GroovyBee Posted January 18, 2011 Share Posted January 18, 2011 Thinking about it some more it should be possible to do an APAC style mode, much like the 7800's 160C mode that came about last year. In the case of 320B you'd have 4 shades of 4 colours if the method worked. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Curt Vendel Posted January 18, 2011 Author Share Posted January 18, 2011 Thatz wat ya git fer wearin a kilt... laddy! I've got a secret to expose... Under my cloths... I'm 100% nude made ja look! AX Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Usotsuki Posted January 18, 2011 Share Posted January 18, 2011 Sorry for getting a bit testy about the docs... I've been briefed on what goes on in the Jaguar community and didn't want it to happen here. :/ My plans for the 78 would probably be best seen in action once all the necessary components are available. I'll at least try to get started as soon as I can. (Does require the XM and the proposed keyboard. I'll prolly need to learn more about SIO after I get past the initial hurdles.) I'm making no secret of what I *want* to do. Whether I can pull it off... well, that's another question but I'll damn well try. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Metal Ghost Posted January 24, 2011 Share Posted January 24, 2011 Good point, that is why I am going to wait a year or so before I buy one, maybe 5 is asking a little too much, but I do want to see some side scrolling platformers and beat em ups. Although not scrolling platformers there are a couple of platformers in the homebrew games Harry's Hen House and Monster! (which are a couple of WIPs I intend to come back to). The 2600 also has K.O. Cruiser which by all accounts is an excellent boxing game. I know its not a beat-em-up but it might wet your appetite . The problem with beat-em-ups in general is that large and colourful graphics are beyond many coders so you need an artist on board. To do any of those style of games justice with fluid multi-frame animation you'd be looking at 128K carts (or more) and that is a whole can of worms in itself. Having said that, I was a big fan of IK+ and Way of the Exploding fist back in the day. So... Never say never . I know this remains off topic a bit (sorry) but since the post was here, I thought it made sense to ask the related question in this thread as well. GB....when you mention the need to have an artist on-board a game development team, potentially at least, how do you mean? Is it in the context of developing character models, background screens and ancillary bits of scenery on paper which would then be translated into code by the coder? Or actually working digitially, if you will, themselves? I'm just very curious about the process. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GroovyBee Posted January 24, 2011 Share Posted January 24, 2011 GB....when you mention the need to have an artist on-board a game development team, potentially at least, how do you mean? A team member to take the burden off the programmer. Is it in the context of developing character models, background screens and ancillary bits of scenery on paper which would then be translated into code by the coder? Or actually working digitially, if you will, themselves? You could do it on paper, like in the good old days but its a long and time consuming process once you get into several multicolour sprites. I have a command line tool that take in windows *.bmp files and a script file that tells the conversion application where to cut sprites from and what to label them (amongst other things). Once the tool has done its work it creates a header file and a text based data file ready for use. This allows the game artist to make any tweaks they want to characters, background tiles etc. and I don't need to worry about it or make mistakes manually touching up data statements. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PacManPlus Posted January 25, 2011 Share Posted January 25, 2011 BTW, I have to say that the utility that GroovyBee is referring to is *awesome!* I've used it for the 320B Pac-Man (in another thread) and my almost finished 'PinOut' game (to be posted). It is *very* easy to use, only requires your favorite graphic editor, and does the hard work for you. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+SpiceWare Posted January 25, 2011 Share Posted January 25, 2011 That sounds pretty cool! My tools for 2600 sprites are online so anybody can use them, but they do require you to have the image available on the internet via URL. Someday I'd like to change it so you can upload the graphics. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Madaracs Posted January 25, 2011 Share Posted January 25, 2011 How is the projected date of January 30th looking? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DEBRO Posted January 25, 2011 Share Posted January 25, 2011 Hi there, BTW, I have to say that the utility that GroovyBee is referring to is *awesome!* I've used it for the 320B Pac-Man (in another thread) and my almost finished 'PinOut' game (to be posted). It is *very* easy to use, only requires your favorite graphic editor, and does the hard work for you. Are they available to the public? And if so...where? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GroovyBee Posted January 25, 2011 Share Posted January 25, 2011 Are they available to the public? And if so...where? Not at the moment. Now the tool is being beta tested in anger it'll be ready for prime time soon. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Underball Posted January 26, 2011 Share Posted January 26, 2011 That post you removed was a joke. The smiley face should have made that pretty clear. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HammR25 Posted January 26, 2011 Share Posted January 26, 2011 Are they available to the public? And if so...where? Not at the moment. Now the tool is being beta tested in anger it'll be ready for prime time soon. I just hope the angry people can find all the bugs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GroovyBee Posted January 26, 2011 Share Posted January 26, 2011 I just hope the angry people can find all the bugs. No bugs found by the beta testers so far. The tool has been used in all my 7800 games apart from the Tempest port so its had quite a bit of testing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ATARI7800fan Posted January 26, 2011 Share Posted January 26, 2011 I just hope the angry people can find all the bugs. No bugs found by the beta testers so far. The tool has been used in all my 7800 games apart from the Tempest port so its had quite a bit of testing. Wait there is a port of tempest for the 7800, when is that coming out :!: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GroovyBee Posted January 26, 2011 Share Posted January 26, 2011 Wait there is a port of tempest for the 7800, when is that coming out :!: http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/159728-7800-tempest/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Madaracs Posted January 26, 2011 Share Posted January 26, 2011 Wait there is a port of tempest for the 7800, when is that coming out :!: http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/159728-7800-tempest/ _That_ is cool! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
malducci Posted January 30, 2011 Share Posted January 30, 2011 (edited) Thinking about it some more it should be possible to do an APAC style mode, much like the 7800's 160C mode that came about last year. In the case of 320B you'd have 4 shades of 4 colours if the method worked. Isn't that effect going to pretty much limit such new softs to PAL only then? Or are you thinking more along the lines of title screen and related stuff? Also, what's the price point of this addon? I didn't see anything on either 'XM' opening thread posts. Is there a non forum site/link for information on this addon? Edit: Found the link. $100 for this thing!? Seriously?? Edited January 30, 2011 by malducci 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GroovyBee Posted January 30, 2011 Share Posted January 30, 2011 Also, what's the price point of this addon? I didn't see anything on either 'XM' opening thread posts. Is there a non forum site/link for information on this addon? Edit: Found the link. $100 for this thing!? Seriously?? How much do you think it should cost? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
malducci Posted January 30, 2011 Share Posted January 30, 2011 (edited) Also, what's the price point of this addon? I didn't see anything on either 'XM' opening thread posts. Is there a non forum site/link for information on this addon? Edit: Found the link. $100 for this thing!? Seriously?? How much do you think it should cost? It's not possible to ask without rolling your eyes, maybe? And to answer your question, I was expecting $30-40 range to be honest. Someone mentioned $150 and I figured that couldn't be right. $100 is better than $150, but still. For $100, might as well make a system on a chip and at a much cheaper cost too. Or maybe this is an Atari thing I just don't get? I understand in keeping with an addon as in the spirit of a console (i.e. not trying to stuff a small embedded PC into it), and a quick glance at the spec appears that way (although the FM chip mentioned in some other thread, seems a bit out of touch IMO). So I wasn't figuring on a price that high. For the people that ARE working on/directly involved in the design, what's the larger cost relative to parts going into this kind of project? The custom plastic shell? Individual chips VS a single ASIC or FPGA package? Edited January 30, 2011 by malducci 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GroovyBee Posted January 30, 2011 Share Posted January 30, 2011 It's not possible to ask without rolling your eyes, maybe? Retro products cost whatever they cost due to the relatively low number of units sold. If you don't like the price then its probably not for you. And to answer your question, I was expecting $30-40 range to be honest. So for low quantity (less than 500 to be made) you expect to pay £30-$40 for :- - Custom designed plastics and faceplate. - PCB. - Printed box and manual. - 128K RAM. - POKEY. - YM2151. - Additional logic and PLD. - 2K non volatile RAM for HSC. - EEPROM for BIOS/HSC. - Connectors. For XM's asking price that's a lot of bang for the buck considering that a NES Powerpak goes for $135 or a Jaguar Skunkboard for $99 (less if you preordered). Someone mentioned $150 and I figured that couldn't be right. $100 is better than $150, but still. For $100, might as well make a system on a chip and at a much cheaper cost too. Cheap to make but not so cheap upfront R&D and NRE costs. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mirage Posted January 30, 2011 Share Posted January 30, 2011 A project like this takes an immense amount of time to plan, execute, then produce. I'd be willing to bet that at ~$100, there's no real profit being made from this whatsoever, and certainly not in terms of being paid for labor hours. I wouldn't begrudge the developers from the small $100 fee for a product like this after all their time put into it. The only change I'd personally like to see in this regard is it being offered without a box, for a slightly reduced price without, as I have no desire for a box on a new item, and would rather not pay for it. But if the only version is with the box, I have no problem with that either. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DracIsBack Posted January 30, 2011 Share Posted January 30, 2011 Edit: Found the link. $100 for this thing!? Seriously?? Wow - that's quite the disparaging comment! Way to attack someone's extremely hard work! I seriously doubt Curt is making any money on this given the volumes and the painstaking effort put in. He and the guys working on it are certainly not getting paid for the time in this labor of love. I really get irritated by the killjoys who keep coming in here and attacking the thing ... 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
