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Kurt_Woloch

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  1. Posted · Edited by Kurt_Woloch
    Forgot something...

    Here are my times for this past week (December 9th through 15th) on classic systems...

     

    Arcade:

    Ghosts 'n' Goblins - 161 min. in 4 sessions

     

    After having completed Turtles last week, I switched games and played some Ghosts 'n' Goblins for a change. I reached the end of Level 2, but couldn't beat it.

     

    I also tried to find a ROM for the Tomy Tutor (AKA Pyuuta) version of Turtles / Turpin, but couldn't find one. According to a Youtube video I've seen, though, it seems to be pretty choppy. I think it could have been much closer to the arcade.

    • Like 4

  2. Posted

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

     

    Arcade:

    Turtles - 195 min. in 4 sessions

     

    Odyssey^2:

    Turtles - 113 min. in 3 sessions

     

    This week I played two versions of Turtles, the original arcade one and the Odyssey^2 / G7000 one. In both versions I eventually managed to get to the roof, but on the arcade version it took me longer than expected.

    I found out that while on the Odyssey^2, the sequence of house positions is random, it follows a pattern in the arcade... the sequence is always upper left - lower right - upper right - lower left and then repeats. Thus you can anticipate where the next house will appear and plan your path accordingly. On the Odyssey^2 you have to wait until you've picked up a baby to see where the house appears. Other than that, it appears that the Odyssey^2 version is pretty much as close to the arcade as possible (under the system's limitations). The sound effects are similar as well, and the floor numbers are spelled out in both versions (e.g. "First floor"). This is contrary to all other arcade ports Magnavox put out which are always pretty much distorted from what's probably the original version. In most Odyssey^2 games, you only have one life, while in Turtles you have several and even get a bonus turtle at 5000 points (as in the arcade). I think the Odyssey^2 in this case got the best home port of this game because all other home ports are more distorted (except maybe on the Casio console whose version I didn't get to play yet).

    • Like 5

  3. Posted

    Here are my times for this past week (November 25th through December 1st)...

     

    Odyssey^2:

    Turtles - 95 min. in 2 sessions

     

    This week the only game I played was "Turtles" on the Odyssey^2. This is probably one of the best arcade ports on the system (given that it's a relatively simple game) and the only one done by Philips / Magnavox under its original name. I reached the 7th floor out of 8, with the layout of the first 4 floors being relatively similar to the arcade original, but floors 5-8 differing considerably from it with dead ends and other nasty parts, so that you have to devise a different strategy to complete those stages.

     

    • Like 4

  4. Posted

    As it stands, this game is really far away from Defender... yes, it's inspired by it, but even on this system I think it could be much closer. One of the main parts of Defender is that you can actually move your ship to the left and right... here you can only move it up and down, in this way the game is actually closer to "Taz" (or, in Europe, Asterix) for the Atari 2600 than to Defender. So, the question is now which direction to take... do you want to make t closer to Defender, or to Taz, or do you have ideas of your own that differ from both games?

     

    I don't know if it's a good idea to restrict the player's ship to certain positions that line up with the "grid" on the Odyssey so that the grid lines can be used to display the shots. The problem is that the grid positions are spaced so that sometimes you get a B in a position where you can't shoot it because one possible shot height is above the B and the next one is below it, but there's none that would hit it.

     

    Another problem is that you can't really see how far up and down you can take your ship. I often found myself hit by a B because while there was still some room below it, my ship wouldn't go down far enough to avoid the B, resulting in a collision.

