Someone made Tail Gunner for GBA

[ComputerSpaceFan]

I was looking for any new homebrews for the GBA and found this nice little Tail Gunner remake. (Click the GBA link on his site) Unfortunately it plays too slow to be usable so I'm hoping the guy makes some fixes.

But what I can't figure out is why no one has made Tail Gunner yet for the Vectrex. That seems like such a perfect fit!

Edited April 12, 2010 by ComputerSpaceFan

[Video]

That's pretty sweet.

 

Lots of games never made it to GBA for unknown reasons. Things like Lemmings, Starfox, and Populous were no brainers IMO, WTF??!?

[gtoal]

I was looking for any new homebrews for the GBA and found this nice little Tail Gunner remake. (Click the GBA link on his site) Unfortunately it plays too slow to be usable so I'm hoping the guy makes some fixes.

But what I can't figure out is why no one has made Tail Gunner yet for the Vectrex. That seems like such a perfect fit!

I appreciate this is a very old thread but with old posts being so easily findable nowadays, I'll add this info anyway in case anyone bumps into it again...

 

The port above started as my port of Tailgunner to the gp32 - it was written in C and produced by a static binary translation of the original Cinematronics game. Later the C core was reused by Norbert Kehrer to produce a Java port for the web. I'm fairly sure that the GBA version above is the Java port somehow encapsulated with a java interpreter for the GBA. If it's slow it's because of the Java stage being involved. If he were to modify the original C port instead ( http://dl.openhandhelds.org/cgi-bin/gp32.cgi?0%252C0%252C0%252C0%252C38%252C428,0,0,0,30,203), it would likely run at full speed.

 

However these translated binaries are pretty large, and there is no way that they could port to the 6809-based Vectrex - also the vectrex can't display as many vectors and as quickly as the Cinematronics hardware, so a straight port of the original rom is out of the question. However at the moment I am writing a new clone of Tailgunner for the Vectrex from scratch, and although the performance requirements are rather tight, I think it will be possible... (although maybe not in time for the self-imposed Christmas 2017 deadline I set myself for getting it done - I'm having to learn a lot of new coding tricks to get acceptable performance on the hardware and development is progressing slowly...).

 

 

Graham

[norbert_kehrer]

I appreciate this is a very old thread but with old posts being so easily findable nowadays, I'll add this info anyway in case anyone bumps into it again...

 

The port above started as my port of Tailgunner to the gp32 - it was written in C and produced by a static binary translation of the original Cinematronics game. Later the C core was reused by Norbert Kehrer to produce a Java port for the web. I'm fairly sure that the GBA version above is the Java port somehow encapsulated with a java interpreter for the GBA. If it's slow it's because of the Java stage being involved. If he were to modify the original C port instead ( http://dl.openhandhelds.org/cgi-bin/gp32.cgi?0%252C0%252C0%252C0%252C38%252C428,0,0,0,30,203), it would likely run at full speed.

 

However these translated binaries are pretty large, and there is no way that they could port to the 6809-based Vectrex - also the vectrex can't display as many vectors and as quickly as the Cinematronics hardware, so a straight port of the original rom is out of the question. However at the moment I am writing a new clone of Tailgunner for the Vectrex from scratch, and although the performance requirements are rather tight, I think it will be possible... (although maybe not in time for the self-imposed Christmas 2017 deadline I set myself for getting it done - I'm having to learn a lot of new coding tricks to get acceptable performance on the hardware and development is progressing slowly...).

 

 

Graham

 

HI,

 

I just wanted to add here, that I now ported my 15-year old Java applet with Graham's static binary translated code of Tailgunner to JavaScript. This makes Tailgunner playable in modern webbrowsers.

 

If you would like to try it, have a look at my website at http://members.aon.at/nkehrer

 

I added also a screenshot below.

 

Thanks, Graham, for the great binary translation of the original game. Your old C code can still run almost unchanged in modern JavaScript.

