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Venture Homage Project Seeks Team Members


tomjscott

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I am starting up a homebrew hobby project that may turn into a released game if all goes well. I am a huge fan of the original Venture game by Exidy. I first played it at an outdoor arcade at a local fair when I was working an ice cream truck there with my parents. Later on, I got the Colecovision and played Venture at home for endless hours. I want to create a sequel to the game with upgraded graphics and sound for the Jaguar CD.

 

I am a principal engineer at Bally Technologies and work as a C++ programmer by day. I've programmed since the Commodore 64 days. I'm looking to put together a small team to develop this project and am in need of someone who can create sound effects and music for the Jaguar. I have an artist who hasn't yet confirmed his involvement, but I expect that he'll be on board.

 

I will be attending the Classic Gaming Expo in Vegas at the end of the month and can certainly meet up with anyone who is interested and will be there. Otherwise, please respond on this forum or e-mail me at tscott at magiqueproductions dot com.

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I love Venture on my ColecoVision, especially the music!

 

I wish I could help with this; I really do.

 

Also, I know it's very early, but would you consider a smaller, cartridge-oriented release (2~6Mb?) for those of us with SkunkBoards and the like? :)

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So you are mainly trying to at least port the 2D arcade game? That alone would be awesome.

 

I'm actually doing a sequel that will be 2D with upgraded sound and graphics. I don't plan to re-create the original game at this time, but perhaps that'll be a future easter egg addition.

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I love Venture on my ColecoVision, especially the music!

 

I wish I could help with this; I really do.

 

Also, I know it's very early, but would you consider a smaller, cartridge-oriented release (2~6Mb?) for those of us with SkunkBoards and the like? :)

 

Currently, the only way I have available to produce this is through CD creation now that the encryption is freely available. I don't have the skunkboard. I have found one person willing to do music and sound so far. I may have my graphics artist as well, but that's not definite yet. I'll be creating a homepage for this soon and starting a developer blog so people can see how this develops.

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This sounds like a wonderful project

 

I wish you luck and a lot of perseverance :)

 

From the other thread i see you will be ordering a BJL kit - I think this is a very sensible way to start. I also started with BJL.

If good progress is made and one feels the need for better debugging capabilities then one can look at the more expensive possibilities like skunkboard and alpine.

Edited by Atari_Owl
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This sounds like a wonderful project

 

I wish you luck and a lot of perseverance :)

 

From the other thread i see you will be ordering a BJL kit - I think this is a very sensible way to start. I also started with BJL.

If good progress is made and one feels the need for better debugging capabilities then one can look at the more expensive possibilities like skunkboard and alpine.

 

I now have the bjlcd, which I tested last night and it booted and was waiting for file upload. I only need the bjl cable to load programs now. I also have insrructions for burning encrypted CDs, but I haven't tested that yet.

 

I also now have my artist confirmed. His name is Santiago Iborra and I've worked with him before on my classic D&D module publishing. His portfolio can be viewed at www.quellion.com.

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This sounds like a wonderful project

 

I wish you luck and a lot of perseverance :)

 

From the other thread i see you will be ordering a BJL kit - I think this is a very sensible way to start. I also started with BJL.

If good progress is made and one feels the need for better debugging capabilities then one can look at the more expensive possibilities like skunkboard and alpine.

 

I now have the bjlcd, which I tested last night and it booted and was waiting for file upload. I only need the bjl cable to load programs now. I also have insrructions for burning encrypted CDs, but I haven't tested that yet.

 

I also now have my artist confirmed. His name is Santiago Iborra and I've worked with him before on my classic D&D module publishing. His portfolio can be viewed at www.quellion.com.

 

Encrypting CDs is a lengthy and unpleasant process (unless you have a single load file in which case you can use ULS). I would therefore strongly recommend that you develop using BJL until you have the code working as you want and then consider putting it on CD - whatever you do don't try to develop it on CD.

 

If necessary BJL cables can be built moderately easily - http://www.mdgames.de/bjlmod.htm bottom of the page

 

Mr Iborra's work looks first rate.

 

Please stick with this - i'm sure that it will be disheartening at times, but I'm hopeful you can fight through those times and produce something excellent for us to enjoy.

Edited by Atari_Owl
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Is the Bally you work for tom the same Bally as owned by WMS (who used to own the coin op part of atari)

 

WMS does not own Bally. Funny you should say that though. I used to work for SDG, which was bought out by Bally. At SDG we developed the gaming platform that Williams uses for their video slot machines. They've since modified the source to something beyond what we originally delivered, but I'm sure the heart of it is still our code. However, we are the Bally that used to do pinball machines, Pacman and all that. Now we only do casino slot machines and systems. I've worked primarily on the multimedia team doing OpenGL development.

