Kurt_Woloch

Sorry for reviving such an old thread, but I've recently been playing Private Eye too, and I was looking for maps of the game. Sadly, the Electricfrankfurter site is down by now. Are the maps still available somewhere?

Here are my times for this past week on modern systems... Android phone: McDonalds app games... 2 min. Yeah, McDonalds has got games in its app again, and this time it's not the standard rabbit or other character which has to jump from hole to hole collecting things... they actually offer multiple different games, but only one per day. In a screenshot I saw a sliding puzzle, but when I first played it, I got a memory game. You have to remember 5 items in, I think, 15 or 20 seconds in the correct order, and you only get one chance to do it. If you do it, you earn a ticket for a price-reduced food item. If not, you have to wait until the next day to play a different game, which in my case was a maze which you have to find the correct exit for during a time limit, and you have to do two successive mazes to win the prize. However, the third time I tried to play, the app froze completely on startup, and it has done so ever since, still there isn't a new version of it to upgrade to, so I'm currently stuck with a frozen McDonalds app. That's why I only accumulated 2 minutes of playing time on this... and it's also been my only game on modern systems this week.

Here are my times for this past week (September 28th through October 4th) for classic systems: Arcade: Jr. Pac-Man - 85 min. in 7 sessions Mario Bros. - 19 min. I got to play a bit this week, though I try to keep my sessions short with only 1 or 2 games each. I played Jr. Pac-Man a few times and Mario Bros. once (which was a single game). I also looked into more modern games, especially Factorio, but I think this would use up too much of my time for now.

Here are my times for this past week (September 21st through 27th) on classic systems: Arcade: Jr. Pac-Man - 9 min. Atari 2600: Private Eye - 97 min. in 2 sessions This week I mainly played Private Eye on the Atari 2600 where I mapped out cases 2 and 3 though I didn't manage to complete them because from Case 2 on the time limit is very tight, and I didn't manage to meet it... in Case 2 you have to cross 48 screens in 120 seconds, and in Case 3 you have 240 seconds to cross 106 screens, so that's less than 3 seconds per screen in both cases! Then I threw in a game of Jr. Pac-Man, but only one.

Here are my times for this past week (September 14th through 20th) on classic systems... Atari 2600: Private Eye - 42 min. The only game I played this week was "Private Eye" on the Atari 2600 where I basically mapped out and completed the 1st case. That's all I had time for, though the other cases don't seem to be much different in gameplay, they just add a few other elements which aren't there in the 1st case.

Wow, what an honor to see Baby Pac-Man at the top of last week's list! Seems like Wongojack really likes my pinball logic there. Actually, a baby always has two parents... in this case this would be Bob and me. And I admit that I still like coding very much, so this probably won't be the last retro game I've participated in... but at the moment I've got other things to do. Anyway, here are my times for this past week (September 7th through 13th) on classic systems... Atari 2600: Balloon trip - 3 min. Well, I promised you I wouldn't have much time for gaming this week and next week, but I did manage to sneak in one game of "Balloon trip", a homebrew game a bit similar to Flappy Bird or Joust, but pretty simple... you've got mines and the occasional balloon coming at you at increasing speeds, and you have to avoid the mines and catch the balloons. After a number of balloons you get bonus time where there's only balloons on screen before the game reverts to normal. And that's pretty much it... one game was enough to see it all.

Here are my times for this week (August 31st through September 6th) on classic systems... sorry, again no gaming this week, and I think it will stay this way for at least the next two weeks. Instead my actual current "game" is refactoring code, which is actually nearly as challenging as playing computer and video games. In two weeks I'll have one of my rare gigs as a keyboarder which will pretty much occupy a whole day, and until then I should record some Karaoke playbacks for someone, so I'm pretty busy at this time.

Here are my times for this week (August 24th through 30th) on classic systems... sorry, still no gaming, as last week.. I was busy collecting coordinates of Bird scooters, trying to figure out where they could enhance their service area in Vienna.

Here are my times for this past week (August 17th through 23rd) on classic systems... sorry, no gaming at all this week. It's still summer, and my weeks off work are over, so between a bit of swimming and helping my father handle his new smart phone, there wasn't much time left for gaming.

