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Unicorns season: Prince of Persia for the A8!


rensoup

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Practice and usage makes for better work, more capable offerings. I've seen people dust off their old code years later, adding those needed and missing ingredients that they've since learned... someone updates the graphics, and just like that, all of the nay sayers are like omg that's so nice thank you! They don't even realize what they love so much is the thing they ran the people down for in the first place.

 

How about we support every effort and see what happens rather than poop all over stuff... suggestions and ideas are normally a good thing, but beating the folks who work so hard to a pulp never produces anything good.

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There is more to uncover, antic is still a madman only a thing or two left to do... GTIA still has a couple things as well... and while some folks don't like undocumented op codes... they too have a part to play once that wall is hit as that will give a couple of precious cycles making things happen that otherwise might not. One can always make a version using newer opcodes on/for the advanced add on processors to keep things going in the compatibility realm. So many wonderful things are still possible. So buck up buttercup, enough with this negative no more can be done attitude! You're always surprised when the next thing happens.

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18 minutes ago, EnderDude said:

It's not like these "cheap" projects you speak of were for nothing. The developers learn from that experience and can potentially become more skilled from that learning experience. One doesn't become a great programmer for a specific system overnight. Experimenting and trying new solutions to problems, such as making display routines, or music player routines more efficient takes time and a good understanding of the hardware's advantages and disadvantages to do right.

In other words, cut them some slack!

Thats how I release stuff on new platforms. Eg my snes demo dzero needed 3 smaller starting projects to get familiar with the hardware. And i mean not mastering the platform.

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3 minutes ago, _The Doctor__ said:

There is more to uncover, antic is still a madman only a thing or two left to do... GTIA still has a couple things as well... and while some folks don't like undocumented op codes... they too have a part to play once that wall is hit as that will give a couple of precious cycles making things happen that otherwise might not. One can always make a version using newer opcodes on/for the advanced add on processors to keep things going in the compatibility realm. So many wonderful things are still possible. So buck up buttercup, enough with this negative no more can be done attitude! You're always surprised when the next thing happens.

Fuck! 

I'm not negative. 

All those people who expect false things, stop development for the real stuff on the Atari. 

Get it , or not. 

It's a negative plot to expect things , just for some expectation cause and to wait for the negative result. 

Get it, or not. 

 

I'm telling now for decades where the limits and where the benefits were. People just had to understand it. 

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31 minutes ago, _The Doctor__ said:

There is a way to delete the bad material within a quote. You can edit the post and only delete the quoted material... placing a note stating the quoted material broke forum rule or rules.

 

the person who quoted or made the reply could have a PM dropped to them explaining the reason the quote or whatever was deleted.

 

Such a thing might be helpful.

 

The replying poster may also be given a chance to edit their reply so that they aren't left to look like they are responding to something that never took place... They could at least keep their good responses and just type a note that their post is edited to keep the bad post they responded to from continuing. More than one way to handle it that's for sure.

 

It ain't easy, but it's possible. Just some ideas.

I appreciate the tips, but I decided it was best to remove both to avoid additional derailing of the topic. TIX's response was understandably harsh considering the original offending post. There was not any point to leaving it without the context of the original post.  Now I'm going to drop this discussion because it is way off topic.

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16 hours ago, emkay said:

It's about the graphics part. It has been adjusted to fit to 8 bit, which helps a lot with the masking. 

You keep telling me how I did it eh... 

 

True the graphics backgrounds are from the BBC, but that's not code. The BBC uses entirely software sprites so masking is handled by the A2 code. I had software masking working in the very first build I posted back in 2019. Things got a lot more complicated when I started mixing software and hardware sprites but that's nothing to do with the BBC...

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So I've got bad news... I'm delaying the release by a week... new release date:

 

19th october 2021

 

The final build isn't the final build anymore and I ran out of disk space...

 

I need 3 sectors for the DD version and 8 sectors for the SD version... So it's byte hunting season again!

 

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1 hour ago, rensoup said:

So I've got bad news... I'm delaying the release by a week... new release date:

 

19th october 2021

 

The final build isn't the final build anymore and I ran out of disk space...

 

I need 3 sectors for the DD version and 8 sectors for the SD version... So it's byte hunting season again!

 

Don’t worry…..we’ve  been waiting for this game for about 30 years…..a week delay is nothing :)

 

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2 hours ago, rensoup said:

It always seemed like a really boring game ?

Compared to PoP, I fail to see just how The Last Ninja could be classed as 'boring' considering it's actually more involved than PoP and actually has a pretty good soundtrack while playing the game.

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11 minutes ago, Mazzspeed said:

Compared to PoP, I fail to see just how The Last Ninja could be classed as 'boring' considering it's actually more involved than PoP and actually has a pretty good soundtrack while playing the game.

Probably the shitty smelling bathroom tiles in the Ninja's dojo that made it stink so badly :).

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2 hours ago, rensoup said:

It always seemed like a really boring game ?

