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Unicorns season: Prince of Persia for the A8!


rensoup

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29 minutes ago, DjayBee said:

I tried to manually optimize the layout of the disk and directory.

usually such an operation would be beneficial and for this particular demo version it will work, but I would not be attached to this method because in future versions file indexing will be performed so the distribution of files in the directory will lose its importance and the distribution of files on the disk will gain importance. Such indexing can be done in at least two ways, the first will take the indexes from the current directory and the second will have the indexes written at the disk creation stage... you never know which one will be chosen and in the second case optimizing the directory (spread of files) will damage the game.

 

 

Edited by xxl
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10 minutes ago, xxl said:

usually such an operation would be beneficial and for this particular demo version it will work,

This was my only intention.

I am curious as how much speedup these changes will bring in reality.

 

Did you think about my idea of a transparent disk cache for machines with lots of RAM?

This way machines with 320+ KB of RAM would need to load every sector only once.

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13 hours ago, Level42 said:

Why not go for it ? IMHO extended memory on any side (Internal RAM or external ROM) isn't straying from the original hardware. After all, the first games were 4k ROMs. The cartridge port Normally only supports 16kB of ROM space but we all know plenty of former floppy only games were later officially released by Atari as XE cartridges using bank-switching. If one is a purist, those games should be still loaded from floppy.....

Well for the other reason I mentioned above... feature creep!

 

12 hours ago, Mazzspeed said:

In terms of making another title for the A8, what about 'Metroid II: Return of Samus'? There's a version available for the RPi that's awesome, I could see it as an A8 game considering it started out on retro platforms.

Though choice especially if lawyers can get involved, the one you mention got taken down.

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10 hours ago, Philsan said:

? never got into football games ?

9 hours ago, Mazzspeed said:

Has anyone tried porting the SCUMM engined Lucas Film games to the A8? To this day Maniac Mansion is still one of my favourite games of all time.

 

Converting the art while keeping the quality is probably impossible, except perhaps Maniac mansion... Plus there are games that are enjoyable to replay but it's not the case for adventure games.

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1 hour ago, DjayBee said:

I tried to manually optimize the layout of the disk and directory.

like XXL said I will be keeping the sector start of each file into the main exe and will be bypassing the directory, so that should be a good saving.

 

But thanks for your test as I'm also interested in finding out if seek times between files are that important... 

 

1 hour ago, xxl said:

you never know which one will be chosen and in the second case optimizing the directory (spread of files) will damage the game.

 

not sure what you mean by damage the game ?

 

1 hour ago, xxl said:

and if it is just reading then it just won't load

?

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9 hours ago, Mazzspeed said:

Has anyone tried porting the SCUMM engined Lucas Film games to the A8?

Yep, have looked into it. Difficulty is the graphics are based on 256 char sets and so would need a complete re-encode and then new decoding written to construct dlists and dlis etc.  Then colour loss and clashes with player sprites (whether h/w, s/w or a combination of the two). Not a straight-forward port.

 

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8 minutes ago, rensoup said:

not sure what you mean

there may always be a "tester" who will copy this ATR to another medium not using the "duplicate" function or just sector by sector but using copy files but not in one go, just change the order of files on the disk/disk image then the indexes will not point to the right files and they will pretend they don't know what happened but the game stopped working ;-)

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1 minute ago, Wrathchild said:

Yep, have looked into it. Difficulty is the graphics are based on 256 char sets and so would need a complete re-encode and then new decoding written to construct dlists and dlis etc.  Then colour loss and clashes with player sprites (whether h/w, s/w or a combination of the two). Not a straight-forward port.

 

Fair enough. I always really enjoyed those games, they were adventure style games, but better due to the graphics. I also liked the quirky humor.

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8 minutes ago, xxl said:

there may always be a "tester" who will copy this ATR to another medium not using the "duplicate" function or just sector by sector but using copy files but not in one go, just change the order of files on the disk/disk image then the indexes will not point to the right files and they will pretend they don't know what happened but the game stopped working ;-)

yeah but if I'm writing the layout, I don't need to write the full directory, just xbios.com and the file it loads (and maybe a warning message)... it should be pretty obvious that the whole game isn't visible... but I guess you never know!

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1 hour ago, DjayBee said:

I tried to manually optimize the layout of the disk and directory.

 

Please try on hardware:

pop_DDfastestmouse_notplayable2_optim.atr 179.64 kB · 3 downloads

 

What I did:

- Optimized only the files loaded for the current demo

- The smaller the file, the closer to the directory sectors

- The smaller the fille, the further up its entry in the directory

- Put the biggest files to the beginning of the disk

Thank you! I will try that probably tomorrow. Our adult son just flew in for a visit this week - first time we’ve seen him in almost 18 months due to COVID. :) 

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11 minutes ago, rensoup said:

I don't need to write the full directory

I like it!!! I didn't think about it.

haha good!

