RushJet1

Naaaah as much as I like this game and as much as the art takes advantage of the limitations, it's definitely not 16-bit quality. All backgrounds are black out of necessity, whereas the NES would have no problems with this. You could use the lower resolution mode but then the NES is double the resolution. Later NES games had some fairly elaborate background art with some parallax-alike in some games even. The Atari 7800 can definitely do some things the NES has issues with. With the MMC controllers they could do some very impressive stuff though.

Wanted to make a longer-form track on TIA for some reason. ataria.bin

Well John Hancock made a video about it and MetalJesusRocks posted about that video on his website apparently: https://www.metaljesusrocks.com/metal-jesus-likes/new-atari-7800-game-rikki-vikki-unboxing-review/ It's always fun when you realize that more people liked that one video than bought the game on Steam :X

It didn't get a ton of press coverage, though some smaller sites picked it up. I'm surprised that AtariAge itself didn't have anything to say about it. We got it reviewed on a decently-sized YouTuber's page (The 8-bit Guy) but 1) the game was reviewed as a part of 3 games being reviewed, and 2) most of those people are interested computers more than consoles, and even if they are, they'll be interested in the hardware copy if at all, and he doesn't mention that it's available on Steam anywhere. Otherwise though it's a decent review of the hardware cart.

In its current state, not directly. Any arpeggios you hear in Rikki and Vikki are manually put in as notes. There isn't an arpeggio macro or setting. But since it's software-based, it could be added in the future.

There are diagnostic codes but the "unauthorized services" being referred to above are part of the game itself.

As a proof of concept (I guess?) here's a version of Discomfort Dispenser for the N163/NES. Stereo is added afterwards and this is not emulating the awful 15khz multiplexing noise that the N163 had, but there were other similar wavetable systems that would have worked fine as a solution that were in use at the time. https://www.dropbox.com/s/e19xufggwtj4ocz/rv_misery_c_nes_n163.mp3?dl=0

Thanks! I like the music in your Thrust port too. Don't know if Paul Slocum frequents these forums or not tho.

I've since made better drums so I updated this track with drums now. Also, is it possible to play a track during gameplay? float2.bin

New track - Subspace subspace.bin subspace.mp3

I don't know anything about a Speccy port, but it's coming to Genesis.

Just a reminder that if you want the soundtrack or CD, you can get it here: https://rushjet1.bandcamp.com/album/rikki-vikki The soundtrack's digital version is free, or you can drop me money if you want. The CD is $10 with no shipping charges. I keep thinking that I'm going to make a video about how I made the soundtrack soon, but life keeps getting in the way.

From the manual: emphasis on "one"

https://twitter.com/tailchao/status/1087833123293986816?s=09

https://youtu.be/V9A07AFk1lA It's pretty simple to do this with the cart, in this video around 2 minutes 30 seconds, he shows how to adjust the volume. Just in case modifying the Atari 7800 is too much trouble.

Rikki & Vikki: micro soundtrack for TIA, just to see how different parts might sound on the chip. Some turned out better than others. Rock1: Easily the best one, and the longest. rock1.bin Sand: Gets the melody down pretty well, not very long. s1.bin Flame: Pretty short and the arps are jarring. flame.bin Metal: Gets the melody down but not very long. m1.bin Boss: Ran out of instruments I could use for this. I could do it in 60hz mode. rv_boss_s.bin Discomfort Dispenser: Tried doing this run of notes but it sounds off discomf.bin

One of the difficulty switches changes the TIA volume as well.

Maybe it's the composite mod itself, in the video I noticed that a lot of the colors are oversaturated as well

They'd delay the game for 2 more years, but it would be an amazing game.

Yeah it's sold out. It was also distributed by Super Fighter Team, iirc.

This is true, but it comes with caveats. Its 320-pixel mode is pretty restrictive with color use, restricting you to 3".5" colors per object, where the .5 is sometimes transparency or background color depending on pixel location. There's also a weird bug where one of the colors is only accessible if it's next to another color in the palette, which is why Rikki & Vikki has a lot of alternating vertical bar colors. Not sure I'd say POKEY is definitively better than the NES's sound- NES is more in-tune and has 5 channels, plus has DPCM which is basically just configurable sample playback. Both systems can make sounds that the other can't imitate, so I'd call it a draw, with a slight nod to the NES because of lack of tuning issues- you can make POKEY music that sounds better than lots of NES music out there, but the skill cap is a lot higher. At least we can probably all agree that both systems curbstomp the SMS here. With additional mappers, the NES having less system memory doesn't really matter. You could just bankswitch more stuff in from the cartridge. MMC5 is particularly crazy in this regard. It's just that the NES had a lot of them compared to the other two systems due to popularity. A lot of later Konami, Nintendo, Hal, and Capcom games push the system pretty hard, and there are a lot more examples than those. The real way it could have had better sound is including the POKEY on the system itself instead of expecting millions of POKEY chips to be made in carts and have devs foot the cost, that's just crazy. Another problem with the 320 pixel mode is that the CPU and graphics chip, Maria and Sally, share their memory bus on the 7800, which means that there is a lot of contention that causes slowdown in 320 pixel mode. This doesn't happen in 160 pixel modes (nearly as much) because there's less to draw. If you're looking at Rikki & Vikki as the bar here, the game very cleverly uses the colors it has to the max, relying on nearby colors and the brain's perception of colors against black to mask the fact that there are only ever 7 colors max on screen, it has its own mapper to assist in the whole Sally/Maria bandwidth thing, and Osman spent months optimizing code for speed in that regard, saving a few precious cycles of CPU execution time etc. every couple updates. Not sure if other game studios would go through all that to make their 320 pixel games play well.

"We're going to Misery Land!!"

Because I'm apparently a masochist: Rock Cavern 1 Flame Cavern bins for all rikki & vikki related stuff I've released on TIA Technically "TIATune" was originally made for Rikki & Vikki, based on what frequencies I could use on the TIA, but with more channels and pitches obviously BupBoop "TIATune" - this is actually the original TIAtune (on TIA) - this is actually the cover

In addition to a different ending, all levels and bosses are different in 2-player mode.