Revontuli

Any ideas from anyone on how to detect an unformatted HSC in the A7800 emulator? Currently an unused HSC gives garbage data (or all set to 255, I think?) Once I *do* start saving, it's all fine, but it's very awkward for a first time player. I hope this isn't the case with the SaveKey/AtariVox - although I haven't run into this particular problem with them - I think they default to 0. How do other folks handle this sort of thing with a "first time" use of the HSC (and, for that matter, SaveKey/AtariVox)?

I usually put cheat codes in my games, even if they were originally for testing purposes (things like level select and invincibility come in handy sometimes when you're trying to find particular bugs) I also usually do things like make a "cheat" invalidate a high score, but I usually ship with them still on the ROM somewhere. Easter eggs are usually present in some form or another - People have found a secret room in Harpy's Curse (which they should revisit if they haven't tried the most recent ROM ). I was also watching some of the forum threads, and someone got *really* close to figuring out/stumbling on another Easter egg as folks were figuring out certain mechanics and dynamics in Dragon's Descent. This is in addition to the secret boss you can find if you play the game in a certain way.

Trying to get as much testing in before PRGE as I can - I'm curious how far folks have gotten in the game, and if anyone has tried using the save game system in any capacity. Passwords should work with earlier ROMs, to a point - and you can use a password to restore progress, and then save at a tablet (for those who have been playing the game with earlier versions). Also curious if anyone has uncovered the second quest yet...

Here it is! Latest version of Harpy's Curse! This should be feature complete, with a few more secrets (again, if you found an area requiring four keys, try going back that way in this build... ) These ROMs support SaveKey/AtariVox (A7800 supports it, and hardware if you're playing the ROM using an SD Cart): HarpysCurse_9_2_2023_Beta7_SaveKey.bas.a78 HarpysCurse_9_2_2023_Beta7_SaveKey.bas.bin These *don't* have the save feature, but that makes them a little more emulator-friendly (they'll run fine on BupSystem, for instance): HarpysCurse_9_2_2023_Beta7.bas.a78 HarpysCurse_9_2_2023_Beta7.bas.bin I did a ton of last minute bug fixes, so if anyone finds anything glitchy or buggy, please let me know! POKEY audio doesn't seem to work on 7800GD currently - I'll try and figure that out. Haven't tested on Dragonfly or POKEYfied Concerto.

Here it is! Latest version of Harpy's Curse! This should be feature complete, with a few more secrets (again, if you found an area requiring four keys, try going back that way in this build... ) These ROMs support SaveKey/AtariVox (A7800 supports it, and hardware if you're playing the ROM using an SD Cart): HarpysCurse_9_2_2023_Beta7_SaveKey.bas.a78 HarpysCurse_9_2_2023_Beta7_SaveKey.bas.bin These *don't* have the save feature, but that makes them a little more emulator-friendly (they'll run fine on BupSystem, for instance): HarpysCurse_9_2_2023_Beta7.bas.a78 HarpysCurse_9_2_2023_Beta7.bas.bin I did a ton of last minute bug fixes, so if anyone finds anything glitchy or buggy, please let me know! POKEY audio doesn't seem to work on 7800GD currently - I'll try and figure that out. Haven't tested on Dragonfly or POKEYfied Concerto.

Pokey seems fine on a7800 (and JS7800, for that matter) - The main test, of course, is to see if it works on a burned ROM on a cart, but the 7800GD would be nice as a semi-final platform to test on A friend played through the game - and in doing so found a few nasty bugs I need to fix (although she beat the whole thing!) - I'll see if I can get something uploaded Saturday.

I appreciate the patience and wanting to wait for the physical game! That said, I will say to everyone in the forums that *am* looking for guinea pigs testers to look for glitches, bugs, etc. This can also be an opportunity for folks to give feedback before a final build is burned to cartridge. I post public betas and try to give curious folks and testers time to play, so if you find an annoying bug, or you think a boss is way too hard, or there's a particular shade of purple that you don't like in the opening screen, you can at least post your grievances in the forums I'm going to try and sprint to get a beta build posted tonight for the weekend - I want to play through on an SD cart once or twice to make sure there's no egregious bugs beforehand.

I'm giving this a try on the 7800GD - any advice for getting the ROM working with POKEY support? I've got POKEY music working on BupSystem, using $450, and the headers *look* ok...but I'm not getting POKEY audio via the 7800GD cart. I haven't tried this latest build with the Dragonfly yet (I need to wrangle some cables before switching back to the DF to test it, too). Regardless, I'm close to posting a new beta (hopefully in a day or so). I've been playing through the new quest and trying to tune the difficulty - as I've said before, it's for those who have beaten the core game, and want a challenge (one can speedrun the main quest in a crazy amount of time, for instance). The second quest a bit less mercy - I'm hoping to get the feeling of finding a power up go from "nice to have" in the main quest to "holy cow, now maybe I can survive that new corridor I found!" If you know where everything is, you might be complete the 2nd quest relatively quickly, but *getting* to that point of mastery should take some time. I'll have to see what folks think...watch this space!!