     

    So... as a programmer I would try to bring the game closer to Defender. The enemy ships in Defender actually look somewhat like "A"'s, so those would make good approximations of enemies while the men appearing in Defender also are part of the Odyssey's standard character set. The tree on the surface could scroll left and right in order to give the illusion of moving over the surface, and maybe it should also be interspersed with some small hills consisting of the two "ramp" characters, and between that would be the men you're supposed to protect, which the A's would try to abduct. As for how to display the enemies, the landers could be green A's, the mutants could be cyan A's, the baiters could be one half of an 8, the bombers could be filled blocks, the pods could rapidly change between +'s and small x's, the swarmers could be red "ship" characters and the enemy's fire could be made up of dots. I don't know if you're up to that task though because doing the ground properly would involve keeping track of multiple ground objects which scroll, appear and disappear according to the player's position, and the left and right acceleration should also somewhat obey the laws of physics, so the calculations are a bit more complex than just moving left a pixel if the player holds the joystick left and doing the same thing for right. Just sayin' because I've even seen some commercially released games where, for instance, the enemies' movements don't quite match up to the ground scrolling etc. Maybe you should team up with Bob (PacManPlus) who at one point planned to port Defender to the Atari 7800...

  5. Posted

    On 11/5/2019 at 6:15 AM, Swami said:

    Seems like the limitations in the math tables was about the biggest hurdle and I think that would remain with the xm. 

    What are you referring to as "math tables"? If you think about what I've done with the pinball part, I didn't actually use any tables for math... there are some multiplication routines in there, but they don't use any tables. There is a big table which basically gives the information about the position and shape of all the objects the ball can collide with, and then there are several small tables for those surfaces which, depending on the pixel column where the ball hits the object, give the angle of the surface which tells how the ball should be deflected, as well as some special cases where it should be deflected without losing any momentum (this is done for the bumper surfaces if active and the drop targets when taken down). Those tables pick from a total of 18 possible angles plus the special cases (and vertical and horizontal surfaces are two more special cases which don't appear in the tables because multiplications aren't performed for those, so a whole circle would actually be divided into 40 different angles). This isn't terribly accurate, but I thought it would be enough to be believable since due to the limited graphics resolution, you can't tell what the exact angle is supposed to be anyway, and in the game arcs and round paths are often actually divided into several discrete angles for the graphics as well.

     

    I think another limiting factor is actually the programmer's mind which has to grasp all that should be done to make the game as good as possible. You can do very much on a 6502 processor if you know how to do it and how to make the right compromises...

     

    Oh, for the object tables, I took some inspiration here...

    https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/43705/2d-collision-detection-for-pinball-game

    (look at the greyscale picture especially) and also in how "Midnight Magic" on the Atari 2600 is doing its collisions (since it has been ported to the Atari 8-bit line, and the source code is available).

    • Like 2

  6. Posted

    Here are my times on modern systems for this past week (November 18th through 24th)...

     

    Browser based:

    Manyland - 36 min. in 2 sessions

     

    Manyland is a 2D multiplayer game where you get to create your own world made of 16x16 tiles. You can copy existing tiles or create your own which can be used as background, solid or climbable. There are also several extras. The game mechanics are pretty much a Jump and Run game scrolling in all 4 directions. I'm not 100% sure if I'd call it a real game though, since I don't know if there's actually a goal you have to reach.

    • Like 2

  7. Posted

    Here are my times for this past week (November 18th through 24th) on classic systems...

     

    Arcade:

    Missile Command - 3 min.

     

    Atari 7800:

    Baby Pac-Man - 7 min.

     

    Channel F:

    Pac-Man - 11 min. in 2 sessions

     

    Commodore 64:

    Jr. Pac-Man - 9 min.

     

    This week I only played short sessions of 4 classic games for half an hour in total... mostly variants of Pac-Man. The most unusual of the bunch is probably Jr. Pac-Man on the C-64 which isn't nearly as good as the arcade original. The mazes don't scroll and have been shrinked considerably, being only a bit wider than those on Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man. And it doesn't play particularly well either... I often missed a junction I was meaning to take, and in the end the game just crashed, and I gave up.

     

    In Missile Command, I only played a single game and that was fueled by a certain similarity to a game I'm envisioning. There doesn't seem to be a game anywhere where you play the operator of a scooter company. This would in part be strategy and action... You decide a scooter model and pricing, and then there's a map screen where you set the locations where scooters should be deployed and pulled for charging and maintenance. And this would work similarly to Missile Command in that you click on the locations, and then the delivery van goes to the locations consecutively (and in its speed) and brings out and collects the scooters. Actually, it would also be a bit similar to Dino Eggs. When the van enters the headquarters, you get the number of scooters in the van and their charge and maintenance level and then put them into the depot, on the charger and in the maintenance bay and put freshly charged and repaired scooters in the van to deploy. As I said, such a game doesn't exist yet, neither on the web nor for classic systems.

