Commando: tried the 8-bit version for the first time

[AtariGuru]

I love what these guys are doing these days, using coding skills, tricks and tech not around in those days and also the ease of collaboration that the Net makes possible just allows for good idea's to become great idea's which then turn into great real games.

 

Put it all together and one time impossibilities become real....

 

 

i agree. i'm currently playtesting venture for those guys and its awesome so far

[Gunstar]

@Mclaneinc- another "new" game I forgot to mention is called 'Crownland' if you haven't seen it, check it out! It's an incredible platformer that is going beyond any platformer I've seen on a Sega Master system or NES! Forget Super Mario Bros! The Atari 8-bit has something that looks and plays even better!

 

If anyone else can think of any "new" 8-bit games that have come along in recent years that I've overlooked, please mention them. I know there are some I'm forgetting.

Edited October 30, 2011 by Gunstar

[+MrFish]

Do an open-ended search on Atarimania and then sort the results by date. You'll have to wade through the "unknown release date" games at the beginning, but once you get past those you should have plenty good recent games to check out.

[thgill]

@Mclaneinc- another "new" game I forgot to mention is called 'Crownland' if you haven't seen it, check it out! It's an incredible platformer that is going beyond any platformer I've seen on a Sega Master system or NES! Forget Super Mario Bros! The Atari 8-bit has something that looks and plays even better!

 

That might be going a bit far. While Crownland is very impressive, I dunno if I would say it exceeds the better stuff on the NES or SMS.

[Mclaneinc]

@Mclaneinc- another "new" game I forgot to mention is called 'Crownland' if you haven't seen it, check it out! It's an incredible platformer that is going beyond any platformer I've seen on a Sega Master system or NES! Forget Super Mario Bros! The Atari 8-bit has something that looks and plays even better!

 

If anyone else can think of any "new" 8-bit games that have come along in recent years that I've overlooked, please mention them. I know there are some I'm forgetting.

 

Yes saw Crownland, brill Mario clone but I'm hoping the author can rework the code to get rid of the sprite flicker from his multiplex routine, the demo version does not have it.

 

Lovely little game, with beta testing for Altirra over the time its been about I've actually put *every* listed game through the emulator as a test so I'd thought I'd seen pretty much everything but there's always a couple that creep through my net

 

The levels me and sergey go through for the Altirra lovers

 

Phaeron gets a tiny bit of credit

Edited October 31, 2011 by Mclaneinc

[Mclaneinc]

I love what these guys are doing these days, using coding skills, tricks and tech not around in those days and also the ease of collaboration that the Net makes possible just allows for good idea's to become great idea's which then turn into great real games.

 

Put it all together and one time impossibilities become real....

 

 

i agree. i'm currently playtesting venture for those guys and its awesome so far

 

That's another one I'm looking forward to, from what's been shown its looking good...You lucky lady!

[Gunstar]

@Mclaneinc- another "new" game I forgot to mention is called 'Crownland' if you haven't seen it, check it out! It's an incredible platformer that is going beyond any platformer I've seen on a Sega Master system or NES! Forget Super Mario Bros! The Atari 8-bit has something that looks and plays even better!

 

If anyone else can think of any "new" 8-bit games that have come along in recent years that I've overlooked, please mention them. I know there are some I'm forgetting.

 

Yes saw Crownland, brill Mario clone but I'm hoping the author can rework the code to get rid of the sprite flicker from his multiplex routine, the demo version does not have it.

 

Lovely little game, with beta testing for Altirra over the time its been about I've actually put *every* listed game through the emulator as a test so I'd thought I'd seen pretty much everything but there's always a couple that creep through my net

 

The levels me and sergey go through for the Altirra lovers

 

Phaeron gets a tiny bit of credit

 

Yeah, I noticed that sprite flicker too, but I've seen much worse flicker on especially Sega Master system games, but also a few NES games.

 

And o.k., maybe Crownland isn't as good as the best SMS and NES stuff, but it's as good as or better than a lot of it, which is a mile stone for the Atari 8-bit where platformers are concerned, mainly due to the Atari's lack of colors and hardware sprites compared to the newer 8-bitters, Crownland shows that the 8-bits overall engineering makes it possible to keep up with the newer systems, even if it takes a lot of work and software "tricks."

 

How does Space Harrier on the SMS compare to the new 8-bit version?

[slampam]

I like those PAL screen colors on the first page. The first stage screen looks like puke-green on NTSC.

 

With these ground colors...($hex)

 

(16) 03 00 :new color (26)

(86 86 87) :new color (96 96 97)

(F5 F4) C5 :new color (25 24)

99 (F2 F3) :new color (22 23)

(F3 F2 F2 F3):new color (23 22 22 23)

 

...It more resembles PAL color. (of course this'll look bad on PAL)

[STE'86]

yeah its amazing how modern coding ttechniques and about 256k more than you would have had to do a game in the 80's can make a difference isn't it?

Edited November 30, 2012 by STE'86

[TheNameOfTheGame]

Oh good, never knew about crownland. Looks amazing, but it locks up for me in Altirra 2.10 just right after the scrolling starts at the beginning of the first level. Are there any specific settings I need to make sure of?