malducci Posted January 30, 2011 Share Posted January 30, 2011 (edited) I really get irritated by the killjoys who keep coming in here and attacking the thing ... I'm 'attacking' it?? What is it with this forum? I'm seeing this trend where whenever people question anything or anyone in 'authority', they're almost immediately attacked, or made snide comments towards, or belittled, and whatnot. Re-read my post. It's valid question as to why the cost was so high, relative to what was being offered. While I haven't gone from home made stuff to full production (yet), I've closely watched and read other similar hobbyist projects. I'm not implying they shouldn't make the addon or sell it, but compared to what I've seen of what they are offering upgrade wise - it seems rather expensive. I assume there's valid reasons as to why. Hence my list asking for more specifics. A project like this takes an immense amount of time to plan, execute, then produce. I'd be willing to bet that at ~$100, there's no real profit being made from this whatsoever, and certainly not in terms of being paid for labor hours. I wouldn't begrudge the developers from the small $100 fee for a product like this after all their time put into it. The only change I'd personally like to see in this regard is it being offered without a box, for a slightly reduced price without, as I have no desire for a box on a new item, and would rather not pay for it. But if the only version is with the box, I have no problem with that either. I wasn't implying they were making a killing off of this. If anything, I figured they'd be close to breaking even (cause that's how these things usually go). How much time someone put into, IMO, is irrelevant to what people get out of it. Should product X but sold for more than product Y, simply because a team put more time into it? Even if product X technically offers less than product Y? (Just a simple analogy). I'm not part of the 7800 crowd. Or the 5200 or A8 crowd (I owned a XL or such BITD for a short period of time). I don't own these systems. But I'm fascinated by and adore the homebrew/dev stuff for the A8 community. So my point of view is different, I guess. Because $100USD (£ is more than USD) seems pretty pricey if you applied the relative upgrades to any other homebrew and gamer console groups (though I've heard different about the C64 community). For XM's asking price that's a lot of bang for the buck considering that a NES Powerpak goes for $135 Ok. Have you read what the Powerpak supports? Here's a small exert: Inside the PowerPak is a Xilinx FPGA, 512KB prg space, 32KB battery ram space, 512KB chr space, boot rom, and glue logic. The FPGA has extra graphics ram for four screen games and MMC5 exram. On top of that, it supports CF cards and a crap load of mappers and it's upgradeable. And I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure it was designed with the primary purpose of profit in mind. On a similar note, Kevtris did a complete and accurate NES on a single chip via FPGA. Video, cpu, audio. Everything. I mentioned those since you brought it up. But I rather not compare such products to this addon. I'm directly interested in the design choices and where the large part of the costs came in for this addon. Were they not able to consolidate everything into a single package, for a low volume/build? Stuff like that. How much was cost a factor in design. How does the 7800 community feel about this price point. This isn't a dig on the 7800 gamers, but the 7800 is looked down upon compared to other consoles of its class (NES and SMS just to name the popular two). To fix some of the more inherent problems of the original design, is the community more willing to pay more for an upgrade cart to make the system shine as they felt it never got a chance to - compared to how other console community/gamers might feel about spending that much for an upgrade? Or maybe it's that I'm looking at this as a game console upgrade, which is different that I would if this were a computer upgrade. If this was for the A8 computer, $100USD wouldn't sound as unreasonable. But that's probably because upgrades were never cheap for such computers BITD (I ran a Coco2 and then Coco3 before jumping to PC). The Atari 8bit community seems to blend the console and computer dividing lines of Atari (with many owning multiple). At least that's the impression I get. - Custom designed plastics and faceplate.- PCB. - Printed box and manual. - 128K RAM. - POKEY. - YM2151. - Additional logic and PLD. - 2K non volatile RAM for HSC. - EEPROM for BIOS/HSC. - Connectors. The 2151 looks like it would be the more expensive part there (assuming it's a single IC package). IIRC, the original chip also required an external DAC for it as well. Wouldn't it be cheaper to use an FPGA to handle both the 2151 and the Pokey chip or approximations of them? Or is that already being done? The 2151 also definitely seems out of character with the 7800 or an upgrade in the spirit of, but that's just my opinion. I figured the plastic casing probably isn't cheap either (in small quantities). Edited January 30, 2011 by malducci 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rybags Posted January 30, 2011 Share Posted January 30, 2011 30 bucks barely pays to make a cartridge these days. I imagine the PCB alone for the XM probably comes to over $40. Not to mention a low volume run of the plastic cases. VBXE came in somewhere around $150 and some baulked at that, but you'd pay a third of that for a decent 512K upgrade. It's not like anyone's forced to buy these things, if you don't want to pay you can just use the (possibly deficient) PC-based emulation. I'd be buying one myself but just don't have the time to dedicate to it, but that's not to say I haven't ruled it out in future. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mirage Posted January 30, 2011 Share Posted January 30, 2011 I'm 'attacking' it?? What is it with this forum? When you word your question as "$100 for this thing!? Seriously??", then yes, it comes off as attacking, and there's hardly any other way to take that. It really sounds like you just want to nitpick the piss out of this for no reason. It should be obvious that the materials and production alone make it not a money-maker, so is it really necessary to dissect it any further? If you truly wanted a technical discussion of how it's made, then "$100 for this thing!? Seriously??" sure as hell isn't a productive way of starting that discussion 7 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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