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Tempest Xtreem Playable Demo


Kjmann

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Well Here it is Fans. The Tempest Xtreem Playable Demo. 3 levels for you all to enjoy. =)

There may still be some bugs in it but the gameplay should be pretty close to the final product.

 

 

 

Awesome! Going to try it now.

 

OOPS - forgot to say thanks to all involved.

 

EDIT #2

Doesn't work on the real thing (Atari 130XE with 320KB "Peterson" mod, 32-in-1 OS, NTSC). Worked in both PAL & NTSC in emulator.

Looks and plays great!

 

Stephen Anderson

Edited by Stephen
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Doesn't work on real machine. It's a pity because I feel very hard the controls of the emulator specially on this type of game. Ok, let's go:

 

The Good

======

 

- Look graphically exactly at what I can imagine of an 8bit Atari version of Tempest 2000. Excellent

- Have all enemies and bonuses of Tempest 2000 that I can remember. Excellent

- The music is extraordinary good, create a great ambient

 

The Bad

=====

 

- Your ship move too blocky, one cell per time. Maybe there are 2 adjustments I think it could be done: 1- Rotate the shape of the ship as on Tempest 2000 (this could be optional because is very difficult), 2- The most important: move the ship with fine movement. I only can think an example as THE EXTERMINATOR, it looks very fine the movement, with extra acceleration algorithm should be look very cool !

- The control feels unresponsive when you want to move only one cell. (Maybe I can be confused by the emulator control). It's necessary to add fast responsive movement by ONLY ONE cell when you do a very little and fast push on stick.

 

I hope this can help. Anyway, is a great work and promises much this product.

 

Regards

Edited by Allas
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- Your ship move too blocky, one cell per time.

I agree, moving without changing shape looks odd. The ship needs to creep around the playfield a bit, just like the original.

 

Also, driving controller support? :)

 

Want to also point out that the music is fantastic, just like the outrun, etc. examples I've heard. kjmann - you and POKEY are rockin' :cool:

Edited by remowilliams
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Are you using SpartaDOS? Part of Tempest loads under the OS ROM. Also Tempest does make a directly calls some OS ROM locations (XL/XE version 3.) I can try switching to more conventional OS that is more widely used.

 

From what I see, the OS V.3 is 800XE, a european flavor only. Not US XL standard.

 

It does not load with my XL, my XEGS, or my 130XE.

 

A more conventional OS is almost always preferred.

 

Thanks,

Rick.

Edited by a8maestro
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Pete... hopefully in the final version you gonna switch off OS anyway... or for what the hell are you using the OS in a game like Tempest? ;)

 

Well I am glad that AtariAge is back.

 

I am using the OS to setup the graphics mode and drawing the vectored lines to set up the screen. I did this to save development time and memory space. I may look at the ideal of a custom line routine, but it will take some time to test and develop. Have to consider we are doing this work in our space time. Now the Rom images for my emulator were of the XL/XE standard and I did try it on several different ones, it did work on both NTSC and PAL systems.

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Pete... did you look at that routine I sent to you?

 

And, using the OS routine - making direct calls or going through CIO? I guess it's direct call if it only works under certain OS types.

 

I could look at doing a routine - could probably make it memory efficient as well as reasonably quick. Is the release medium for the game going to be ROM only? What sort of memory constraints are there?

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Pete... did you look at that routine I sent to you?

 

And, using the OS routine - making direct calls or going through CIO? I guess it's direct call if it only works under certain OS types.

 

I could look at doing a routine - could probably make it memory efficient as well as reasonably quick. Is the release medium for the game going to be ROM only? What sort of memory constraints are there?

 

Well Rybags, Pete Said he would really appreciate the help. so if you would write a good line drawing routine that would be awesome.

 

The Release of this game will be Cartridge only. No Emulator Friendly medium is planned.

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A "simple" line draw routine? ok.ok... that should be not a major issue... :D

 

I just dezipped my own bresenham algorithm not much optimised as memory was tight as well... but a line routine should be no prob to get.

 

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=123826

 

unzip with PKzip and unfortunatly you have to load the ASM files with Torsten Karwoth's Macro Ass XE. But I will have a look if I can get the source as TXT file to paste it here.

 

and Pete, have you checked as well the MADS archive & examples? Maybe there are some routines as well...

 

it's in Antic E i guess... and the routine is placed in RAM so we can use self modifing code?

Edited by Heaven/TQA
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Here is a new release of the demo with some changes to the control

 

Remember to stop and tap the joystick left or right to make the claw change positions and step left or right and to individual lanes.

 

This version will also run on a Real Atari.

 

 

 

 

 

Enjoy!

