Unicorns season: Prince of Persia for the A8!

[Mazzspeed]

3 hours ago, Level42 said:

I always assumed it was keyboard control in first instance…..after Apple 2 didn’t have joysticks ports standard…

From memory the Apple II joysticks were analogue - Great for flight sims and the like, not so great regarding arcade like gaming.

 

When I played PoP in the day on an Apple II, I'm fairly certain I used the keyboard. I know I played it on a monochrome green phosphor monitor and I thought it looked great, I was so focused on the game that the lack of color wasn't even a consideration.

[+MrFish]

3 hours ago, Level42 said:

Maybe we can get Archer MacLean to finish it ?

 

 

he was pretty good at programming the A8……(see Dropzone and…..ah …..IK). 
 

he also loved the A8 a lot over the C64 and he’s a fun guy….I had the pleasure of meeting him and man does he have a lot of fun stories from BITD.

 

I wonder if Savetz has ever interviewed him? I enjoy hearing from these old programmers and hardware guys more than anything else.

 

[STE'86]

bloody hell, if u live in the UK, all u need to do is look out for a Revival show. Archer's been to more of them than anyone else.

[rensoup]

On 8/6/2021 at 1:34 AM, STE'86 said:

ahhhh, thats very clever, the sprites are probably being stored "half height" to preserve RAM and expanded up at run time. the beeb mode they are using is 160x256 and has more colour depth than the a8 but at an enormous relative cost in ram at 20k per screen. so storing all those sprites in "a8" res would have been a huge memory sink.

very sneaky. i am impressed. maybe I will find someone to do bbc IK+ afterall.

I would have tried to keep the full resolution at all cost... that chopping did some serious damage to the quality.

 

The mode used is 160x200 so 16KB per screen. So finding 16KB woud have been required to preserve the full height... which was doable but tedious.

[rensoup]

17 hours ago, Mazzspeed said:

Wow...Anyone that thinks the term remarkably similar has the same meaning as identical in relation to the basis of the port is either struggling with comprehension or a troll.

 

 

Yes they are remarkably similar, especially in the black areas...

 

On 8/5/2021 at 9:05 AM, Mazzspeed said:

Furthermore, I'm playing the A8 variant on a Sophia 2 equipped 600XL on a 19" LCD monitor and another on BeebEm in a little Window on a 4k monitor. As stated, I haven't seen a PoP port that sucks, and that still holds true.

 

You are an endless source of bullshit. 

 

Go away.

[Mazzspeed]

1 hour ago, rensoup said:

You are an endless source of bullshit. 

 

Go away.

Excuse me?

 

Once again as context appears to be something you struggle with, I'll cut the post in question into more simplistic terms:

 

"Every port of PoP is based on a differing platform, it's obvious the A8 port is based on the BBC port of the game due to it being remarkably similar - The term remarkably similar does not mean identical, hence: Similar." Yes, you never denied the port was based on the BBC port, my context was specifically aimed at your comments regarding the brickwork graphics and 'bathroom tiles'. Not once did I mention sprites.

 

The reason I state this is because very few PoP ports are in any way as bad as you're trying to claim, with comments like brickwork graphics on other ports looking like 'bathroom tiles' and loader artwork as 'terrible'. You appear to have focused on my comment regarding texturing on brickwork as not what I believe to be outstanding graphics, which was solely based on your comments regarding brickwork under other ports looking like bathroom tiles - Then you go on to claim I'm shitting on people's work while you then follow up with comments focusing on sprites, a point that was never central to the original argument and something you brought up.

 

Essentially, you're the perfect example of pot calling kettle black if you believe I in any way shat on your, or anyone else's, work - Considering my post was in response to you doing precisely that.

 

Is the BBC port a great port? Yes it is. Is the A8 port an outstanding port? Yes it is. Are they faithful to the original in terms of graphics? Not really. Does it really matter? No. Was the original that bad that the graphics needed to be changed? Absolutely not. Did I state you should change anything including your chosen loader artwork? Absolutely not. Anywhere in my comments have I stated that your port is rubbish or that the work put into it by yourself and certain others isn't appreciated? Absolutely not.

 

 

 

 

Edited August 7, 2021 by Mazzspeed

[Yautja]

This community is becoming so absolutely toxic...

[STE'86]

1 hour ago, rensoup said:

I would have tried to keep the full resolution at all cost... that chopping did some serious damage to the quality.

 

The mode used is 160x200 so 16KB per screen. So finding 16KB woud have been required to preserve the full height... which was doable but tedious.

i think u misunderstand me, i am talking about the amount of RAM they have to use to store all the sprite data, the background tile data is running at the same res as the A8, but to save ram it looks to me like the sprites are 50% compressed in the vertical which accounts for the blocky but square pixel aspect ratio. all the data being stored in "fat pixel" mode like the a8 but then Y expanded at run time to give the full height sprite. I can see this being necessary due to the massive amount of frames and the fact that the BBC graphics in that mode with that colour depth, would at a guess take 2x the ram used on the a8 to store the same sprites. and thats not even taking into consideration that the beeb tile data will also be twice the size of the a8 at that res and bit depth.