I'm aiming to have a full beta for Harpy's Curse posted for the weekend - To that end: anyone here 1) beat the game and 2) find an odd easter egg requiring all four keys? This coming build might have something new for you - especially if you think you've explored the whole maze Also, anyone try the save features in the last build posted? How does that seem to be working out, if so? Anyone make extensive use of the passwords? I upgraded my version of 7800Basic, so I *think* I'll be able to post ROMs with full v3/v4 header info, and POKEY-compatible audio working on appropriate SD carts. Lots of testing to do, still... (cross-posting from main 7800 forum)

I'm aiming to have a full beta for Harpy's Curse posted for the weekend - To that end: anyone here 1) beat the game and 2) find an odd easter egg requiring all four keys? This coming build might have something new for you - especially if you think you've explored the whole maze Also, anyone try the save features in the last build posted? How does that seem to be working out, if so? Anyone make extensive use of the passwords?

Thank you! The interview was a ton of fun, and it's great to see folks playing! I was impressed to see y'all power through the whole game, and was glad to give a "director's commentary." Your website and interviews are great resources, and I knew I "made it" when I found my first 7800 game reviews on 7800Forever :) Apologies for being off the radar - I'm working on finishing up (and starting) some 7800 projects, so hopefully you hear more from me soon...

Much appreciated!! I've been trying to update my pipeline to make sure I have ROMs compatible with the latest stuff (I got a 7800GD to help development and testing) but I'm still not sure of the proper steps to get the ROM woking with POKEY-based audio and HSC/SaveKey/AtariVox elements. I updated to 7800Basic v0.29, which seems to compile to a78 v3 and v4. I currently have POKEY set to $450 - this doesn't play on BupSystem (and I don't think it'll work on other setups unless I do something, but I'm not sure what...) Let me know where/what I can do to get a proper ROM built (or point me to where it's been posted, I've been looking, I swear! ) I've the skeleton of the 2nd quest in, I need to make sure it works as I fill out the details and finalize the level design. That said, anyone who can try saving/loading, you can do it at Password tablets, Game Over screens, and of course the Title Screen - I'm sure I missed some stuff, so any feedback would be greatly appreciated!

I just added a beta ROM to test the saving capabilities here and in the original post. You'll need an SD Cart + SaveKey or AtariVox or other compatible save system (or if you're a hotshot on the A7800 you can probably get something working). I wanted to have this and the 2nd quest in one update, but deadlines are coming and I want to make sure the saving system works as well as it can. Testers would be greatly appreciated! I'm also aiming to get the 2nd quest update ASAP (and I *think* your save file and passwords should still be compatible for future ROMs)... HarpysCurse_8_18_2023.bas.a78 HarpysCurse_8_18_2023.bas.bin

I just added a beta ROM to test the saving capabilities to the original post. You'll need an SD Cart + SaveKey or AtariVox or other compatible save system (or if you're a hotshot on the A7800 you can probably get something working). I wanted to have this and the 2nd quest in one update, but deadlines are coming and I want to make sure the saving system works as well as it can. Testers would be greatly appreciated! I'm also aiming to get the 2nd quest update ASAP (and I *think* your save file and passwords should still be compatible for future ROMs)...

If you want a sequencer that is meant to work within TIA constraints, there's TIATracker: https://forums.atariage.com/topic/250014-tiatracker-a-new-sound-routine-and-sequencer-application/ I only really discovered it after I had a process for adding TIA music to my games, so I haven't used it extensively, but it looks pretty solid. My games in the "Dragon Trilogy" (Dragon's Cache, Dragon's Descent, and Dragon's Havoc) for the 7800 all used TIA music (and 7800Basic's tracker, as RevEnd noted above ), here's my own approach - given that I have little musical training and need to incorporate a music track into a game with sfx and other things going on in the CPU: -If you're using TIA on the 7800, 7800Basic's music tracker helps a ton, especially if you're mainly sequencing specific notes to make music. You'd need to add a lot of custom code to get something more sophisticated, so for those who *aren't* chiptune virtuosos (you know who you are) the tracker stuff does a good job. -Adding a little bit of fading echo to each note helps remove a lot of the tinny edge the TIA typically has - I call it "shower quality" -TIA gives you roughly 1 octave of notes that are anywhere *near* in tune, *maybe* 2 octaves if you switch voices/insturments strategically. -The 7800 gives you a lot more room/RAM/ROM to play with, even if the TIA chip's capabilities are functionally the same as the 2600. -While you can certainly use 1 track for melody and 1 track for bass, I'm not good enough make a decent bass track, and tend to use track 2 for sfx. -I always give the option to turn the music "off" I liken the TIA to a drum kit made of water bottles and trash can lids - you *can* make cool music with it, but often need to forget/overlook conventional tuning practices. EDIT: Oh, and here's some Satie in TIA: Satie_GymTIA.mp3 And a cover of Tam Lin, aka the Glasgow Reel, my first track that made me have hope I could make TIA music that wouldn't cause ears to bleed: TamlinTIA.mp3

