Why are we missing beautiful POKEY music?

[leech]

So it looks like the mighty Bruce Lee game actually looks the best on the Atari 800xl (mainly because Bruce Lee's color is more flesh colored, the C64 is very close, but he looks a tad more yellow.)

But the Atari version is missing the title music.  Even the Apple II version has 'music', it just sounds terrible...

I have seen this with several versions of games for the Atari, like Ultima IV is a perfect example.

I have read that it was because people coded for 48k of RAM, but one would think it wouldn't be that hard to add in a detection scheme for more memory? 

Anyone up for hacking music back into games that didn't get it for our beloved platform?

[MrFish]

It's in these versions.

 

Bruce Lee.car

 

Bruce Lee.xex

 

 

[leech]

13 minutes ago, MrFish said:

It's in these versions.

 

Bruce Lee.car 64.02 kB · 1 download

 

Bruce Lee.xex 40.29 kB · 1 download

 

 

Dude, you're awesome, no matter what other people say about you.  😛

[MrFish]

Actually, most versions of Bruce Lee on the 8-bits should have the music. I can see at least one version on cassette doesn't; so, maybe some of the disk or xex versions out there were pulled from that; or some versions may have been from the disk version and bypassed the copy protection by cutting out the intro screen; it was quite common on cracked disk versions (no intro).

 

This preserved ATX version has it.

 

Bruce Lee.atx

 

 

Edited April 22, 2020 by MrFish

[MrFish]

20 minutes ago, leech said:

Dude, you're awesome, no matter what other people say about you.  😛

What, you mean Beavis? Beavis drinks too much cappuccino.

 

[leech]

12 minutes ago, MrFish said:

Actually, most versions of Bruce Lee on the 8-bits should have the music. I can see at least one version on cassette doesn't; so, maybe some of the disk or xex versions out there were pulled from that; or some versions may have been from the disk version and bypassed the copy protection by cutting out the intro screen; it was quite common on cracked disk versions (no intro).

 

This preserved ATX version has it.

 

Bruce Lee.atx 71.56 kB · 0 downloads

 

 

Yeah, the version I tested was missing the Intro screen.

8 minutes ago, MrFish said:

What, you mean Beavis? Beavis drinks too much cappuccino.

 

Ha, for sure.  Must suck for Cornholio now, no TP to see for his bunghole.

You can definitely tell the C64 and Atari versions were coded by the same people, and the Apple version was not.  The game is barely playable on it, whenever pushing the button it acts like it is having a cpu conflict between an animation on screen and producing a sound.

 

Apple II Bruce Lee.m4a Atari Bruce Lee.m4a C64 Bruce Lee.m4a

Edited April 22, 2020 by leech

[+Faicuai]

4 hours ago, leech said:

So it looks like the mighty Bruce Lee game actually looks the best on the Atari 800xl (mainly because Bruce Lee's color is more flesh colored, the C64 is very close, but he looks a tad more yellow.)

But the Atari version is missing the title music.  Even the Apple II version has 'music', it just sounds terrible...

I have seen this with several versions of games for the Atari, like Ultima IV is a perfect example.

I have read that it was because people coded for 48k of RAM, but one would think it wouldn't be that hard to add in a detection scheme for more memory? 

Anyone up for hacking music back into games that didn't get it for our beloved platform?

Recently revamped, with updated intro, new sprites, and obesity-at-its-best!

 

BruceLee-RC10-NTSC_Intro.xex

 

🙂

[leech]

17 minutes ago, Faicuai said:

Recently revamped, with updated intro, new sprites, and obesity-at-its-best!

 

BruceLee-RC10-NTSC_Intro.xex 40.7 kB · 1 download

 

🙂

Sweet!  Ha, I was about to go to bed, but of course I had to play this... Something is just satisfying about kicking that fat green dude around.  As you can tell from my avatar, I'm a fan...

Only thing I think looks actually better on the other computers (crap, can't remember if it was the Apple one or the C64, I think it was the C64... as the Apple one looks terrible) is the.. flame jets?  whatever they are where you run over them, and they kill you.  They have a bit more color on the other one.  But other than that, I'm liking the new sprites!  And the Title screen looks much better!  I want to learn how to hack and patch things, mainly because I want to start working on eliminating the need for Artifacting

[MrFish]

3 hours ago, Faicuai said:

Recently revamped, with updated intro, new sprites, and obesity-at-its-best!

