Kurt_Woloch

Here are my times for this past week (April 15th through 21st): As last week, I didn't play anything that would be eligigle for the tracker. But I'm continuing on the electronic version of "The Grindy Adventure", and this week I created a nifty trick where you can buy items in a supermaket and eat them leter, which unfortuately is normally hard to achieve with this game engine.

Here are my times for classic and modern gaming of this week (June 8th through 14th)... I'm afraid I didn't play anything that's meaningful for thjis tracker. I was busy adapting my story book game "The grindy adventure" to an online format.

Here are my times for this past week (April 1st through 7th, 2024): Commodore 64: Gremlins (Atarisoft) - 125 min. Since I'm finished with "Elevator Action" now, I've cut down on my playing time drastically. This week, I only played "Gremlins" by Atarisoft. I'm not sure if that was actually released, but I also had it back in the days on a disk (I'm pretty sure it was never actually released in Austria though). That version was a bit different though, in that sometimes the right door of the fridge would open and ice cubes would fly out, settling on the floow and building some more puddles if you wanted long enough for the ice to melt. And those could be used for boosting the number of Mogwai's on the screen through multiplication. The more Mogwai's you had, the moere points you'd get. This doesn't happen in the version I'm playing now, however. From night 23 on there are no more puddles beause all available objects are getting used for displaying the enemies.

This is maybe a bad example since the C64 and Atari 8-bit still have different color pallettes, so you can tell them apart by that. But there are, for instance, several different models of Sharp computers, and some Namco games have been made in several different versions for those computers, still some of those versions may look the same. Even more striking are similarities between some games for Colecovision, MSX and Sega SG-1000 as well as lesser known systems such as the Sord. Those are in fact sister systems sharing the same CPU and video chip, and very similar, if not identical sound chips, so many games have been ported over from one of those systems to another one of them. And if that happens, it's really hard to tell the versions apart from one another. This happened both in the old days where, for instance, SEGA issued Zaxxon both for their SG-1000 system and the MSX, and those ports look pretty much identical. And in the last years, old games for one of those systems have now been ported over to one of the others, and of course, they look identical as well, for instance, Collectorvision makes such ports for the Colecovision. Anyway, here are my times for this past week (March 25th through 31st)... Arcade: Elevator Action - 56 min. in 6 sessions Browser-based: ChooseYourStory.com: Shut up and grow it! - 15 min. Hero wars - 84 min. Turbo Outrun Reimagined v0.3.7e alpha by Sk1ds - 7 min. This week I deviated from playing "Elevator Action" only. In fact, that game got eclipsed by the browser game "Hero wars" which is notorious for having Youtube ads showing a different style of gameplay which is nowhere to be found in the actual game. At least not that I could find it. In "Elevator Action" I still didn't finish the 3rd building, and I don't think I ever will. I've watched a Youtube video to find out what gets harder about it, and it seems to stay at 4 enemies on screen, but increase their shooting frequency. They only shoot at you if you're in their line of fire, and until the 3rd building they usually get killed one way or another before they get to shoot again. However, by the 10th building they seem to be able to shoot again about every 2 seconds each. I've now given up on this game, replacing it by work on my adventure game "The grindy adventure" which I told you about about 2 months ago. I'm now trying to convert it into a playable Choose-your-own-adventure game on ChooseYourStory.com where you can find hundreds of games in that style. Out of them, I tried the game "Shut up and grow it!", and I think those games are eligible for this tracker since they are basically adventure games. Lastly, I also tried "Turbo Outrun Reimagined", which is a take on Turbo Outrun or also the original Outrun with improved graphics, but the roots of it are still very easy to make out wich the graphics looking more or less identical to the original arcade games, just touched up in some places.

Here are my times for this past week (March 18th through 24th, 2024)... Arcade: Elevator Action - 116 min. in 13 sessions I don't feel the urge to play any other games than "Elevator Action" at the moment... well, I did, but "Lunar Rescue" wasn't available to play online, at least I didn't find it. One session is usually only one game though. I got to the third building in many of my sessions, but I didn't manage to complete building 3 and go to the next one.

Here are my times for this past week (January 11th through 17th, 2023): Arcade: Elevator Action - 79 min. in several sessions This week I continued to play the arcade original for "Elevator Action". I reached the 3rd building in it, but did not manage to complete it.

