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Omegamatrix

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Posts posted by Omegamatrix

  2. Posted

    17 hours ago, Shannon said:

    Wow.  Just played this today and it's fantastic!  This game was a favorite of mine back in the day.  I used to ride my bike 5 miles to the local Safeway just to play the thing.  I remember thinking that the stick was broke due to the poor response times.  Turned out the game is programmed that way!  :lol:

     

    Anywho.. same comment as others the map screen music is really bad.  The music in some of the rooms seems a little off but still decent.  When in the rooms the monster seems to appear a little too soon?  I may be wrong about that.  And in the one room with 3 spiders after you grab the treasure the 3 spiders are supposed to disappear and be replaced by two spiders.

     

    That is all I noticed so far.  Great work BTW!

     

    The Hallway music is being worked on. Yeah, I do know about the Spider Room special events. I moved it to out of scope due to several factors. If I ever do make an ARM arcade homebrew version this would be handled as well as the special events for the Wall Room, Troll Room, Two-Headed room, Demon room, and Cyclops room.

     

    I'm not sure if anyone noticed but I did restore the treasure in the Spider Room to be the Doll. The original 2600 version had a Key for the treasure, but the Doll is the correct treasure for that room.

    13 hours ago, VectorGamer said:

    Got to play this the other night. Any chance the collision detection can be fixed? Multiple times I shot the bad guys but they didn't die.

    Thank you for playing. The collision system is actually inherited and unchanged from the original 2600 game. It is quite the convoluted code using hardware collisions for half the sprites and doing software collisions for the rest. It won't get any better unless the game is rebuilt from scratch. So I shelved it for a future ARM version, which I may or may not ever do. I have other projects to complete first, Circus AtariAge being one of them.

     

    I have pushed both enhanced collisions and intelligent flicker management to out of scope for this project, but I will look at few previous versions to see if a bug has been introduced. Right now I am wondering if you see the arrow fly through the enemy? Are you playing in emulation or an Atari? Please let me know.

  3. Posted

    The flags should be set appropriately, but the write back will not work as it is writing back to the read address. So you really have to do INC and DEC a longer way using this ram. I usually just load the value into the X, do a DEX, and write back.

     

    There's more on instruction timings cycle by cycle here:

     

    http://nesdev.com/6502_cpu.txt

     

     

    If you take DEC absolute for example, it does this: 

         Read-Modify-Write instructions (ASL, LSR, ROL, ROR, INC, DEC,
                                     SLO, SRE, RLA, RRA, ISB, DCP)

        #  address R/W description
       --- ------- --- ------------------------------------------
        1    PC     R  fetch opcode, increment PC
        2    PC     R  fetch low byte of address, increment PC
        3    PC     R  fetch high byte of address, increment PC
        4  address  R  read from effective address
        5  address  W  write the value back to effective address,
                       and do the operation on it
        6  address  W  write the new value to effective address

    The effective address in this case is the one it reads from. So it tries to write back to the read address, and that won't work in this case.

    • Thanks 2

  4. Posted

    On 10/25/2019 at 9:37 PM, Shaggy the Atarian said:

    One note, I tried this now on my Atari Flashback Portable and it doesn't work. Just get the "Venture Reloaded" title screen for a moment, which seems to be stuck in a boot loop (the title disappears, then it shows up again. Just keeps doing that no matter what you press, apart from going back to the start menu). 

    I'm not surprised it doesn't work. I did not intentionally make it not work, but until they start using a current version of Stella in these portables there will always be incompatibilities.

    • Thanks 1

  5. Posted

    On 10/24/2019 at 1:12 PM, David Alexander said:

    I definitely will want this on a Cart. Anybody know when it will be released on a cart? Thanks.

    Realistically, I hope it is within 6 months. Releases on AA go in batches, and Al has to build a billion carts for the post PRGE show, and then handle Christmas.

     

    - Right now the rom is close to final. There might be a few more release candidates, with one more scheduled for sure.

    - I am going to see about hold a label contest soon

    - No work on a manual or box has been done.

     

    So there is still lots to do. Mostly this becomes the work of other people from this point on.

  6. Posted

    On 10/24/2019 at 2:07 PM, Raiu said:

    First, I think I found a bug: It's possible to walk through top walls by pressing up against it (and firing?).  If the wall is against the top of the screen, then you get stuck in the wall and slide to the right (slamming into any enemies in the way), otherwise, you just pass right through and get stuck outside the level.

     

    Possible bug: the timer bonus at the end of each stage is wrong (instead of multiplying the points you got in the round by the number on the timer, it just adds 100 points per bonus left).

     

    The game doesn't award you any points if you shoot a monster before you pick up the treasure in the room.  I know that's how it worked in the original Atari 2600 version, but that's not how it works in the Colecovision or arcade versions, where you always get points for shooting monsters.

     

    Scoring is very low in general.  I played an entire game, clearing 13 rooms (i.e., the first three levels and then the Goblin Room the second time around), and only got 5900 points total.  Meanwhile, I got over 11000 points in the arcade version from just the first four chambers normally, and 7500 from turning on cheats and just picking up the four treasures and shooting nothing.

     

    One final criticism: I really, really, don't like the map screen music.  I know the 2600 doesn't have great sound hardware and can't play certain notes, but it's much more off-key than the rest of the game's music, especially the final note.  Is that still being worked on?  (Suggestion: the arcade game has different map screen music, maybe that would work better?)

     

    Overall, though, this is amazing.  Absolutely amazing.