[EnderDude]

[emkay]

PoP-corn time. 

 

It's about a game that runs on 40 years old hardware. 

Using the low amount of pixels is the challenge. 

And, about spreading pixels vertically: It's a logical thing, if you want to have a good ascpect ratio.

Also, there are details vertically possible, if they resemble the details to a visual degree. 

The real bonus is in the animation details.  

 

Also a heap of pixels might look similar on different games, just by the use of colors:

grey - stones

green - grass

blue - water

yellow - light

brown - sh... erm... earth

 

How many 8 bit PoP games do you know, where the Prince has a skin type color ?

 

The image in post #2457 ....

 

The prince to the left looks like 1970s . The prince to the right looks like 1990s.

[Level42]

9 hours ago, MrFish said:

 

I wonder if Savetz has ever interviewed him? I enjoy hearing from these old programmers and hardware guys more than anything else.

 

Yes I wondered about that too. Indeed I love hearing those interviews too….best parts of the podcasts.

[Level42]

On 8/6/2021 at 1:08 AM, STE'86 said:

thats ported from the speccy version and has nothing to do with artifacting.

Looks like it was ported from the Gameboy version………muhahahahaha.

[Level42]

9 hours ago, STE'86 said:

bloody hell, if u live in the UK, all u need to do is look out for a Revival show. Archer's been to more of them than anyone else.

Not sure at what that “bloody hell” was aimed at, but indeed it was at one of those where I met him and we went out to have dinner with a small group of people. He told a lot of interesting and fun stories from BITD. The first words I said to him was : “Thank you for one of my most favourite games ever: Dropzone”. He was clearly happy about what I said and responded that 98% of the time people say something similar but instead mention International Karate.

Some months later I bought a Lunar Lander PCB from him (to reconvert a LL cab back to LL from a bootleg Asteroids conversion). He had (has ?) an incredible collection of arcade games and hardware and he made a one-off Dropzone arcade machine for himself…..from what I heard the program was slightly adjusted to handle the coin-mech(s).

 

sorry for off-topic but at least it’s not throwing poo.

Edited August 7, 2021 by Level42

[Mclaneinc]

14 hours ago, Level42 said:

Maybe we can get Archer MacLean to finish it ?

 

 

he was pretty good at programming the A8……(see Dropzone and…..ah …..IK). 
 

he also loved the A8 a lot over the C64 and he’s a fun guy….I had the pleasure of meeting him and man does he have a lot of fun stories from BITD.

 

I sold him his first disk drive at Maplin.. True... Always had a chat when we saw each other at the shows.. As you said, a nice bloke

[Mclaneinc]

1 hour ago, Level42 said:

Not sure at what that “bloody hell” was aimed at, but indeed it was at one of those where I met him and we went out to have dinner with a small group of people. He told a lot of interesting and fun stories from BITD. The first words I said to him was : “Thank you for one of my most favourite games ever: Dropzone”. He was clearly happy about what I said and responded that 98% of the time people say something similar but instead mention International Karate.

Some months later I bought a Lunar Lander PCB from him (to reconvert a LL cab back to LL from a bootleg Asteroids conversion). He had (has ?) an incredible collection of arcade games and hardware and he made a one-off Dropzone arcade machine for himself…..from what I heard the program was slightly adjusted to handle the coin-mech(s).

 

sorry for off-topic but at least it’s not throwing poo.

Did you get to go to his gaming room with all the machines?

 

Sadly I never did, heard it was amazing... Saw a couple of shots in a mag..

 

 

[Level42]

6 hours ago, Mclaneinc said:

Did you get to go to his gaming room with all the machines?

 

Sadly I never did, heard it was amazing... Saw a couple of shots in a mag..

 

 

I’ll PM you, don’t want to derail any further…..

[tjlazer]

On 8/4/2021 at 7:49 PM, STE'86 said:

Today i was looking at the past few pages, i was struck by the title image that Jose posted and was inspired to think that something like this could work. colour selection and conversion permitting obviously

This looks AWESOME!

[ivop]

12 hours ago, emkay said:

The prince to the left looks like 1970s . The prince to the right looks like 1990s.

You mean like:

 

  and 

[Dinadan67]

The man to the right is no prince. His name is TAFKAP.

[_The Doctor__]

26 minutes ago, Dinadan67 said:

The man to the right is no prince. His name is TAFKAP.

anything to get out of contractual obligations and issues... it's a symbolic thing really

[rensoup]

23 hours ago, Mazzspeed said:

Once again as context appears to be something you struggle with, I'll cut the post in question into more simplistic terms:

 

That'd be because context fluctuates with each of your posts.
 

