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cd-w

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Posts posted by cd-w

  12. Posted

    Unfortunately, I cannot play Hunchy II, because it is not a free program. I will not buy it. I am very saddened that I will not be able to have the pleasure of playing this game without forfeiting my freedom and supporting a culture of greed and lack of education.

    To educate you:

     

    1) The rom is freely available here: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/72308-hunchy-ii/page-4?do=findComment&comment=945737

    It can be played in an emulator or on real hardware with a Harmony cart.

     

    2) The source code is also freely available (part of the zip archive above) so anyone can learn how the game was created.

     

    3) The cost of the cart version is mostly production, and any extra I donate toward the running of the AtariAge website.

     

    Chris

    • Like 2

  13. Posted · Edited by cd-w

    It's not from me. Actually it was already there when I first joined and later took over development. I have to dig up some old mails, I think the name was mentioned somewhere.

     

    Chris should know better.

    The music is a TIA chiptune composition by Richard (Kulor) Armijo called "Zombified Zombie Bones". He entered it in the battle of the bits competition back in 2008, and kindly gave his permission for me to use it in Star Castle. You can find some of his other awesome chiptune creations linked from his battle of the bits profile.

     

    Chris

    • Like 2

  14. Posted · Edited by cd-w

    Chetiry took advantage of the Melody hardware too, didn't it?

     

    Only for the high score table and music playback - the Chetiry game itself is pure 6507 code. Space Rocks and SF2 use actual ARM code (written in C) for parts of the game. That doesn't mean Space Rocks is any less of an achievement - the tight timings on the Atari mean there is very little time to execute the ARM code, and heavy optimisation is still necessary.

     

    Chris

    • Like 1

  15. Posted · Edited by cd-w

    3E/3F used by Boulderdash and a few demos - the ROM for boulderdash will never be released publicly.

    SB and 4A50 are schemes designed by Supercat but have never been used.

    X07 was used by Stellas Stocking, but the ROM has not been publicly released. Since it is a collection of minigames, it could be easily be broken down to work within 32K.

    EF and EFSC were designed for Homestar Runner which never progressed beyond an early demo.

     

    So you are really not missing out on anything ...

     

    Chris

  16. Posted · Edited by cd-w

    The list of supported bankswitching schemes for Harmony is given in the manual where you can use a file extension to force a particular scheme:

     

    .2K Atari 2K

    .4K Atari 4K (default)

    .F8 Atari F8

    .F8S Atari F8 with Superchip

    .F6 Atari F6

    .F6S Atari F6 with Superchip

    .F4 Atari F4

    .F4S Atari F4 with Superchip

    .FA CBS RAM +

    .FE Activision FE

    .3F Tigervision 3F

    .3E 3E (3F with up to 4K RAM)

    .E0 Parker Brothers E0

    .E7 M-Network E7

    .CV Commavid

    .UA UA Limited

    .AR Arcadia Supercharger

    .DPC DPC (Pitfall 2)

    .084 0840 Econobanking

    .CU Custom bankswitching

     

    As Thomas says, Harmony can support all bankswitching schemes that will fit into 32K ROM and up to around 6K RAM. The .CU extension allows user-defined bankswitching schemes (currently DPC+, Star Castle, and Chetiry schemes).

     

    Chris

  18. Posted

    Commercial game development (for consoles and pc) is completely different from home-brewing. Developers don't get much freedom to be creative - that side of things is handled by the game designers, directors, producers, etc. Commercial game development these days is basically about making a bunch of flaky sdks and engines (3d, physics, ai, audio, etc) work together, managing a huge collection of art assets, and writing state machines. This is normally done against an insane deadline, with constantly changing goals, and obscure bug reports from testers. All the time hoping that the project doesn't get cancelled, the studio go out of business, or the development gets outsourced!

     

    The closest commercial equivalent to home-brewing is probably app development. Apps are normally developed by small teams, with freedom to be creative, while working around the limitations of the platform.

     

    Regarding your dinner, I'd find out what kind of developer he is, and stick to high-level comparisons of modern vs classic games!

     

    Chris

     

     

    • Like 1

  20. Posted

    I'm based in the UK, and Thomas is based in Germany. However, we only worked on the software side of things. The carts can only be purchased from Fred, who is based in the US. If you ask nicely he may be willing to mark the package as a "Gift" to avoid import duty.

     

    Chris

  21. Posted

    I really hope you will reconsider. It would be a real shame to see this fantastic emulator go stale. Stella is one of the main reasons that I find 2600 home-brew development enjoyable, thanks to the excellent debugger. I have often thought about coding for the 7800, but the lack of a proper emulator that works on Linux always puts me off (I have always hoped that you might extend Stella with 7800 support at some point). There would be far less 2600 home-brews if it were not for Stella.

     

    I think the TIA emulation is already around 99% accurate? The only issues that I'm aware of are mid-line NUSIZx changes and some minor RESPx differences? Are there any other issues that need to be addressed? If the current implementation is difficult to understand, perhaps it would be more enjoyable to try a reimplementation, e.g. a gate-level simulation of the schematic?

     

    Chris

    • Like 2

  24. Posted

     

    For the horizontal motion it seems more difficult to match the arcade speed without ghosting and choppy moving, that's why I decided for a constant speed for now. I'll have another look and try to find a better horizontal mapping when all levels are done. They may be too easy with Mario that fast.

     

    You probably need to use fractional positioning (eg 16 bit values) to get the jump offsets to look correct.

     

    Chris

  25. Posted

    Currently, the 25 m stage is 232 lines high (without any score display). With a single score row it would probably become around 238 lines high. That seems a bit much, and I would loose a lot of cycles in overscan. It would also heavily decrease the number of pointers and cycles to maintain the display...

     

    In that case it wouldn't work without scrolling - Chetiry is already pushing the vertical limits. I like the idea of extra levels that take advantage of the scrolling. Perhaps you could extend the climbing sequence at the end of each level also? Will your engine be able to display the sloped girders in the first level?

     

    Chris

     

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