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Tempest Elite coming soon to Atari 8-bit


peteym5

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Pretty sure Brexit will have zero impact on us UAS'ers. And I've got mixed feelings on Trump's import tax, but if t brings jobs back to USA, I'll take one for the team...

Many people inside the United States have very similar feels. For almost two generations, we had been seeing the American Industrial Job Market. Where I am, in the Buffalo, NY area. My father and many friends worked the Bethlehem Steel Plant in Lackawanna, NY. Employed 1000's of people. Now many companies have been using foreign labor and shipping things back to the United States. Even if the United States had a small import tax. That is why I am working a job just paying barely above minimal wage and doing these games to make extra money on the side. Still barely makes end meet here. Myself, Video 61, and People involved in Art, Beta Testing take part of the share. So you are buying American and Supporting Americans with my games.

 

I am wondering about the keyboard running on the emulator vs keyboard on real hardware. The Space Bar Pause Function while running in Emulation seems to work, but when running in real hardware, it quickly toggles between the pause VBI and the game VBI superfast. I am working on resolving the issue before the game is released. I am hoping someone with technical knowledge knows what might be causing and what will fix this issue.

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I am wondering about the keyboard running on the emulator vs keyboard on real hardware. The Space Bar Pause Function while running in Emulation seems to work, but when running in real hardware, it quickly toggles between the pause VBI and the game VBI superfast. I am working on resolving the issue before the game is released. I am hoping someone with technical knowledge knows what might be causing and what will fix this issue.

Are you trying to do your own debounce or using the OS?

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I have been watching the news reports on Brexxit, just if it ever happens, there would be new shipping costs Inside England. I am looking into the Shipping fees and VAT tax involving mailing products inside the EU. I am not sure having a centralized trustee over there we can ship to and re mail out from their location would be cost effective. I am also not aware of anyone currently inside the EU is capable of manufacturing new cartridges to our spects. Burning EPROMs over there currently can help either. They would have to work with myself and Video61 and pay us for every game they sell.

 

I also don't think a franchise type deal would work for either party, it would get complex pretty instantly and would hit your profitability.

 

However taking in to account the import duty / tax would be good..

 

About all I'd be good for is beta testing but I'm sure you have plenty of those already :)

 

Lets see what actual deal Mr Trump gives us here in the UK, that will affect Brexit so much either way..

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It is doing a custom debounce because it needs RAM from $C000 to $FFFF. Need to set it up so it knows when you press a button and release it. All I find is Last Key Pressed in the tech manuals.

Use a debounce counter. Decrement it each VBI until it reaches zero. When a keyboard interupt happens, read the key and save the value. set the debounce counter to 3 or 4 or whatever you like. Next time a key is pressed, check if it is the same as the previous key. If it is, and the debounce counter hasn't reached zero yet, assume it's a bounce and ignore it.

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Use a debounce counter. Decrement it each VBI until it reaches zero. When a keyboard interupt happens, read the key and save the value. set the debounce counter to 3 or 4 or whatever you like. Next time a key is pressed, check if it is the same as the previous key. If it is, and the debounce counter hasn't reached zero yet, assume it's a bounce and ignore it.

My understanding was you didn't need debounce on controllers since they are only read once per frame, the state is either on or off at the exact instant the controller is read from, then the same process repeats 16.6ms later. So the game responds accordingly when a button or input or key on a keyboard gets pressed or released. I'm not sure why debounce code is needed when the controller only gets polled once per frame, unless you are instructing the CPU to read data continuously and do nothing else.

 

It's like the Atari controller having no "debounce" circuitry on it or the console and "just works" 100% of the time. Nor do the NES, which have a parallel serial interface.

 

Unless the keyboard somehow interrupts the CPU whenever a button is pressed, the data should be live on the inputs, then the CPU can request a read of the data whenever it decides to do so, and the likelihood of the circuit bouncing during this interval is slim.

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My understanding was you didn't need debounce on controllers since they are only read once per frame, the state is either on or off at the exact instant the controller is read from, then the same process repeats 16.6ms later. So the game responds accordingly when a button or input or key on a keyboard gets pressed or released. I'm not sure why debounce code is needed when the controller only gets polled once per frame, unless you are instructing the CPU to read data continuously and do nothing else.

 

It's like the Atari controller having no "debounce" circuitry on it or the console and "just works" 100% of the time. Nor do the NES, which have a parallel serial interface.

 

Unless the keyboard somehow interrupts the CPU whenever a button is pressed, the data should be live on the inputs, then the CPU can request a read of the data whenever it decides to do so, and the likelihood of the circuit bouncing during this interval is slim.

Deleted. Sorry, I was a bit grumpy when I woke up. :)

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We managed to get something working this morning. As with copying and pasting code, I got the space bar pause function to work great across several games. I added or increased the countdown before it will be allowed to toggle pause again. I know I had it working on several of the 16k ROM games I completed in the last 2 years, but the pause function stopped working on the recent stuff I had been working on. You cannot look at it working in the emulator and assume it works in real hardware. The Input from the PC keyboard is simulated and what happens is not accurate on the emulator.

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We are talking about thte keyboard and you obviously have no idea what you are talking about.

Deleted. Sorry, I was a bit grumpy when I woke up. :)

Explain to me how the keyboard works then. Does it only ouput signal when polled, or when the CPU reads off it? Is there some register that reads keypresses and sends a dump of that data to the CPU upon request?

