eru

Not sure how much I can say at this moment, as some things are not finalized, but just wanted to confirm what you saw is true. We're in touch with the authors of the compilation, and we hope Yoomp! lands in the final version. I don't know if any other homebrew games will be included.

I'm not against the idea, but let me ask everyone involved. Thanks for everyone's interest, it means a lot!

Unfortunately, at this time we don't have plans to release more Yoomp! boxes. I wish I had better news, alas, some of the team moved on and we just have no capacity to work on that.

... and I also added some basic documentation for Lua scripting here: https://github.com/MarcinZukowski/atari800/blob/better-yoomp/data/ext/README.md#lua-scripting I think I'll pause for now, and see if there's any interest in pushing this further from others... Any ideas are welcome

If anyone is interested, I added a signficantly richer Lua support. Now extensions 4 out of 6 games I previously played with have been fully ported to Lua: Yoomp!, Zybex, Alternate Reality and Behind Jaggi Lines. River Raid and Mercenary are still in C, as they are the longest and hardest. But what's out there can probably already do quite a bit. Example for Yoomp! here: https://github.com/MarcinZukowski/atari800/blob/better-yoomp/data/ext/yoomp/init.lua

I'm working on this in spare moments. For now, I added a bit more Lua support, so far I managed to port the Behind Jaggi Lines extension 100% to Lua. If someone's interested, it's here: https://github.com/MarcinZukowski/atari800/blob/better-yoomp/data/ext/bjl/init.lua Work in progress, as they say...

That's exactly a part of the idea. It's possible to partially change the visuals (see Yoomp! in the video) or even completely (see River Raid). Same for sounds. The problem is, one usually needs to do quite some reverse engineering. Except for Yoomp! (where I, obviously, had sources), all these games took some time. Just accelerating things is relatively easy, as it's easy to find where the time is going, see the note about it. But actually e.g. extracting where do elements go on the screen, is not easy, and for River Raid it took me a few good hours, and it's definitely not complete (e.g. tank missiles or helicopters shooting I still didn't do). But it can be done. MULE is a great idea, and probably wouldn't be terribly hard to do. Maybe when I find some time... But first, I think the best investment would be to make the extensions easily scriptable. Probably I'll stick to Lua for now (even though I hate the language), but eventually I see JavaScript a possibly better option. Lua embedding is already partially done.

From my side, the intention was never do port this to anything physical, it was just playing. But I bet some things that one could do on the emulator could _also_ be done with e.g. VBXE or some accelerator...

Playing a bit more. This is fun

Someone suggested also changing sounds - here's a little example with some random sounds replacing the "fire" sound in RiverRaid:

Just wanted to share some fun I had with the atari800 emulator in the last few weeks. The idea is that we have per-game programmatic extensions in the emulator, that can e.g. make the games faster or look differently. But there's no limit, we could e.g. easily add additional levels to games, change logic, etc. You can see the results in this video (in Polish, but with English subtitles). More info in my repo on github, also all the code is there. I will try to polish it a bit and consider merging into the official atari800 repository. Curious what folks think... P.S. Cross-linking the polish AtariArea discussion

Yoomp! only uses TRIG0, but also uses SKSTAT ($d20f) for SHIFT detection. Since the game starts immediately, it would suggest either of these pressed. Or START press is detected, but I doubt CONSOL ($d01f) is influenced on XEGS. No idea.

Wow, I admittedly did not believe NRV can pull it off. But, it's great to admit I was wrong. Congratulations! Now, I have a dilemma what to do with that one thing...

Well... you definitely know how to build attention Still waiting, I'm very curious.

NRV: I'm following this thread, and I think you are spending too much time here on things that are effectively details. I would strongly encourage you to invest your time into further development of the prototype, and only once you see if/how the entire engine fits together, start polishing things. Good luck!

Hi NRV, Just wanted to wish you good luck with the project. Having what you achieved so far is a nice first step, but the biggest hurdles are in front of you. I do have some experience in writing similar stuff, so a few notes: do not underestimate the complexity of ray-caster your texturing routine (around $4000), if I get it right, does not allow smooth horizontal scaling of textures - wonder how you plan to manage this, as sticking to drawing full bytes will produce very weird artifacts the GFX mode that you are using, while looking very good, sucks wrt performance. So for a fast-paced game, go for 9++ (4x stretched GR9) or something else If you manage to make the entire thing (free-walk wolfenstein) work with 5 FPS with this graphics, that's already an achievement. Good luck! eru

Hey Bryan, I'm curious - do you still have the code doing GR9 shifted by 1/2pixel around? We would like to verify it, perhaps with some tweaks we can come up with code that works on all machines - that would rule, opening very cool possibilities. Thanks in advance!

Yes No

Last week AtariArea organized a 24h compo. The subject was "PM-only". So we did submit a simple demo, called "PM-09". Unfortunately took the last place. Luckily, it also got the first prize. Yes, there was only one submission. Still, hope you enjoy it. P.S. Why can't I upload .XEX? pm09.zip

+1 for MADS - it's the best assembler around, has active development, provides lots of (often not really useful, but cool nevertheless) addons, and works like a charm on MacOSX. For coding, I recommend jEdit - with some plugins it is a very powerful and customizable editor. Oh, did I mention this is how Yoomp! was written? jEdit + MADS + MacOSX

If you prove you are serious about spending 1m on an Atari demo, I will Seriously, though, the 'real life' is an issue, and one needs to focus on what's really important to survive (ekhm). I know it must be the same for C64 folks, but with a bigger scene they might be more motivated or something....

It's simple - if you win 1 million in a lottery, pay us, and I can promise we'll make something that will make Numen look like a piece of crap

EoD is an amazing piece of work. One can complain it's not perfect at places, and it obviously isn't. But it beats to dust anything anybody ever did in demos on Atari. And yes, it hurts me a bit to say it. It's beautiful how they used C64 features, especially colors in hi-res. Also, the 'polishing' is amazing - most people don't realize that probably most of the effort goes into stuff like this, not in the actual effect development. A discussion about the artistic value is really biased. We tend to think that the new games on A8 are 'fun' - but, honestly, doesn't part of the fun come from the fact that it runs on A8? In most cases it does - these games wouldn't stand a chance if played on some other platform. Obviously, there are some exceptions, but we have to be honest. Also, even if you say 'A8 scene is more into games', I will ask: "How come we don't get so many games with gfx/msx/code quality even close to EoD?" So, when you look at the demos, and think of 'art' in it, don't judge it with the same things in mind you would use for 'real' art or even PC demos. It's like art done with some obscure method, e.g. woodcuts vs drawings - knowing how a thing has been made does impact your judgment. So, my message: stop whining, just watch it again and appreciate what it is.

Damn, I was asleep already, *sigh* Well, I think maybe it's for the better. Congratulations to Defender II m.

Hey, and I need cash to... hmm.. hmm... buy some food to write Yoomp 2!