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Rikki & Vikki


TailChao

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On 3/25/2020 at 3:24 PM, Jinks said:

RF FTW

Agreed. While I do like the crispness of S-Video, abusing NTSC smearing is a blast.

 

I thought everyone had gotten the CRT photos out of the way 20 pages ago, but hey - whatever. Here's some more Linytron.

 

Flame Cavern Metal Cavern Oh, hello there.Bubble Cavern Sand Cavern

Edited by TailChao
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On 3/27/2020 at 11:40 AM, TailChao said:

Agreed. While I do like the crispness of S-Video, abusing NTSC smearing is a blast.

 

I thought everyone had gotten the CRT photos out of the way 20 pages ago, but hey - whatever. Here's some more Linytron.

 

Flame Cavern Metal Cavern Oh, hello there.Bubble Cavern Sand Cavern

Like so hard....Need to get my 7800 back up and running.

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Unfortunately due to an increase in the cost of international postage, we can no longer offer the same shipping rates to customers in Canada and Mexico. The new shipping costs are as follows.

  • Domestic : $5.99
  • International (Canada) : $19.99
  • International (Mexico) : $21.99
  • International (Everywhere Else) : $24.99

I've updated the first post's FAQ to reflect this new pricing - thanks for understanding.

 

Don't forget, we also offer a digital version which is currently on sale for only $1.99 until April 8th - no shipping required!

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5 hours ago, TailChao said:

Unfortunately due to an increase in the cost of international postage, we can no longer offer the same shipping rates to customers in Canada and Mexico. The new shipping costs are as follows.

  • Domestic : $5.99
  • International (Canada) : $19.99
  • International (Mexico) : $21.99
  • International (Everywhere Else) : $24.99

I've updated the first post's FAQ to reflect this new pricing - thanks for understanding.

 

Don't forget, we also offer a digital version which is currently on sale for only $1.99 until April 8th - no shipping required!

That is a steal on the Steam version!

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On 3/27/2020 at 11:40 AM, TailChao said:

Agreed. While I do like the crispness of S-Video, abusing NTSC smearing is a blast.

 

I thought everyone had gotten the CRT photos out of the way 20 pages ago, but hey - whatever. Here's some more Linytron.

 

Flame Cavern Metal Cavern Oh, hello there.Bubble Cavern Sand Cavern

I need to play more. Never made it to the giant birds or fish. Level F5, what is that?

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8 hours ago, Theallknowingsause said:

Sadly my 7800 is acting up but I think my RF signal looks better then most composite signals imo

Huh, looks like the horizontal sync is spazzing out. RF is composite with more junk in the signal, so the differences you're seeing are likely from the leveling in the composite mods or in the television itself.

 

 

6 hours ago, MrBeefy said:

That is a steal on the Steam version!

A Dutly Discount, if you will.

 

 

3 hours ago, Swami said:

I need to play more. Never made it to the giant birds or fish. Level F5, what is that?

F5 = Flame Cavern, Floor 5

Don't forget - there's over 100 screens of Misery Land in each cartridge.

Edited by TailChao
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1 hour ago, TailChao said:

Huh, looks like the horizontal sync is spazzing out. RF is composite with more junk in the signal, so the differences you're seeing are likely from the leveling in the composite mods or in the television itself.

I've actually tested another thing with RF and it worked fine, if you saw it in motion it doesn't look like the V sync is out of wack, it looks too digital for it to be that, but who knows. I've talked to CrossBow about this and he thinks it's the chip that communicates with the RF modulator, but who knows lol.

 

Also, didn't know about the composite thing, that makes sense because of how allot of the same quirks exist with RF.

Edited by Theallknowingsause
Punctuation and added part about not knowing about RF
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6 minutes ago, Theallknowingsause said:

I've actually tested another thing with RF and it worked fine, if you saw it in motion it doesn't look like the V sync is out of wack, it looks too digital for it to be that, but who knows. I've talked to CrossBow about this and he thinks it's the chip that communicates with the RF modulator, but who knows lol.

It could be any number of things, which calls for the obligatory - if you continue to have trouble contact us and activate the warranty card's secret powers. We've yet to meet a console that can't be coerced into running the game properly.

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45 minutes ago, Theallknowingsause said:

Strangest thing just happened, I plugged in the 7800 to my Lcd TV and it's fine on that tv, here's my Timex Sinclair 1000 on the same tv using the same cable

20200405_090154.jpg

Lol you give it some brocolli? Seems gassy.

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Update on my issue:

 

Turns out it was in fact a bad LHE mod (bad on non-CRT's, that is). Big shout out to -^CrossBow^-  for pulling out the LHE and installing a UAV mod instead. Excellent work, as you can see from these pics. (And it works much better now on my flat panel...)

I've also decided that since I have some unintended time at home (still working, luckily, but no longer have to commute!), I'm going to dig the old CRT out of the garage and get it set up. It weight about 400lbs, so digging it out will be no small feat. (It's a Sony KD-34XBR960...which, IMO, is one of the best TVs ever produced.)

