Wrathchild Posted January 31, 2008 Share Posted January 31, 2008 (edited) As January has kicked off what looks to be a great year ahead for the A8 series, here is work so far on this conversion of another classic title to add to the list The game should be run with 64K at least as RAM under the O/S is used. Generally most of the game keys seem to be working OK and the map looks good and you can wander around and choose menus etc, but I've only just got that working today and so take it with a pinch a salt. CONTROLS (ATARI) Character Control Keys: ----------------------- 1-8 Look in direction (N-NE-E-SE-S-SW-W-NW) Space Bar Move in current direction (sends to Choose menu if you can't move until you choose) <- (backspace) Back to Look in current direction from Think screens (doesn't appear to do anything) Return Think - Examine selected character/battles TAB Choose Menu C Go to Select Character Mode Other Keys: ---------- 0 (zero) Night (end turn) Y Yes (as when dawn appears) N No S Save Game to tape (*) L Load Game from tape (*) (*) Code currently disabled The big stumbling block for this title is the use of colour. It maybe OK in the two-tone mode but working the engine to employ sprite under/overlays would be quite an undertaking. An alernative would be to swap to a 4 colour character mode but this would mean re-designing all graphics and the loss of the nice detail available currently is not as nice (IMHO). Still, its early days... plenty of time for improvements. Regards, Mark [EDIT] the instructions had the 'Choose Menu' and 'Select Character Mode' keys the wrong way around. lomXL.zip Edited February 8, 2008 by Wrathchild Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pengwin Posted January 31, 2008 Share Posted January 31, 2008 Mark, that looks amazing. Well done. You say the problem is the use of colour, well, how about a gradient at the top of the screen (using DLIs') and then maybe a different colour for the ground area. just a thought (but I have had a drink or two ) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wrathchild Posted January 31, 2008 Author Share Posted January 31, 2008 Almost forgot - some of the graphics may look corrupted (e.g. Dragon) as the font memory gets overwritten by the screen's character map due to this being a simulation of the c64 screen memory layout (except it takes up a little more memory space - hence the overlap). So there's still some jiggling around to do with the use of memory to correct this, but shouldn't be too hard Also, don't ask 'how do I play this game?', check around on the internet - e.g. here Mark Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
deathtrappomegranate Posted January 31, 2008 Share Posted January 31, 2008 Excellent I loved this game on the Spectrum way back when, and couldn't stop playing until I'd beaten it. I "borrowed" the font for a commercial demo, too. I always thought that it was better than many people gave it credit for, so I'm very happy to see it resurrected on the A8. Keep up the good work! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wrathchild Posted January 31, 2008 Author Share Posted January 31, 2008 (but I have had a drink or two )I did wonder why your avatar's eyes looked shot RE colour gradients, nice idea - I may try something later on that, but the screen uses charmode and so adding in the colour changes is a little trickier that a raster/bitmap mode (e.g. currently there is a DLI every 3 lines of chars = 24 pixels). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wrathchild Posted January 31, 2008 Author Share Posted January 31, 2008 Keep up the good work! Thanks! Is the weather in Scotland so bad tonight that its keeping you all up? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pengwin Posted January 31, 2008 Share Posted January 31, 2008 Oh yes...it's freezing up here...still, keeps me awake enough for Yoomp! (I still love that game) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
deathtrappomegranate Posted January 31, 2008 Share Posted January 31, 2008 There was a young man from TyndrumWho was buried in snow, to his bum. When they asked, "Are you chilly?" He said, "Aye, and my willy Has shrunk to the size of a crumb." Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
happymonster Posted January 31, 2008 Share Posted January 31, 2008 Would the 3 colours PM overlay effect I talked about recently work in the char mode? That might help the gfx a bit.. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
walter_J64bit Posted February 1, 2008 Share Posted February 1, 2008 What other C64 games are going to be ported over? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
_Fandal_ Posted February 1, 2008 Share Posted February 1, 2008 Looks great! F. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xxl Posted February 1, 2008 Share Posted February 1, 2008 nice Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wrathchild Posted February 1, 2008 Author Share Posted February 1, 2008 What other C64 games are going to be ported over? Hi, Actually I wouldn't mind getting back into fixing the drawing routines of a well known game I'd started porting way back that's called "The Sentinel" (or "The Sentry" in the US I think). Actually the Spectrum version looks OK so could be a candidate for an XXL port one day... or even the BBC version. It might also be worth progressing the Barbarian and World Class Leaderboard work I did. Then again "The Bard's Tale" would be a good favourite to do. Oh yes, there's also Paradroid, Impossible Mission, Rock'n'Bolt, Speedball and maybe the Infocom engine for v4&5 titles. Stunt Car Racer would be a challenge too and if I was feeling very bold, I'd go for something ambitious like the Maniac Mansion engine. All of these I've looked at to various degrees in the past and so if anyone wanted to collaborate on progessing any of them then drop me a PM. Best wishes, Mark Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
happymonster Posted February 1, 2008 Share Posted February 1, 2008 Just a test.. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
