Alex Kidd on Miracle Island - Playable Demo

[Omega-TI]

Could you have a corrupted version? What version of the F18A are you using?

I loads up just fine here using version 1.8 and the copy of Alex Kidd I just downloaded << HERE >>.

 

The only thing I notice is that I need to do a power cycle after use to clear the F18A settings.

[Asmusr]

Could you have a corrupted version? What version of the F18A are you using?

I loads up just fine here using version 1.8 and the copy of Alex Kidd I just downloaded << HERE >>.

 

The only thing I notice is that I need to do a power cycle after use to clear the F18A settings.

 

The issue is when you run it without the F18A. It doesn't work in JS99er either when you turn off the F18A emulation.

[Omega-TI]

 

The issue is when you run it without the F18A. It doesn't work in JS99er either when you turn off the F18A emulation.

 

Ahhh..... so much for reading the message thread backwards before morning coffee. My bad!

[Asmusr]

This comes back to me now. The issue is that Alex Kidd is not setting the 16K RAM bit in VDP reg 1.

[Omega-TI]

I'm not trying to twist anyones arm, pressure them or suggest they do anything, but it does seem that Alex Kidd would make a nice full FG99/F18A exploit game. Of course the same could be said about the Raycaster demo Castle Wolfenstein, or the Power Strike Demo or a half-dozen other examples.

 

I wonder which programmer is going to be the first to ring in the 'new era' in TI gaming?

[TheMole]

This comes back to me now. The issue is that Alex Kidd is not setting the 16K RAM bit in VDP reg 1.

Yeah, and although I fixed this in a number of places, apparently some code paths were still setting reg 1 to zero instead of just resetting the blanking bit. That's fixed now. However, the bug persisted. It falsely detected an F18A when there was non installed. Turns out my F18A detection code (reading the status register, priming a different status register and comparing the two values) was hopelessly naive. I changed the implementation a bit, and now it works as it should in js99er. If someone can test it on real iron, I'd be very grateful.

 

Fixed rpk here: alexkidd.rpk

[TheMole]

Yes, I think that "F18A incorrectly detected when not actually present" what is causing the crash. Or I guess it could also be the detection code itself leaves the system in an unstable state even if the F18A in not detected. I do know that holding the fire button to bypass the detection does work, although it then skips past the lovely title screen too quickly.

 

Level 2 is hard!

 

Thanks for reporting, and for playing! I don't test the 9918a version nearly enough myself, so if you see anything else amiss I'd love to hear it.

 

Yeah, level 2 and 3 in the demo are fairly faithful copies from levels in the original Sega Master System game, but they are from later in the game (levels 4 and 7, I believe) and probably a bit too hard compared to the beach level. The whole demo has balancing issues throughout, so that's something I'm trying to be aware of while planning the full game .

 

Let me know if you get to level three, that one's a doozy

[RupanIII]

Ah, thread is here, sweet. How's this going? 3 levels done sofar in the demo?

With SEGA's love of spreading their brand, maybe you could get their blessing on the game these days for little more than the fact that you have put your effort into it.
Heck, maybe it could end up as one of Coleco's Mini Arcade games if it went far enough.

I'm just spitballing ideas. You + Pico or You + Sega etc.
How are the Ti emulators running on Pi? I haven't dabbled in that yet.

[repetto74]

Has anyone managed to get Alexkid working on the FlashRom99? I cannot get the file to be displayed on the FlashRom99 menu. All other games are working OK.

 

Thanks

Rick

[Omega-TI]

Look at the file size. It's 512K. It works on the FinalGROM just fine, but I don't think you'll have any luck on the FlashROM.

[repetto74]

Ok because Alexkid is available in the roms list for the FlashRom99 in the repository so maybe this is a mistake then.

[Omega-TI]

I'll fix that this evening.

 

Thank you for bringing that to my attention. It's now been fixed, so hopefully no one else will have the same issue.

Edited January 12, 2018 by --- Ω ---

[repetto74]

This Alexkid looks solid!! May push people to switch to the FinalGROM just to play it

[Omega-TI]

This Alexkid looks solid!! May push people to switch to the FinalGROM just to play it

 

It's possible. With the FinalGROM games can be 'rather large' up to 1 megabyte (try doing that on a regular TI system).

From what I understand, at the moment there are few programmers who know how to exploit the bank switching involved, but when/if they come up with a 'killer idea' I'll bet they'll learn.

 

With a larger percentage of the active TI community owning a FinalGROM at this point, any larger capacity games written specifically for it WILL get played and enjoyed. And like you said, when people see these games in action (like YouTube videos), they'll want an FG99 too!

 

In some ways I wish I could look into the future a couple of years FinalGROM's & F18A's make a potent combination. There will always be games that cater to minimal standards, but WOW some of this new stuff.

[TheMole]

Ah, thread is here, sweet. How's this going? 3 levels done sofar in the demo?