Here are my times for this past week (March 4th through 10th, 2024)... Arcade: Elevator Action - 64 min. in 7 sessions This week, like last week, I only played the original version of "Elevator Action". I did improve somewhat, more often completing the 2nd building

I don't think the original game has scrolling... I just watched a Youtube video of it and it just displays a screen worth of surface as an overview, including different flashing bonuses, then as you come near to one of them, it abruptly zooms in on it, but again, no scrolling.

Yes, indeed, it does. But I've noticed something interesting with the fuse in this game... if you set a bomb to the right of a wall, the fuse forms a black rectangle which will obstruct the right part of the wall. I don't know why this happens... could this be one of the limitations of the VDC, such as if you put two characters next to each other, they just won't overlap, but the whole 8-pixel rectangle of one character will obstruct the other one? Is that how it works? If so, this would also prevent multiple dots in different colors from being set next to each other to form a background. Instead, they would have to be at least 8 pixels apart in order to fully appear on screen.

Yes, they can be created. The problem is bandwidth limitations, so things might get tricky. Actually, I first deemed it impossible, but the more I think about it, I figure it might just work out. Anyway, the shapes of the sprites are stored in the VDC, so to change the shape of a sprite you have to send the new shape to the VDC, every byte of it. But they are shown on consecutive scanlines, and each scanline is doubled, so in average you have 2 scanlines to write 4 bytes of sprite shapes plus rewrite the registers so that the sprites get displayed again further down the screen once they are done. The question is if this works while they are being displayed or if the VDC has some restrictions preventing this. Also, you'd probably have to do the register re-writes all at once so there's no gap between the last scanline of a sprite and the first scanline of its repetition. If this can be done, it probably needs an unrolled loop.

Here are my times for this week (February 26th through March 3rd 2024)... today is March 3rd in the USA as well, right? RIGHT??? Anyway, here are my... yeah, as said above. Arcade: Elevator Action - 57 min. in 3 sessions This week I continued to play the original arcade version of "Elevator Action" just for a little distraction (rhymes, huh?). One of the sessions was pretty short because right after starting the game, it came to me what I actually wanted to do, so that session only lasted for one game. I managed to beat the 2nd building multiple times and start the 3rd, maxing out at about 17,500 points. What was also interesting, but isn't a game, is a paper that came out on "Cellular functions of spermatogonial stem cells in relation to JAK/STAT signaling pathway"... whatever that is. This scientific paper has actually been written by AI and the illustrations created by Midjourney. On the surface, this looks like a legit scientific paper, but if you look at the figures a bit more closely you'll realize that they are pretty much nonsense, and the descriptions of the figures are gibberish with the words that are in principle correct often varying in spelling, i.e. the term "spermatogonial stem cells" once appears as "Spermatocial stem cells", then there is an "iollotte sserotgomar cell", there are "senctolic stem cells" and "dielocttal stem ells", with the "e" of "dielocttal" actually being a mirrored "s" (a "2" in lowercase). And the madness goes on like this in the other figures which are all AI generated...

Here are my times for this past week (February 19th through 25th, 2024): Arcade: Elevator Action - 49 min. in 3 sessions The only game I played this week was the already familiar Elevator Action in the original arcade version. I made it through the first two buildings twice, but couldn't complete them. Other than that I "played" around with some AI picture and video generators / enhancers such as "Stable Cascade" or "Clip Interrogator" (both on Hugging Face), but those aren't really video games, so they aren't eligible for inclusion here.

Here are my times for this week (February 12th through 18th, 2024): I didn't really play any games this week, though at two points I was close to... Firstly, I tried to play the arcade game "Pump Plop" on retrogames.cc. This seems to be a more modern take on "Circus" (don't know what its actual arcade name was, this was the name on the Atari 2600). But it requires a spin controller which isn't supported on the emulator used by this site, so it's sadly unplayable. Secondly, I downloaded "Smurf Rescue" for the C-64. However, I didn't really play the game, but only went to examine it. The graphics are pretty close to the Colecovision version, but it's slow due to being programmed in BASIC. I think this could be improved by running it through a compiler like Austro-Comp. But there are some difficultis with that... the game first unpacks and only then reveals it's a BASIC program if you stop it, and then I don't know which non-standard subroutines it used (it probably uses some).