 

BruceLee-RC10-NTSC_Intro.xex 40.7 kB · 6 downloads

 

Hey, that's the updated title screen I did years ago (I think my first Graph2Font effort), finally hacked in with the music.

 

Enhanced "Bruce Lee" Title Screen

 

 

Edited April 22, 2020 by MrFish

[+Faicuai]

6 hours ago, MrFish said:

Hey, that's the updated title screen I did years ago (I think my first Graph2Font effort), finally hacked in with the music.

 

Enhanced "Bruce Lee" Title Screen

 

 

There seem to be similarities, although the renderings look a bit different:

 

 

Subtle differences in artwork, but significant ones in color-mapping, though...

[MrFish]

1 minute ago, Faicuai said:

There seem to be similarities, although the renderings look a bit different:

 

 

Subtle differences in artwork, but significant ones in color-mapping, though...

The problem is the palette used for the original. It looks totally different when the Xformer palette (which is not a very good palette compared to what is used in Altirra) is used, as you can see in screenshots posted in the original thread (from Atari800WinPLus). All that's been done is that the colors have been remapped, which needed to be done, obviously. As far as the graphic differences, you need to go to the last post in that thread to most recent version I created at that time -- which has the lettering shadows, and different corners for the border, etc. The graphics are exactly the same, aside from the color remappings, which reflect all my originally intended colors anyway; it's just that I was working from an inferior palette at that time (Xformer).

 

 

[leech]

Colors off the 1200xl (unmodded).  Anyone know why L1 would blink?

Edited April 22, 2020 by leech

[+Faicuai]

11 minutes ago, leech said:

Colors off the 1200xl (unmodded).  Anyone know why L1 would blink?

The Chinese, compact-version of Hulk...and years before it!

 

 

 

Edited April 22, 2020 by Faicuai

[_The Doctor__]

L1 might be blinking as keyboard scan is turned on and off... as the screen waits for someone to press something..

[leech]

4 minutes ago, _The Doctor__ said:

L1 might be blinking as keyboard scan is turned on and off... as the screen waits for someone to press something..

Ah cool.  Qnd of course I am supposed to be working, but took a break to play Bruce Lee... the jumps on the screen where there are three doors to the right side you open seemed to be harder to make that gap than normal, but otherwise it plays very nicely.  Maybe I was just having an off time, as yesterday I also failed to make a jump I always make...

[MrFish]

I've updated my original Graph2Font artwork to use Altirra's palette and reflect my originally intended colors. It matches the updated version with the sprite hack, for the most part too; but there are a few small differences (the "programmed by" and "art by" text color, and the weave pattern color). I still wouldn't call it final until I've had a chance to test in on real hardware though. That was why the originals had colors that were so off: I didn't have any real hardware set up to test them at the time, only emulation, with palettes that didn't match real hardware.

 

 

Bruce Lee v12 (Altirra Palette)[NTSC].xex

 

Edited April 22, 2020 by MrFish

[_The Doctor__]

They so need to add this to the ongoing projects and finish them, time for the army to wander out and necro bump those threads... I'm kind of sapped for strength so it's time for me to call it a day... talk to you all later :)

[zzip]

16 hours ago, leech said:

I have seen this with several versions of games for the Atari, like Ultima IV is a perfect example.

I have read that it was because people coded for 48k of RAM, but one would think it wouldn't be that hard to add in a detection scheme for more memory?

Alternate Reality is a good example of a game that will detect 64K and load in extra content.   But that's also extra work for the developer :)

 

I think the other issue is disks   virtually every Atari game came on 90K disk so they'd support the 810 drives.  Even the "DD" 1050 was bungled at 127K while other 8-bit platforms had 180K disks to work with.

So for Atari games large enough, you'd either have to cut content or distribute more disks.

