Asteroids Emulator, When Did This Happen?

[Synthpopalooza]

Just watched the C64 video of Asteroids emulator. It really seems to slow down a lot more than the Atari when there are several asteroids on screen.

 

That's your slower Commodore 64 processor speed at work. Altho the C-64 has some advantages over the Atari in the hi-res (320 pixel) department, this is one area where the Atari is superior.

[Darkhog]

You cannot use a mode like that for anything really useful besides static pictures.

 

Then how comes, there are whole animated demos that uses APAC and even Wolf3d clone?

[Synthpopalooza]

Actually APAC mode and related modes (like the mode E PAL Blending one) can be used in games. There is also Cygnus XL (I think that's the game's name) and also a racing game that was released recently, that both use APAC mode.

 

Where you get into trouble is when you use double-buffered modes like HIP, or CIN ... where you have to use 100% of the processor time to interleave the pictures and scroll the scanlines. Plus the memory required for these modes (16K screen ram) is horrendous.

[ACML]

Just another example of the hidden capabilities of the Atari Home Computer that took decades to uncover. It looks just like the coin op version. Back in 1982, it probably wouldn't have been wise to produce an Asteroids game that required 48K of RAM since that would have definitely curtailed volume sales. This reminds me of the new 2012 2600 version of Pac Man that is still 4K. If only Atari had released that instead of the crap version we all shelled out $40 on. Back to this arcade style Asteroids. Our little 800 could do this back in 1979. Just another example of just how ahead of its time this hardware really was (Atari 800 that is). It was so advanced, the pioneers at Atari couldn't understand the potential of the computer they created. I guess if Atari paid royalties to it's programmers, we might have seen better ports.

Edited April 18, 2013 by ACML

[8bit-guy]

tried also the c64 version, way too slow compared to the A8

maybe with supercpu...

[+therealbountybob]

Another "feature" of the game is that it supports either joystick - so if you play 1 player you can team up with a friend: one of you steering and the other firing (both have full control) this is not so good when in 2 player mode though especially when your opponents hand slips and accidentally hyperspaces you into a large rock! Gme could do with remembering 2 player mode too as you end up starting in 1 player by mistake and there's no reset/restart so have to kill off the 4 men

[+slx]

Maybe it also has to Do with the concept of emulation being far less developed in 1982 than today (and a quite decent Asteroids port being abailable plus Arcade and Home Computer being separate divisions with the VCS / 8-Bit crew recreating Arcade games 'by feel' rather than by analysing source if I understood the Atari history book correctly).

[Wally1]

can we put this on cartridge?

 

that would be cool

[Level42]

Sorry for digging up an old thread but I just played this the first time on real hardware and it's simply amazing ! I never would have guessed the A8 could do this, even though I realize the arcade machine and the A8 have the same processor, it is still very impressive to emulate the vector hardware "around it" and the sound too.

 

I own an Asteroids machine (needs to be fully restored though) and I have owned an Italian bootleg called Asterock for a few years so I'm very familiar with how it plays even today.

The speed seems to vary a little bit but (only played on PAL yet, guess NTSC is a bit faster ?) overall it is very very well playable and a lot of fun ! I am even about to say I like the joystick control better than the buttons-only control on the machine.

 

Indeed, since I also have a Lunar Lander, my next thought was: LL should be possible too !!!

 

Asteroids is running on basically the same hardware as Lunar Lander, in fact, Asteroids was developed on a modded Lunar Lander PCB:

 

 

 

Lunar Lander was Atari's first vector game and Atari simply "converted" the Lunar Lander cabinet to Asteroids cabinets, in fact, some very early one's still had the Lunar Lander side-art. However, there were also conversions done in the field later on, and not all of them were legal/official Atari ones.

 

My Lundar Lander had a bootleg Asteroids conversion. The control panel was badly hacked (huge hole made) and a hard plastic overlay was installed on the control panel. I still have the conversion on the PCB but it's not working regretfully. (It's running another LL pcb now).

 

I reconverted it back into a Lunar Lander.

 

Anyway.........you would think that it would be possible to do Lunar Lander on the A8 on the Asteroids emulator basis but there are a few things....

 

1) the zooming is going to be a problem. The arcade game starts with a "large" overview of the moon's surface, but when you come closer to the surface, the game "zooms in" and now the surface "follows" the ship. This means a lot of calculating vectors I guess.

3) the thrust handle. And this is a biggy.....half the fun of playing Lunar Lander on the arcade machine is this very dedicated control. The feel of that thing in your hands is just awesome. In the end it's just a pot, so it might be possible to set-up the software to use a paddle controller for the thruster but you'd need to fix it to some kind of stand to make it playable because you'll also need two buttons (or a joystick) for left and right (the paddle button could act as the abort button, I never use it when playing).
The thruster handle has a spring though, that will give "force feedback" which makes it feel so "real" on the cab....of course a paddle controller will never feel like that.

