Unicorns season: Prince of Persia for the A8!

[xxl]

12 hours ago, rensoup said:

 

@xxl: whose name paired with XBios causes people to go into rage mode! And for the ZX5 unpacker too!

and women faint. 

 

It's nice that you mention everyone, even people who are not important for the project, but the truth is that only you did it, many tried and only you succeeded. Bravo.

 

I had already written a letter praising your completion of the PoP project but it did not appear - probably my fan had too low a sugar level.

[pustakmax]

The game is great. Many thanks to the authors!

I finished Prince of Persia for the first time in my life on my favorite Atari computer. Previously on PC only with prince.megahit

I didn't encounter any problems playing a real Atari 130XE with AVG Cart.

 

In the case of LVL 9. If flipping the screen is not possible. After drinking the drink - maybe you could switch directions - left is right, up is a squat, down is a jump.
Maybe it would be an interesting solution. And the drinks would be used. 

 

Once again, this is vere, very great game!
Thanks!

[rensoup]

14 hours ago, Bobo Cujo said:

First of all, like everyone else on this thread, I'm incredibly, unbelievably impressed by this port.  My hat is very much off to you ?

Thanks!

 

14 hours ago, Bobo Cujo said:

- ESC/Option doesn't seem to skip between-level cutscenes, or skip the death music.  Was this intentional?  (I may be used to this from playing the DOS version of this game)

Yep, although it would have been nice it was extra bytes that I thought i'd regret wasting at some point...

 

14 hours ago, Bobo Cujo said:

- Two of the fake life-up jugs on Level 9 are supposed to vertically flip the screen as a joke (the first one flips the screen, the second one reverses the effect).  In this version, it does nothing.  Was this intentional for technical reasons (PMG handling)?

yep, that would have required a much bigger effort because of the PMG repositioning with DLIs

 

15 hours ago, Bobo Cujo said:

- I don't think the "princess watching the hourglass" cutscene is supposed to play between:
Level 12/Before Jafar, and After Jafar/Before the ending level.

I saw it both times... (I had 12 or so minutes on the clock)

I didn't notice, probably because I used the cheat code a lot ? but that might be possible because level 12 is a 2 part level.

 

15 hours ago, Bobo Cujo said:

- I didn't get to see the ending animation because Altirra/the game crashed ?

Altirra threw up an internal error dialog message (no specifics on the actual error) when the ending was about to play. I enabled the debugger when this happened; attached is a screenshot of the history/registers windows and the history window text itself - let me know if there's a better/more comprehensive way to get a dump for this

Ouch, weird that Altirra crashed just before the game, its is possible that the dump becomes irrelevant. It's hard to tell because unfortunately you have function calls folded.

I tried starting from L12 and it played the final cutscene fine. If you're brave enough you could try again (with function calls folding disabled) and perhaps save the state (not quitck state) before each level ?

 

[rensoup]

10 hours ago, xxl said:

It's nice that you mention everyone, even people who are not important for the project, but the truth is that only you did it, many tried and only you succeeded. Bravo

Without each of those mentioned, the game would have been a little (and sometimes a lot) worse ?

 

My only regret is that the A8 version doesn't have its own tileset...

 

10 hours ago, xxl said:

I had already written a letter praising your completion of the PoP project but it did not appear - probably my fan had too low a sugar level.

Praise from xxl? Doesn't happen very often, thanks ?

[rensoup]

7 hours ago, pustakmax said:

The game is great. Many thanks to the authors!

I finished Prince of Persia for the first time in my life on my favorite Atari computer. Previously on PC only with prince.megahit

I didn't encounter any problems playing a real Atari 130XE with AVG Cart.

Thanks & Awesome ( that means you didn't use any save state ! I'm not sure I ever did that! )

 

7 hours ago, pustakmax said:

In the case of LVL 9. If flipping the screen is not possible. After drinking the drink - maybe you could switch directions - left is right, up is a squat, down is a jump.
Maybe it would be an interesting solution. And the drinks would be used. 

It is tricky because you need some visual clue if you did that or people might think that the game is buggy!

 

I couldn't think of an alternate effect that would be interesting and cheap enough...

[drpeter]

52 minutes ago, rensoup said:

I couldn't think of an alternate effect that would be interesting and cheap enough...

Change skin colour to bright green?  Doesn't affect game mechanics at all, but it's an effect...

[Level42]

Just a suggestion: would be handy to have the readme.txt as a separate (and if possible unzipped) file in the first posting of this thread.

 

 

[rensoup]

1 hour ago, drpeter said:

Change skin colour to bright green?  Doesn't affect game mechanics at all, but it's an effect...

something to do with colors would be easiest but there's no memory for it anyway... It always takes too many bytes to do anything on the 6502!

[Peri Noid]

@rensoup, could you write, how much space would the game consume on the disk/cart without XBios compression? Some people complain about "slow loading times" - it seems so since loading from a disk is slow (no turbo mode and so on). But it would be good to think about a tradeof between overall loading time (including decompression) and loading of raw data without compression, including space requirement of the latter.

[xxl]

infinite loop detected

[Mq.]

It is good idea, I think. An atr without a care about size of it (without compression), is good for every devices like sio2sd and other modern solutions for loading atrs. Additional profit could be that such atr maybe will fit on 360kB disk or 720kB disk - many people have such floppy disk drives for the Atari.

Edited October 28, 2021 by Mq.

[Faicuai]

1 hour ago, Mq. said:

360kB disk or 720kB disk - many people have such floppy disk drives for the Atari.

This is not the case.

 

But you are more than welcome to show actual installed-base data to substantiate this claim, though. 
 