Thank you for the review! I'm glad folks seem to be having fun with the mechanics of Dragon's Havoc, as well as enjoying the graphics. It was also fun to have my "Dragon Trilogy" acknowledged, too, as loosely thematic as it was 🐲

Just a quick little update to say I'm still working on Harpy's Curse. I was (and am) a little sidetracked by other things, but I've got my bitmap-based level open, taunting me. I'm also aiming to fix a few bugs and "problem areas" that can squeeze the player through walls. One little feature I added was a quick "hey, you need to attack while in the air" instruction that appears when you start the game, since I've seen a few streams that took a while to get that (or didn't get it at all): I've been going on talking about a "second quest" and I'm still working through some design philosophies that I'd like to apply on how it will piece together. It's meant to be more challenging - here's a comparison of what the opening section looks like in the first and second quest: White pixels are blocks, cyan is water, green are pillars, blue are statues. You might be able to guess what the red and magenta pixels signify... The keys were largely option in the first quest (although handy for some shortcuts). They'll be much more necessary in the second quest. That being said, I'm still trying to keep the map fairly "open," just more challenging and a little harder to speedrun... Thanks to everyone who has played so far, I'll try and get an proper ROM update posted soon!

I’m aiming for an update to the game soon-adding, among other things, an instruction screen telling you that you can only attack while flying in the air (you’re a bird of prey-you swoop to attack!). Watching some streams, it seemed folks took a while to figure that out. Also bringing in support for saving your game through SaveKey/AtariVox. If that gets to be too much trouble, I may just stick with the password option 2nd quest is still in design phase-I’ve been sidetracked by day job stuff, but will try to make progress this summer.

Keep at it- I try to make my games so that you can’t beat them in a half hour, but you’ll get better with practice (maybe set to movie “training montage” music ). If accuracy is an issue, try to be bold enough to move in close to enemies-you likely hit more often and generally have more shots-per-second as you power up. Double (later triple) tap your shots to take out must stuff! Eventually you can get the timing do that you can auto fire through enemies, pressing the button just long enough to fire 2-3 times. Some early streamers *didn’t* get the mechanics - watching them was like watching someone play Pac-Man and not figuring out that energizer pellets let you eat ghosts! That’s why I moved the instructions to the very first screen one sees on powering on the game. To give more detail to hardware limits, the way the game handles graphics it can draw about 10 sprites per horizontal line: 2 players + 2 player shots + 2 enemy shots + 4 enemies in a row = 10. For context, The NES could do around 8 sprites per row without flicker, the 2600 could do 2 (before a lot of tricks were used). The 7800 does graphics in a different way (you need to do your own backgrounds, for instance, while the NES has separate hardware support for that), but in general most games had a hard (and surprisingly small) sprite limit. There’s a reason early shooters like space invaders, GORF, Galaga etc. only allowed one shot at a time. Super Mario Bros, as you noted, was very strategic about sprite use as well. This limitation led me to make a game where the main mechanic is: “make every shot count!”

In the case of Dragon’s Havoc, the hardware limitations informed a design decision. You can only have so many sprites on a line: 2 players, shots, and enemies add up BUT: The power up system in Dragon’s Havoc is meant to reward accuracy. If you keep miss your shots, your shots (and dragon) are slow. If you fill up your meter by making every shot count, it doesn’t matter much that you only have one shot out at a time, since you can fire several a second-just don’t miss or you (and your shots) slow back down again. Later bosses can be brought down in seconds if you move up close to their heads and hold down the fire button, firing dozens of shots at close range. The fact that a full rate meter gives you a shield means you can afford to be a *little* reckless in that situation, since you can fill your meter up again quickly if you keep hitting the boss’s head. The bosses are a special case of “one shot per screen” - shooting enemies at close range, especially with a filled rage meter, allows you to shoot more often and take out enemy patterns very quickly. It takes some practice, but folks who grasp the system do quite well, and the level design is meant to take that into account. If you simply hold down the fire button and miss 2 shots out of every 3 you fire, it’ll be a tough time. Keep a full rage meter, and you’ll cut through the levels like a hit knife through butter. In Dragon’s Havoc, accuracy *is* your power up-even a semi-filled meter gives you a lot of speed and freedom.

