Jump to content
Have You Played Atari Today?
2600|5200|7800|Lynx|Jaguar|Forums|Store  

Kurt_Woloch

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content Count

    1,780

  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by Kurt_Woloch

  1. Posted

    Here are my times for this past week (May 18th through 24th)...

     

    Atari 8-bit:

    Protector II - 92 min. in 3 sessions

     

    Colecovision:

    Frantic - 51 min. in 2 sessions

     

    TI-99/4A:

    Protector II - 4 min.

    Fathom - 3 min.

     

    This week I managed to complete "Protector II" on the Atari 8-bit in the sense that I rescued most men, but sadly, the last man got lost by losing a life carrying it, not rescuing it, and the game still ended with "The end", not "Mission completed" (not sure if it ever does this). After that I took a look at the other levels, but contrary to "Protector" the game doesn't contain a different map for levels 4 through 6.

     

    After that I revisited the TI-99/4A version of Protector II, also on a higher level, but didn't manage to get very far.

     

    On the TI-99 I also took a quick game of Fathom, but I didn't survive for too long since I don't know what exactly you have to look for. I suppose you're supposed to find the three pieces of the object you should complete, but I ran out of energy before I made it.

     

    Then I revisited "Frantic" on the Colecovision, but I didn't manage to beat the first level this time... I always make some mistakes, sadly.

     

     

    • Like 3

  2. Posted

    I just looked at the schematics of the Channel F, and it seems like the 74146 chip near the bottom right converts a digital signal given by A0 through A3 to discrete outputs, which is a different one of its pins "light up" depending on which color it should be. On this chip, numbers 0 to 9 set a different output pin each while the combinations A through F are invalid and set no pin at all. The output pins you design as "NC" are actually not connected, so it doesn't matter if they "light up", only pins 2, 3 and 5 through 9 are connected and thus valid colors. Maybe "no pin" is also a valid color (probably white since this is the only missing color). Strangely, the colors have different numbers on the schematics... pins 2 through 6 produce color numbers 3 through 7, and pins 7 through 9 produce color numbers 9 through 11. Then, actually coming out of that chip, BG grey, FG green, FG red, BG green and BG blue actually produce the same value because they are switched together. Only FG blue and black produce different values, so this probably is only the luminance value produced there. There are surely some strange things going on, so it's entirely possible than the different combinations which are all "invalid" for the 74145 still have different effects on screen and also are affecting the burst if they appear in select locations.

  3. Posted

    Sorry for reviving this thread, but I think this is one of the best I could find... Since you took a deep look into the electronics, how would you explain the screenshot in this thread...

    There are colors shown which are not normally part of the pallette, such as purple, magenta, orange and yellow. Could those be some of the "undefined" colors, or is there a way to switch the pallette entirely? Maybe by putting out the color burst slightly late or yellow so that all the colors become a different shade?

     

    There still seem to be some "holes" in your definition... if I didn't get anything wrong...

     

    0000>1000 8    > black
    0001>1010 9    > grey (this sets b, so it could also be a color)
    0010>1001    > (this sets a, so it could be a color as well)
    0011>1011    > a sel, could be color
    0100>1100    > b sel, could be color
    0101>1110    > a and b sel, could be color
    0110>1101    > a and b sel, could be color
    0111>1111     > a and b sel, could be color
    1000>0000 0 NC    > this probably produces black??
    1001>0010 1 NC    -> actually boost b sel, so this should produce a bright (or pastel) red.
    1010>0001 2    > bg blue; boost a sel
    1011>0011 3    > bg green; boost a&b sel
    1100>0100 4 NC    > this sets neither A nor B
    1101>0110 5    > fg red; b sel
    1110>0101 6    > fg blue; a sel
    1111>0111 7    > fg green; a&b sel

     

    The question is how the colors shown above could be produced... if the picture only came about by the cartridge connector being loose and thus nonsensical software being executed, it should be possible to write software that produces the same colors. I'm not talking about hardware modifications here, just what could be produced with the stock hardware... which bits the CPU could flip to get results like this. My guess would be some of the pixels on the far left or right which normally aren't visible, but could affect the color burst being sent or something like this. Maybe the pallette is affected by more pixels per line than we know?

