Jetboot Jack

BTW - I have found my copy of ENVISION PC - a great tool that lets you build and animate with characters on the PC and output the data for XE. Its DOS based, but works in win 95/98/2000 just fine. sTeVE

Heaven/TQA It's been a while (like over 8 years) now since I touched any XE programming - I have promised several people that I will exhume my (and my collegues) old work and pop it onto a web page. The sprite multiplexer was used in Shadow of the Beast and a demo of Last Ninja II for getting 4 multicolour or 8 mono sprites (64 pixels) worth per scan line w/o flicker (well mostly) - hideous horizontal timing routines though!!! We abandoned it for other games as it was very timing intensive, we had to use narrow playfield to get enuff DMA time, and then used software sprites in dynamically redefined characeter sets which were nearly just as good... As soon as I have unpacked my belongings (I moved to the US from the UK recently) I hope to start uploading files... sTeVE

At Microprose UK we ported one of our Genesis games, "Tin Head" a platformer, to the 68K in the Jag in a couple of weeks - obviously it looked, sounded and played just like the Gensis game.... The Jag had some lovelly hardware bugs, but was a reasonable platform. Totally un marketed and therefore impossible for a mainstream publisher to get involved in as unit sales were apalling for the games...

7800 Development systems supplied by Atari in the late 80's were ST based and used MADMAC as the assembler. Neopaint with a convertor for the art, and a 2 voice sequencer for the risible audio hardware.... No POKEY tool was supplied - I used a custom written 8Bit program to do POKEY tunes - but never moved them over to 7800... I have to say I found the XL/XE hardware far more flexible than the 7800 to work with. The 7800's sprite facilities were cool, but the awful scrolling (it was tedious compared with ANTIC) and image management compared with the PAM hardware was readily apparent. The audio was atrocious and I'd grown used to character set indirection and developed a pretty nice sprite multiplexer on the ANTIC/GTIA hardware...... I'd have to say that homebrew 5200 would be far easier, simply because its just a RAM challenged XL/XE and that hardware is easy to use and well documented..... sTeVE

Steve Does ship to the UK - when I lived there I got APE etc - awesome stuff!!! sTeVE

Ok... Nice 36" SONY Wega XBR (3 RF and 6 video hookups) the Ultimate videogame TV (excpet no lightguns)! Few - but some are cool SNES Genesis PC Engine Duo RX Jaguar w CD PSOne PS 2 Gamecube 7800 INTV XE GS N64 Saturn 1040 STE (hey I'm from England - loads of games) Plus all the best handhelds scattered on the floor (Lynx, PC Engine LT, Nomad etc)... [ 10-25-2001: Message edited by: Jet Boot Jack ]

If this were back in the day and a real ATARI release they would have made the main character a detailed as possible. Make the main character a detailed one, homage is one thing, but the square in the 2600 version was a pure technical limitation! The 5200 deserves to shine!!!!

Alan - Windoze PM designer - yes please!!!!!!! I only have my old ST cross dev tools and most of that is pretty crappy! (they were good enuff for Shadow of the Beast - but I'm PC spoilt now...) I use a German PC based character set editor - a version of ANTIC envision - does lots of sets and you can animate etc.. As to your kicking character objects smoothly - its perfectly possible with character sets - A coder I worked with did it in MENACE (an unreleased Psygnosis conversion) where we scrolled ANTIC4 with a parallax background done with rotating character sets and LOTS of enemy units animated over the top in 2 pixel movement increments by rotating data thru the characters in the sets...

There are 100's of possibilities for the 5200 graphic hardware - but you gott look beyond the player/misile stuff for killer images!!! You could use 2 players with overlap color enabled for a 3 color protagonist - which would look really good... Giving 2 players and 4 missiles free - set the missiles to combined player mode and get them in one color and you could have 3 mono enemies, or 2 enemies and weapon fx. Pickups can be done as character graphics. Why not use multiple characeter sets to create large animated colurful characetrs and then rotate them through character RAM to create smooth movement - a technique I've used in some 800 games (back in the day)... Or do the whole thing in mode 15 and use bitmapped bobs like Donkey Kong did... sTeVE