 

Generally most keyboards have a matrix of some sort that interfaces connections between two groups of wires. The CPU strobes one group of wires and listens for inputs on the other grouping. Pressing a key on such an X/Y matrix will bridge a connection between two of these wires which is unique for every key, so the CPU can identify the button pressed. That's why most keyboards only support single buttons or a limited combination of buttons before the multiple inputs result in an error read. You cannot say hold down A+S+D+F and have the computer make sense of it.

 

Anyway I haven't studied the matrixed interface for the A8 keyboard, but it is likely different for each brand of computer system. Oftentimes there is a parallel-to-series controller inside the keyboard connected to the matrix that sends signal to the PC over a small number of wires, ie PS2 keyboards operated in this fashion.

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When you disable the OS, your program needs to do these functions. However, in case of an IRQ interrupt, instead of reading every keyboard, break key, and other things, you can just have it toggle the pause. Much shorter and faster than using the OS. A game like Tempest Elite needed the RAM under the OS because of needing RAM for Digital Sounds Effects.

 

Tempest Elite is all but completed. I just needed to tweak the keyboard and pause section this week. Video61 was about to start Burning EPROMs when one of our beta testers tried pausing the game when they needed to stop playing. I am trying to figure out what went wrong because the Beta testers state the pause function worked with Tempest Elite and several other game previously, and now they seem to toggle way too fast. So I have a new way to figure out if the game is running on a real Atari and not on an emulator to make sure someone is playing from the cartridge.

 

I am working on several different projects right now. Someone asked me awhile back if I can make a better Miniature Golf game on the Atari totally in machine language. At first I was not sure I wanted to do it because I said, there are a ton of these games out there done over the years. Then I researched, 2 had been done on the 8-bit and from the look of them, they look like they were done in Basic or depending on the OS for drawing lines and painting. I asked why no one thought about Antic 4 with a custom font to do this. Along with doing compression and smart data encryption, I can put several Miniature Golf courses on a cartridge. You will need to wait and see what the final game will be.

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Hmmm,

 

my favourite Minigolf games on the A8:

 

1) Miniature Golf by D.Plotkin: http://a8.fandal.cz/detail.php?files_id=4184

(there is also a Construction Kit available; Antic released this once as a disk-bonus; it is Basic XL,

but quite good)

 

2) Golfer by Bewesoft: http://a8.fandal.cz/detail.php?files_id=1990

 

3) Slingshot by M. Trimby: http://a8.fandal.cz/detail.php?files_id=3068

(there is also a Construction Set; written in Action! afaik; new levels appeared in ZONG magazine)

 

These three are hard to beat and simply the best Minigolf games for the A8 in my eyes.

 

Okay, there are also Miniature Golf (5200 port by Homesoft): http://a8.fandal.cz/detail.php?files_id=5040

and CX2626 Miniature Golf (2600 port by Playsoft): http://a8.fandal.cz/detail.php?files_id=7373

as well as Mini Golf by Softside: http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-400-800-xl-xe-mini-golf_12229.html

but I do not like them very much, ahem...

 

(Regarding Golf we have Leaderboard, Leaderboard Tournement / Leaderboard 2, the awfully slow Mean 18 which is still too slow with Fandal`s speed-fix and dozens of awful Golf games in Basic and TB XL with awful and/or lousy controls; only the two Leaderbord games are really good in my opinion.)

Edited by CharlieChaplin
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I woke up at 6:30am to a lovely sunrise, birds chirping away and started to read my favourite forum only to find CharlieChaplin pouring scorn on the idea of a new mini golf game, oh how the day suddenly felt sad....

 

:)

 

But suddenly my heart was filled with joy as he had listed at least 3 mini golf games I didn't know about, thank you CC :)

 

How fortunes change so quickly....

 

Btw Petey, don't let grumpy pants CC put you off :)

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Many of the screen shots I have on the prior pages here are either taking from the game running with or without VBXE. The difference is VBXE is running with the game using 320 pixels wide vs Stock with 160 pixels. Many of the sprites are also multicolored in VBXE mode. The Red flippers are several shades of Red.

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Thankyou for your interest. I apologize for the release of the cartridge, there was an issue with the Pause function and some Atari's seem to stick and the pause will toggle on and off too fast. I needed to put in a longer keyboard delay before it reads the keyboard again. An updated version needed to be tested before the release. We test with emulators and flash cartridges so we don't waste too many EPROMS.

 

This time around I was trying to go for more arcade feel over the Tempest 2000. I added another frame of rotation to the flippers. As we know the Atari does not have the best resolution, and it takes lots of work to get around. Really need modern system to emulate those old vector displays. VBXE does display the game at double the resolution and more onscreen colors.

 

I figured out how to store many more web shapes for Tempest Elite have many more and different web shapes, and can have a variable number of lanes. All the shapes is something we have to wait and see.

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...

I Resolved and Improved the Pause Function on Tempest and a few other games. It needed a longer delay before it can read the keyboard again. Appears when something runs on the emulator, reading the PC keyboard does not work the same as reading an actual Atari keyboard. Maybe I can use this to detect if something is running in emulation or real hardware. I have since then incorporated the longer wait into all my future upcoming games.

 

I will be wrapping up that set of 16k games that run on a computer as little as 16k of RAM. So far I released "Delta Space Arena", "Amok Bots", "Megaoids 2016", and "Laser Blast X". Should be releasing "HeliCommander" along with Tempest Elite this spring. As stated earlier, been working on a Miniature Golf, that will contain several courses on one cartridge. Just have wait for the official announcement after I have the game completed. Still trying to see how much I can pack into one 16k cartridge.

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