[+CharlieChaplin]

Oh good, never knew about crownland. Looks amazing, but it locks up for me in Altirra 2.10 just right after the scrolling starts at the beginning of the first level. Are there any specific settings I need to make sure of?

 

Hmm, nothing special, just 128k RAM, XL/XE OS and Basic off, thats all.

 

yeah its amazing how modern coding ttechniques and about 256k more than you would have had to do a game in the 80's can make a difference isn't it?

 

@STE: Oh, another provocation...?!? How nice to do that again in 2012... So you are trying to turn this in a C64 vs. Atari fight again. Maybe Albert should throw out and ban anyyone here trying or provoking to do that... we have already been there, we already did this, it led to nothing (than just another locked thread) and we don`t need this anymore. If you cannot live with this, just don`t visit this forum anymore...

 

-Andreas Koch.

[thegamezmaster]

Go to the page below, click on "CARTS" one of the XL buttons at the top of the site page. It will take you to the first page of the catalog, scroll down through the A's and B's until you reach the C's and shortly thereafter, Commando. Under the picture on the right you can click on a video of the game that is much clearer than my pics. Then stick around and check out some of the other new games they have out for the 'ol 8-bit, like Tempest Xtreem and Space Harrier and Outrun. There's a lot there at the site to distract you, so check out the games I mentioned first, you don't want to miss them.

 

Tempest Xtreem, Space Harrier and the soon to be released Outrun are new games done by modern programmers looking at the 8-bits from a modern perspective and designing games "outside of the box" both visual and audio. Deciding the old 8-bit can still learn new tricks.

 

Commando is just a prototype game that should have been released in the late 80's but never was, still good. You may find some other late era stuff at this site too (both released and unreleased), that you didn't know about...maybe Xenophobe? Or Deflector?

 

 

http://atari-sales.c...ore/frames.html

 

tried the above link and got a page in Hebrew about homes. What happened to the original link?

[+Mitch]

Try this link: http://members.tcq.net/video61/compnew.html

 

Mitch

[STE'86]

Hmm, nothing special, just 128k RAM, XL/XE OS and Basic off, thats all.

 

 

 

@STE: Oh, another provocation...?!? How nice to do that again in 2012... So you are trying to turn this in a C64 vs. Atari fight again. Maybe Albert should throw out and ban anyyone here trying or provoking to do that... we have already been there, we already did this, it led to nothing (than just another locked thread) and we don`t need this anymore. If you cannot live with this, just don`t visit this forum anymore...

 

-Andreas Koch.

 

actually FYI the comment has nothing to do with machines, it's not machine specific but a very general swipe at the all too common belief on most retro forums that "modern coding" is in any way more advanced than 1980's coding. when in actual fact it's generally nowhere near as good. What most of it does rely on however is "bolt on" devices and vast amounts of more RAM than were available "back in the day". So actually the message in my comment was "always take with a pinch of salt, any comment which goes something like "if only XYZ coder was around in the 80's how good could our games have been".

[emkay]

Someone is mixing up 70s and 80s....

[sack-c0s]

Hmm, nothing special, just 128k RAM, XL/XE OS and Basic off, thats all.

 

 

 

@STE: Oh, another provocation...?!? How nice to do that again in 2012... So you are trying to turn this in a C64 vs. Atari fight again. Maybe Albert should throw out and ban anyyone here trying or provoking to do that... we have already been there, we already did this, it led to nothing (than just another locked thread) and we don`t need this anymore. If you cannot live with this, just don`t visit this forum anymore...

 

-Andreas Koch.

 

I agree with him actually - if someone were to do a reasonable version of a game that ran on a stock 80s machine, and a slightly improved version that needed a massive memory expansion I'd rate the stock version coder a lot more. This is regardless of if the game runs on a 320k Atari, a C64+super CPU, some kind of Russian frankenspectrum... 80s game coders get a lot of stick for 'not being the best they could have been' and unfairly compared to people using 4 or 5x the RAM on a newly upgraded machine. There's also the fact we don't have a producer hovering over our desks demanding we have an entire arcade conversion at the duplicators in 3 weeks time.

 

That's not to say I'm against these upgrades - if people are going to fit them there's no point in not coding for them and pushing them for every last cycle and byte. I'd just rather if people made comparisons they were made like-for-like. We can do better than the 80s coders, artists and musicians but we *are* building on their research and have far better tools.

[emkay]

I agree with him actually - if someone were to do a reasonable version of a game that ran on a stock 80s machine, and a slightly improved version that needed a massive memory expansion I'd rate the stock version coder a lot more. This is regardless of if the game runs on a 320k Atari, a C64+super CPU, some kind of Russian frankenspectrum... 80s game coders get a lot of stick for 'not being the best they could have been' and unfairly compared to people using 4 or 5x the RAM on a newly upgraded machine. There's also the fact we don't have a producer hovering over our desks demanding we have an entire arcade conversion at the duplicators in 3 weeks time.