    • Like 4

  8. Posted

    Here are my times for this past week (November 11th through 17th, 2019)...

     

    Arcade:

    Kicker - 26 minutes

     

    Atari 7800:

    Baby Pac-Man - 10 min.

     

    Commodore 64:

    Crystals of Zong - 11 minutes

     

    I only played three games this week because it was rather busy at work and at the dentist (where I didn't play in the waiting room)... I replayed three games I've played earlier, Kicker, Baby Pac-Man and Crystals of Zong. In Kicker, I survived the 1st set of levels on the 2nd attempt, in Baby Pac-Man I reached the 3rd maze despite only a few power pellets earned, and in Crystals of Zong my game ended in the first Mummy level.

    • Like 4

  10. Posted

    Here are my times for this past week (November 4th through 10th)...

     

    Channel F:

    Pac-Man - 9 min.

     

    Colecovision:
    Frantic - 23 min.

    Looping - 4 min.

    Pac-Man - 28 min. in 2 sessions

    Steamroller - 74 min. in 3 sessions

     

    After having surpassed 50,000 points in "Jr. Pac-Man" last week, I turned to different games this week... 2 Pac-Man ports on the Colecovision and Channel F and some more Colecovision games... Looping (which I didn't play for long and never even made the 1st level), Frantic and Steamroller which I've all played before. In Frantic, I made the 1st level, and in Steamroller I reached the "Activision patch score" of 35,000 points on, I think, my 3rd attempt.

    Actually I was inspired by the relatively good and life-like graphics offered by some of the Intellivision and Colecovision games back in the day. Somehow I dreamed of games that were more complex than they actually were. For instance, there was that mock screenshot of "Smurf" displayed by Coleco on the box and some adverts that showed a screen actually not appearing in the game with the smurf in front of a fence, and it said the smurf had to eat mushrooms or berries to survive, which actually wasn't the case in the game. I imagined how it would be if the smurf could go behind the fence and continue with different screens than if it stayed in front of the fence (and of course, only one way would actually lead to Gargamel's castle!). I imagined how it would be if the player in "Bowling" on the Intellivision could go away from the bowling alley and could go out into the alley in front of it, which in case of one Bowling alley would be Vienna's main alley (Hauptallee), where also "Pitfall" takes place, and actually, according to my findings, there would be demand for some Hive scooters, but none are being put out there. But that's another topic... ;-)

    • Like 4

  11. Posted

    Here are my times for this past week (October 28th through November 3rd) on classic systems...

     

    Arcade:

    Jr. Pac-Man - 198 min. in 14 sessions

    Jungle King - 4 min.,

     

    Atari 2600:

    Ms. Pac-Man - 8 min.

     

    I had this week off from work, so I had more time left for gaming, hence the greater minute count. In Jr. Pac-Man, I reached my goal of 50,000 points. Then I threw in a game of Jungle King (that's the version with the Tarzan yell in it) and one of Ms. Pac-Man on the 2600 just for a comparison. The Pac games also happen to have ghosts in them, but I didn't play them because of this, but rather because of the comparison with a scooter dropping algorithm as described last week.

    • Like 6

  13. Posted

    Here are my times for this past week (October 14th through 20th)...

     

    Arcade:

    Jr. Pac-Man - 88 min. in 8 sessions

    Ms. Pac-Man - 10 min.

     

    Channel F:

    Pac-Man - 25 min. in 2 sessions

     

    Nothing fancy, nothing new... I only played some variations of Pac-Man this week. Still, that I'm playing games at all is a good sign telling I'm slowly returning to normal operation after some "exception" weeks caused by my father's stay in the hospital. I only played one game of Ms. Pac-Man since I've been playing it excessively in the last weeks already, but I threw in some Jr. Pac-Man which I haven't played for a while, and for a comparison also the Channel F version of Pac-Man.