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The game still seems to be promising. But I have some notes:

 

-The game runs in 60Hz well (in the emulation), but in 50Hz (PAL) the whole movement is messed

-The movement of the ship is very raw

-The "implementation of rules" when the ship is caught, is much too coarse.

--They catch the ship even if there is an "inch" between the ship and them

--If the enemy is on the border you are automatically dead. In the original game you always have a chance to kill them.

Edited by emkay
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Here is a new release of the demo with some changes to the control

 

Remember to stop and tap the joystick left or right to make the claw change positions and step left or right and to individual lanes.

 

This version will also run on a Real Atari.

 

 

 

 

 

Enjoy!

 

 

Awesome! I thought I would have to get a Dreamcast to do an Atari job. :P

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The game still seems to be promising. But I have some notes:

 

-The game runs in 60Hz well (in the emulation), but in 50Hz (PAL) the whole movement is messed

-The movement of the ship is very raw

-The "implementation of rules" when the ship is caught, is much too coarse.

--They catch the ship even if there is an "inch" between the ship and them

--If the enemy is on the border you are automatically dead. In the original game you always have a chance to kill them.

 

 

 

Alright lets address these one at a time.

 

-The game runs in 60Hz well (in the emulation), but in 50Hz (PAL) the whole movement is messed

 

We are aware of this problem but not quite sure how to fix it. this game after all was made in the USA which means "originally Designed for NTSC"

We would ask rybags and Heaven to contact Pete or I in Personal Email to offer any suggestions on a fix when playing on PAL hardware.

 

 

 

-The movement of the ship is very raw

 

Yes and for a good reason. the decision was made that in a fast paced game like this the claw had to be able to move back and fourth VERY quickly. to do this the idea hit us that we could have it set up so the player could move the joystick back and fourth to make bullets spread out in several lanes and thus have more of a fighting chance to live. but if the player stops, and waits for a quarter of a second (in NTSC That is) they can tap the joystick left or right and step either direction one at a time and keep tapping to keep moving from one lane to the next and through the different positions on the lane. when a flipper comes at you from the left or right you need to be cocked to the oppisite side they are comming from to have a chance to kill them. although that dosen't always work either, some times they can slip through. =)

but this game wasn't intended to be easy to beat. after all there is nothing worse than a game that you can just blow through and complete in a hour, I would consider that a waste of my money to buy such a game.

 

 

-The "implementation of rules" when the ship is caught, is much too coarse.

--They catch the ship even if there is an "inch" between the ship and them

--If the enemy is on the border you are automatically dead. In the original game you always have a chance to kill them.

 

This is our rendition of tempest. the rules are what we set. this is not tempest 2000 or original tempest for the 8bit.

This game will have a similar feel to tempest 2k but will not be an exact rendition of it. after all, tempest 2k was Jeff Minters brain child and we wanted to come up with something that had some of the good points of T2k and add some of our own flavor to it.

We were not interested in duplicating the original or T2k.

 

Heaven and Rybags. If you have some ideas for the PAL problems Please send me an email to my regular yahoo account. =)

 

Please everyone else feel free to leave more of your comments and I will try to respond and take note of any actual bugs that come up. =)

 

 

Thanks everyone.

Edited by kjmann
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Here is a new release of the demo with some changes to the control

 

Remember to stop and tap the joystick left or right to make the claw change positions and step left or right and to individual lanes.

 

This version will also run on a Real Atari.

 

 

 

 

 

Enjoy!

 

 

 

Awesome job, keep up the good work!!! I tried it on my Mac via emulator and my only complaint is the controls seem a bit dodgy. I kept getting "stuck" but that may be because I don't have a gamepad on my iMac, so I was using the keyboard. I will try later on my Toshiba laptop with gamepad. I gotta say this game has so much potential!!! Imagine if this had come out back in the 80's!!! It surpasses Livewire in everyway and that was one of my favs back in the day.

Edited by Warriorisabouttodie
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I tried to use the Make ATR for this but it freezes my laptop when trying to write the image to disk. Only one I've ever had an issue with locking up my laptop. 3 times and I just gave up (and this was after re-connecting to make sure everything was in order) Maybe I'll try to give it another go this weekend.

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The music on PAL seems to go bad at times too, although I was just changing modes in the emulator which might have caused some havoc.

 

Any chance I could have a summary of the control algorithm? Definately needs a bit of tweaking.

It's like sometimes you tell it to move and you get response, others you move and it does nothing and you die. NTSC included, although I can only do NTSC in emulation.

 

Also, don't know if the arcade does the same, but at EOL the spikes killed me when it said I had the shield on.

Edited by Rybags
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