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Is the Bally you work for tom the same Bally as owned by WMS (who used to own the coin op part of atari)

 

WMS does not own Bally. Funny you should say that though. I used to work for SDG, which was bought out by Bally. At SDG we developed the gaming platform that Williams uses for their video slot machines. They've since modified the source to something beyond what we originally delivered, but I'm sure the heart of it is still our code. However, we are the Bally that used to do pinball machines, Pacman and all that. Now we only do casino slot machines and systems. I've worked primarily on the multimedia team doing OpenGL development.

 

I started a facebook page for the game at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=111236398925690

 

I'm writing a sort of developer blog there as things develop.

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Is the Bally you work for tom the same Bally as owned by WMS (who used to own the coin op part of atari)

 

WMS does not own Bally. Funny you should say that though. I used to work for SDG, which was bought out by Bally. At SDG we developed the gaming platform that Williams uses for their video slot machines. They've since modified the source to something beyond what we originally delivered, but I'm sure the heart of it is still our code. However, we are the Bally that used to do pinball machines, Pacman and all that. Now we only do casino slot machines and systems. I've worked primarily on the multimedia team doing OpenGL development.

 

I started a facebook page for the game at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=111236398925690

 

I'm writing a sort of developer blog there as things develop.

 

I hope you will feel free to post if you run into any set-up or coding difficulties... we can help... and your experiences will also help other people who decide to start coding the Jag.

 

Best of Luck.

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I hope you will feel free to post if you run into any set-up or coding difficulties... we can help... and your experiences will also help other people who decide to start coding the Jag.

 

Best of Luck.

 

I definitely will seek advice whenever I have issues. I am keeping my facebook page up to date with my progress as well and will post issues there too.

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Are you going to reproduced any other Classic Colecovision games for the Jag? :love:

 

I'm considering it, but I don't even yet know how this first attempt will turn out. If it goes well and I enjoy the process then I would love to do a Donkey Kong Sequel for starters.

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Agh me again - feel free to tell me to butt out if I become annoying.

 

Two points come to mind - I hope they will be helpful.

 

1 - Please don't rely on the emulators, they are no substitute for coding on the real hardware and can behave quite differently.

In addition you may find that WIn98 is a more stable environment for the dev kit than XP... please think hard before abandoning a Win98 set-up just because emulators aren't working.

 

2 - This is tha Jag community so there is a subject which will be brought up sooner or later... (so it's probably better to make you aware that it will be mentioned at some point)

 

Rights

 

(Rights for Exidy games are currently with Mean Hamster, Inc, if that's any help?) of course if its going to be sufficiently different then there are no worries

 

 

Very Best of Luck

Edited by Atari_Owl
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Agh me again - feel free to tell me to butt out if I become annoying.

 

Two points come to mind - I hope they will be helpful.

 

1 - Please don't rely on the emulators, they are no substitute for coding on the real hardware and can behave quite differently.

In addition you may find that WIn98 is a more stable environment for the dev kit than XP... please think hard before abandoning a Win98 set-up just because emulators aren't working.

 

2 - This is tha Jag community so there is a subject which will be brought up sooner or later... (so it's probably better to make you aware that it will be mentioned at some point)

 

Rights

 

(Rights for Exidy games are currently with Mean Hamster, Inc) of course if its going to be sufficiently different then there are no worries

 

 

Very Best of Luck

 

Thanks for the tip on Win98. I don't really care for the emulators anyway so that's a good point. I'll continue to work on the Win98 machine and see how that works out for me. As far as the rights for Venture, I want it to be obvious it's a homage title, but to avoid copyright issues if possible. However, maybe Mean Hamster Software would be open to a licensing arrangement if the product turns out well. I did a google search and found their website. I'll look into that and let them know what I'm up to.

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I am assuming since your using my BJL cd you found my website (if not it is linked below).

 

I have both the original Windows 9X compatible dev tools on my site, and a newer set I put together that is Windows XP and 2000 compatible.

 

If your using Vista or Windows 7, the old Atari tools seem to work fine with them. Just an issue with XP and 2000.

 

I also have a live CD that boots into Linux and has all the old and new dev tools working on it. If your already using Linux on a system, I recommend using the dev tools under that. It is nice that everything just works. You can also use Seb's Removers Library which is a nice set of libraries to handle things like sprites, mod playback, sound playback, joypad reading, etc.

 

You can use VMWare Player or Virtualbox to run my live ISO (or boot it directly) if you want to play with jag development under Linux without doing a Linux install. I have seb's library installed on the live cd along with a bunch of other stuff.

 

Owl is right on the jag community. If you plan on selling the CD I can guarantee you some will come down on you hard if you haven't acquired the rights. It happened with Gorf's version of Gorf for the Jaguar. I got called out on my work in using the Doom engine, but luckily I had already talked to Carmack at id Software and got the proper info on how I should proceed from him.

 

http://www.hillsoftware.com

Edited by belboz
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