23 hours ago, Mazzspeed said:

"Every port of PoP is based on a differing platform, it's obvious the A8 port is based on the BBC port of the game due to it being remarkably similar - The term remarkably similar does not mean identical, hence: Similar." Yes, you never denied the port was based on the BBC port, my context was specifically aimed at your comments regarding the brickwork graphics and 'bathroom tiles'. Not once did I mention sprites.

 

You never mentioned sprites because they are visually remarkably similar, something you carefully analyzed with this setup:

On 8/7/2021 at 2:53 AM, rensoup said:

On 8/5/2021 at 9:05 AM, Mazzspeed said:

Furthermore, I'm playing the A8 variant on a Sophia 2 equipped 600XL on a 19" LCD monitor and another on BeebEm in a little Window on a 4k monitor. As stated, I haven't seen a PoP port that sucks, and that still holds true.

 

 

Fact is: Sprites are the major visual difference between the BBC and Atari version. That's where a lot of work went into as can be witnessed with each release.

Anyone may find that they look good or not, that's taste... you on the other hand, were factual and didn't even notice what everybody else did.

I don't like the original title screen. I think it would be ok framed in a motel bedroom. As a videogame title pic, it's terrible.

 

Anybody who dislikes my mouse title picture, that's their right and I'm fine with that. 
 

On 8/7/2021 at 3:39 AM, Mazzspeed said:

Is the BBC port a great port? Yes it is. Is the A8 port an outstanding port? Yes it is.

Technically that's not possible because they are visually remarkably similar. probably because the BBC and the Atari are remarkably similar too (Except for Antic/GTIA/Pokey... ?)
 

On 8/7/2021 at 3:39 AM, Mazzspeed said:

Are they faithful to the original in terms of graphics? Not really. Does it really matter? No. Was the original that bad that the graphics needed to be changed? Absolutely not.

Discarding-reality bullshit.

 

When games get released on a platform, unless porting Tetris, its userbase expect said games to take advantage of it otherwise there would be no market for different machines. That's why the Mac version doesn't look like the A2 version... 
 

Thanks for a complete waste of time.

[rensoup]

22 hours ago, STE'86 said:

i think u misunderstand me, i am talking about the amount of RAM they have to use to store all the sprite data,

 

I wasn't disagreeing with your explanation, just correcting the screen buffer sizes (16KB, not 20KB)

 

I did mention this back in 2019 in the 2nd post:

On 11/26/2019 at 7:33 PM, rensoup said:

    .The BBCM version runs at 160x192 8 colors (but with a horrendous predefined palette) with 128KB of RAM. The 6512 (6502 variant) is clocked at 2Mhz. The sprites are stored at half the vertical resolution though, because the coder ran out of memory (to be fair the 2 screen buffers are twice bigger than the Atari ones)
    

 

The sprites are stored using 2bits per pixel on both the A8 and BBC. So given that they are half height on the BBC, they take half the space. Note that the A8 and A2 have the same sprite storage requirements.

 
I did improve those storage requirements on the A8 later on to make space for the extra skin and vest colors.
 

[snicklin]

(Disclaimer: This post is intended as humour only! Absolutely no malicious intent.)

 

Thank you so much Rensoup.

 

I've prepared a new Rastaconverter based intro screen for the game, so you can get rid of any of the others that you've got. Credit goes to IvoP for the idea.

 

Rensoup, please put this into the game, if you don't, I'll never download your game for free and I will tell everyone else not to download it. Without this intro screen, your game will not be worthwhile.

 

Plenty of colours, very 90s influenced.

 

ModernPrinceOf....xex

[STE'86]

41 minutes ago, rensoup said:

 

I wasn't disagreeing with your explanation, just correcting the screen buffer sizes (16KB, not 20KB)

 

I did mention this back in 2019 in the 2nd post:

 

The sprites are stored using 2bits per pixel on both the A8 and BBC. So given that they are half height on the BBC, they take half the space. Note that the A8 and A2 have the same sprite storage requirements.

 
I did improve those storage requirements on the A8 later on to make space for the extra skin and vest colors.
 

thats very interesting, i had no idea that you could mix and match colour depth like that on the bbc. i had wrongly assumed that to display on the 8 colour mode that you would have to store the sprites in 8 colour mode. This would explain the lack of sprite colours. I had thought that yellow might be a better skin tone choice and may well have worked in the dungeons but then would have gone tits up in the palace section. its interesting that despite the half res they managed to preserve the authentic weird run from the rotoscoped video of the original. Jordans brother does have that strange run in the videos . Not to say your versions more "disney" run doesnt look nice mind.

 

[Mazzspeed]

2 hours ago, rensoup said:

That'd be because context fluctuates with each of your posts.

Rubbish it does! My context hasn't changed at all. I stated I saw nothing wrong with PoP's original graphics or artwork and commented on how your A8 port was quite obviously based on the BBC port, you went on a rampage about sprites. It's that simple. If anyone wasted any time it was yourself bringing sprites into the discussion.

 

You criticize the work of others, and then fly off the handle when someone pulls you up on it.

Edited August 8, 2021 by Mazzspeed