Pokey Titles

[SINGLE TOOTH]

When I was searching through the many "pokey" related posts, I didnt happen to stumble upon this morsel.

 

Everywhere Ive read all say that only 2 titles (ballblazer and commando) use the pokey chip, but what about Jinks? It has voice and nice music. Is that pokey, or something else?

 

Sorry if I'm a dumbass

Edited June 27, 2007 by SINGLE TOOTH

[Mayhem]

No Pokey in it... though Beef Drop is technically three now.

[DracIsBack]

Jinks is just a plain ole TIA chip.

 

For all its faults, I never rate Jinks a 1 star because I'm always impressed that they pulled off sound like that. Reminds you of what can be done with TIA when you try.

[SINGLE TOOTH]

Its just the TIA? It was speaking!!!

 

Wow. That is very impressive. I thought maybe they just used pokey for the talking part and the musical cutscenes.

 

The actual gameplay could be better though. It could actully be a fun game, if they put more time into the ball physics.

[Bruce Tomlin]

The TIA has an "all on" mode, where you can use the volume to play up to two channels of 4-bit PCM audio. And the WSYNC register means that you can have accurate timing using the 15KHz horizontal sync.

 

The downside is that you have to constantly update the audio to avoid glitches, even during vertical sync. You could reduce the sample rate to 7.5KHz by doing every other scan line, but you still can't miss updates. Pitfall II has a chip which returns the next sample of sound automatically, reducing overhead to the minimum. There's also Quadrun and the Berzerk hack, which blank the screen to play voice.

 

I've written a touch-tone telephone dialer (shameless plug: five copies of the original ten run still available), but the overhead of looking up two sine wave samples takes up more than half the CPU time on each scan line. And I do it as an assembler macro (JSR/RTS takes 12 cycles), so it takes a full 4K to do almost nothing other than play the sound.

 

 

The only thing special about Jinks is that it is the most common 7800 game with a RAM chip installed. And it is a sufficiently bad game that nobody will care about you junking the ROM to reuse the board for a homebrew.

[SINGLE TOOTH]

The TIA has an "all on" mode, where you can use the volume to play up to two channels of 4-bit PCM audio. And the WSYNC register means that you can have accurate timing using the 15KHz horizontal sync.

 

The downside is that you have to constantly update the audio to avoid glitches, even during vertical sync. You could reduce the sample rate to 7.5KHz by doing every other scan line, but you still can't miss updates. Pitfall II has a chip which returns the next sample of sound automatically, reducing overhead to the minimum. There's also Quadrun and the Berzerk hack, which blank the screen to play voice.

 

I've written a touch-tone telephone dialer (shameless plug: five copies of the original ten run still available), but the overhead of looking up two sine wave samples takes up more than half the CPU time on each scan line. And I do it as an assembler macro (JSR/RTS takes 12 cycles), so it takes a full 4K to do almost nothing other than play the sound.

 

 

The only thing special about Jinks is that it is the most common 7800 game with a RAM chip installed. And it is a sufficiently bad game that nobody will care about you junking the ROM to reuse the board for a homebrew.

 

 

The touchtone dialer is for the 7800? What do you use this for?

[Video]

Its just the TIA? It was speaking!!!

 

Wow. That is very impressive. I thought maybe they just used pokey for the talking part and the musical cutscenes.

 

The actual gameplay could be better though. It could actully be a fun game, if they put more time into the ball physics.

 

Actuallym, the 2600 also talked. (on a few games) And many games had really impressive music (including homebrews) But....it's a weak enough system that it eats into video data to do this. You can get great sound out of itm but some things (like talking) eat all the video processing to do so, so the games blank the screen to play voice.

 

I suppose you could cut the voice resolution in half, and still produce a picture, but would it still be understandable?

 

The 7800 uses a lot of the 2600 hardware to do other stuff besides dound, so it gets to use just about all of it to do sound, and can pull pretty good stuff off, when the programmers try.

[shadow460]

Quite a few 2600 titles had good sound and music with only the TIA chip. Bump 'n' Jump comes to mind, as do Rabbit Transit and the official Frogger. I'm not sure if one can count Starpath games or Pitfall II since they did use custom hardware.

 

There's an expansion board out there that has a POKEY chip installed. It's called the XBoarD, and new games could be coded to use it. I think Beef Drop is coded that way, but it's got Pokey on the cart, so there's no point unless a pokey less run is made.

[+MrFish]

Reminds you of what can be done with TIA when you try.

 

Has anyone tried to hack some of these games with terrible TIA sounds/music, to bring them up to at least a resonable level?

Edited June 30, 2007 by MrFish

[+MrFish]

Has anyone heard these yet?

 

Better-Than-Pitfall II: Music for the 2600. Absolutely amazing!

 

Somethin' to think about...

Edited July 1, 2007 by MrFish

[Shawn]

Commando

Ballblazer

Burgertime

Frogger

Tainted Love

 

 

Thats all of them.

[phaxda]

DUMB post deleted; failure to look at other thread.

 

 

Commando

Ballblazer

Burgertime

Frogger

Tainted Love

 

 

Thats all of them.

Edited July 1, 2007 by phaxda

[Bruce Tomlin]

Tainted Love does not use the Pokey.

 

I know because I was trying to use it as a test for my cart board.

Edited July 3, 2007 by Bruce Tomlin

[Shawn]

Tainted Love does not use the Pokey.

 

I know because I was trying to use it as a test for my cart board.

 

So the only reason I have it inside a commando is for the bankswitch then?

[Bruce Tomlin]

Tainted Love does not use the Pokey.

 

I know because I was trying to use it as a test for my cart board.

So the only reason I have it inside a commando is for the bankswitch then?

Yep.

 

The only reason it used a "pokey" bankswitch for the CC2 was because there wasn't a non-Pokey 512K bankswitch file.

 

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?s...t&p=1232071

 

Pokey is also enabled but the "demo" only uses TIA.

[Schmutzpuppe]

Tainted Love does not use the Pokey.

 

I know because I was trying to use it as a test for my cart board.

So the only reason I have it inside a commando is for the bankswitch then?

Yep.

 

The only reason it used a "pokey" bankswitch for the CC2 was because there wasn't a non-Pokey 512K bankswitch file.

 

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?s...t&p=1232071

 

Pokey is also enabled but the "demo" only uses TIA.

True, Tainted Love is only TIA.

Multi Lock On demo uses Pokey.