emkay Posted February 2, 2008 Share Posted February 2, 2008 Just a test.. Just an almost perfect "Grayscale" conversion. Id would be "perfect" if the whole picture is brighter and the "black knight" is the darkest shape on the screen. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
happymonster Posted February 2, 2008 Share Posted February 2, 2008 To get the black knight, the sky would have to be black too. Which might actually work for the kind of moody gfx style used in this game. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
emkay Posted February 2, 2008 Share Posted February 2, 2008 To get the black knight, the sky would have to be black too. Which might actually work for the kind of moody gfx style used in this game. I'm pretty sure the picture can be adjusted Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wrathchild Posted February 8, 2008 Author Share Posted February 8, 2008 An updated version here as I've shuffled everything around in memory to try an include all graphic images - the result being that one image I had to be left out. However, this game is big and uses all of the memory, for example the O/S is switched out and all zeropage addresses are reserved to be used in the same way the C64 would. Also, the overhead of providing the screen mapping seems to have not left me with space for the save/load routines which are still left out. Therefore here are a couple of options: 1) The C64 game uses some of the memory under the O/S to save the 'initital game state', so that when a game is restarted this is restored and you start afresh. In a single executable version of the game the usefullness of this can be debated (e.g. quit and reload). So this could be dropped in favour of pushing some more static graphic data in RAM under the O/S. 2) The game could run from a disk image and so therefore pull in the 'initial game state' data when required. This also has the advantage that a loader titlescreen could be employed too. The game would still require 64K to run without having to load from the disk during gameplay. 3) In order to have the game run on non-64K+ machines, a cartridge would have to be used. This could either be an AtariMax flash-cart (128K) or an XEGS (64K or 128K) model. A little more thought involved in taking this approach but obviously limits its distribution to emulator playing or existing flash-cart owners. 4) Try to optimize the current code a bit further to squeeze everything into 64K and leave it at that (and maybe tack a shown-once titlescreen into the XEX. Let me know your thoughts. Mark lomXL.zip Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wrathchild Posted February 8, 2008 Author Share Posted February 8, 2008 Another aside: The C64 used a single sprite for the 'sun' which quite nicely tracks across the sky, rises/sets and chanegs colour accordingly. I think I can free up a memory window to do this using just missles on the A8, so currently you don't see it in the demo. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted February 8, 2008 Share Posted February 8, 2008 Great work, Mark! I would vote for option b)...make a disc game out of it... if the game would be a commercial release it would be sold on 5,25 discs anyway.... and we could have title screen... is there any space loft you could utilisize 128k ram for 130xe support if available? or ramdisc? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
deathtrappomegranate Posted February 8, 2008 Share Posted February 8, 2008 If you plan to distribute the game using actual media, a cartridge is the only way to go. However, if it's going to be available on the web only, then a disk image is probably simpler. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Goochman Posted February 8, 2008 Share Posted February 8, 2008 I would not worry about 48k machines - I would guess the vast majority of folks that would be interested have 64k+ If selling this as an Atarimax 8mbit cart would solve all kinds of issues then go for it - I think haivng another quality release in a shorter timeframe would be better for all IMHO. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+CharlieChaplin Posted February 8, 2008 Share Posted February 8, 2008 (edited) Well, if the prefered disk-version of the game should be played on *real* Ataris, make sure, it does not use memory from $0700-$09FF (as your first upload did!). Otherwise with a standard OS one cannot load it from any existing DOS, Gamedos, Bootloader, etc. (ok, some third-party OS`s have built-in file-loaders, but I want to have the game running on standard XL/XE OS also)... -Andreas Koch. Edited February 8, 2008 by CharlieChaplin Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wrathchild Posted February 8, 2008 Author Share Posted February 8, 2008 Fair point Andreas but if loading from a disk image then DOS isn't a factor as a stand-alone game disk usually provides its own boot-strapping code. It also implies that you'd like DOS in memory during the loading of the game, then what? Should the DOS area be overwritten as the game code/data is expanded into as the game requires - or would you prefer the game to leave that area alone, e.g. for save files? As far as I currently know the zero-page registers used by the game maybe important to the DOS, these would have to be swapped out and restored as the DOS is used. That aside, I think you're more after a single XEX (rather than a disk image) version as already supplied but which avoids use of memory below $A00 until it has been fully loaded? If so I can work towards that, or are there some compression programs that would simply take the existing XEX and produce a new one that loads higher and decompresses upwards? Best wishes, Mark Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+CharlieChaplin Posted February 9, 2008 Share Posted February 9, 2008 Well, I prefer *.XEX files that can be loaded at least with a Gamedos... So you are free to use (some/most of) page 0 to page 6 (but as said before not page 7, 8 and 9) and then $0A00-BFFF and C000-CFFF, D800-FFFx (if you switch off the OS and use RAM under the OS)... -Andreas Koch. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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