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Lords Of Midnight - C64->Atari port


Wrathchild

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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 by Wrathchild
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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 ;) )

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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

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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!

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(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).

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What other C64 games are going to be ported over? :cool:

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

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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

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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?

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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.

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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 by CharlieChaplin
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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

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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.

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