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Let's imagine: MYST on the Lynx


JagChris

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On 3/25/2022 at 3:10 AM, JagChris said:

 

Well if I can get the sources from my frigging old dropbox account you won't have to code puzzles. It should largely be done already. 

 

I think these bastards are ignoring me. 

 

I don't think Dropbox is the company it once was.

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Well Dropbox won't return my messages and now it even seems their send us an email option isn't available anymore. 

 

Actually this shouldn't be an issue but these source codes are being hoarded due to a broken deal. They should be available to everyone.

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On 4/1/2022 at 5:32 AM, WesleyrpgAust said:

Don't forget the Lynx is capable of 16 colours per scanline so in theory it's capable of displaying 1632 colours (16x102)

 

I'm sure it would run out of RAM/Video RAM well before it could utilize the 1632 individual colours though!

Nope. it wont run out of RAM.

People were clever enough to prove this years ago.

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Am absolutely convinced that it can be done, converting hi-res images (2560x240) down to just 160x102 pixels by simply blurring those pixels down, to convert hi-colors (256) down to 16 colors you can use dithering (that pixel blurring can help eliminate those dithering artifacts) and that old lcd screen does help blurring away those artifacts,

another way is to use color blending to eliminate that muddy effect in 16 colors

another method is to use the ham color trick by breaking that 256 color image down into 16 layers and then refreshing each image 16 times to make all 256 color do appear to the naked eye and that low responsive lcd display to help with that effect as well,but it does involve extra processing power thus eating battery’s more quicker.

to overcome to 512KB limit of rom size of the atari lynx ,you could split let’s say a 4MB game into section of 512ZkB and load thenm 1 after another by using to isolating the lynx ram(that’s how the lynx sd card also work to switch from the menu to a game from your choice)

this way you can overcome this limitation,

also the lynx seems to have a hidden option to run in 480x102 mode but at the cost of colors,but it shows that there is still a huge potential with the atari lynx

so games such as nyst can be imagineble on the lynx?

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On 3/28/2022 at 7:50 PM, PFG 9000 said:

As popular as that opinion may be these days, Myst was a very fun game in its time.  The visuals of course were state of the art, but its greatest strength was its immersive atmosphere.  Obtuse puzzles are no fun if the world they're in isn't engaging.  But Cyan realized this and made the environments beautifully captivating.  There is some pretty thoughtful lore behind the series, even just with the first installment.  And Myst's soundtrack holds up well nearly 30 years later.

 

Maybe I'm just biased though.  I loved every second of Myst on the Jaguar CD back in the 90s.  But it was the best-selling PC game for years, so I can't be the only one who enjoyed it.

Well, it was the gateway drug of choice of many for '90s Windows gaming, and I too was entranced by the beautifully-rendered graphics until I realized that many of the puzzles were irritatingly illogical and unsolvable. Bring me the red pages!

 

I will say that I was just as captivated at the time by Jewels of the Oracle, a contemporary puzzler with equally gorgeous graphics that no one remembers. That one would be a much better fit for the Lynx.

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  • 2 months later...

With the full rewrite of our ECSD cart, I was pretty impressed at how fast I could decode a BMP file from SD, transfer it over to the cart SRAM, tell the lynx the data was ready (via a slow eeprom interface) and have the lynx render it. There is very little lag on completely unoptimized code so what is possible if we try optimise it?

I'm thinking I could clock my ARM in my cart from 72mhz up to 120mhz (safe limit), optimise my SD code to extract sectors directly to the cart SRAM without double buffering and use the AUDIN line as a simple handshake to tell the Lynx the image is ready to read from the cart. If the images were pre-prepared (not BMP, and sector aligned) I think we'd push frame rates high enough to be considered video (on an oem screen anyway). If a small CPLD in the Lynx was allowed, we could get direct cart IO access which would remove just about the only bottleneck in the system preventing smooth FMV

I might play around with FFMPEG to see what is really possible. A little tighter seek/read function could help too

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