There's always a chance to learn something new...

[Faicuai]

3 hours ago, Peri Noid said:

But it would be good to think about a tradeof between overall loading time (including decompression) and loading of raw data without compression,

Such virtual tradeoff is inexistent with the use of a multi-cart of choice.

 

On the other hand, with a 180KB DD image, my [IndusGT + RAMcharger] not only does a good job in handling the load-times with Track Buffering enabled (~55KB of effective buffered data), but it also saves me from needlessly resorting to denser floppies, or swapping .ATRs on my SDrive or AVG SIO-server which all (also) do a pretty decent job with current 180KB DD image.

 

The performance boost when moving to cart-version is so large that any incremental improvements on the .ATR / floppy side become irrelevant. Therefore, the real advise we should give to our community is to buy a competent multi-cart, at an affordable price (just like AVG, for instance, or any other) and they will be much better off on the long run, and will do much better than any conceivable floppy-format.

[Mr Robot]

Wow are there _still_ discussions about alternative formats!? 

 

I thought that now the final was out, people would be ripping it apart, producing XEX versions, versions with alternative title screens, versions without the intro, versions on 16MB atr files, cheat versions, SDX compatible versions, no-turban versions etc.

 

 

[+x=usr(1536)]

6 minutes ago, Mr Robot said:

Wow are there _still_ discussions about alternative formats!? 

 

I thought that now the final was out, people would be ripping it apart, producing XEX versions, versions with alternative title screens, versions without the intro, versions on 16MB atr files, cheat versions, SDX compatible versions, no-turban versions etc.

 

 

Don't forget the Nekkid Princess version.  8-bit n00dz r h4wt.

[cwilbar]

18 hours ago, rensoup said:

Thanks & Awesome ( that means you didn't use any save state ! I'm not sure I ever did that! )

 

It is tricky because you need some visual clue if you did that or people might think that the game is buggy!

 

I couldn't think of an alternate effect that would be interesting and cheap enough...

Maybe left/right, or up/down 'jitter' provided it is easy enough by shifting during vertical blank/etc ?  Or everything becomes 'dim' or something. 

 

I have not gotten to playing this yet, but I've (quietly) watched this (massive and often argumentative) thread for a long time.

 

Congrats on the release, I look forward to playing it.

 

[Peri Noid]

5 hours ago, xxl said:

infinite loop detected

Actually here I'm on your side.

[Mq.]

I said: 360kB disk or 720kB disk - many people have such floppy disk drives for the Atari.

3 hours ago, Faicuai said:

This is not the case.

 

But you are more than welcome to show actual installed-base data to substantiate this claim, though. 
 

There's always a chance to learn something new...

XF551 with original firmware works with 360kB I think, but I'm sure XF551 with hyper XF firmware works with floppys 5,25" and 3,5" in 360kB (single side) or 720kB (double side). For example I have XF551 with 3,5" floppy disk drive 720kB.

Toms 710/720 disk drives do the same.
There are a lot of such drives in people houses. Additionally both XF and Toms are replicated nowaday by Zaxon, and other people.

[Faicuai]

35 minutes ago, Mq. said:

XF551 with original firmware works with 360kB I think, but I'm sure XF551 with hyper XF firmware

The XF551 sales are small in comparison with 1050 (for instance), which is by far the A8 floppy drive in "everyone's home"... which is also the most likely one to receive some sort of DD / high-speed upgrade, too. 

 

I would venture to say that even SDrive (in all its variants) is way more popular than XF551...

 

Anyway, nothing comes close to the performance and convenience of a multicart for PoP, even a good-old-and-tested Atarimax 8Mbit would do wonders!!

 

[Heaven/TQA]

For me best use on my 8mbit atarimax cart… just need to decide… PoP or Stunt Car

[Mr Robot]

3 minutes ago, Heaven/TQA said:

For me best use on my 8mbit atarimax cart… just need to decide… PoP or Stunt Car

Isn't there room for both with a little loader menu? 

[Mq.]

9 minutes ago, Faicuai said:

The XF551 sales are small in comparison with 1050 (for instance), which is by far the A8 floppy drive in "everyone's home"... which is also the most likely one to receive some sort of DD / high-speed upgrade, too. 

 

I would venture to say that even SDrive (in all its variants) is way more popular than XF551...

 

Anyway, nothing comes close to the performance and convenience of a multicart for PoP, even a good-old-and-tested Atarimax 8Mbit would do wonders!!

 

Yes, of course, nowadays everyone uses mainly a modern equipment. I only suggested, if someone would like to play with real floppy, then there are more solutions, and it could be additional benefit if there would be not compressed bigger atr which could load with hyperspeed/ultra speed/ whatever speed. Nevermind, I play PoP from cartridge, and I don't care about it, because I use floppy for fun only sometimes. 

[xxl]

12 minutes ago, Mr Robot said:

Isn't there room for both with a little loader menu? 

I used to prepare a version of xBIOS for AtariMax that emulated D1:/D2:/D3:/D4: - the cartridge emulated four drives simultaneously, in each there was a different "ATR"... However, the programmer seems to have suspended work on the game Maybe when this game project will revive then such a solution will appear.

[Draxxon]

Thanks for such an awesome game! We added this to the Atari Flashback 9/X and even made a snazzy custom bezel for it. Thank you, again!

 

 

[ojanhk]

Thank you so much for this game, it’s awesome and the port you’ve done is amazing. After playing a bit, I had to check and tonight I launched PoP on a MegaSTE just to confirm: your 8bit version is so much better than the Atari ST version !

Again many thanks for all the hard work, and my deepest respect for your programming skills !