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Overcoming the 64KB ram limit of the atari lynx


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Somebody reviewed luchtenstein 3D demo(wich is in reality a cover up of wolf3D) running on the lynx,while it has only 2 levels,but it does show what the lynx is capable off, HOWEVER, he did mention that bigger levels aren’t possible on the lynx due it’s limited ram,

 

but i was thinking, how about deviding giant levels into sections of 32KB by refreshing the ram halfway trough once you reached a certain point section in a level and then load the second section of it and so forth, now to avoid that your progression in the first section of a level get’s lost,the game should remember your first section by storing it into it’s own ram, the same means to section 2 and so on,and when you walk to the first section into a level , then it should reload in the first section of that level by erasing the second section of it,and so it,so the game must be also capable to switch back and forth into the first and second section etc,,, of a level while still (temperatury) remembering your progress,this way we might be able to overcome that 64KB limitation of the lynx by adding  virtual work ram into the game, so if a wolf3D is 256KB big in size,it should be slit into sections of (let’s say) 6 including your prgress data and then keeping exchanging that data from 64KB work ram of the lynx, this way we could in theory create larger more biggers levels then what the atari lynx is normally allowed us to do?,just may,i believe that games such as super mario 3 on nes works similar that way trough the mmc3 chip wich contains 8KB of extra ram above the nes’ses 2KB of ram in order to exchange & swap data in and out on the fly from 8KB into the 2KB work ram, in order to get around that 2KB limit, i suppose??

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10 hours ago, johannesmutlu said:

Somebody reviewed luchtenstein 3D demo(wich is in reality a cover up of wolf3D) running on the lynx,while it has only 2 levels,but it does show what the lynx is capable off, HOWEVER, he did mention that bigger levels aren’t possible on the lynx due it’s limited ram,

It is a question of organization. The Lynx cards can be w/o problem 512KBytes large. Larger ones with some logic on the card (like the SDCard cards).

_But_ who or how many gamers will going to pay 80 or more Euros for such a game?

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18 hours ago, 42bs said:

It is a question of organization. The Lynx cards can be w/o problem 512KBytes large. Larger ones with some logic on the card (like the SDCard cards).

_But_ who or how many gamers will going to pay 80 or more Euros for such a game?

It’s true that there’re 512KB rom lynx games, but the idea in this topic was to virtually increase the 64KB ram of the lynx to allow biggers levels to be possible on lynx,

 

 

now to your question, Am afraid only diehard gamers will spend $80 for (retro) games,unlike regular consumers wich absolutely wouldn’t do that,especially those casual games, i as a retro fan will do that if it became my most wanted most have game?

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4 hours ago, johannesmutlu said:

It’s true that there’re 512KB rom lynx games, but the idea in this topic was to virtually increase the 64KB ram of the lynx to allow biggers levels to be possible on lynx,

I think 64K are a lot for one level. I remember Spindizzy on the CPC464 which had a huge map in roundabout 50k (they did use nearly _all_ available RAM and overwriting even BASIC memory).

So I think it is a matter of how you describe the map the most efficient way and do a clever overlaying/loading of assets.

 

Edited by 42bs
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Frankly, the only limitation here is the limited understanding how Lynx internals work and of overall game developing techniques of this "somebody" that claimed the statement that 64kB of RAM prevents from introducing bigger and/or more levels in games. I see no practical benefits from the ability to stream out memory to some backup storage as mutable data are usually very small. The majority of consoles form the 80-ties had very little RAM but multiple times more ROM. Even Sega Megadrive with powerful 68000 on board had only 64kB of RAM.

 

Edited by laoo
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On 6/1/2021 at 10:04 AM, laoo said:

Frankly, the only limitation here is the limited understanding how Lynx internals work and of overall game developing techniques of this "somebody" that claimed the statement that 64kB of RAM prevents from introducing bigger and/or more levels in games. I see no practical benefits from the ability to stream out memory to some backup storage as mutable data are usually very small. The majority of consoles form the 80-ties had very little RAM but multiple times more ROM. Even Sega Megadrive with powerful 68000 on board had only 64kB of RAM.

 

I always thought the RAM is pretty sizable for a 80s handheld console with that resolution and 4 bit color depht. The C64 has 64Kbyte too and the SNES has 128 Kbyte (but needs to handle much bigger data).

Edited by agradeneu
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1 hour ago, agradeneu said:

I always thought the RAM is pretty sizable for a 80s handheld console with that resolution and 4 bit color depht. The C64 has 64Kbyte too and the SNES has 128 Kbyte (but needs to handle much bigger data).

indeed, but you have large screen (8k each), thus double + collision buffer reduces that already by 24k.

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  • 10 months later...
On 6/1/2021 at 8:56 AM, LordKraken said:

@johannesmutlu I'll +1 42bs. The lynx resolution is pretty low, so it's fairly easy to dynamically stream data from the cartridge to create huge detailed map, that's what we do on Odynexus. The limiting factor then is the cartridge size.

Wooow,that game oddynexus looks pretty cool?

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On 6/1/2021 at 10:04 AM, laoo said:

 The majority of consoles form the 80-ties had very little RAM but multiple times more ROM. Even Sega Megadrive with powerful 68000 on board had only 64kB of RAM.

 

that's another story, Atari 7800 or MegaDrive had ability to add external ROM or RAM mapped directly to the CPU address range. In case of Lynx, the Cartridge ROM is just a streaming device like a tape/fdd.

Would be cool to have a solution where the CPU has direct access to more than 64kB RAM, banked like in Atari 800 XL or Atari 7800.

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nice idea, but i miss the case where it is really needed. as longs as you cannot trick the custom chips to use it, it does not give you much advantage.

managing the video to a differnt "bank" would already give you 16km more.

 

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