  4. Posted

    Sorry about hijacking such an old thread, but I found the screenshot above and wondered how it came about, since there are colors in there which the Channel F normally can't produce. There are even lines with, seemingly, more than 4 colors in them, which should also be a no-no. So I'm wondering if there's a way to create these pallette variations on purpose.

     

    The variations I spotted are the following ones:

    Most of the lines are black / white, which is one of the normal pallettes, nothing special there. But then there's a line showing white on orange, with one green spot in between. This reminds me a bit of one of the Apple II pallettes. It would surely be nice if there actually was a pallette showing black, white, green and orange on the Channel F, which would expand the normal black / white pallette. There's also another line showing mostly white on green, which could be the same pallette. Or could it be just a slight variation on the normal red / green / blue / grey pallette?

     

    Below the green/white line we have one showing green / red / blue with one pixel in black, which is not a normal background color for this pallette.

    Further down below we have the line showing more than 4 colors... it alternates white with green and yellow, then with orange and purple.Out of those, only green and white are colors the Channel F is normally able to produce. What's even more interesting is that all those colors occur on the same line. The colors are, however, grouped... the pallette seems to be white/green/yellow for 18 pixels, then white/purple/orange for 10 pixels, then white/green/yellow for 18 or 19 more pixels, then white/purple/orange for 18 pixels, then white/green/yellow for 28 pixels, then white/orange/purple for 4 pixels.

     

    Then further down we have a line alternating white with magenta, which clearly is a different shade than the purple above. One of those lines has a green pixel thrown in though.

     

    Finally, near the bottom we have one more variation on white / purple / orange / green which some dirty-looking pixels thrown in.

     

    Now the question is if there is a way to achieve such variations on the normal pallette on purpose without hacking the hardware.

  5. Posted

    Here are my times for this past week (May 11th through 17th) on classic systems...

     

    Atari 8-bit:

    Protector (Synapse) - 63 min. in 2 sessions

    Protector II - 251 min. in 5 sessions

     

    I continued to play the Synapse version of Protector until I managed to complete the mission (by rescuing the last man before running out of ships). After that I took a quick look at the other levels. At Level 4-6 you actually get a different map.

    Then I turned to Protector II which was originally also an Atari 8-bit game. And that original version is actually much smoother than the C-64 version in that some enemies which move character by character on the C-64 move smoothly on the Atari. I didn't manage to complete the misson on this version yet though...

    • Like 5

  6. Posted · Edited by Kurt_Woloch
    improved paragraph formatting

    Here are my times for this past week (May 4th through 10th) on classic systems...

     

    Atari 800:

    Protector (Synapse) - 67 min. in 3 sessions

     

    Commodore 64:

    Protector II - 202 min. in 5 sessions

     

    TI-99/4A:

    Protector II - 164 min. in 3 sessions

     

    This week I continued to play various versions of Protector. I managed to complete the easiest missions so that I've rescued all the men with ships remaining. I already went through details concerning the different versions of the game. The TI-99 version does get tougher in further levels (which you have to select by hnd from the title page though).

    • Like 4

  7. Posted

    Here are my times for this past week (April 27th through May 3rd) on classic systems...

     

    Atari 800:

    Protector (Synapse) - 43 min.

    Protector (Crystalware) - 80 min. in 3 sessions

     

    Commodore 64:

    Protector II - 42 min.