Here are my times for this week (February 5th through 11th, 2024): Arcade: Elevator Action - 54 min. in 3 sessions Elevator Action II - 56 min. Browser-based: 98.js: Space Cadet Pinball - 12 min. This week I played a bit of Elevator Action again, but by the third building things get pretty tough. Then I tried its unpopular sequel, Elevator Action II, where only the first level is an elevator stage like in the original game. The subsequent levels differ in layout greatly. Finally, due to a livestream on Youtube I got aware of a utility called paint.js, which is a replication of the Windows 98 version of Paint in Javascript that runs on a website. I could actually use that for something which you can't do in the Windows 10 version of Paint anymore... resizing pictures WITHOUT applying antialiasing. But I needed such a function for a picture conversion from a while ago. You see, back in the day I started a C-64 conversion of the Magnavox Odyssey^2 game "Smithereens" (AKA "Stone Sling") which in German was called "Burgenschlacht" (battle of castles). Since the C-64 has vastly better graphics than the Odyssey^2, I modeled the background graphics a bit after the G7400/Odyssey^3 version with the additional background graphics, in my case showing a river dividing a meadow, like this: You can see some trickery with raster line interrupts and sprites in the border here. However, this was not nearly close to the background graphics of the G7400 version, which look like this: This, however, isn't quite up to what the C-64 can do... the C-64 has a multicolor mode which basically the G7400 doesn't have, its graphics capabilities are maybe on par with the hi-res mode of the C-64. So I put that picture through the AI picture processor FotoR, yielding the following result: That looks much nicer, however it's now more than the C-64 can do, so I had to convert it down to its resolution and colors somehow. There's an online converter for C-64 graphics, but it spits out multicolor pictures in the resolution 160x200, looking like this: However, this now has the wrong screen aspect ratio, so each pixel has to be stretched horizontally again, and as I mentioned, you can't do this in Windows 10 paint without applying anti aliasing, but with Paint.js, you can do just that, yielding the following result: And that's what a proper background on the C-64 would look like, there might just be some unresolved color clashes if a tile uses more than 4 colors, but I didn't look into that yet. It actually comes close to the style in which I "modernized" the sprites which in the G7400 version are 8x8 pixels and monochrome, but can look much better on the C-64. However, while doing that I noticed that Paint.js actually belongs to a Windows 98 simulator of sorts called 98.js, and with it they included several apps that come with Windows 98, including Space Cadet Pinball, and that's what I played and listed. Oh, here's a PRG file for everyone who wants to experience my original "Burgenschlacht" demo (as far as it got) for the C-64, also containing some music... can anyone guess the song? demo burgenschl.PRG

Here are my times for this week (January 29th through February 4th, 2024)... Browser-based: ChooseYourStory.com: My posessions - 27 min. ChooseYourStory.com: Just Another Saturday Night - 27 min. ChooseYourStory.com: HBIO Project - 4 min. Quest (Youtube Choose-your-own-adventure game) - 41 min. Commodore 64: Bristles - 24 min. This week was a bit about choose-your-own-adventure games which actually used to be published as books. After seeing one of those with a pupil of a different class, I started to write one myself back in 1987-1989 while in school, but it didn't get beyond that one copy on paper. However, mine seems to work quite differently from what's offered in those books, leaning more towards what text adventure games on early home computers had to offer. You see, those books mostly have a story which is constantly advancing and hardly ever circles back. Mine, in constrast, has a bunch of locations, practically an open world, you can freely go to, where several characters appear you can interact with, or you can enter one of the venues or join a party and take part in the storyline offered there until finally it puts you back into the open. The chapters are pretty short with only a few lines each, down to one line in some cases where a character only gives a brief response to what you're saying and then it rebranches. The characters and places are all taken from real life, and all the parties described really took place, just without some of the options possible in the game, and not all at once. The whole thing is called "The grindy adventure", and maybe one day I will bring it into electronic form. I hope the people depicted in it won't get angry about this. Anyway, this is why I looked for a site where you can play and even design choose-your-own-adventure games online, which ChooseYourStory.com is, and I played three of the games offered there, My possessions, Just Another Saturday Night, and HBIO Project. I also played a choose-your-own-adventure game offered on Youtube called "Quest", however, while those on ChooseYourStory.com have different branches, "Quest" rebranches quite often, so that in a typical playthrough you will see nearly all the scenes the game has to offer, and if you choose different paths, you will get to see the same scenes as well, just with a different outcome and maybe in a slightly different order. Other than that, I tried "Bristles" for the C-64 by First Star Software, but I didn't find it too enjoyable, so I have no urge to play it more.

