Is Castle Crisis available for the 7800?

[Warlords4life]

Sorry if it's been asked before and ty in advance. 

[Albert]

No, only for the Atari 5200 and Atari 8-bit computers.  And for the Atari 2600, there's an excellent rendition of Warlords called Medieval Mayhem.  Kind of surprised nobody's made a proper port of Warlords to the 7800 yet!

 

 ..Al

[Warlords4life]

Thanks Al

[tep392]

I was given the source for Castle Crisis, so I hope to do this some day.  I'm busy with another project right now, so it's going to have to wait a bit.  My only concern is if I can read 4 paddles simultaneously with enough resolution.  Doing paddles on the 7800 is not as strait forward as on the 2600.

[Albert]

7 minutes ago, tep392 said:

I was given the source for Castle Crisis, so I hope to do this some day.  I'm busy with another project right now, so it's going to have to wait a bit.  My only concern is if I can read 4 paddles simultaneously with enough resolution.  Doing paddles on the 7800 is not as strait forward as on the 2600.

That would be fantastic!    If the Atari 2600 can read four paddles simultaneously with enough resolution (for Warlords and Medieval Mayhem, for instance), I really hope the 7800 would be able to do so.  It's interesting if the 7800 throws up roadblocks to make this more difficult and perhaps not as efficient as on the 2600!

 

 ..Al

[+SpiceWare]

7 hours ago, tep392 said:

My only concern is if I can read 4 paddles simultaneously with enough resolution.

 

You do not need to read all 4 paddles every frame.

 

Before deciding to write Medieval Mayhem from scratch my original plan was to do a hack of Warlords. I started by creating a disassembly of it, with plans to convert it to 8K, then add extra features like the extra fireballs.

 

While I didn't convert it to 8K or add extra features, I did make good progress on the disassembly. When doing so, I was shocked to discover that Warlords only reads 1 paddle per frame, so it takes 4 frames to read all 4 paddles.  This results in jerky movement, so Warlords applies a motion smoothing function every frame. You can disable the smoothing in Stella by hitting the ` key to enter the debugger, then typing the following in the prompt:

• rom fc52 ea ea ea ea
• rom fc59 ea ea ea ea
• saverom

Warlords smoothing disabled.a26

 

For Medieval Mayhem I read 2 paddles per frame, so it takes 2 frames to read all 4 paddles.  I found that was fast enough to not require a motion smoothing algorithm, so I did not use one.