     

    TI-99:

    Protector II - 132 min. in 4 sessions

     

    This week I played more versions of Protector... first the Atari 800 version by Synapse, then the one by Crystalware which is the actual original version while the Synapse version has been changed a bit (made easier). Then I played the TI-99 version and last the C-64 one. Most versions except for the C-64 one have some quirkiness in scrolling and game speed. The Atari 800 versions start scrolling very slowly as you start a life and then gradually get faster. The TI-99 version is inconsistent in speed in that your ship moves slowly, but speeds up greatly while shooting (!), and the speed is yet different while the level is scrolling. The C-64 is the most consistent one in this respect. The versions are all a bit different from each other also in the level design. They basically play the same title music, but while the Atari and C-64 versions stay monophonic, the TI-99 one becomes polyphonic later on (the piece used is the Solfeggietto in C minor (H 220, Wq 117:2)). This is unusual for Atarisoft because their other titles mostly had rather poor sound compared to other systems' versions. Well, this probably was by a different programmer who probably used TI's Editor/Assembler package to develop the game since some of the sound effects are very similar to those of Tombstone City whose source code was supplied with the E/A package.

    So which version is the best? I think I liked the C-64 one most for its consistency, although on that one you sometimes have difficulties picking up people to rescue.

     

     

    • Like 6

  9. Posted

    Here are my times of this past week (April 13th through 19th)...

     

    Atari 2600:

    Juno First - 9 min.

     

    Atari 7800:

    Choplifter - 8 min.

     

    This week I didn't play much... the last helicopter game as a continuation of last week, Choplifter, and then Juno First, one of the games that support the Atarivox. I was far more busy completing my sound conversion utility which converts sound files to the TIA. Doing so, the utility picks from all the possible waveforms and attempts to match the spectrum of the original file as closely as possible with those limited resources. However, actually often the sound contains a wide spectrum which is best matched by a noisy waveform, out of which you can't make out much of individual tones anymore, only noise with about the correct average pitch.

    • Like 5

  11. Posted

    Sorry if this is off topic, but this seems to be the closest thread I can find which is actually open to post to (rather than the closed "topics" you need an invite to post into)...

     

    I got interested in the Atarivox's speech and sound capabilities yesterday, and I tried to read up on them to find out as much as possible...

     

    Basically, the Atarivox (and the Atarivox+) is a wrapper for the Speakjet chip, which in turn contains a SP0256 core, the SP0256 being an old chip by General Instruments which was already used in devices back in the early 80's.

    The Speakjet claims to have an internal 5-voice synthesizer which is also used to put out speech by using a complex mathematical model. However, I doubt if all of this can be true...

     

    My main goal was to find out what sounds you can get out of the Atarivox without using the built-in allophone logic. Can you get out speech, maybe even more natural speech than with the built-in allophones? With the speech synthesizer of the TI-99 you could do that if you knew how to generate LPC data because that's what the synth operated on. Sadly, back in the day this wasn't well documented at all. But some of TI's own cartridges did that since the knowledge and encoding software was present at TI. TI Extended BASIC allowed sending in short bursts of LPC data, but no one knew how to generate it. There also was a TI PC which contained a speech synthesizer (or had one as an accessory), and there you could record your own speech which got converted to LPC. But that PC didn't sell in large numbers apparently... however, with today's knowledge it's possible to encode LPC youself at least if you understand the topic. I've successfully created a program in Visual Basic 5 which is able to convert audio to LPC suitable for the TI speech synth. On the TI-99 itself, however, there was only the possibility to use a TTS engine like the one built into the Terminal Emulator II cartridge which put out a pretty robotic sounding voice similar to the voices now appearing in the Atarivox enhanced cartridges.