Here are my times for this week (January 22th through 28th, 2024)... sorry, I didn't play any games this week. I read up on some though... in particular, I watched some videos about LCD pinball games and compared Nintendo's double-screen version with that of a different manufacturer which has got more LCD segments so that more different ball positions are possible, but the ball always moves in a straight line which isn't realistic. Nintendo's pinball, in contrast to that, has fewer possible ball positions, but the way the ball jumps from position to position looks somewhat more realistic. The second thing I was wondering about was how the sprite hardware of the Donkey Kong arcade game works. I haven't really come to a conclusion there. They talked about a bank of shift registers handling the sprites, but it's pretty unknown how many of them actually are and how in detail they work i.e. how they are supposed to be programmed. Other than that, there were two farewell parties from colleagues this week, and I did my quarterly cemetary tour today, visiting 5 tombs instead of 4 for the first time.

Here are my times for this past week (January 15th through 21st, 2024): Arcade: Crazy Kong (Galaxian hardware) - 4 min. Crazy Kong (Moon Cresta hardware) - 4 min. Crazy Kong (Scramble hardware) - 3 min. Non-eligible: Rubik's Cube - 11 min. I didn't play much this week, but I did try 3 variations of "Crazy Kong" running on alternative hardware. Those have been butchered compared to the official release though, which runs on Crazy Climber hardware. On Galaxian hardware, the sound has been compromised... apparently they don't manage to put out very pure tones. Also the number of sprites has been noteably decreased. On Moon Cresta hardware, the game is pretty similar to the version on Galaxian hardware with basically the same sound, but they seem to have managed to retain a few more sprites. On Scramble hardware, the game looks differently with different colors and vastly different sound. Actually I doubt it's really Scramble hardware since the sound sounds more like other Konami games like Turtles, also retaining some of Turtles' sound effects and background music... which means it has better music than the original Donkey Kong! The way I explain this is that for the CPU ROM, well, all those games have a Z80 CPU, so the main code was not too hard to port over. However, the sound chip on "Turtles" is vastly different to that on Crazy Kong / Crazy Climber or even the original Donkey Kong, so they have re-written some of the music to work on that sound chip, but mostly retained the sound effects and music from Turtles. Since those machines have a dedicated sound CPU, I guess they only slighly altered the code for that CPU. Finally, I revisited Rubik's Cube, which despite the new format of the tracker, is still in-eligible because it's not a video game. I struggled a bit remembering all the moves at first, but then I got my time back down to about 4 minutes.

Here are my times for this past week of January 8th through 14th, 2024: Sorry, this week I didn't get to play anything. It's been the first week after a holiday break from work, and on top of that work in the flat of my deceased father has started with an electrical check on Tuesday and then the decluttering starting on Thursday. So I didn't have nearly as much time as in the last weeks.

Here are my times for this past week (January 1st through 7th, 2024) on... well... all systems: Arcade: Breywood - 17 min. PC (modern): Evony - The king's return - 48 min. I continued to play "Breywood" this week until I managed to beat the 2nd level. Which is kinda hard, but over time I figured out some tricks like not taking all the speedups right away, but switching weapons and let each golem run over 1 speedup amulet. Then I tried "Evony - The king's return", which is a PC download which you basically can play for free, There are just constantly game items for sale

Here are my times for this past week (December 25th through 31st, 2023) on modern systems: Browser-based: Hero Wars - 52 min. This week I played Hero Wars again after seeing some ads for it on Youtube, to check what gameplay featured in the ads aer actually playable, and the shocking answer is none.

Here are my times for this past week (December 25th through 31st, 2023) on classic systems: Arcade: Bomb Kick - 34 min. Bonanza Bros - 16 min. Bouncing Balls - 19 min. Brain - 22 min. Breywood - 111 min. in 2 sessions This week I continued my quest to play arcade games in alphabetical order. Bomb Kick is another game of the formula pioneered by Mario Bros. with levels consisting of single screens where you have to throw bombs at various enemies which turns them into fruit which you then have to collect. One of the enemies is kind of a worm which is hard to eliminate. Bonanza Bros is a game where you have to find various objects in a mostly side-scrolling area. Sadly, I couldn't find my way through the 2nd level already. Bouncing balls is kind of a puzzle game where balls of different values fall down, and you have to find the correct chute for them in order to reach some point value exactly. I remember having played this when it came out in the arcade back in, I think, 1991. Brain is a side-scrolling shooter with some twists. One is that you can fly up and down at well which causes the screen to scroll accordingly and even stops the steady scrolling from right to left. Breywood was the most interesting game of this week. Its concept is similar to Gauntlet, but there are also differences. You have Golems hidden behind doors which you can open to free them, at which point they will join your party, increasing firepower and giving you an additional weapon to choose from. Behind other doors there are armadas of Zombies which, if killed, not only give points but also coins you can collect to replenish your constantly ticking down life energy. The goal of each floor (level) is to pick up a key and open the door to the exit.