Here are my times for this past week (August 10th through 16th)... Arcade: Millipede - 63 min. Atari 2600: Joust - 4 min. After having played the Atari 2600 version of Millipede lately, this week I played the Arcade version. I played until I surpassed 300,000 points, which is the highest score you can start at, and I managed to reach that bar pretty quickly. It definitely helps if you're able to cope with the many spiders that come at you in the first round after the game continue starts. Shooting them all down will often give you enough points to reach the next extra life, at which point you can't go down with the starting score of the next game anymore. And it's actually easier than on the Atari 2600 where the spiders move a bit more erratic and are harder to hit. Then I played another small bit of Joust on the Atari 2600 (and then continued analyzing its sounds). Apart from that, It's been my first working week after a 3-week break, so there were some things to catch up at work. Also I had a 1-day training, and I did an excursion looking for shared scooters (or bikes) of a new type (Wheels), and I tried to read the coordinates of Bird scooters, but failed at that because at the endpoint I have you get about 10 times as many scooters as there really are, and each time you query the same point on the map, the set of scooters you get varies drastically. Apart from that, I'm also refactoring the code of my private databases. This all didn't leave much time for gaming

Here are my times for this past week (August 3rd through 9th, 2020) on classic systems... Arcade: Joust - 8 min. Atari 2600: Outrun's lair - 3 min. Tutankham - 42 min. in 2 sessions Channel F: Cranberry Quest - 7 min. This time I officially played Tutankham on the 2600. :-) But it still looks the same... I've made progress in disassembling the source code of the Joust sound chip CPU (in the arcade version), having now decoded more than half of the code base. There's a huge difference to how that was coded compared to the TI-99 builtin routines. Cranberrry quest is a new WIP for the channel F, where as a controler, you controll the Cranberry, taking it through different screens with different enemies. The ending, however, hasn't been designed yet.

I've recently watched the Youtube video of Zeropage Homebrew Stream showing the Marble Madness WIP. Today I've again noticed something that's been hanging on my wall for many years now... it's a hand-drawn mockup of Marble Madness on the Atari 2600. Back when I drew it in the late 80's, I was under the (wrong) assumption based on the display of Pitfall II that the Atari 2600 would be capable of showing 4 playfield colors per scanline if the scanlines were doubled (similar to the C-64's multicolor mode)... which then proved to be wrong, BUT with the technique shown here, something similar could still be achieved. It just seems that in the WIP presented here, the actual graphics is a little different to the one I envisioned... the WIP here basically scaled up the grid pattern so that the grid is still visible, it apparently took the level maps from the 8-bit instead of the arcade and Amiga versions, and it scaled it down a bit so that it looks a bit squashed. So... I decided to take a photo of what I drew and present it here. Some of the colors are pretty much washed out over the years... most notably I used two different pencils for the dark blue, one of whose color bleached while the others' didn't. But I think the vision I had is still visible... basically the grid is replaced by black lines at different heights. I drew this in 4 colors, and those colors (like in the shots above) could be simulated by alternating scanlines between black/white and black/blue. The arcade version is 36 characters wide, so we'd need 5 PF writes per line with a 6th write writing 0 to PF0 on the left side (assuming that the playfield is displayed using the 36 rightmost columns). There might be trouble with repositioning players in mid-screen and also with color-striping them, so that the way I drew the enemies might not be possible. It might even be necessary to alternate graphics writes for the two players on alternating scanlines, but I don't exactly know by heart how many writes are really possible. Alternatively, you could maybe alternate write to the graphics and color registers of the players to get them color-striped, but at a lower resolution, like it's been done in the post above. The 3D effect could be strenghened a bit by making the black bars thicker on the ramps that run down to the right side. Anyway, here are the mockups (I actually meant to rotate them properly, but the uploaded pictures don't seem to reflect that):

Yes, this is the version I played. Unfortunately, though, I made a mistake when posting my Atari 2600 times... coming from the fact that Stella doesn't report the game being played anywhere, and if you switch games, you do so inside of Stella, which doesn't affect the window title... So... actually I only played 3 minutes of this version of Turbo, the remaining 19 minutes of that session I actually played Tutankham (which is next to Turbo in the alphabet...). Similarly to that, I also only spent 3 minutes playing Run Out!, the remaining 8 minutes I actually played Room Of Doom (which is next to Run Out! in the alphabet) Sorry for those mistakes, I was pretty tired when I posted my times last night and forgot that the sessions were shared among multiple games each... the times for the other systems should be correct though. I can't actually remember posting the last sentence... I don't know what to make of that one (what's that with the Chinese hardware?)... could this have been edited in by someone else? Actually, I played both games because I have viewed some Youtube videos about ports of "Superscaler" games, which was Sega's sprite scaling technique used in Out Run, which over the years could draw more and more sprites on screen. The arcade original of "Turbo" is still using something more primitive which can only draw 8 8-color sprites, but the complexity grew from there... Hang-On already displays 12 scaling sprites in more colors and partly big sizes.. Pole Position came in between those two and is properly also able to draw at least 10 scaling sprites at once, but I've seen the sprite hardware exceed its limits if the player car, two enemy cars and a roadside sign happen to share the same scanlines. Out Run can (theoretically) display 128 sprites on screen, but in reality you don't see as many at once... The actual interesting thing for me was how much of that can be carried over to the home versions. Chris Butler in particular wrote a pretty good scaler engine on the C-64 which got used for "Thunder Blade", "Power Drift" and "Space Harrier" and uses a character grid to quickly change the screen contents... which comes at the cost of the objects jumping in 8 pixel steps, but allows pretty high framerates for a 3D game, though the limit seems to be at about 16 scaling objects simultaneously. There seem to have been more attempts to do similar graphics, for instance here:

Here are my times for this past week (July 27th through August 2nd) on classic systems... Amiga: Tiny Galaga - 13 min. Arcade: Dig Dug... 33 min. Joust - 13 min. Atari 2600: Turbo (in Batari Basic) - 22 min. Run Out (in Batari Basic) - 11 min. This week I tried "Tiny Galaga" which is a pretty much colour-less port of Galaga on the Amiga. The I played a bit of Dig Dug, and the arcade version of Joust, which I played primarily because I'm trying to disassemble its sound code and to find out where each of the sounds atart in the ROM. Turbo is a bit similar to the Sega game, but it's actually an original game beause some things are quite different to the arcade verson. On the Atari 2600, Turbo and Run Out are ports of TUrbo (Sega) and Run Out (probably on Chinese hardware).

Here are my times for this week (July 20th through 26th) on classic systems: Arcade: Joust - 42 min. in 2 sessions Tetris (Atari Games) - 22 min. The end - 35 min. Atari 2600: Joust - 10 min. Millipede - 141 min. The end - 19 min. Commodore 64: Jack Attack - 11 min. Joust - 23 min. Legend of the Amazon women - 54 min. This week, there are multiple games I've played on multiple systems. I continued to play "Amazon women" on the C-64 and made it through the jungle (to the end of the game). Then I tried "Jack Attack" which I've seen in a Youtube video, and it's quite amusing, but not very deep. Then I learned that an Atari 2600 version of "The end" has been coded, so I tried that (which is quite good) and then the arcade original. While I've made it through 5 stages easily on the Atari 2600 version (after which the already built part of the "The end" banner disappears), I only made it to the 2nd stage in the arcade version due to the aliens being much quicker in building the banner. Then I replayed the arcade version of Tetris. I think there I've reached about all there is to see. On this game Atari Games went with pretty lowly specs... an 6502 processor and POKEY sound in 1987 when other games already used 16-bit processors and FM sound. At least they coded the main game in Assembler, unlike the C-64 version by Mirrorsoft which is in fact compiled BASIC. Speaking of the C-64, there lies the real sensation of this week... the long lost Atarisoft C-64 conversion of Joust has finally surfaced! It's a pretty good conversion, but the sound is pretty awful... I suppose they weren't finished with it yet. They just took the Atari 800 version (even without the programmer's consent!) and rewrote it for the C-64. But the SID has clearly different specs than the POKEY, yet peaking in the code, it seems like the sounds have only been half-heartedly converted and don't sound correct at all. But judging from the posts on the Games that weren't 64 site where this has been released, some people seem to have (or have had) a better version with better sound, though that one hasn't surfaced yet. Alternatively, I considered hacking the game myself. To that end, I'm currently examining how the sound works both in this and the arcade version. I then also tried the original arcade and the 2600 version, and after that I played some Millipede on the Atari 2600. That is, I played until I surpassed the 300,000 point mark, which took over 2 hours. There are ways you can play to facilitate reaching this mark, for instance, on the first screen after a restart there's a great number of spiders, so you should end that screen as quickly as possible, which you can do by shooting the highest DDT box available on screen so that it will annihilate all of the Millipede as it passes by.

It should also take batteries.

Here are my times for this past week (July 13th through 19th)... Commodore 64: Legend of the Amazon Women - 65 min. This week I only played one game, in one session, Legend of the Amazon Women. I didn't manage to complete it this time though I've done so before. I think I made it about halfway through the game this time. In this game, it's more important to avoid the arrows than the enemy's punches because the arrows cost you more hit points. Also, you get far more points if the enemy gets hit by an arrow than if it gets hit by you, and 200,000 points give you an extra life.

Here are my times for this week (July 6th through 12th) on classic systems... sorry, no gaming this week. Summer's nearly in full swing, and I'm trying to do my household chores in order to find time for a little swimming or something like that.