 

RAM wasn't a limit back then. Well in the late 70s, but not in the mid 80s. A Super CPU or some chpiset exchange is not only something different...

 

 

 

 

That's not to say I'm against these upgrades - if people are going to fit them there's no point in not coding for them and pushing them for every last cycle and byte. I'd just rather if people made comparisons they were made like-for-like. We can do better than the 80s coders, artists and musicians but we *are* building on their research and have far better tools.

 

And that's what makes me shivering

People used the C64 development stuff to create software on the A8. Still today this won't break.

Btw: Games like Space Harrier could run on a stock (128KB)XE , and Commando was there as a cartridge image back then.

It's only those "C64 lookalikes" just as YieAR Kung Fu, that waste endless resources for less approach.

Edited December 1, 2012 by emkay

[Heaven/TQA]

Emkay... You are right... Most of the Time the sprite mimic games need 1mb on a8 sad but true.

[+CharlieChaplin]

Well,

 

the A8 has a common "trick" when using carts, known as bankswitching. This is not really a trick, it was/is a standard right from the start of the A8 in 1979 and it allows one to use programs on A8 carts that are much bigger than 48k / 64k but still work fine on 48k or 64k machines. In the early 80s some companies (e.g. OSS) used 16k carts on the A8 that occupied only 8k RAM via bankswitching, in the late 80s (1987-1989) Atari even used carts that had 128k or bigger codespace and still worked fine on 64k machines. A lot of these bigger carts were not officially released however, like Commando or Xenophobe for example.

 

So Commando and Space Harrier both work fine on 64k Ataris and do not require more than 64k RAM as long as you have them as cart versions; hacked/cracked file-versions however that are single-load versions do require extra RAM. Thus, if you complain about some game file-versions requiring 256k or 320k RAM, you have to blame this on the hackers / crackers and pirates not wanting to use the original cart, not wanting to use a disk / file-version with multi-load stages, etc. I would still not call these hackers lazy, since it is a lot of work to re-work all the cart-code to work from XRAM instead. (I am not sure if *all* those file-versions of former cart games would also work on a 64k Atari from diskette using multi-stage loads, maybe some hacker can prove it; Summer Games for example had been a multi-stage disk for 48k computers before it was "converted" to a bankswitching 128k mega-cart that still worked on 48k or 64k computers)...

 

Since I do own the original cart., Commando is a 64k game for me, I plug in the cart, switch on my 64k Atari and it works. Rhetoric question: How can I run a program on the 64k Atari that is much bigger than 64k without the need for extra RAM ?!? Answer: Use a (bankswitching) cart ! Afaik, Atari also released some (many?) carts on the C64 under their label Atarisoft - standard 16k carts I guess. Since I do not own a C64 - does or doesn`t it allow bankswitching for carts ?!?

 

Maybe someone has to convert the 256k / 320k single-stage load file-version of Commando into a 64k multi-stage load diskversion first to show some people that this is possible (or impossible). If I remember correctly this had also been done with the 320k demo Numen, someone made the several parts of the demo available as files to show that they do work on 64k Ataris, if they are loaded multi-stage (one after another) or just individually from a gamedos...

 

-Andreas Koch.

Edited December 1, 2012 by CharlieChaplin

[TheNameOfTheGame]

Hmm, nothing special, just 128k RAM, XL/XE OS and Basic off, thats all.

 

-Andreas Koch.

 

Hmmm, I had it that way and it still crashes. Using Altirra 2.10 and atarilxl.rom firmware. Crashing with the Crownland.xex file 54,594 uncompressed bytes downloaded from http://atari.fandal....p?files_id=5650

 

Never had any problems running anything from Altirra before. Does this need some PAL settings or different firmware?

 

Here is right before it crashes/freezes:

 

 

Then if I walk more to the right it freezes like this:

 

Edited December 1, 2012 by TheNameOfTheGame

[TMR]

Afaik, Atari also released some (many?) carts on the C64 under their label Atarisoft - standard 16k carts I guess. Since I do not own a C64 - does or doesn`t it allow bankswitching for carts ?!?

 

The Atarisoft C64 cartridges are all either 8K or 16K, mostly the latter by the look of things. There are a few bank switching schemes for the C64 but they weren't commonly used for games until the second wave of cartridge releases when the C64GS came out.

 

Maybe someone has to convert the 256k / 320k single-stage load file-version of Commando into a 64k multi-stage load diskversion first to show some people that this is possible (or impossible).

 

i've had a very rough hack of the cartridge version from Atari Mania and, whilst i'm not 100% sure it wasn't me crashing things by prodding around, it appears to be constantly bank switching during play. Even if it was my fault, there'd at least need to be a load after the helicopter intro because that lives in a different bank.

[Bryan]

Emkay... You are right... Most of the Time the sprite mimic games need 1mb on a8 sad but true.

Very few games actually have anything near 1MB of discrete game data. Basically, all that space is equivalent to a faster CPU since you can just hard-code all the possibilities and shave cycles. The games could usually be done in a much smaller space but at a speed penalty.