     

    This was actually spurred by some thoughts about an algorithm which might play this game using some kind of gravity formula in order to determine the player's movements where the ghosts would repel the player, and the dots and fruits would attract it. You could do a similar thing for determining the movements of a juicer or charger putting out freshly charged scooters for a scooter sharing business like Lime and Bird... in this case the points where the scooters need to be put would attract the juicer, and when collecting the scooters the scooters to collect would attract the juicer.

     

    To this extent, I also thought out a concept how to create a service area by calculating a "gravity strength" for each point by adding up the square of all distances from scooters and designating all points above a given strength as the service area. Turns out that if you do this in a way that gives a service area of 1 square mile for one scooter, the resulting combined service area should be exactly as many square miles large as there are scooters.

    • Like 4

  14. Posted

    Here are my times for this past week (Oktober 7th through 13th) on classic systems...

     

    oops, seems like I actually didn't play anything this week, be it classic or modern. Rather I played around with visualizations of demand for shared e-scooters in different parts of Vienna, taken from position data from a company which has its API pretty much out in the open... looks like this (actually this picture is combined from the data of one company with the business area of another...):

     

    765986852_KarteHiveDest.thumb.JPG.c6a6b4f09e8cea4a6576359680165cfa.JPG

    • Like 6

  15. Posted

    Here are my times for this past week (September 30th through October 6th)...

     

    Arcade:

    Ms. Pac-Man - 48 min. in 3 sessions

     

    Commodore 64:

    Ms. Pac-Man - 69 min. in 2 sessions

     

    This week I continued to play Ms. Pac-Man on the C-64, but eventually I noticed I didn't get any further, so I selected a higher level until I got to the 3rd intermission ("Junior") which is actually quite short. I did the same thing on the original arcade version by doing the rack test (F1 in MAME) to see more screens, including all intermissions. But with 5 lives, I reached over 50,000 points even without the rack test. I think the arcade version is actually a bit easier than the C-64 one, plus the C-64 one runs at a slightly inconsistent frame rate (it slows down when dots are eaten).

    • Like 6

  18. Posted

    On 9/17/2019 at 3:36 PM, carlsson said:

    Here's the summary for Week 37, running from September 9 - 15. We logged 4721 minutes of eligible play, playing 49 games on a total of 18 systems.

    Top 10:

     

    1. Final Fantasy VIII (PlayStation) - 566 min.
    2. Assembloids (Atari Lynx) - 450 min.
    3. Sonic 3 & Knuckles [aka Complete Version] (Genesis) - 416 min.
    4. Phantasy Star II (Genesis) - 360 min.
    5. Cosmic Fantasy 2 (TG-CD/PC Engine CD) - 321 min.
    6. Kaboom! (Atari 2600) - 286 min.
    7. Super Mario World (SNES) - 265 min.
    8. Postal 2 (PC (Windows 95/98)) - 200 min.
    9. Dragon Quest V (SNES) - 195 min.
    10. Mega Man 2 (NES/Famicom) - 190 min.

     

    Pre-NES top 10:

     

    1. Kaboom! (Atari 2600) - 286 min.
    2. Solar Fox (Atari 2600) - 135 min.
    3. Pac-Man Collection (Atari 7800) - 118 min.
    4. Oink! (Atari 2600) - 50 min.
    5. Blue Print (Atari 2600) - 37 min.
    6. Space Invaders (Atari 2600) - 25 min.
    7. Hunchy II (Atari 2600) - 18 min.
    8. Commando (Atari 2600) - 12 min.
    9. Donkey Kong (Atari 2600) - 10 min.
    10. Gamatic 7706 (Pong) - 4 min.
    10. Santa Lucia (Intellivision) - 4 min.