 

Bye

 

Norbert

 

[Tifany]

Love Tailgunner!!!! Thank you for this! Any chance of a port to the 2600, 7800, or 8bits?? would be pretty cool with a trackball!

Edited January 12, 2019 by Tifany

[+LS650]

I can remember playing Tailgunner "back in the day". That Javascript one above is actually pretty cool.

[norbert_kehrer]

Love Tailgunner!!!! Thank you for this! Any chance of a port to the 2600, 7800, or 8bits?? would be pretty cool with a trackball!

 

Thank you, Tifany.

 

I agree, that Tailgunner would be cool on an 8-bit homecomputer or console, but a port is certainly not easy. The main issue would probably be the slow line drawing on the raster-oriented console or computer screens. The dedicated vector hardware of the arcade machine was very fast in drawing all those lines, but on raster-oriented devices all would have to be done in software with probably massive speed impact.

 

It is certainly an interesting programming challenge for Atari coders, though.

 

Norbert

[+-^CrossBow^-]

Also a Tailgunner emulator was made for use with the VecFever cart. Basically with an updated firmware on the VecFever and a copy of the Tailgunner rom, this is playable on the Vectrex. Same with Asteroids now as well.

[Iwantgames:)]

Also a Tailgunner emulator was made for use with the VecFever cart. Basically with an updated firmware on the VecFever and a copy of the Tailgunner rom, this is playable on the Vectrex. Same with Asteroids now as well.

There's also a tailgunner game for the Vectrex32 cart along with Ultima Akalabeth

[gtoal]

On 1/14/2019 at 9:48 AM, -^CrossBow^- said:

Also a Tailgunner emulator was made for use with the VecFever cart. Basically with an updated firmware on the VecFever and a copy of the Tailgunner rom, this is playable on the Vectrex. Same with Asteroids now as well.

Actually that was also a static binary translation, not an emulation.  In fact it started off as the same one discussed above; and the asteroids was initially the one that David Welch produced, but I later heard from Thomas that he had rewritten the translators himself so I believe the final released versions used Thomas's translators (which haven't been released).  Since there's a lot of interest in this stuff again I've taken up a background task to produce a full suite of binary translators - 6502, 6809, z80 and CCPU. Maybe also 68K if I get those others finished satisfactorily first.  Work in progress is at http://gtoal.com/SBTPROJECT/ - I'll move them to github only after all four are working to some extent... If you want to browse the code to get a feel for the techniques involved, the 6809 one is probably the nearest to completion at the moment.  I did a write up a few years ago which you can still find at http://gtoal.com/sbt/

 

PS Tailgunner and asteroids and others will be available for the Vectrex on our new "PiTrex" cartridge which uses a Pi Zero WH as its CPU to drive the Vectrex, with the 6809 being halted under control of the cartridge.  Described elsewhere.

 

Edited May 4, 2020 by gtoal

[ComputerSpaceFan]

34 minutes ago, gtoal said:

Actually that was also a static binary translation, not an emulation.  In fact it started off as the same one discussed above; and the asteroids was initially the one that David Welch produced, but I later heard from Thomas that he had rewritten the translators himself so I believe the final released versions used Thomas's translators (which haven't been released).  Since there's a lot of interest in this stuff again I've taken up a background task to produce a full suite of binary translators - 6502, 6809, z80 and CCPU. Maybe also 68K if I get those others finished satisfactorily first.  Work in progress is at http://gtoal.com/SBTPROJECT/ - I'll move them to github only after all four are working to some extent... If you want to browse the code to get a feel for the techniques involved, the 6809 one is probably the nearest to completion at the moment.  I did a write up a few years ago which you can still find at http://gtoal.com/sbt/

 

PS Tailgunner and asteroids and others will be available for the Vectrex on our new "PiTrex" cartridge which uses a Pi Zero WH as its CPU to drive the Vectrex, with the 6809 being halted under control of the cartridge.  Described elsewhere.