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Champ Games - Galagon (aka Galaga) 2600


johnnywc

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Hello there!

 

Does not work with the UNO cart on real hardware :(

 

That is correct. I don't believe any of the ARM-based games (Scramble, Mappy, Super Cobra Arcade, Draconian, etc.) work with the UNO cart because it doesn't emulate the ARM (which is on the Harmony cart), but I believe I read somewhere that the developers are trying to upgrade the firmware on the UNO cart so that some day it might be able to run these games (I may be wrong here).

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That is correct. I don't believe any of the ARM-based games (Scramble, Mappy, Super Cobra Arcade, Draconian, etc.) work with the UNO cart because it doesn't emulate the ARM (which is on the Harmony cart), but I believe I read somewhere that the developers are trying to upgrade the firmware on the UNO cart so that some day it might be able to run these games (I may be wrong here).

 

 

Yep; currently, no games that use the melody ARM work on the Unocard (DPC+ and CDF). In principle, it would be possible to run the same ARM code on the STM32 CPU used on the Unocard, but the memory map is different. I'd like to look at this at some point (I have managed to get DPC+ games running on the modified memory map in emulation by patching the binary), but I don't know if and when this will happen ;)

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This is really great. I was excited to try it on my Harmony.

 

I did notice two things that *might* be possible adjustments.

 

One the arcade and NES versions, I always wait to get my second ship until right before the first bonus round. Let's say the last shot is the one that retrieves your ship, the two ships will be centered perfectly for the first bonus round. The first bonus is easily cleared by rapidly firing the weapons. As the aliens approach, each gunner takes out a row of aliens. Each player gunner lines up perfectly with a row of descending enemies.

 

On this version, either the aliens are too far apart, OR the players ships are too close together. They do not make contact with the aliens when they come out.

 

Also, the blue aliens seem to swoop a little lower when they loop underneath the player.

 

As always, the star field, graphics, sound, and gameplay are top notch. The game play and patterns are much smoother than the 7800 version. This is what the 7800 should have been like (with Maria graphics though. lol)

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Hi Darryl,

 

I did notice two things that *might* be possible adjustments.

 

One the arcade and NES versions, I always wait to get my second ship until right before the first bonus round. Let's say the last shot is the one that retrieves your ship, the two ships will be centered perfectly for the first bonus round. The first bonus is easily cleared by rapidly firing the weapons. As the aliens approach, each gunner takes out a row of aliens. Each player gunner lines up perfectly with a row of descending enemies.

 

On this version, either the aliens are too far apart, OR the players ships are too close together. They do not make contact with the aliens when they come out.

We have been working on tweaking this as a few people have pointed out this 'trick' - I will look at making a few more adjustments to get it a bit closer to the arcade.

 

Also, the blue aliens seem to swoop a little lower when they loop underneath the player.

Good catch; this is an easy one to fix. :)

 

As always, the star field, graphics, sound, and gameplay are top notch. The game play and patterns are much smoother than the 7800 version.

Thanks so much for the kind words!

 

John

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As long as we're nitpicking... (I use that word in jest, because it's really cool we can even talk about this level of detail!)

 

Would I be correct in assuming the reason why the Galaga flagships always show scores when destroyed, even when worth only 150 points in formation, and also the reason why you always hear the Galaga flagship "explosion" when a floating score is to be displayed, is because that's all running from the same block of code for the sake of squeezing this into the 2600's capabilities?

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You've heard of the Harmony Encore, right?

 

Edit: Jinx. :)

 

Harmony (original): up to 32K

Harmony Encore: up to 512K

I have.

1. If you don't live in the North America or West Europe, it's to expensive to buy.

2. I bought once the original and after 2 months, it just died. It took me one year to find someone in Easter-Europe who can fix it.

+1 Also I found someone who assemble UNO carts in my own country.

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As long as we're nitpicking... (I use that word in jest, because it's really cool we can even talk about this level of detail!)

 

Would I be correct in assuming the reason why the Galaga flagships always show scores when destroyed, even when worth only 150 points in formation...

Hmmm, I'm pretty sure this is how it is in the arcade (it will show 150 in white if the flagship is destroyed in formation). If that's not correct, I'd be glad to fix it! :)

 

... and also the reason why you always hear the Galaga flagship "explosion" when a floating score is to be displayed, is because that's all running from the same block of code for the sake of squeezing this into the 2600's capabilities?

Again, I'm pretty sure this is how the arcade is, but I may have misheard it while I was researching. There's certainly some ROM savings if I can run the same chunk of code for multiple situations, but to make small changes like this would cost about 4 - 8 bytes for the conditional check so no big deal.

 

If you can provide specifics, I can put them on the to-do list to make sure they're included in the final release. :)

 

Thanks for the feedback!

 

John

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Hmmm, I'm pretty sure this is how it is in the arcade (it will show 150 in white if the flagship is destroyed in formation). If that's not correct, I'd be glad to fix it! :)

The "150" is displayed on the demo score screen, so what you have there is correct. But in-game, Galaga flagships don't display any floating score when destroyed in formation. Here is a reference (timestamp 0:46, in case the URL doesn't take you there directly).

 

Again, I'm pretty sure this is how the arcade is, but I may have misheard it while I was researching. There's certainly some ROM savings if I can run the same chunk of code for multiple situations, but to make small changes like this would cost about 4 - 8 bytes for the conditional check so no big deal.

Every alien ship's unique explosion sound will still play even when triggering a floating score. Here's an example (timestamp 2:13) where in the first challenge stage the blue ships keep their explosion sounds even when a "1000" is displayed. I think it's worth noting the brown / elf-hat / whatever-they're-called ships use the same explosion sound as the Galaga flagship, so you do in fact hear it in other places. Just not everywhere there would be a floating score.

 

One more minor nit. At some point in every stage, the background tones stop being queued. Here's a reference (timestamp 1:17) where the tones are playing while much of the formation is still present in stage 1. By the time there are only a few red ships left in formation, the tones have stopped for the rest of the stage. I'm not exactly sure where the stopping point is; possibly when X number of ships are left in formation. If you act on this and can't figure out where to put the trigger (or if this would save some bytes of programming), a safe spot could be when there are no ships left in formation, which is how Galaxian does it.

 

Thanks for the feedback!

Thank you again for another awesome port!

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I will be demoing this at VCFMW14! Just scored a 13" CRT for $20 so I don't have to modify any of my 2600s for s-video just yet. I'd love to have a real cart by then - I'll still probably demo on the Harmony just so nothing wanders off.

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Also, the blue aliens seem to swoop a little lower when they loop underneath the player.

 

 

They killed me three times today, cause at the beginning of my game, i steered in the corner sometimes when they come. I later changed this when i found out, thats not the best place in this version.

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