[leech]

5 minutes ago, zzip said:

Alternate Reality is a good example of a game that will detect 64K and load in extra content.   But that's also extra work for the developer

 

I think the other issue is disks   virtually every Atari game came on 90K disk so they'd support the 810 drives.  Even the "DD" 1050 was bungled at 127K while other 8-bit platforms had 180K disks to work with.

So for Atari games large enough, you'd either have to cut content or distribute more disks.

That is true, forgot about that.  Yeah AR is one that would even detect 128kb and load more into RAM, so you would need to swap floppies less.

I have seen one version of Ultima IV crammed into 3 instead of 4 'sides'.  Not sure what other differences there are.

I am not a coder (yet) so not sure how hard it is to do a memory detection function to add more features would be.

I really want to start hacking on Ultima IV again though and see if I can upgrade it for the VBXE.  😛

[MrFish]

Here's a side-by-side with the original, to show what was changed.

 

    

 

 

[+Stephen]

Impressive.

[leech]

I kind of chuckled a little because the Apple II version has an extra screen that says that Bruce Lee is a trademark owned by Linda Lee, or something to that effect.

[zzip]

32 minutes ago, leech said:

I have seen one version of Ultima IV crammed into 3 instead of 4 'sides'.  Not sure what other differences there are.

I haven't seen that version, but hackers would often compress games onto fewer disks.  While developers at the time might not have been using compression at all, or weak compression.

 

32 minutes ago, leech said:

I am not a coder (yet) so not sure how hard it is to do a memory detection function to add more features would be.

The bigger issue on 8-bit is managing that memory.   The 6502 can only see 64K of memory at one time.   And everything above 48K on the Atari is taken up by the OS Rom.   So in order to use that extra 16K, they used "bank switching",  you'd have to turn off the OS Rom, to use that extra 16K, then turn it back on before any OS calls are made.   Similarly, 128K Ataris had to bank switch that extra 64K into the second 16K bank of memory.    So this means you have to plan out how your code is laid out, so that you aren't swapping out anything critical while accessing the extended memory. 

 

Personally I never had much luck with it, my attempts to access my extra 16K in Assembly language would crash.  I probably forgot to disable interupts that depended on OS routines or something.

 

EDIT: should add that other 6502-based computers like Apple II and C64 must have had similar issues, but I never programmed them at this level so don't know how they handled bank-switching.

Edited April 22, 2020 by zzip

[leech]

3 minutes ago, zzip said:

I haven't seen that version, but hackers would often compress games onto fewer disks.  While developers at the time might not have been using compression at all, or weak compression.

 

The bigger issue on 8-bit is managing that memory.   The 6502 can only see 64K of memory at one time.   And everything above 48K on the Atari is taken up by the OS Rom.   So in order to use that extra 16K, they used "bank switching",  you'd have to turn off the OS Rom, to use that extra 16K, then turn it back on before any OS calls are made.   Similarly, 128K Ataris had to bank switch that extra 64K into the second 16K bank of memory.    So this means you have to plan out how your code is laid out, so that you aren't swapping out anything critical while accessing the extended memory. 

 

Personally I never had much luck with it, my attempts to access my extra 16K in Assembly language would crash.  I probably forgot to disable interupts that depended on OS routines or something.

 

Curious, since the 1200XL seems to be a weird unicorn in the 8bit world, is it the same there with the OS taking the 16kb?  I'd guess so.  I knew about the bank switching, and the limit of the 6502, the book I started reading on assembly is technically for the 65816, but of course covers the 6502 as well.  Then again it also mentions the 65832, which never actually came out. 

I kind of want to write some stuff for the Rapidus, since it seems there aren't a whole lot of things supporting it yet, and I should justify getting one

[zzip]

1 minute ago, leech said:

Curious, since the 1200XL seems to be a weird unicorn in the 8bit world, is it the same there with the OS taking the 16kb?  I'd guess so.  I knew about the bank switching, and the limit of the 6502, the book I started reading on assembly is technically for the 65816, but of course covers the 6502 as well.  Then again it also mentions the 65832, which never actually came out. 

I kind of want to write some stuff for the Rapidus, since it seems there aren't a whole lot of things supporting it yet, and I should justify getting one

The 1200XL must have been doing something similar.   Never owned that model though.