Treasure of Tarmin / Minotaur Cheet Sheet

[+wavemotion]

For the past few weeks, I've been playing Treasure of Tarmin (my favorite Intellivision game) using save states to gather information on all the equipment in the game. I know there is a FAQ out there with some of this information - though it lacks the details on Armor and Rings and a few other bit of useful information. So I took it upon myself to go and gather up all the information I could on all the stuff in the game. One thing I couldn't completely nail down is the small "synergy bonus" (for lack of a better term) that gives a small bonus of +0/+1 or +0/+2 for combinations of armor (for example:  Tan Helmut at 2/0 and Large Blue Shield at 18/2 should be a total protection of 20/2 but is 20/3 instead... in this case the sum is greater than the parts). 



Today I found the last item I needed... on level 166 I found my first large purple ring (I had found several smaller purple rings but never the big one!). This confers a bonus of +20/+40. With that my cheat sheet is complete - pending a sanity check for typos... I've attached it to this post for anyone interested. 

I have it in the back of my head to write a full-color guide to the game that defined a summer for me in 1983:  The Complete Tarmin.   Someday... 
 

Treasure of Tarmin Cheat Sheet.pdf

[4ever2600]

Awesome!  Thanks for the share,  my sentiments exact concerning the game.  As for your pic, no way is that intellivision lives ds.  How'd you get that sweet looking interface!?

[+wavemotion]

19 minutes ago, 4ever2600 said:

Awesome!  Thanks for the share,  my sentiments exact concerning the game.  As for your pic, no way is that intellivision lives ds.  How'd you get that sweet looking interface!?

Right... after suffering for a decade with the badly screen-cropped Inty-Lives-DS (plus no sounds for count food, count arrows), I decided to write an Intellivision emulator for the DS. It's based on the old BLISS core but heavily updated/modified for running on the DS and DSi.  The emulator is called Nintellivision (NINTY-DS is the short-name) and I support custom overlays. I have an all-text Minotaur overlay built into the emulator but I designed that custom overlay for my own personal use - taking a high resolution scan of my Treasure of Tarmin overlay - and then re-arranging it in a horizontal format (I also can map side-buttons on the Inty controller to hotspots on the touch-screen so added the Count Food and Count Arrows). 

I can also map any intellivision controller function to any button on the DS.  So I've got my preferred setup as follows:

A=Attack
X=Swap (eXchange)
B=Open
Y=Pickup
Left Shoulder=Rotate Pack
Right Shoulder=Show Map
Select=Save/Load Game State

It's really awesome to play with this setup

Edited September 28, 2021 by llabnip

[4ever2600]

*Right... after suffering for a decade with the badly screen-cropped Inty-Lives-DS (plus no sounds for count food, count arrows)*

 

Man I hear that.   Sighs... 

 

 

[Oscar G.]

Thanks for the cheat sheet and your hard work. Definitely useful. 
 

In terms of the broken official DS version of the game, it’s indeed a great shame as it’s a perfect game for the portable format and touch controls. 
 

I’ll also be interested in playing the fixed version on DS/DSi. Is there a place where one can find instructions/guide/resources for the hack? Thanks again and a big hello from Belgium. O

[+wavemotion]

6 hours ago, Oscar G. said:

I’ll also be interested in playing the fixed version on DS/DSi. Is there a place where one can find instructions/guide/resources for the hack? Thanks again and a big hello from Belgium. O

The emulator is open-source and you can find it on github:  https://github.com/wavemotion-dave/NINTV-DS 

It's also baked into the latest release of Twilight Menu++ (TWL++) which is an open-source menu replacement for the DS/DSi which has a suite of virtual consoles built-in (including the 5 emulators I've worked on... StellaDS, A5200DS, A7800DS and XEGS-DS which is a full Atari 8-bit emulator... plus the latest Nintellivision). 

The trick is getting these to run on your DS.  This comes down to two main possibilities:

• If you have an older DS-LITE or DS-PHAT (no SD card) then you will need a Flash Cart.  Everyone and their brother (in China) makes these carts... they run from US$15 for cheap ones to $50+ for less cheap ones but in my experience even the cheap R4i knock-off flash carts get the job done with no problem.  Think of these flash carts like the venerable LTO cart - you put your games on the micro SD card and that sits inside a normal DS looking cart... boot the cart and you get a menu of the games on it. 
• If you have a "newer" (still a decade old) DSi with an SD card you're in great shape. The extra CPU power of the DSi, extra memory and the addition of an SD card makes this easy. You just need to put some files on the SD card to get it to boot into TWL++ and you can then play all the old systems on the rock-solid Nintendo DS handheld (in my opinion, as solid a hand-held as you can buy). 

Google will help you find a guide on how to do both of these things - it's a bit beyond the scope of this thread but you can PM me if you need help.

 

Lastly, this project is less a 'hack' than a ground-up (well, using the BLISS core) emulator for the DS/DSi. It's capable of playing any intellivision game minus ECS support (which I'll add eventually). It's got built-in JLP accelerator and RAM functionality (hello Grail of the Gods!!). The Intellivoice is emulated (via SP0256 emulation) rather than .WAV files used in the DS-Lives. It's using code and technology that existed in 2010 - and took 3 weeks for me to get up and running with full save state support, high-scores (10 for each game), custom overlays, custom button mapping. It supports two kinds of "dual action" controllers so you can fire and move at the same time in many games, etc. It has customization of the color palette. They could have paid me a pittance and used this emulator instead of the one we got   I agree, it's a shame since the DS touch-screen is as close a you can get to having the feel of the original inty games in the palm of your hand.  And with quality-of-life improvements (save states, custom button maps, etc.) the experience can be even a bit more enjoyable. I have a small fleet of Intellivision master components and about 80 games - but I hardly haul it out anymore as the experience on the DS/DSi has now provided a more convenient way to play the games I love. I will, of course, continue to support the BSR and future Intellivision projects - though I had to take a good long break after the disappointment that was DS Intellivision Lives. 