 

UAV_Int_Overview.jpg

 

Int_Detail2.jpg

 

Int_Detail1.jpg

 

AV_Int_Detail.jpg

Edited by gollumer
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On 4/7/2020 at 4:15 PM, gollumer said:

Turns out it was in fact a bad LHE mod (bad on non-CRT's, that is). Big shout out to -^CrossBow^-  for pulling out the LHE and installing a UAV mod instead.

Fantastic, another Atari wedge back in tip-top shape.

 

Reminder for anyone planning on ordering - make sure the address you enter in PayPal's checkout system is written clearly and correctly. I mentioned this earlier in the thread, but we've gotten two orders with mangled destinations in the past few weeks. If we catch it then you'll get a confirmation email asking for clarification, if not your package could get lost - especially if it's going overseas.

 

Check your spam folder for messages from a PenguiNet address, yadda yadda. This way we can ensure your copy of the game arrives and arrives soon.

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  • 2 weeks later...
17 hours ago, Giles N said:

How was it - speaking autobiographically - programming and developing for the Atari 7800?

It was overall fine, and I mean that quite as-is.

 

Most of the nice features in the architecture come with an asterisk, but that's fairly common for when it was made. There were no hideous issues in developing the software or our custom hardware for the cartridges - the biggest limit was the budget we had to work with rather than the console we were targeting.

 

 

More cycles for Sally would have been nice, but what we got isn't horrible. Having worked with all three of the NES, SMS, and 7800 trifecta - Atari's wedge didn't feel out of place or out of its league. So the base unit's design is okay. However, I don't think the available designs for the 7800's cartridges were very good. They made the numbers go up, just not in a way which gives a helpful boost to game software.

 

Maria's architecture was fun to work with, but she is also minimalist to a fault. Her lack of rendering features (no flipping, no mixing, no priorities, no no no) severely impact what you can achieve - she's only good at one thing (drawing wide, arbitrarily positioned objects) but can do this extremely fast. This also makes her benefit far more from increased texture memory than the NES or SMS since you get way higher performance by not tiling your visuals. Our SOUPER mapper was designed to plus this and the upcoming PMC1 further nudge it.

 

The hardware's minimalism was a repeated encounter, not in a bad way either. Moreso I was always surprised it was able to do so much with so little. This made writing the emulator much easier - it took around nine days to get Rikki & Vikki to run, starting from zero. But I don't remember much of those nine days.

 

Mode 320B fit well with my preference for resolution over color count, Rikki & Vikki's visuals were all stylized around this, favoring animation and good movement in the characters rather than detailed backgrounds. As I've written before, I still believe much better can be achieved on the hardware.

 

 

The only things I found unsatisfactory relative to its contemporaries were the build quality of the units and design of the controllers.

 

Hmm... that's about it.

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8 minutes ago, Theallknowingsause said:

Did you find any cool video effects that you thought looked cool, but couldn't find anywhere to use it in the game?

If you mean effects found by experimentation, no.

 

Nearly everything was "paper computer'd" and then implemented as-is, the assets had to all follow a schedule. The only sequence which had any effects or animation tests done for it was Eternal Misery (last boss of the co-op campaign), since I needed to figure out how many drawings I could actually fit in memory and how fast new texture sets could be moved in between phases.

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2 hours ago, TailChao said:

It was overall fine, and I mean that quite as-is.

 

Most of the nice features in the architecture come with an asterisk, but that's fairly common for when it was made. There were no hideous issues in developing the software or our custom hardware for the cartridges - the biggest limit was the budget we had to work with rather than the console we were targeting.

 

 

More cycles for Sally would have been nice, but what we got isn't horrible. Having worked with all three of the NES, SMS, and 7800 trifecta - Atari's wedge didn't feel out of place or out of its league. So the base unit's design is okay. However, I don't think the available designs for the 7800's cartridges were very good. They made the numbers go up, just not in a way which gives a helpful boost to game software.

 

Maria's architecture was fun to work with, but she is also minimalist to a fault. Her lack of rendering features (no flipping, no mixing, no priorities, no no no) severely impact what you can achieve - she's only good at one thing (drawing wide, arbitrarily positioned objects) but can do this extremely fast. This also makes her benefit far more from increased texture memory than the NES or SMS since you get way higher performance by not tiling your visuals. Our SOUPER mapper was designed to plus this and the upcoming PMC1 further nudge it.

 

The hardware's minimalism was a repeated encounter, not in a bad way either. Moreso I was always surprised it was able to do so much with so little. This made writing the emulator much easier - it took around nine days to get Rikki & Vikki to run, starting from zero. But I don't remember much of those nine days.

 

Mode 320B fit well with my preference for resolution over color count, Rikki & Vikki's visuals were all stylized around this, favoring animation and good movement in the characters rather than detailed backgrounds. As I've written before, I still believe much better can be achieved on the hardware.

 

 

The only things I found unsatisfactory relative to its contemporaries were the build quality of the units and design of the controllers.

 

Hmm... that's about it.

This is extremely interesting !!

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