Tyrant

256 level grey-map to CRY blue-map. Easy.

If you want any help getting it converted and assembled, there's a number of people around (myself included) who have and use alpines with the atari tools. I'd be glad to have a look and see if we can't get it all merged together.

The main reasons I can see for 8 bit is if you're going to do some phunky magic with rotating parts of the palette or having the same sprites drawn in multiple different palettes at different times. Then again having sprites in 4 bit allows for 16 different palettes to be used at once if you want that kind of effect. Or of course if memory is a worry, which it often is on the Jaguar.

36 steps / 9 cycles was at the time the highest I could find available. I think it gives a pretty good control, but I'd say anywhere from nine up to about 20 cycles would be acceptable. But that's just a guess. The guys from Reboot have done some sensitivity testing, and their upcoming rotary game will have a sensitivity adjustment in software. It should be possible to patch Tempest to have a similar adjustment.

I considered that, but as I said in my earlier post, just widening the spokes/gaps (which must be equal width) isn't enough. You would also have to re-locate the optical sensors, since they have to be the correct distance apart relative to the size of the spokes. Typically in an optical encoder the two sensors are very close together, often in the same integrated package (making them impossible to separate), and if you were to widen the spokes without adjusting the sensors, you would find that the two square waves would shift sideways relative to each other so that the transitions on both lines occur much closer together, with long periods in between where both outputs are in the same state.

You would have to do more than just remove spokes, you'd have to widen the others to compensate, and widen the space between the sensors too, otherwise the 4 steps in each cycle would be different sizes and you'd get a very odd output with some pulses longer than others even when spun at a constant speed.

That's interesting. Back when I was making them, the only other ones anyone had were JediJeff optical controllers which were incredibly hyper-sensitive, and hacked 2600 controllers, which were the other way. I had the choice between detented and smooth, and went with detents because it made the menus and bonus stages easier to navigate (I didn't know about the second pad trick for bonus stages at that point).

Painter is a really good game. Sure it doesn't have a lot of hype behind it, but it's a better game than some of the others which commonly go for large sums on ePay.

Interesting post. However, I've got a couple of minor quibbles for accuracy's sake. First off, you say mechanical encoders are generally too slow (low resolution), but that depends on the make and model of the encoder. The ones generally used are the original 2600 pads, which have just 16 steps (4 cycles) and are very slow indeed, and ones with 36 steps (9 cycles) which give a much better feel. Secondly, you use the word "detents" to describe the number of steps (resolution) of mechanical encoders. While I am not a linguist, I have generally found that mechanical encoders tend to come in two varieties, those which have a little resistance between each step, and those which spin freely. The ones which have that feedback resistance are referred to as "detented". The controllers I made and sold have 36 detents per spin, as I believe do the ones made by Jonathan Ascough, while the ones made by Chaos Reigns used smooth ones with no tactile feedback between steps. I may however be wrong about that as I don't own any of those guys controllers myself. Also, your "Bugs" section is misleading, and implies that you have created a clever work-around for a flaw in the design of the controller circuit. In fact you have simply connected everything badly and it should really be "this is why you shouldn't do this". The Jaguar controller has four common lines, which are polled in sequence during normal gameplay. By directly connecting any of the pins to +5v or to ground, you are effectively locking an entire column of buttons to either on or off. It should be pretty obvious that in the matrix setup you illustrated, if you bypass the diodes and resistors and just connect things straight to the power and ground rails (via your optical encoder) you're going to get some pretty odd results. Otherwise that's a moderately useful post.

I managed to complete it on the 3DO without ever finding any bugs at all, but some of the later missions were hell without a mouse. Play it on an Atari ST if you want a decent experience of it.

The whole scene has dealt with a lot of grief on certain subjects and I'm sure you've felt it far more than most. You have my respect for what it's worth, and most likely the respect of the whole scene, although I can't speak for anyone but myself, naturally.

Hi Zerosquare, that is definitely one of Symmetry's. As for the executable format I think it's just an abs file with an odd name, but I haven't looked at it's internals. I know wdb (Atari's Alpine tool) handles it fine with a read command. Edit: And that explanation text was a good read. I've read other voxel tutes but none so clear as that. At least to me, I'm sure many people will struggle with it's terseness but I'm odd when it comes to those things. I read a dozen texts about binary space partitioning and didn't get it until I read the doom source code which made it really clear lol.

Jaguar's don't display anything but a black screen when there's no cartridge inserted.

Y'know, Yak said to me that he's sure he implemented an auto-detect, but I've tried to get the cart to detect one, and I've looked all over the T2k source code archive that was released, and I can find no evidence of and kind of auto-detection, nor any support for the weird rotary controller described in the tech-ref manual.

Yes, that's why I typed this in at the bottom of my message: "PS Ah, didn't realize this was an old thread!" My comment was directed at DrClu rather than yourself, but in retrospect it was a bit harsh of me. Sorry about that.

Do you even look at the dates of the threads you're bumping? That guy made 24 posts total, and last logged into AA 4 days after starting this topic. There's no point asking him about his gf's dead wikia site.

Also FWIW, my Jag PSU's (Official UK ones) buzz quite loudly, but they've done it for years so I can only assume that it's normal.

Took me a moment to work out where to put it. Upload to $802000, go from $802000 That's really pretty gorgeous. Nice and smooth and very impressive for only a months worth of getting used to the system. Actually scratch that, it's impressive regardless of experience.

Cool video, thanks for sharing, and thanks Lee for making it, I'm glad you like the controller.

Does that mean I'll never be able to complete the collection of reboot releases in the small cases? Not having managed to make it to any e-jagfests I've missed out it seems.

More buttons have arrived! Stock of the enclosures is running low now... and my cable is getting low too... stock control is annoying.

eBay bought paypal years ago, and as far as I know, paypal will never reach into their own pockets to compensate anyone for anything. I could be wrong though, I'd like to be wrong, but afaik the only money buyers can have back comes from the sellers.

There is only one problem I can see with marking a lower-than-actual value on the customs form... it might reduce the amount of compensation you can claim back if the game gets lost/damaged in transit.

One of the coolest parts of that demo in my most humble opinion is probably not the most challenging by any stretch, but for simple beauty and awesomeness the fractal fern wins in my book.

I absolutely agree. Nobody is going to make any real money in this game, which is a shame, because if there isn't any motivation for anyone to take on the tedious job of supplying the slow and infrequent demand for legitimate homebrew releases once the initial rush of a new game announcement wears off. That's partly why I went for a waiting list model for selling my One Button Controllers. It means that I can legitimately put off making them until I have the time/components, while ensueing that everyone who wants one will get the chance eventually. There's hardly enough profit in each one to cover the time spent making them, but as you say it's a labour of love (and it does provide a little extra in these hard times). Btw, for anyone waiting for one, I'm currently waiting for more components to be delivered.