[+wavemotion]

12 hours ago, 4ever2600 said:

*Right... after suffering for a decade with the badly screen-cropped Inty-Lives-DS (plus no sounds for count food, count arrows)*

 

Man I hear that.   Sighs... 

What's really perplexing is that the DS vertical screen is 192 pixel lines. This resolution couldn't be any more prefect for Intellivision which utilizes that same number of pixel rows (NTSC anyway). There is absolutely no need to do any sort of scaling in the vertical direction (horizontally the DS is 256 pixels and so some stretching is required to fill the screen). I can't for the life of me understand why we got some games with cut-of content at the bottom and yet other areas of the screen were compressed vertically (take a look at things like the knife which lose a pixel row as you get closer).  Maybe the emulator was ported from some other emulator that rendered the screens upscaled and then the port to Intellivision Lives DS downscaled it rather than just let it draw at the natural resolution of the STIC. I don't know... but it still doesn't make sense that anyone could sign-off on the games with such obvious bugs as to render some of the best games nearly unplayable (I still played Minotaur on DS-Lives and would try to remember or write down the stuff that was not shown... though it was painful). 

Tarmin is only one example of problems. Cloudy Mountain you can't hear the arrow clicks for counting... though at least the game is mostly playable (despite occasionally having the little adventure guy run through walls and sometimes get suck when the action gets hectic on screen).  Space Spartans completely omits any sort of number counting - I guess they didn't include those .WAV files (as I recall, those might have been built into the iVoice binary) ... so you can't hear how many aliens are in your sector nor your energy count. The list is long - too long for a beloved platform that deserved better. 

Edited September 29, 2021 by llabnip

[ts-x]

This looks fantastic! I’ve been thinking about a portable retro gaming device with a larger screen for awhile, but the lack of Intellivision support was always a deal killer. This makes the DS/3DS a much better option. Speaking of the 3DS, is Nintellivision able to scale the resolution to fill the entire screen?

 

One other thought, have you considered adding combo button press functionality for the 4 primary buttons? Jzintv allows this and it is really useful for Cloudy Mountain, TRON Deadly Discs and some sports games. Combos would allow 8-direction shooting using just the 4 primary buttons e.g. pressing A and B together could be set to KP9 shoot SE.

 

Thanks for all of your work on this, looking forward to trying it out!

[+wavemotion]

Thanks ts-x...  right now you can map any of the 8 DS buttons (not the d-pad) to any keypad/button function on the Intellivision. But you can't do combinations. 
For Cloudy Mountain, I map ABXY to the four main arrow shooting directions. And I map L/R shoulder buttons to 'Run' and then set the controller type to 'Dual Action' so I can run and shoot at the same time. Although I can't fire on the diagonals with this setup (without touching the custom overlay), it does allow me to play fairly smoothly and I have no problems beating Hard (3) and very occasionally I can beat Hardest (disc). 
I though about adding combo buttons but I'm worried about race conditions where the system thinks you've pressed A before B and fires a stray arrow... or else I have to delay a bit to see if another key is pressed at "nearly the same time" which delays the arrow firing which might be perceived as laggy controls.  But it's a solid idea... and I'll definitely play with it a bit to see if it handles smooth enough in practice. 

 

 

Edit: forgot to answer your 3DS question... I don't have a 3DS. But I've been told it will run on a 3DS and I think it will stretch the screen but really that's not very optimal anyway since the DS/DSi has the proper vertical resolution (192 pixel lines) for the Intellivision. That is: there is no stretching vertically to render a proper Intellivision screen. Any stretching on the 3DS will be slightly blurry (just as native DS games will stretch slightly and look "out of focus" a bit on a 3DS).   I play mostly on my DSi XL which is a really big hand-held screen... I think it's pretty close to the size of the 3DS screen based on only having played the 3DS a few times. 
 

Edited October 3, 2021 by llabnip

[Oscar G.]

Thank you very much for sharing these interesting resources. I will check them out. It provides a “new hope” vs the failed promise of the Intellivision Lives portability. Much appreciated. 

[ts-x]

For anyone interested in portable Intellivision play, I recommend keeping an eye on Nintellivision’s progress over at GBAtemp.  It already supports the majority of the game library, save states, custom touchscreen overlays and controls, menu based button mapping and control configuration, game manuals, custom palettes, and a ton of user defined options. Llabnip has even fixed several long standing compatibility issues with the original BLISS core!

[SiLic0ne t0aD]

Sweet! Hopefully this'll work/look right on the New 3DS XL too.

[ts-x]

38 minutes ago, SiLic0ne t0aD said:

Sweet! Hopefully this'll work/look right on the New 3DS XL too.

I have a New 2DS XL and it's working like a charm via TWiLight Menu++.  There are several Atari emulators developed by llabnip available under that umbrella as well (2600, 5200, 7800, XEGS).  I've already spent some time with the Atari 2600 emulator and it's pretty sweet.  It includes a lot of the same type of functionality.

[SiLic0ne t0aD]

Word! I'll give it a go. ?