    Hello Raiu,

     

    Thank you for your feedback.

     

    1) The wall bug has been fixed for Release Candidate 2 (RC2). I'm glad you found it because I could not replicate it on my keyboard, and I would not have known otherwise.

     

    2) Yeah, I took a deviation with bonus points adding up instead of multiplying. I was worried about people wrapping the score too easily. However, seeing that the overall scores have been pretty low I have since changed it for RC2 to be a true multiplier. Points might not exactly match the arcade version, but it will be more rewarding and increase the score overall.

     

    3) The original Atari version didn't allow points for killing monsters until the treasure was collected. This prevents cherry picking to get a high score by continually entering/exiting the room to kill a close monster without getting hit. To get more points you have to dodge the monsters and get to the treasure first. However, when I saw videos of people playing the game it showed me that most people found it fun to blast away. They also might have been upset about the lack of points except I don't think they noticed because of the rotation of texts at the top of the screen.

     

    With that in mind I believe I figured out a way to get the best of both worlds. Simply put you will get points for killing monsters right away. However, if you exit the room without the treasure you will no longer get points for more monster kills in that room until after you pick the treasure up. This seems fair. Also, if you die before getting the treasure everything resets, so you will be allowed points for monsters kills again. This is already in place for RC2.

     

    4) Yes, the big room music is not good. Iesposta also said noted it sounded off key, and I agree. I will work on it for RC2.

     

     

     

    I hope to get RC2 done reasonably soon, within a couple of weeks. If anyone has more feedback please post.

    • Like 1

  8. Posted

    Another video review:

     

     

    FYI, I can see in the video that phosphor was not enabled in Stella, so there is a lot of flicker in the video.

     

    Overall I was happy to see Brian's review. I felt all his points were fair and I welcome the critique.

    • Like 1

  10. Posted

    Ladies and Gentlemen, 

     

    As seen at PRGE and on ZeroPage Homebrew, this is Venture Reloaded.

     

    812951545_TreasureScreen.thumb.png.3155cb2c9dff7159dfcb9eb5a83cd8ed.png  1939564899_Level3.thumb.png.18c19dc1bb64e7f1812099c033df216e.png

     

    765933673_SkeletonRoom.thumb.png.b86f9015efbb3802741a130fd93a8fb8.png1767012523_TrollRoom.thumb.png.469b7ddaf44ad9309f653ca694e5f5d4.png

     

      

     

     

    NEW - Dec 14, 2019 - Latest and greatest rom RC3 is below!!!

     

     

    Venture Reloaded (RC3).zip

     


    This is a hack, not a homebrew. Everything has been updated and new content has been added. The earliest a cart release will happen is next year through AtariAge.

     


    If you are using Stella than you must enable Phosphor to eliminate flicker. This is found in the display tab of the game properties.

     

    Phosphor.png.8ed2bf4561c4209f3d12ccb41309ad7c.png

     

     


    You can also configure Stella to use a SaveKey to auto-save your highscore. In the controller change the P1 controller to SaveKey.

     

    SaveKey.png.1f35e941a292720e3becc693c9ce968a.png

     

    Have fun with this!!! If you do get all the treasures please be sure to post a picture of the Treasure Screen in a spoiler with your score. Congrats to all who participated in this challenge. We have now passed the cut-off date for entries. 😀

     

     

    • Like 36
    • Thanks 6

  11. Posted

    On 10/21/2019 at 9:06 AM, Thomas Jentzsch said:

    The 'unmassaged' ROM was 4094 bytes long and missed the startup vectors. So I removed two bytes from the explosion when the balloon hits the floor and added the missing 4 bytes.

    I found similar faults with the reset vector in some of Alex's other games.

     

     

    • Thanks 1

  19. Posted

    2 hours ago, save2600 said:

    When I first started seeing the red box re-releases to games like Venture BITD, I assumed that they were enhanced versions of the originals. Was disappointed to find they weren't!  🤣

    It's a marketing masterpiece.

     

    BTW we should take into context that this is just a 4K game, and that is not a lot of room for all those rooms. Pun intended.

  20. Posted

    2 hours ago, eegad said:

    It was one of those arcade games at the time that I loved,  but was bad at playing.  2600 version was good,  but much easier than the arcade. Played it a lot but was always annoyed that after the second level it started repeating.  Arcade version had 3 or 4 levels before repeating. Though I'm pretty sure somebody made a "venture arcade" version in more recent years with the missing levels. 

    Yeah, Batari made a hack with the 3rd level. It's got a bug in the Genie Room, but at least we have it at all.

  22. Posted

    22 hours ago, save2600 said:

    I had it since BITD and it's one of my favs for sure. Fun to play to this day and have you checked out the Wolfenstein hack in the AA store? More rooms and stuff to explore...

    I tried the Wolfenstein hack. It's quite complex for a hack. You would not know it started as Venture. I like the title screen too.

  23. Posted

    19 hours ago, Nukey Shay said:

    Not getting how Entombed has these "archaeologists" stumped, tho.  It's just using the separate nybbles of rnd for PF1 and PF2...each bit position corresponds to 2 bit positions of PF to make the passages wide enough for the player character to move though.

     

    You're right. This part of the code looks straight forward. So really the magic is in the pattern of numbers from the pseudo random generator, and how that corresponds to D7 and D0.

     

    I have not looked at the rest of the code at all, but I am wondering if this random generator is only called for this routine? It would be more interesting if it wasn't. If it is not called only by this routine I would want to know if it is called every nth time, repeatedly.

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