 

Look at me, replying to a year-old post... but yeah, three levels done. Still basically stuck where I left it with the demo, I've done graphics for some of the missing game features (the shop, special power-ups, a few more enemies etc...), but a hard-drive crash, deadlines at work and some gcc issues sucked all of the momentum out of the project. I really should spend some time setting things up again, but I'm getting married in a couple of months which is taking up a lot of my free time so perhaps I should just focus my efforts on the 4k coding contest instead for now .

[TheMole]

Allright!

 

After many years of letting this project gather dust, I finally decided to dive into why adding a small bit of code here and there managed to break the entire game. I of course initially decided that the issue had to be with the compiler and it couldn't possibly be anything in my code because the stuff I was adding was in a totally different place in the code from what ended up breaking...

 

Silly me... it turned out that the code responsible for loading assets (I use a ld-driven method of storing raw binaries in the cartridge image file, and access them using variables defined at link time) was only working most of the time. In certain circumstances I created a bunch of buffer overflows that overwrote the stack and made all kinds of weird stuff happen, or mostly just crash the entire thing . I completely retooled that part of the game, and added a few new features to test the overall stability, and lo and behold, it seems rock solid right now!

 

So, to my and no doubt everyone else's surprise, I'm going to be picking this up again and hopefully releasing new builds on a more regular basis :).

 

New in this version:

• There's an inventory screen: press space bar to bring it up, use the joystick to navigate to a power-up and press fire to activate it. Only one power-up has been implemented for now.
• New power-up: invincibility, this makes Alex invincible for a short while. Note that falling onto dangerous terrain (water, lava, spikes, etc...) will still kill Alex, but enemies will die instantly upon touching the player. Note: I'm still bringing my pc-based tools for asset creation online, since they've gathered quite a bit of bit rot since 2017, so the visual effect given to Alex in F18A mode (9918 mode looks nice enough, I think) when he's invincible is... headache inducing is probably the best way to describe it. This is going to change in a future release.
• There's a shop that will show up in between certain levels: here you can spend your hard earned money (so collecting money is now useful) on power-ups, extra lives, etc... Currently only extra lives, the invincibility power-up and a gambling item can be bought. The gambling item will basically increase your amount of money by a somewhat random amount. If you're lucky you might win more than it cost you to buy the thing in the first place. Not sure if this is going to stay in, but I needed at least three different items for the shop, so...
• I upgraded to @Tursi's libtivgm2 for playing music and sound effects. It seems to run a bit more efficient than the previous version, but I think I'll need to play around with the tools a bit more to get it to sound better. Currently sound effects override the music in the wrong channels at times, which can make it sound a bit weird.

 

alexkidd8.bin

[jrhodes]

Are you planning for a eventual full game, or this always just going to be a demo/showcase?

Either way, never thought i'd be doing anything like this on the ti-99, very nice job!

[+OLD CS1]

Running Classic99 v399.062, it freaks out with the F18A enabled.

[TheMole]

1 hour ago, OLD CS1 said:

Running Classic99 v399.062, it freaks out with the F18A enabled.

Unfortunately, I don't have a convenient way of running Classic99 here at the moment, so it's hard for me to test. Does Classic99 implement the extended status registers? If so, my code is probably detecting the presence of an F18A while the emulator doesn't support the features needed for it to work (mostly ECM3 and the extra background layer).

 

You can bypass F18A detection altogether by holding the fire button while selecting the game in de module library.

[Tursi]

No, Classic99 doesn't support a lot of the graphics extensions of the F18A, so that's likely the case. Although there's a bit implemented, like extended color sprites (which I'm not sure if they still work), dual pages, and text mode tile attributes, it's still pretty spotty. The only thing I guarantee is standard 80 column mode and the GPU.

 

Sorry. Life has just been too distracted to focus much on the new rev.

 

[TheMole]

I was working on a new level for Alex Kidd to release as an update to the demo when I got frustrated with the cumbersome process of having to manually create all the assets in Gimp, convert them using command line tools, check if the 9918 and F18a version were interchangeable in terms of gameplay, etc... so I decided it was time to work on the tools a bit.

 

I discovered the wonderful Dear ImGui, which I can't recommend highly enough to anyone who wants to make cross-platform GUI-driven tools. It's a joy to work with, and it's super easy to port to different platforms. It only took me a couple of days to throw together the following:

 

The goal is for the editor to spit out all the assets in binary format, ready to include in the cart image, without the need for additional manual work. Not quite there yet (still need to add the entity editor, and there's a couple of things I still need to do to get the 9918a scrolling algorithm input generated correctly), but it greatly improves my workflow already.

 

The video also gives a sneak preview of the upcoming new level, for those that are interested

 

Who knows, perhaps I will be able to release the entire thing for those that want to use the engine to create their own platform games eventually...

[CLBrown]

Hi, Mole!  Bringing this into this conversation from the other (older thread) I'd posted in before.