 

---

Actually, it would be enough to erase sector $168 and no DOS will understand this floppy anymore. xB will work normally.

 

:D

Edited by xxl
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14 hours ago, rensoup said:

? never got into football games ?

 

+1 No fan of sports games in general, only exception would be Major League Baseball which was actually fun to play....

 

And someone from Switzerland (especially after their excellent EC tour) shouldn't call football "soccer" :D :D :D

I'd still love a simple conversion on the A8: KC Munchkin  (Philips Videopac/Odyessey 2). It's one of the good games on that platform and I actually paid 30 euro's to get a G7000 with 6 games included just to play that game :D


The A8 could handle it easily and even improve graphics I guess...

Edited by Level42
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I can't understand all of the discussions! If I can't make a contribution, I'll shut up and accept the developer's result as it is. Loading times, pauses in loading, holy shit ..... I remember loading EVERYTHING from tape and it was a pain. Everyone has the choice of loading the game from a floppy disk, cartridge, or maybe even cassette. But no, there are still complaints about pauses, loading times, features like moving graphics while loading, music should play, etc ....... 'Damn f*cking shit' If you can't do better, shut up and enjoy the Publication.

 

 

In short words: Thank you rensoup an TIX  and also some Sounders like Miker .... for making an fantastic port to the A8.

I can't await the final version. 

 

THANKS!!!!!

 

 

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22 minutes ago, MARIO130XE said:

I can't understand all of the discussions!

 

 

Why? You are a part of strange behavior here?

 

rensoup should ONLY do a version that is running on standard hardware, but in perfection ;)

If people wanted to run it on "special setups" , they should find a solution for optimizations. dot. 

And, btw. Miker's FX are contra-useful.

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Hello Mario

 

2 hours ago, MARIO130XE said:

If I can't make a contribution, I'll shut up and accept the developer's result as it is.

 

A developer can never test his or her software on every piece of hardware.  Rensoup doesn't even have a real Atari.  So he might never find the bugs in his software.  I don't see how not telling him which bugs people run into helps in any way.

 

Sincerely

 

Mathy

 

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I think constructive criticism is welcomed, it's the entitled demands and if the dev pushes back a bit they get lectured with "the customer is always right" type stuff. Anybody who has done development on these machines know choices/sacrifices need to be made, you can't have it all. Sometimes I will make a choice that I know others won't like, but it won't be fun for me to implement it the way they want. It's twice as bad to have to spend pages defending why. Or maybe I made a decision based on dozens of prototypes and don't want to waste time defending my reasons. We know its easy to lose motivation on these projects especially when life is shuffling our todo list.

 

I think it was the Dungeon Master thread that also showed examples of this. Started feeling bad for that guy.

Edited by invisible kid
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In this forum it seems like every development thread for a highly-anticipated game (almost invariably a port) turns toxic.   The more anticipated the game, the more toxic the thread becomes (I'm thinking of the Stunt Car Racer thread as another example). I think it's because these ports tap into long-held desires to have these legendary (in our heads at least) games on the A8 platform.  People have very strong opinions about how they want to see the games presented, even if technical concerns don't allow it or the developer's vision differs from theirs.  Hence the temptation to go beyond constructive criticism and into backseat-driving.  It's not enough that we have the best 8-bit version of the game in existence, there's still something wrong with it that has to be fixed.

 

Thank you rensoup, TIX, miker and emkay (did I leave anyone out?) for this really wonderful port of PoP.

 

 

Edited by FifthPlayer
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17 minutes ago, FifthPlayer said:

In this forum it seems like every development thread for a highly-anticipated game (almost invariably a port) turns toxic.   The more anticipated the game, the more toxic the thread becomes (I'm thinking of the Stunt Car Racer thread as another example). I think it's because these ports tap into long-held desires to have these legendary (in our heads at least) games on the A8 platform.  People have very strong opinions about how they want to see the games presented, even if technical concerns don't allow it or the developer's vision differs from theirs.  Hence the temptation to go beyond constructive criticism and into backseat-driving.  It's not enough that we have the best 8-bit version of the game in existence, there's still something wrong with it that has to be fixed.

 

Thank you rensoup, TIX, miker and emkay (did I leave anyone out?) for this really wonderful port of PoP.

 

 

Ironic, as both games had something in common...

 

Thankfully, as stated many times, there's a .CAR port of the game that now works on my SIDE3 as a result of another member informing FJC of the issue. Otherwise there's every chance the problem would never have been resolved.

Edited by Mazzspeed
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32 minutes ago, invisible kid said:

I think constructive criticism is welcomed, it's the entitled demands and if the dev pushes back a bit they get lectured with "the customer is always right" type stuff.

 

What's especially galling in this instance is the fact that there are no 'customers'. This port was a gift to the community from rensoup and the crew. We should all be grateful.

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