     

    The question is if it's possible to do better with the Atarivox as well. It is possible to freely program the synthesizer part build into the SpeakJet to generate sounds. As far as I can tell, each of the voices is able to create a sine wave, and then the sine waves get mixed together. There's a bit more with distortion being able to be added to some voices and modulation by the 6th oscillator. However, the user manual claims that MSA (Mathematical Sound Architecture) gets used to get speech out of those voices, and at this point something doesn't quite add up for me. According to this, the speech would be supposed to be generated by 6 sine wave oscillators and a bit of trickery. However, the SP0256 actually uses a 12-pole LPC filter to generate speech, which is similar to the TI synth mentioned above (which uses a 10-pole LPC filter). However, this technology is nothing like 5 or 6 sine voices, though it might produce similar results, but it needs completely different data to do so. The question, then, is if they actually still use LPC to put out speech and at some points, or for some sounds, switch to the 5-voice synthesizer to generate those. The next question, then, would be if it's possible to send in LPC data (compatible to the SP0256) to the SpeakJet (and in turn to the AtariVox) or if only the allophone engine is able to do that while the user is restricted to send data to the 5-voice synthesizer. In this case, the allophone engine would be able to do things you can't reproduce by sending in data bypassing that engine.

     

    Has anyone attempted to send in sound data directly like it's written in the user guide, or was the Atarivox only ever used to output speech and its pre-defined sounds?

     

  12. Posted

    Here are my times for this past week (April 6th through 12th) on modern systems...

     

    Browser based:

    Helicopter Strike Force - 2 min.

    Fire Helicopter - 5 min.

     

    Like on classic systems, I was looking for helicopter games on the Internet as well this week. Helicopter Strike Force has a top-down view, but I couldn't quite figure out what to do. In Fire Helicopter, you have to put out fires with your helicopter using a bucket of water, shown as a side scroller similar to Choplifter. Still you can't rescue any men, and it didn't hold my breath for too long.

     

    • Like 4

  13. Posted

    Here are my times for this past week (April 6th through 12th) on classic systems...

     

    Apple II:

    Rescue Raiders - 177 min. in 3 sessions

     

    Atari 2600:

    Choplifter - 3 min.

    Chopper Command - 12 min.

    Omicron - 10 min.

     

    Atari 800:

    Fort Apocalypse - 73 min.

    Survivor - 21 min.

     

    Commodore 64:

    Fort Apocalypse II - 72 min. in 3 sessions

     

    This week I continued to play "Rescue Raiders" on the Apple II until I managed to win the first battle, then I continued playing other games, many of them having a helicopter as the main character:

    "Choplifter" on the Atari 2600 is a homebrew effort which isn't quite authentic

    "Chopper Command" is the well-known Activision game. You don't get to pick up men in this one.

    "Omicron" isn't a helicopter game at all, but I saw them playing it on a Youtube video.

    "Fort Apocalypse" is another helicopter game, this time I played the original Atari 8-bit version which I had never played before. I managed to complete it after some failed attempts.

    "Survivor" is said to have been Synapse's first game on the Atari 800 (their original target platform), and it plays quite well. Surprisingly, it just ends after winning a level instead of continuing on harder difficulty.

    "Fort Apocalypse II" is basically a remake of the C-64 version on the C-64 itself by a German programmer with the same graphics but an expanded play area. It adds two more caves to the existing two, and due to being reprogrammed, there are other subtle differences as well. Most notably, there isn't an enemy helicopter and you can adjust how aggresive the enemy tanks should be. The whole game feels less "floaty" than the original version.

    • Like 6

  14. Posted

    Here are my times for this past week (March 30th through April 5th) on modern systems...

     

    Gameboy Advance:

    Super Army War - 20 min.

     

    Super Army War is the Gameboy Advance version of Armor Alley and Rescue Raiders which I played on the classic tracker. Super Army War has much better and fluid graphics and sound, but it's been simplified in that you don't get to choose which ground troops get deployed, rather this happens automatically. In Round 2 your helicopter is replaced by a plane which is faster, but much harder to steer. I didn't like this one as much and went back to the Apple II original.

     

    • Like 5

  15. Posted

    Here are my times for this past week (March 30th through April 5th)...

     

    MS-DOS:

    Armor Alley - 134 min.

