skeezix

Sweet.. fgor years, I had the only ST BBS online.. lookslike theres 1 or 2 others now.. very very cool. How many calls (telnets) do you guys get? Its a shame theres not likely enough traffic to warrant inter-bbs space empires like in the old days (My BBS is temporarily down, due to lightning damage; I shoudl have it back up shortly. http://www.codejedi.com/bbs for details) jeff

I don't know if everyone here is already aware of this or not, but thought I'd post Nab it here: http://www.codejedi.com/shadowplan/castaway.html (If you have a PSP with 1.00 or 1.50 ROM on it, so you can run homebrew.) Fairly full featured though still growing. jeff

Writing a full shift-reduce parser is tricky work; you could always take a stab at using yacc/lex to do it for you, but you'd end up spending some time learning them rather than writing code. But they do make life easy for big platforms Still, rolling your own isn't too too bad.. jeff

.. and you're including the C source, so I'm sure linux/freebsd/mac-osx ports will pop up in no time I've no contacts at RG, but perhaps someone here does? Our man of AA has some ears there I'm sure jeff

Anyone talked to Retro Gamer about this yet? jeff

(Please forgive my ignorance of this thread.. I've been following events, but not this thread.. just checked alienbills site and thought I'd better ask..) Does anyone need a mailing list or message board for this project? Or are there some already? Evidently AA is the place to do it, but if anyone needs some web space to post some files, or a mailing list or the like, I can host 'em if no one else is setting up something. I've not had time to keep up, but I do want to help out with such a cool project in what minimal way I can squeeze in (mail me at [email protected]) jeff

As far as I know, I'm running the worlds only online Atari ST BBS; see http://www.codejedi.com/bbs for details Most ST BBSes were single node; a very few (mentioned above) were multinode on one ST. A few were multi-noide with multiple ST's. Sadly, most of the games were single node only of course .. simple GFA hacks et al. So you'd have to put locking in there so only one guy coudl run the game at as time or it'd munch the data files for most games. I've been trying to build up an archive of ST BBS software/games slowly, since most people have forgotten it So if you have any door games etc, please fire them over to [email protected] and I'll stick 'em in my archive (its up for FTP), and put them onto my BBS. (My BBS runs under an emulator I've built.) I have often been tempted to modify BBS Express to be multi-node but in the end, it'd be easier to wriote a new bbs in perl over a couple days that modify the old Express to be multinode friendly. But we'll see jeff

Theres a few databases around, such as the TOSEC database and .. I forget his names website, and even that new application letting you poke around. A couple years back I started up a project to catalog a bunch of disks that were missing from the current (then) sources.. I wasn't aware of TOSEC until much after I'd started the project, but I did at that time crib some data in. What I had was a dozen peopel making CRC checksums of their disks and entering the game listing into textfiles of a certain format and put it all together. Its been floating around for awhile, but people kjeep starting up new projects to do the same work.. so here goes, spread the word and maybe it'll be useful: Its found here: http://www.codejedi.com/shadowplan/castaway.html The last update was awhile back and is here: http://www.codejedi.com/castaway/binaries/...s/stgames23.txt You can just use any word processor or text editor, hit Find and enter part of a game name to find its occurances on various pirate collections or originals or the like. jeff

Cool stuff, I'll take a look. I wasn't aware people were using cart's to assist ripping. I've got an eprom burner et al, so just need to find some blank carts then.. jeff

Anyone know anything about old cracking tools for the ST? Back in the day I was doing a lot of coding but not a lot of cracking of course, so while I'm aware of some things like Knife-ST hex editor, I've no clue about what graphics/audio rippers the naughty boys used, nor which monitors or mem-searchers or other tools they may have used. Anyone know the best tools, and/or where to find them? (I keep an archiv of ST stuff, not just games of course. One of these days I'll have to put it up online. Further, someone needs to record some of this stuff like the above that no one publicly talked about. By I also am looking for ways of poking around some old ST apps of course jeff

I'd like to contact one or both of these guys (of ST game authoring fame, mostly for Time Bandits); they've done a couple of interviews over the last few years, so I know they're about... just wondering if anyone has their email address or the like Let me know (here, or to [email protected]) jeff

Intro This project actually began a year or more back .. I built a multiplatform engine for creating retro-style games; specifically, I created it originally to build a few games, but then I've grown and generalized it to allow for quite an array of game designs. The game I originally wanted to remake was Time Bandits (Atari ST), and then later I figured out that Gauntlet and Bomberman and other games are "similar" in a lot of respects. A year passes; the original engine was put together, then ported to a pile of platforms, and then grown to include a scripting language so it could be really powerful. I've started a few little games with it, and a few other people are working on other games. Cool stuff. See one of the levels in BombZ here: http://www.codejedi.com/zot/screenshots/tbscr.jpg Thats using a Time Bandits tileset with some Bomberman gameplay, all written in script, and running on Windows, Mac, Linux/Unix, GP32, Palm OS and Pocket PC Help? Yep.. I've built this engine for making retro games; so far I've put together a Space Invaders-like game (ZInvaders), and the game above, and a Pacman-like game, and someone is working on a RTS (!!). I'd like to buckle down and work on the Time Bandits remake though. The "hard" parts are done, but now the tedious part (tedious to me anyway).. making all the maps. Time Bandits had 16 areas, each with 16 levels (thats 256 levels, though some of multiple floors!) Each area actually has 4 groups of 4 areas.. each group was the same floor layout, more or less, and rotated.) So 64 distinct areas with multiple floors, rotated around 4 times. So maybe 300+ maps! I'm trying to dream up a good approach to cloning them; I could disassemble and figure out how the original Time Bandits encodes them, but that sounds like a lot of work as well. (I'm an emu author and I know how to decode 68k assembly, but its not th emost fun ever Another option is to get a few people playing the game with a trainer on (so as to avoid dieing). Then take screenshots every few inches, and stitch the screenshots together. Then go over screenshots and encode them into the game engine map format. Whew! So lots of work! So my question to all my Atari and Retro loving friends is.. 1) Anyone interested in making their own retro game? I've got an engine for you See http://www.codejedi.com/zot for the engine runtimes and mailing lists and such; work in progress, but already cool as heck. 2) If you're interested in helping out with my Time Bandits remake project, let me know! (post here or email me at [email protected]) 3) If you just want to play around, then you can already run BombZ and ZInvaders on most platforms; they're work in progress minigames, but playable.. BombZ: http://www.codejedi.com/bombz/screenshots/bombz2.png ZInvaders: http://www.codejedi.com/zot/screenshots/zinvader2.jpg Yes, I know I can play Time Bandits in emulators (I've written emus, and ported CaSTaway to Palm OS and GP32 to make it portable.. but a remake is the true mark of the obsessed!) jeff