     

    Top 10 systems:

    1. Genesis (1020)
    2. Atari Lynx (757)
    3. Atari 2600 (576)
    4. PlayStation (566)
    5. NES/Famicom (466)
    6. SNES (460)
    7. TG-CD/PC Engine CD (321)
    8. PC (Windows 95/98) (200)
    9. PC (DOS) (169)
    10. Atari 7800 (118)

     

    It is a bit of a fantasy week over here, headed by Final Fantasy VIII with honorable mentions of Phantasy Star II in 4th and Cosmic Fantasy 2 in 5th. A brand new Lynx homebrew (well, a port from other systems AFAIK) and the combo Sonic 3 & Knuckles also sneak in on top 5. Pre-NES we have old time favorites such as Kaboom!, Solar Fox and Pac-Man Collection, with an observation it only took 4 minutes to enter that list this week. The collective of homebrews makes the Lynx the most played Atari system, but still beaten by the Genesis in a week with a good amount of diversity.

     

    Cosmic Fantasy 2 (TG-CD/PC Engine CD) becomes member #384 in the 1000 Minute Club with 1101 minutes so far, and also is the first TG-CD (*) game to enter the club.

     

    (*) Interesting abbreviation, could mean something completely else outside the world of retro gaming, though I think the two sides are not entirely compatible over there.

    Hmmm... could it be that my Ms. Pac-Man entry from last week was overlooked? Or is the C-64 not being considered a pre-NES system? I believe it should be because it has first been released earlier than the Famicom / NES in every market (I think it's 1982 / 1983 in the first market, and 1983 / 1987 in Europe). And I consider Ms. Pac-Man a "classic" game anyway, which screams "pre-crash" in any way, especially since it's been released for the C-64 on a 16K cartridge, which became highly unusual after the crash.

    • Like 3

  21. Posted

    Here are my times for this past week (August 26th through September 1st) on modern systems...

     

    Android phone:

    McDonalds treasure hunt - 2 min.

     

    I played one game of that while on the toilet. Other than that, I didn't play anything this week. I visited my father in the hospital twice, fetching and bringing him things he needed, both from his flat where I also cleaned up the mess he left a bit, and from his car. And I went swimming also because it might be the last hot week for this year, so in September there should be more time for gaming again. But I did manage to sneak in some rides on rented scooters with Lime now letting you ride scooters placed outside of the service area in Vienna. ;-)

    • Like 3

  22. Posted

    Here are my times for this past week (August 26th through September 1st) on classic systems...

     

    sorry, I didn't play anything this week. I visited my father in the hospital twice, fetching and bringing him things he needed, both from his flat where I also cleaned up the mess he left a bit, and from his car. And I went swimming also because it might be the last hot week for this year, so in September there should be more time for gaming again. But I did manage to sneak in some rides on rented scooters with Lime now letting you ride scooters placed outside of the service area in Vienna. ;-)

    • Like 6

  23. Posted

    Here are my times for this past week (August 19th through 25th)...

     

    Atari 2600:

    Chaotic Grill - 18 min. in 2 sessions

    Colony 7 - 5 min.

     

    I tried the new version of Chaotic Grill which was released last week. The improvements are noticeable, but I still see room at the top especially for the music.

    While at it, I also briefly replayed Colony 7 on the Atari 2600, but only for one game.

     

    • Like 5

  25. Posted

    Arcade:

    Jr. Pac-Man - 24 min. in 2 sessions

     

    Commodore 64:

    Marble (Homebrew) - 7 min.

    Ms. Pac-Man - 38 min. in 2 sessions

     

    This week I replayed Jr. Pac-Man (original version) and Ms. Pac-Man (Commore 64 version). That C-64 version seems to be harder than the arcade one. I didn't manage to surpass about 30,000 points on it. In Jr. Pac-Man, I reached about an average result

    One game I played, I think, for the first time since many years is "Marble" a homebrew version of Marble Madness converted from isometric to 2D graphics which I wrote back in early 1985 in BASIC and then compiled it using the Austro-Comp compiler. As is customary for games I did myself which appear on the tracker, I've attached the program file to this thread. It's supposed to be run on a C-64 emulator (i.e. VICE).

     

    c_marble 2.PRGc_marble 2.PRG

    • Like 6
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