     

    Apple II:

    Rescue Raiders - 273 min. in 5 sessions

     

    This week I continued to play the original version of Armor Alley, but then I switched to Rescue Raiders, which in turn is the original version of Armor Alley. In Rescue Raiders, the enemy copter is pretty touch and attacks you relentlessly, so it's hard to fight it, and I didn't manage to win a single battle. There are also a few differences, for instance you can't shoot while on the ground.

    • Like 4

  16. Posted

    Here are my times for this week on modern systems:

     

    Browser based:

    Survivor (Web Remake) - 15 min.

    Armor Alley (Web Remake) - 580 min. in 5 sessions

     

    After having played Drelbs last week, I wanted to play a somewhat similar game by the same company, Survivor on the C-64, but when I looked for it, I found a Javascript remake of it on the web (at http://www.schillmania.com/survivor/) which does have a few differences... the action seems to be smoother in places, and the playfield doesn't wrap around.

     

    Then I went to see what else the author of this game has to offer and found a remake of Armor Alley, a DOS game from 1991. Compared to the original version, this remake is smoother, and the gameplay is more frantic. There also is, as far as I can see, no multiplayer option, and the entire menu system (which actually seems to be similar to Windows) hasn't carried over. The games on this can go on for quite a long time... some games I played lasted more than two hours, hence the high playing time. You can find this one here: http://www.schillmania.com/armor-alley/

    • Like 5

  17. Posted

    Here are my times for this week on classic systems:

     

    MS-DOS:

    Armor Alley - 145 min.

     

    This week I only played one classic game, Armor Alley, and even that is from 1991. It's a game similar to Choplifter where you control a helicopter, but the actual goal is to reach the enemy side of the playfield with a van while the enemy tries to do the same thing, and you can order new units with several keys, as well as fire different weapons. All in all it's much more complex than Choplifter. Actually I played the web version first (more on that in the modern tracker). The MS-DOS version is similar, but does have several differences... the gameplay is somewhat more relaxed in that there are less units on the playfield at one time because you also have to use funds to buy helicopters, and the enemy helicopter seems to be more keen on destroying your men than on attacking you. Also you need several shots to take out enemy men, but also several men to turn a bunker into one of yours. On the other hand, half of the bunkers are yours from the start... but I think I'm going too much into the details of the game.

     

    • Like 4

  19. Posted

    Here are my times for this past week (March 10th through 16th) on classic systems...

     

    Commodore 64:

    Drelbs - 165 min. in 5 sessions

     

    Non-Eligible:

    Rubik's Cube - 21 min.

     

    This week I only played one game, Drelbs on the Commodore 64. By now I've managed to get to the end of the 4th round, but not beyond that. What's interesting about this game is that it runs at an inconsistent speed with many slowdowns, but the relative speed of the objects to each other varies from round to round. Your main enemies get faster and faster, but you slow down from Round 1 to Round 3 and then speed up again in Round 4 while some other enemies slow down.

    I also had a session on Rubik's Cube because my father "prepared" the cube with more turns than usual, resulting in a non-obvious solution.

    • Like 5

  20. Posted

    Here are my times for this past week (March 2nd through 8th)...

     

    Commodore 64:

    Drelbs - 58 min.

    Wizball - 129 min.

     

    This week I continued to play Wizball on the Commodore 64, but I also started another game, Drelbs, which I haven't played for a long time. This one is somewhat less complex than Wizball, only being set on a static screen instead of scrolling levels. It's interesting nonetheless, and I played it for a long time back in the day. In the game, I reached the 3rd round... not sure if I managed to complete it, but I don't think so.