Here are my times for this past week (December 18th through 24th) on classic systems: Arcade: Boggy '84 - 89 min. in 2 sessions Bogey Manor - 48 min. Bomber (Clone of Scramble) - 2 min. Bomber Man (Japan) - 25 min. Bombjack Twin - 15 min. Bongo - 18 min. I continued the quest of checking out all available games in alphabetical order, starting wih Boggy '84. which is similar to Donkey Kong, but you have to either "destroy" 8 donkeys or get all 7 keys that are scattered around the screen. I didn't manage to go through all 4 initial rounds, but I saw that someone at Youtube did. This also uses the parallax scrolling inherent to the Scramble hardware used to display a stream carrying a boat on Level 2. Then, Bogey Manor is a game about a man running in a haunted house having to destroy all glasses, or else he gets defeated by several ghosts. Bomber (Clone of Scramble) is really that... the only differenc to Scramble I could make out is slightly different text on the title screen. Maybe the colors are wrong too, but I didn't learn those by heart. Other than that, I only played one game (reaching the asteroid stage). So I continued with "Bomber Man (Japan)" which is a different beast with more modern hardware and sample-based music. I didn't manage to beat even the pre-entered high score, but I got quite far, just not far enough. Bombjack Twin ist pretty closely based on the original Bomb Jack arcade game, but with more colorful and modern graphics, but it's also faster, reminding me of "Bomb Jack" on the Commodore 64 by Elite Systems. Finally, Bongo is a game I already had on the Commodore 64 by the name of "Quari", but it's by the same company, Jetsoft. The conversion is pretty close though the game itself is not too bright, it rather reminds of a bad C64 game thatn a proper arcade one.

Well, that's not what I experienced... here's screenshots from both versions: Atari version: Sun version: So at least in the title screen they look a bit different. But you're right in that the game screens are basically nearly undistinguishable. The difference is really in the spawning behaviour of various enemies, in the music and in what happens if the player falls. Anyway, here are my times for this past week (December 11th through 17th) on classic systems (again I didn't play any modern games this week): Arcade: Arabian (Sun) - 25 min. Black Panther - 22 min. Ikki - 28 min. NES: Super Arabian - 193 min. in 4 sessions I continued playing "Super Arabian" on the NES for more than 3 hours, but finally I managed to get through all 4 rounds of a level. After that I replayed the original Sun version where I struggled a bit on the first attempt, but on the second attempt I managed to complete the 4 rounds again. Apart from that, I played Ikki, which reminds me a bit of Rally-X in that you run around as a farmer on fields and try to collect some things which are displayed on a radar in the same style as in Rally-X. Other people run and shoot after you and you shouldn't let them get you, but fortunately, you can shoot back. You can complete extra tasks like picking up a key and freeing the farmer sitting in cage. However, soon you get attacked by Ninja fighters who move and shoot much faster than the other people. Black Panther, on the other hand, is basically a beat-em-up game but with a panther as the main player. It's a bit more modern than "Arabian" and was made in 1987 if I remember correctly, thus already having FM music,

Yes, all that was not marked as Arabian (Atari) was the Sun Electronics version. I don't know what version Wongojack played though. By the way, I unfortunately just realized I forgot to count yet another session from Sunday with 25 more minutes on Super Arabian (NES) which happened before the 36 minutes session I did count, so that would bring the NES version Super Arabian (which was also done by Sun Electronics, but strangely reminds me of the arcade game Sky Skipper) up to 18 + 25 + 36 = 79 minutes for last week. Sorry for the sloppiness lately, but there has been much going on with the flat of my deceased father last week, so I didn't count my times as carefully as usual, at least not on Sunday.

Sorry, I forgot to count the last session I played yesterday... NES: Super Arabian - another 36 min. for a total of 54 min.