This is all so awesome to hear - thank you all!!! I'm also glad the challenge level seems to be going over well I didn't want a game folks could sleepwalk through in a half hour, but I figured giving unlimited continues (resetting the score) allowed a fair way to learn/practice the game. I'll admit the later levels can get pretty mean, but they should yield to practice and mastery of the rage mechanic. I love to hear about folks' progress (and trying for a 1 credit completion!) I'm also getting back to some other projects I have coming down the pipeline - I've been tied up with some non-Atari stuff as this year got underway, but I do have some other 7800 games coming now that I've finished the Dragon Trilogy

Thank you! I will admit I've played Cartesian Chaos a fair amount, and it hits that nice sweet spot of arcade action that looks simple but is very hard to get right in practice. This is a great addition to the 7800 game library - Awesome work!

Impressive scrolling! While I have a few ideas on how to have different elements of a scrolling background have different palettes, my own scrolling engine assumes a single palette for the whole thing (or at least per zone). I'm curious as to the approach/limitations you have for system, and how many cycles you have left!

There are a lot of technical reasons to scroll stuff certain ways on the 7800 - I'm legitmately impressed with ReZolve as it's very difficult to get full-screen multi-directional scrolling on the 7800 and still have space/time for anything else. Of course, it's Bob, so if anyone can do it he can. Vertical/multi-directional scrolling on the 7800 can be tricky, since it's easy to double your draw calls if tile graphics cross screen zones. You can shift the zones along with the tiles, but that of course can make a lot of other things complicated (like drawing stuff that *doesn't* scroll, like the UI). The 7800 can draw a ton of graphics, but not *quite* enough to fill a full screen (+ tile margin needed to scroll + additional sprites like the player and enemies) without some kind of compression or compromise. You also need to store all of this stuff in RAM, one way or another, so opting for the extra 16k RAM bank can be very handy. As far as scrolling design, I found a nifty article that outlines many different ways games tackle certain scrolling techniques with regards to the "camera" and its relationship to the player: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/scroll-back-the-theory-and-practice-of-cameras-in-side-scrollers

Those of you who have been following me for a while know I tend to make games featuring a certain kind of creature. A creature known for: -A snake-like shape -Nasty sharp teeth -Long periods of sleep punctuated by short spurts of aggressive wakefulness -An obsession with shiny objects So, predictably, I've decided to work on a game starring a swashbuckling ferret! Eclipse is a fortune hunter roaming the land for treasure, and possibly saving the world from nefarious forces... In a console generation almost defined by side-scrolling plaformers, it's odd that I can count the number of the ones that exist on the 7800 on one hand (even including the homebrew scene's excellent work). My codebase can support a fairly sophisticated one, I think, so I'm taking a stab at it while I fine-tune "Harpy's Curse." The "engine" is building directly off of the shoulders of "Harpy's Curse" with some added features. Level sections can either be horizontal or vertical - Vertical scrolling shifts a few tiles at a time when the player is above or below a certain margin. Not quite as smooth as the horizontal scrolling, but this type of scrolling was good enough for Super Mario Bros. 2, and if I'm including both horizontal and vertical scrolling sections, this should mean I can switch between the two without having two entirely separate systems. Vertical scrolling footage here: https://youtu.be/w6Pz5ySjkq4 I need to do some adjustments on speed and the scrolling margins to make things "feel right," but the basics are there. The way I implemented things, the scrolling thinks it's "horizontal" for most of it, I just draw the tiles such that it's rotated 90 degrees. If anything it's a little simpler, since I only scroll a whole tile at a time in vertical mode. While such scrolling could be fancier, I don't think it'd be worth the extra ROM and complexity given the game's scope - I have other fish to fry on the project, and this already opens up a ton of new gameplay opportunities. Now I need to incorporate the items/enemies system from the horizontal mode. Since things like the collision detection only really care about the tiles onscreen, the main thing I need to change is having stuff appear and disappear at the top and bottom of the screen instead of left and right (basically switching the x and y coordinate checks I use from the existing code). I usually try to have every project I do require I learn at least one new thing. Aside from some type of vertical scrolling, I'm looking at the bankset system to effectively double (or more) my graphical space. I'm also looking into types of data compression like lz4 (or maybe RLE, although with the way I make levels that can often make data *bigger*) for the levels and music. Harpy's Curse used its own compression system, but the potential extra tile types mean the levels in this game will be "heavier," so I'll see how much space I really have to play with in a 128kRAMx2 layout. I'll try and post more as progress happens, and probably pose questions and observations about the new 7800Basic features I'm taking advantage of.