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What is 'TRON: Complete'?


bikeguychicago

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Maybe I'm blind, but I looked at all four of the websites in Rev's sig, and I see no mention of "TRON: Complete" anywhere.

 

Go to intellivision revolution and look at the 'homebrew releases' section and its in there....the source just links back to this thread! LOL

 

Its a way to keep track of who is interested in getting it.

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I will probably make the deadline to get on the list end of June. An announcement will be made on my site, this thread and most like a new thread. I think everyone that was remotely interested has had every oppurtunity to know about it.

 

I want it to be somewhat collectable to people. One run is all that will ever be made.

 

And then its off to the next multicart. ;-).

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I will probably make the deadline to get on the list end of June. An announcement will be made on my site, this thread and most like a new thread. I think everyone that was remotely interested has had every oppurtunity to know about it.

 

I want it to be somewhat collectable to people. One run is all that will ever be made.

 

And then its off to the next multicart. ;-).

 

I wonder if people saw the clue Rev left in the statement.

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The "next" multicart clue? I saw that, but have no idea what it could be. Here are my suggestions ;-)

 

Atarisoft (Defender, Centipede, Pac Man)

 

Parker Brothers (all 6)

 

Imagic (all 14, might be too much)

 

Mattel Games (by Network)

 

Super Pro Series

 

ECS games

 

Just some thoughts.....

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The reason I hesitated to reveal the specifics on this was because I wasnt sure if the multicart was do-able.

 

My original plan was to make a deluxe box set and have 4 separate Tron carts in it. I has found a very cool Plastic book style case that could house 4 carts in a custom fitted foam tray. It is larger than the intv boxes by 2 inches in height and one inch in depth. I will show a mock up i made if I can find it.

 

But this will be in a normal box.

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The menu in a multi cart intrigues me.

Is it possible to make a big game made by distinct roms and glue the roms?

Something like starpath did with multi loads in escape from mind master?

 

How it's done is that the Intellivision supports multiple ROM "banks" and allows switching between them. Only one bank can be active at a time, but each one represents the entire memory space available to a game at a time.

 

Keep in mind that ROM boards nowadays can have a TON of code because memory is rather cheap--as opposed to how it was in the days when 8-bit dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

 

You can then load up multiple games into different blocks of ROM and create a menu that switches to the bank of the selected game. The menu, of course, would have to be in its own bank.

 

Back in the Mattel days, it was expensive enough to get a single 8K ROM chip onto a cartridge, and even harder to make interesting games that fit within that space, that it was virtually impossible to use this feature for retail games. However, I believe that the demo cartridges used this feature.

 

By the way, "ROM" in this context means the Read Only Memory where the games are stored in the cartridge, not the game file in your computer, that people typically call a "ROM."

 

This is how the CC3 works as well.

 

-dZ.

Edited by DZ-Jay
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How it's done is that the Intellivision supports multiple ROM "banks" and allows switching between them. Only one bank can be active at a time, but each one represents the entire memory space available to a game at a time.

 

Keep in mind that ROM boards nowadays can have a TON of code because memory is rather cheap--as opposed to how it was in the days when 8-bit dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

 

You can then load up multiple games into different blocks of ROM and create a menu that switches to the bank of the selected game. The menu, of course, would have to be in its own bank.

 

Back in the Mattel days, it was expensive enough to get a single 8K ROM chip onto a cartridge, and even harder to make interesting games that fit within that space, that it was virtually impossible to use this feature for retail games. However, I believe that the demo cartridges used this feature.

 

By the way, "ROM" in this context means the Read Only Memory where the games are stored in the cartridge, not the game file in your computer, that people typically call a "ROM."

 

This is how the CC3 works as well.

 

-dZ.

You're absolutely right!

I did some research and I found that today even the Atari 2600 can have a bigger game without beeing too much expensive and not having to use the Starpath k-7.

Look at this Atari 2600 multi cart. I know it's for the Atari but I think you're gonna like it...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=h9e4XPDDnbg

 

Sorry for going off topic. :-D

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Yeah off topic. Without bankswitching that is the limit (Atari 2600 was limited to 4k) but with good bankswitching and good coding, you can have near infinity memory size.

 

Someone could come up with a really huge game that'd make Minecraft world seems tiny, load it onto a array of several 32Mbit EPROMs but that'd be a lot of coding to do and lots of debugging to do not to mention a bankswitching circuit. That's why it's rare to see a single game reach or exceed 128k on any pre-crash system.

 

PS just wondering, would extremely large bankswitched circuit be a hindrance due to the time it'd take to flip from one bank to another? Slow old system + about a hundred "banks" to switch to would take several cycles to reach there.

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