 

Yeah, the game runs fine on my real hardware (from FinalGrom), noting I have no F18A in real life (I really, really wish that they were available, or even better, that the gen 2 version was available, but so far, they're sort of like unicorns or pretty virgins... )

 

On Classic99, with F18A (partial) support enabled, I get the funky graphics I saw earlier.  This is what I see:

1.bmp

 

And Classic99 locks up... I need to do a hard reboot.

 

If I disable F18A support in Classic99, everything works fine, albeit obviously in the somewhat less pretty 9918 mode.

 

I don't have TI MAME or MESS emulation running locally, and I'm not really familiar with JS99, either...  I have PC99, Classic99, TI994W, v9t9, and Win994a...  but it seems I'm behind the times where the "emulation community" is doing things these days, huh?  And among my choices, only Classic99 has F18A support (which USUALLY works quite well, but according to Tursi himself is not a "complete" implementation).

 

So, what I'm picking up here is that if I ever manage to get my hands on an F18A (hopefully gen2, but gen1 would be nice, too!) upgrade, the BIN file I've been playing with ought to work properly... right?  And apparently, running in JS99 or MAME would be workable as well.

[RickyDean]

14 minutes ago, CLBrown said:

Hi, Mole!  Bringing this into this conversation from the other (older thread) I'd posted in before.

 

Yeah, the game runs fine on my real hardware (from FinalGrom), noting I have no F18A in real life (I really, really wish that they were available, or even better, that the gen 2 version was available, but so far, they're sort of like unicorns or pretty virgins... )

 

On Classic99, with F18A (partial) support enabled, I get the funky graphics I saw earlier.  This is what I see:

1.bmp 165.78 kB · 1 download

 

And Classic99 locks up... I need to do a hard reboot.

 

If I disable F18A support in Classic99, everything works fine, albeit obviously in the somewhat less pretty 9918 mode.

 

I don't have TI MAME or MESS emulation running locally, and I'm not really familiar with JS99, either...  I have PC99, Classic99, TI994W, v9t9, and Win994a...  but it seems I'm behind the times where the "emulation community" is doing things these days, huh?  And among my choices, only Classic99 has F18A support (which USUALLY works quite well, but according to Tursi himself is not a "complete" implementation).

 

So, what I'm picking up here is that if I ever manage to get my hands on an F18A (hopefully gen2, but gen1 would be nice, too!) upgrade, the BIN file I've been playing with ought to work properly... right?  And apparently, running in JS99 or MAME would be workable as well.

If you go to https://js99er.net/#/ and go the menu on the right and go to options, enable F18A support. Then Go to the dark blue software button at the bottom of the screen, click on it and go to f18A specific, you will see the Alex Kidd demo as an option. Click it and let JS99er reset the title screen and your ready to play. Don't ask me how, as I don't know, having never played it yet.

Edited December 19, 2023 by RickyDean

[TheMole]

Ah, now I understand what you were saying before!

 

So, yes, Classic99 has partial F18A support, but it doesn't support all of the features used by Alex Kidd. Unfortunately, there's no way for the game to detect Classic99's implementation (that I know of) and default back to the 9918 version. If I'm not mistaken, F18A support in Classic99 is limited to the 80 column mode and the tms9900 "GPU", it does not support the ECM color modes added by the F18A. Instead of turning off F18A support in the menu, you can also just hold the P1 fire button while launching the game from the module selection screen (PRESS 2 FOR ALEX KIDD) which will make it skip the F18A check and default to the legacy video mode.

 

js99er.net is - to my knowledge - the only emulator that has full F18A support, mame does not implement it at all. @RickyDean's explanation should get you up and running if you wanna check out the enhanced graphics!

 

[TheMole]

While I'm here, might as well provide a small update.

 

Work on the editor has finally progressed a little bit, taking a break and working on something else has done wonders for my motivation and inspiration. Here's a screenshot of the latest status of the editor:

 

I can now edit complete levels for both VDPs simultaneously, including enemy placement, animations, etc...

I've added support for a few new enemy patterns as well, and added a flag for ice levels, which have (even) more slippery physics.

 

As a result of all of this, I'm happy to share a little season-appropriate demo of the new level. Note that, as is typical for the obligatory ice level you'll find in many platform games, this is a fairly challenging level as far as platforming is concerned and more aligned with what a player can expect in the later levels of the finished product. If platform games are not your thing, you might find this one a tad frustrating ;).

 

Also, I haven't thouroughly tested this on multiple emulators or real hardware, and if you manage to finish the level, it'll go into the old levels which aren't 100% compatible with the latest data structures anymore, but all-in-all it should be a fun diversion during the holiday season.

 

I'm traveling back to Europe for the holidays tomorrow and will be traveling for work throughout early January, but I wanted to get this out before I'm going to be away from the TI for a while. So pardon the rough edges!

 

Happy Holidays, everyone!

 

alexmas.rpk alexmas8.bin

Edited December 19, 2023 by TheMole