Here are my times for this week (June 29th through July 5th)... Commodore 64: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom - 19 min. VIC-20: Seafox - 15 min. This week I only did two short sessions on two classic games... besides continuing to play Seafox on the VIC-20, I tried the C-64 version of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which has a different level layout than the arcade version. I only got to the first cart sequence on it. In Seafox, I also didn't manage to get any farther than previously. Actually, I spent way more time doing tasks which aren't eligible as games, but still quite challenging, like "upgrading to a new phone", "unlocking a sim-locked phone", "cutting a SIM card down to size" and "teaching your father how to operate a smart phone". On those tasks combined, I spent several hours last week.

Here are my times for this past week (June 22nd through 28th)... Arcade: Blueprint - 9 min. Dragon Breed - 25 min. Manhatten (DECO Cassette) - 7 min. VIC-20: Galaxian - 1 min. Seafox - 57 min. in 5 sessions Space Battle - 4 min. This week I managed to get in a bit more gaming than last week. It started by watching a video telling that "Space Battle" was actually made by the later president of Nintendo. However, Atarisoft put another version of the same game out with "Galaxian", which is a bit less glitchy, but also less colorful, and "Space Battle" actually has the better rendition of the music... by far. Then I switched to Seafox, of which I played a few sessions. On the arcade side, I tried Blueprint for three short games, and Manhattan for, actually, one game, after which I stopped playing because the game doesn't have too much depth. Playing Dragon Breed was inspired by an article about the C-64 version using mixed colors for some of the end bosses. But I quickly got to a point where I wouldn't get better.

Here are my times for this past week (June 15th through 21st) on classic systems... sorry, no gaming this week. I've fallen behind with my household duties, and my father pushed me to get on with them, so I tried to do something productive this week instead of gaming. On another, maybe more interesting note, I attempted to write a converter that converts video into something for systems with low framerate and throughput, such as the Channel-F or CD+Graphics. The principle would be that on each frame, it finds the portions of the picture that have the greatest difference to the picture now displayed on screen and then changes only those portions... as many pixels are possible, which would be at most 300 pixels per frame (1/60 second) on the Channel F and 1 or 2 tiles of 6x12 pixels each for CD+Graphics. Sadly I didn't manage to solve the problem how to extract the single frames off the movie and get their pixel data. Seems like on my ageing XP machine I don't have any software or libraries that would make this possible... there are some controllable from VB.NET or VB5, but each time I try to copy the picture from the screen, it comes out black because it's only populated directly in screen memory by the graphics card.

Here are my times for this past week (June 8th through 14th)... Amiga 500: Thundercats - 154 min. in 8 sessions. This week I got a bit better at Thundercats. I now often beat the 4th stage and then lose all my lives at the next one. Other than that I'm trying to figure out how to get as many games as possible into my gaming schedule.

Here are my times for this week (June 1st through 7th) on classic systems... Amiga 500: Thundercats - 251 min. in 10 sessions PC (Windows 95-ME): Cosmic Do! - 10 min. This week I heavily played the Amiga version of "Thundercats" which I liked playing back in the day. The game has 14 levels, but I never managed to complete the 5th one. You can get much farther if you have patience though because camping at selected spots give you basically unlimited amounts of extra lives before you go on actually advancing in the game. But I didn't have that much patience... The times for "Cosmic Do!" are actually from last week I posted them in the modern tracker, but Carlsson looked up the game and found it to be classic. Carlsson, unfortunately, I didn't read your reply until this weekend when the times were already tabulated, so I'm re-posting it now here on the classic tracker... I hope this isn't against the rules.

Here are my times for this past week (May 25th through 31st) on modern systems... PC (Windows): Cosmic Do! - 10 min. I replayed Cosmic Do! for a bit after not having played it for a few years now. It's basically Cosmic Guerilla with the characters of Mr. Do!, also with some gameplay enhancements bringing it more on par with Mr. Do from the game elements. But it hasn't much depth, so I didn't play it for too long because nothing much different is happening in later levels. It however feels much more polished and smooth than Cosmic Guerilla itself does. Actually I'm not sure if this is supposed to be a modern or a classic game. It's from 2003, and it hasn't got a README file. I can't find this game anywhere on the Internet anymore in order to get some info on it, but it still runs flawlessly on my XP machine. Don't know what would be the low end for it though...

Here are my times for this past week (May 25th through 31st) on classic systems... Colecovision: Frantic - 94 min. in 6 sessions I continued to play Frantic on the Colecovision, but now I think I'm fed up of it for now. I routinely manage to beat the 1st level (5 rooms), and the 2nd level is sometimes unfair, spawning you in the crossfire of two bases. If you're unlucky, you die there, get spawned again and die again immediately. This happened often enough to put me off.