the map compression and basic graphics; I have been able to cram in quite a bit while keeping the size relatively small.

The Turbografx version is an impressive game. Even compared to many of the ports, they did a great job on that version. I kind of feel the same way about the gameplay, it's lacking compared to the overall atmosphere from the art direction and music. It's going to be difficult to capture any of that on the Intellivision, and I still don't know how far I want to take this, but it started as a curiosity after CMadruga brought the 2600 port to my attention LOL.

In most of all of the ports the character is centered horizontally. On the overworld there is only horizontal scrolling, but in dungeons the scrolling is both vertical and horizontal. Right now I am only using two sprites for the character. I have thought of trying to use three for more detail on the zoomed sprites, but it probably wouldn't look much better

I recorded a short video on my Intellivision with LTO flash to show the two variations. https://youtu.be/5mFp6KzTYFs

I have reduced the grams for the background to 51, leaving some for the main character, and room for enemy bitmaps. Some more probably should be cut down, but this makes things a bit more manageable. I've added some more animation, the ability to walk left and right, jump, and punch. Ducking and jump kicking is not implemented. Some basic enemy logic has been added as well. I have also been experimenting with using zoomed sprites to keep things closer to the size of the original game, but also having smaller sprites. I've attached both variations as ROMs and source for those interested in trying it out. sotb5_s.bassotb5.romsotb5_s.romsotb5.bas

@cmadruga I have been looking at various ports of this game. To be honest, I am only really familiar with the Lynx port; It's the only version I have played, and played through. The C64 version looks the least like the rest, but has some nice parallax effects that seem doable on the Intellivision with the small repeating mountain pattern, they also didn't bother trying to replicate any sort of gradient. It's difficult to decide which way to go though. As it is, the backgrounds can be optimized a bit cutting down the number of grams into the 50s without changing much visually. Reducing the mountains to silhouettes reduces the number of grams into the 40s, which leaves a lot available for enemies, and trees, and the well. Some of those can be dynamically defined as well.

Thank you! When I get more time to invest on this, I will try to more accurately replicate some of the controls. Pretty much all of the controls were done just from my memory of the game, so I am sure there are a lot of other differences as well in terms of jumping distance, movement speed, etc.

Thank you. I think you could do the same with an isometric game like those, it may require two sprites for masking to help keep the edges defined though, but I would think you could apply the same type of technique. I may have to look into that more.

Are you using the default control scheme for jzintv? for me, button 0 is the right shift, and 1 is the right Alt key.

Hello everyone, I was blowing the dust off of some old projects and figured I would share a binary of my work in progress for people to try out on an emulator or LTO. There are a few screens to explore through, and most platforming elements work pretty well. I meant to release this a long time ago, but just got sidetracked with other things. The controls are as follows: holding button 0 (top left), then pressing left or right will allow the character to walk slowly pressing left or right runs holding button 1 (bottom left and right buttons) and then pressing left or right will jump in that direction pressing up jumps vertically, and climb ledges above the player while running, pressing button 1 will perform a longer jump pressing down at a ledge will climb down holding button 1 while performing a jump, the character will grab a ledge if available holding button 1 while climbing down will allow the character to hold the ledge rather than dropping. persia24.rom

Ha! Multi-tasking isn't the word. More like short attention span Great progress by the way. It's really looking and sounding faithful to the original. Hopefully the ice banks can be animated without too much trouble (maybe through redefining the appropriate GRAMs?)

Sorry for the late reply. This will be released on a physical cartridge. I haven't given any thought to a ROM image release yet, and there is no release date either, but things are moving along. Box art is the current focus.

Impressive work! This has progressed very quickly into a very polished looking game.

Agreed. IntyBASIC is such a wonderful development platform, and for me brings a lot of the joy I used to get typing programs in BASIC on older computers. Seeing a BASIC compiler for the Intellivision was the sole reason for even attempting to make a game for the console.

Hopefully that wait won't be too much longer. Its been a long while since starting this project, but the game is completed. A thread was created in the main Intellivision forum that will be updated as the physical release gets closer.

Quarth is one of my favorite puzzle games. The Famicom has a very fun port of the arcade game. I have dabbled a bit with this on the Intellivision, but ran into the same issue, and didn't stick with it for too long. I've run into a similar issue with pathfinding AI routines, which prompted me to stop working on a clone of Lode Runner.

Penguin Adventure is a similar game, but also considerably more ambitious. The animated backgrounds alone seem like they'd be hard to replicate on the Intellivision. The progress on this is looking great!

The keypad is only used for pausing with 1 and 9. The Intellivision can't register key presses and disc presses completely separate from each other. I had found this out while trying to implement an alternate control scheme that would have allowed the controller to be held sideways, and using the keypad as face buttons, similar to an NES controller.

It runs on ordinary Intellivision hardware and does not make use of ECS. I am currently undecided about a digital version yet.

I find using the Intellivision II's controller to be more than acceptable, it's only towards the end of the game I have to hold the controller somewhat angled just so to ensure proper button presses (or my palm will end up pressing the side buttons). The Intellivision 1's rubber side buttons feel much harder to press and cause a bit more strain during longer play sessions. The game now has a password system in place so it doesn't have to be cleared in one sitting, so hopefully that will also help.

If you have not tried the demo, it is available in the programming forum. The controls feel pretty close to the NES game, although maybe a touch faster. I do find that playing on the console, the side buttons become difficult to press by the end of the game, and accidental jumping and whipping happens from squeezing the entire controller.

I really haven't posted much about this since releasing the demo a while back, but here are some additional screenshots:

I haven't uploaded a build in a while. This is the version that I had posted on Youtube. On the title screen, it defaults to single controller mode, on that, one button shoots and the player stays stationary, the other button shoots and locks the aim in the direction pressed. At the title screen, pressing 2 or 3 will switch to dual controller mode, and dual inverted controller mode (for holding the controllers upside down), and pressing a direction on controller 2 will start the game. Keep in mind this build still is buggy, but the game no longer stalls. I just never tracked down why occasionally an enemy will remain on the screen when the level ends. robo05.rom

Antarctic Adventure would be great on the Intellivision!

Here is a video: https://youtu.be/T2Cj0dS38e8