Well, I've just checked the C64 version and got immediately bored by the annoying "procedural" (?) screen redraws on every advance, plus the really slow speed when traversing the pathway from scene-to-scene... the fight-dynamics are choppy, at best, with a ton of frames missing in-between animations and screen re-draws of those dummy-sprites.

 

Maybe a little too much, already, for 8-bitters... but I would wonder how it would look on the A8, though...

 

(have not really seen up-close 16-bit ones, which seem preferable for the scenery, perspectives, and gameplay) 

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6 hours ago, rensoup said:

So I've got bad news... I'm delaying the release by a week... new release date:

 

19th october 2021

 

The final build isn't the final build anymore and I ran out of disk space...

 

I need 3 sectors for the DD version and 8 sectors for the SD version... So it's byte hunting season again!

 

cut few lines of the title screen top/bottom?

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18 hours ago, Goochman said:

Well if looking for a big challenge like PoP maybe The Last Ninja?  isnt that the one game folks didnt think was possible on the 8bit?

Never a fan of this.. initially I was impressed by the colorful graphics and music.. but when it comes to gameplay it is simply not a good game.

The controls are some of the worst I've ever used, not to mention the cheap deaths, I think the following captures my feelings exactly ?

 

 

image.thumb.png.0b45df7017ef84d3b9cf86168ec7924d.png 

 

PS If we are looking in the c64 library, my vote goes to Turrican  !

 

 

 

 

Edited by TIX
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45 minutes ago, TIX said:

Never a fan of this.. initially I was impressed by the colorful graphics and music.. but when it comes to gameplay it is simply not a good game.

The controls are some of the worst I've ever used, not to mention the cheap deaths, I think the following captures my feelings exactly ?

Personally, I don't find the controls regarding PoP as a game in general much better. A big part of both games is mastering the janky controls.

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9 hours ago, rensoup said:

It always seemed like a really boring game ?

Thanks! The Last Ninja series is one of those which I never understood why so many people like to play any of them. Yes, it's plain boring. Also, controls suck and you often get stuck on single pixels you don't even see. Maybe it was hyped back then and that's what people remember.

 

I tried playing any of the three parts on various systems - and they just all suck.

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1 hour ago, derSammler said:

Thanks! The Last Ninja series is one of those which I never understood why so many people like to play any of them. Yes, it's plain boring. Also, controls suck and you often get stuck on single pixels you don't even see. Maybe it was hyped back then and that's what people remember.

 

I tried playing any of the three parts on various systems - and they just all suck.

The Last Ninja series had some very nice pixel art and a banger of a soundtrack (on the C64 at least) but the playability was.. not good. I've seen this to be a thing with European gaming tastes in general during that era; style above substance, and if style is all you have we'll just take it anyway. Compare nearly any US publishers (Accolade, Activision, Epyx, DataSoft, Electronic Arts, Microprose, Synapse, Broderbund, HesWare, SSI, Origin, Sierra, Muse, Lucasfilm, Infocom, Mindscape, etc.. ..and people ask why I don't convert all my machines to PAL..?) who consistently turned out quality, QUALITY titles against, well, just about everything else. It's a real shame, because I would love to see a fusion of talents, east and west, in an alternate universe. At least we seem to be getting that with homebrew and smallscale retro releases these days!

 

Somehow, the ZX Spectrum seemed to have largely avoided these issues, probably because playability was much easier to get on that system than shiny glitter. The ZX is my favorite eurogaming experience.

Edited by rmzalbar
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Geezus. For a game many here are critical of, I think sales of 2,000,000 units, of which 1,250,000 were sold on other platforms after the initial release (by the time many had heard all about the controls) speaks for itself.

 

I can't actually find a reference to the sales numbers of the original Prince Of Persia game...

 

EDIT: I found some numbers. Originally, Prince Of Persia on the on the Apple II and IBM PC was a commercial failure in in North America, where it sold 7,000 units per platform. It wasn't until 1990 when the game was released on the NEC PC-9801 in Japan that sales increased to 10,000 units, eventually reaching 2 million units by the time the sequel was in production (1993).

 

TLN doesn't sound like that bad a game to me. Furthermore, the Last Ninja on the Amiga had the exact same redraws as the C64 version.

 

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19 hours ago, ilmenit said:

For the Last Ninja there was "work in progress" port from BBC Micro:

http://atarionline.pl/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=2375&page=1

sorry - that looks horrible!

 

As someone who actually undertook converting (yes and failed in the end, but that's a different story) LNII "back in the day" despite the few and low-res Atari sprites causing a few issues actually replicating the C64's environment graphics is not that hard.

 

The magic of going behind stuff is super simple (looks very impressive to the user though) masks.

 

The biggest problem is the fiddly and generally annoying controls and the gameplay that results from them, it's all just frustrating IMHO - it's not a game that has stood the test of time (like quiet a few British classics) - try it now on the C64 if you don't get annoyed in ten minutes you are one of the few!

 

sTeVE

Edited by Jetboot Jack
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