     

    Aside from that, I was interested in a few other things... how to program the AI for soccer players and a security circuit in shopping trolleys blocking one wheel if you leave the store with them. Turns out the electronics in the wheel use a chip which has a 8051 core, the 8051 of course being the successor of the 8048 chip used in the Odyssey^2 console. However that core runs at about 50 times the speed of the original 8048 (24 MHz with most instructions only taking 1 cycle). This set me on a search for how systems evolved over time. You could say that eventually, the TI-99 evolved into the Sega Master System and then into the Mega Drive and its accessories while the Atari 2600 evolved into the Atari 8-bits and the Amiga computers, and if you up the specs of the Intellivision, you get something very similar to the Commodore 64, which in turn was succeeded by the unreleased Commodore 65.

    • Like 4

  22. Posted

    Here are my times for this past week (February 17th through 23rd) on modern systems:

     

    Browser based:

    Adios, Amoebas - 36 min.

    ASCII Patrol - 13 min.

     

    I continued playing the JAVA game Adios, Amoebas which I told you about last week.

    Apart from that, I tried the online version of ASCII Patrol, an ASCII adaptation of Moon Patrol. In my opinion, it cheats a bit by having an unusually high resolution of 46 lines with 126 characters each, which actually is not so bad graphics-wise. It plays pretty well actually and is also pretty accurate to the arcade... at least it's nearer to it than the Atari 2600 version.

    • Like 4

  23. Posted

    Here are my times for this past week (February 17th through 23rd)...

     

    Atari 7800:

    Baby Pac-Man - 10 min.

     

    Commodore 64:

    Wizball - 242 min. in 5 sessions

     

    This week I mainly played Wizball on the Commodore 64. I got farther in the game than I hoped for (about 70% complete, estimated), but it went downhill from there.

    I also played a bit of Baby Pac-Man on the 7800, mostly because I told my team leader at work that I had participated in programming the game, and he mentioned it again when we had lunch with some colleagues, one of which wants to show old IT things to pupils at school to show them how IT used to look like in earlier decades. So she's looking for examples like 5 1/4" floppy disks, and she also plans to show them this game on an emulator after I've helped her install it on her laptop.

    • Like 4

  24. Posted

    Here are my times for this week (February 10th through 16th) on modern systems...

     

    Browser based:

    Adios Amoebas! - 40 min.

    Funny Pizza - 109 min. in 4 sessions

    Rail Shuffle - 6 min.

     

    This week I finished playing Funny Pizza because I've now seen nearly every game element there is, except one for which I'd have to bake another 100 items.

     

    Then I played two Java games by Karl Hornell which you can find on his page Javaonthebrain.com, but you have to add his site to the exception list because his Java applets are detected as being unsafe though they are in fact completely harmless.

     

    Rail Shuffle is a variation on the arcade game Loco-Motion and the Intellivision game Happy Trails where you have to re-shuffle train tracks to have the train pick up all the bags. But it's pretty hard in that the board is more sparsely populated with tracks so you have to shift quite some pieces around to get something that makes sense. And in Level 2, you're already dealing with two trains at once!

     

    Adios Amoebas is a bit similar to Pengo. You are on a 9x9 playfield, and Amoebas get swapped in which you have to either shoot or crush by moving weights. For shooting you have to regularly pick up ammunition, and in later levels the Amoebas start to fire back at you. I haven't played this in a long time, but it still works, at least on lower Java versions. I think this would actually be a good candidate for a de-make to 8-bit systems and consoles since it looks like it could perfectly work on many of them, at least as long as they are tile-based or have a hi-res bitmap screen.

     

    • Like 4

  25. Posted

    Here are my times for this week (February 10th through 16th) on classic systems...

     

    Atari 2600:

    Seaquest - 26 min.

     

    Commodore 64:

    Wizball - 60 min. in 3 sessions

     

    I basically played two classic games this week. In Seaquest on the Atari 2600 I strived for a 100,000 point score which I didn't quite reach. I also didn't reach it in Wizball on the Commodore 64, but managed to get a few color pots complete.

    • Like 4
AtariAge
Forums
Store
General
Follow AtariAge

Copyright ©1998-2021 AtariAge

×
×
  • Create New...