4) (hardcore mode): you can switch "levels" of play during the game on the real machine and the "level" is indicated with light bulbs on the control panel (this is also why Asteroids CP's are so insanely big (AND uncomfortable to play) for just a few buttons....)

 

All in al isn't that easy I guess...but should be possible with maybe some slowing down during the zooming part.

3D vectors are pretty much out of the question, there is a lot of hardware 3D calculation going on so Red Barron, Battlezone are out of the question, not to mention any later games.

 

Is the creator of this emulator actually a member of AtariAge forums ? It would also be fun to see if it would be possible to run some of the bootleg versions. In essence this will add little of nothing to gameplay, but it's interesting from a technical point of view.
Some bootlegs were 1:1 copies of Atari's PCB, but others, like Asterock, had differences. On Asterock the inputs work "inverted", meaning they are switched to + voltage instead of the usual ground. But more important: the sound circuits are different. The creators (Sidam) did this to try to avoid copyright problems....without succes though)

Edited November 11, 2014 by Level42

[Rybags]

I don't think it is faster on NTSC - it can vary due to graphics mode but PAL will have less cycles stolen to the point where usually the overall machine speed is higher. I don't think the emulation is tied to VBlank or at most might have throttling so it doesn't run too quickly when only one rock is left.

 

Lunar Lander, there's a lot of lines there just in the status display. A good idea with that game at the least would be to do it with conventional text. Also the terrain on far view is fairly complex. Not sure if the Asteroids emu uses softsprites or point plotting for the small rocks and shots. With such games it would be less CPU intensive to treat only the larger objects as line draws but it all comes down to being able to discriminate among object types in the vector emulation which mightn't be as easy as you'd think.

[snicklin]

I recently saw an Asteroids cabinet for the first time since I was about 4 or 5 years old. I was absolutely amazed at how bright that the vectors get. You don't feel that through MAME.

[Rybags]

There's options to increase the realism but in the end it's like doing pinball on a video screen - you can simulate it to a point but it'll never match the real thing.

[Level42]

Yes nothing beats a real vector monitor, and the black and white one's especially IMHO. Love them, that's why I got 4 vector games

 

Rybags, yes the texts should be converted to regular (atascii) text, I suppose it's easy to have a few text lines on the top of the screen instead of the vectors. The hard thing then is that you will have to "pull out" the info to be displayed (the calculated numbers) out of the game code, so that part already won't be running natively anymore.

And it's not something you can skip, you need to have a look at thus numbers just before you land to know if the vertical speed is low enough and if the horizontal movement is small enough.

 

The terrain of the moon is very static in the first screen (apart from the blinking "bonus adder numbers") but.........they are redrawn every "frame" to keep them on the screen on the real hardware....

that is easily forgotten when you are used to putting some values in the screen memory and it just "stays there". So indeed....that makes it a pretty tough job....but there is the challenge...right ?

Having the terrain drawn over and over again on the A8 would be wasting precious CPU time so again, there, probably some code change would be necessary....

I am nowhere near capable of doing something like that in software though.....give me a vector monitor and I'll fix it but software is not my thing.....

 

In fact.......I would LOVE it if someone would try to write a new game on existing arcade hardware.....but I realize the "market" for something like that is even smaller than for new A8 games...

Edited November 11, 2014 by Level42

[Rybags]

With technical information of the vector processor in hand, reverse engineering and delete/reassign of objects probably wouldn't be too hard.

[Level42]

Something like this: http://www.jmargolin.com/vgens/vgens.htm#Lunar%20Lander,%20Asteroids,%20%20and%20Asteroids ?

 

It goes way over my head....

[kogden]

A Lunar Lander emulator would be quite cool.

 

There's options to increase the realism but in the end it's like doing pinball on a video screen - you can simulate it to a point but it'll never match the real thing.

 

Very true. When I was a kid I had a Vectrex and my dad had a Cinematronics SpaceWar arcade game he restored. Vector displays are really cool. I wonder how hard a PBI vector generator would be to build for the Atari?

 

Here's a link on how to convert a standard CRT to a vector tube. Requires rewinding yoke so it's a bit of work but certainly cheaper than buying a replacement vector monitor these days.

 

http://hackaday.io/project/2871-build-an-arcade-xy-vector-monitor

 

This is expensive but would allow you to play vector MAME games on a real vector monitor with a PC:

 

http://www.zektor.com/zvg/