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Game Idea: Dragon's Lair 2600


dr. kwack

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Hiya,

 

For the past few days while I should have been working, I've wondered...

 

If someone were to carry out a "Coleco-fied" version of Dragon's Lair for the 2600, what would it be like? I can picture the label on the cream colored cart plain as day but would the game be like the ADAM version (which I have never seen first hand- although I know the EA/"Amazing Software" version for the C-64 is pretty much the same) or...

 

Could you actually pull off a cart containing a few of the simpler rooms from the arcade game like "Drink Me", Flaming Ropes, or Falling Platform?

 

I know they would have to be very simplified but considering some of the great stuff we've seen home brewers doing lately (like the dancing baby demo)I think it could be interesting.

 

I have some ideas.

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Well, considering you never actually controll Dirk (in the arcade) It's more of a button sequence to select the next set of frames shown. It should be very possible to do....considering someone wanted to take the time and money to cram all those full frames into a cart. It would be a huge cart though.

 

Check out the GameBoy Color though. It's got a decent version of Dragons Lair. Of course, the bad thing is I think that it is on a 16 Mb card

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  • 4 weeks later...

Ha! Very nice mock-up!

 

As far as the C-64 version goes, yeah I had that as a teenager. I was quite the DL fanatic and since I only had a C64, that version had to suffice. It was quite lacking though.

 

Actually a few of the boards worked on the same principle as the arcade. You had to go the right direction at the exact moment or you would die. This made the fly weapons and skeleton hall boards kind of crummy to play. You just kept pushing "sword" again and again and again until the move was complete.

 

Shoe

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  • 3 years later...

Just dug out this thread out of the "Enormous Homebrew Thread Repository" and wondered what kind of quality the frames would have on a 2600. Hmmm... if you have 30 frames per second, you could try to do it with playfield graphics, changing both foreground and background colors in every scanline. I don't know if it would be possible to change both color registers and rewrite the full width of the background in each scanline... but if it was possible, you'd need 7-8 bytes per scanline, with 200 lines on screen that's 1400-1600 bytes per frame, or 42-48k per second.

How good could such a frame look like at all? Maybe something like this...

post-8393-1175816670_thumb.jpg

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Just dug out this thread out of the "Enormous Homebrew Thread Repository" and wondered what kind of quality the frames would have on a 2600. Hmmm... if you have 30 frames per second, you could try to do it with playfield graphics, changing both foreground and background colors in every scanline. I don't know if it would be possible to change both color registers and rewrite the full width of the background in each scanline... but if it was possible, you'd need 7-8 bytes per scanline, with 200 lines on screen that's 1400-1600 bytes per frame, or 42-48k per second.

How good could such a frame look like at all? Maybe something like this...

post-8393-1175816670_thumb.jpg

Different folks, most notably Andrew Davie, have achieved *much* better results. Do a search of the [stella] list archives, perhaps starting here: http://www.atariage.com/pipermail/stella/2...ust/016960.html

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Could you actually pull off a cart containing a few of the simpler rooms from the arcade game like "Drink Me", Flaming Ropes, or Falling Platform?

 

A specially-built cart should be able to pull data from a SmartMedia chip fast enough for a full realtime display. Not sure there'd be enough justification to spend the effort building the cart, though.

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The whole point of Dragon's Lair was the stunning graphics and audio from laser disc. I think it was bad that any non-laser disc ports were done back in the day. The only way to do a port that I think is worth doing it is to build a driver plugged into a Joystick port that controls an external DVD player. The original 7800 console has a special accessory port on the left side for driving a laserdisc player that was never released.

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The whole point of Dragon's Lair was the stunning graphics and audio from laser disc. I think it was bad that any non-laser disc ports were done back in the day. The only way to do a port that I think is worth doing it is to build a driver plugged into a Joystick port that controls an external DVD player. The original 7800 console has a special accessory port on the left side for driving a laserdisc player that was never released.

 

A 2600 version of Dragon's Lair using a SmartMedia-chipped cart should not be particularly difficult. The 7800 might be a bit more interesting. The raw data transfer rate from a SmartMedia chip would be adequate without any particular difficulty, but SmartMedia devices require a brief pause after reading each page of data (typically slightly over 2K). I think the trick would be to count out the Maria fetches to ensure that each page boundary corresponded to the end of a batch of DMA fetches.

 

If that were done, I would think full motion video would be possible at 160x200x16 resolution. It might even be possible to switch color sets on alternate scan lines. Video at 30fps would probably burn through flash at a rate of about a half a megabyte per second; 60fps video (which would look better than 30fps if alternate-scan-line coloring was used) would need twice that. Given the availability of very large SmartMedia devices that shouldn't be a problem. If 24fps source material were used, shave about 20% off those figures.

 

One slight difficulty would be managing the audio. I'm not sure how many CPU cycles could execute per scan line while the DMA was running full-screen 160x200x16, but something like:

 sta WSYNC
 lda SMREAD
 sta AUDV0

would probably be necessary.

 

I think the 7800 could probably do a very decent-looking Dragon's Lair style game, though I'll admit I'm not sure what the point would be. Certainly not to show what was possible "back in the day".

Edited by supercat
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The whole point of Dragon's Lair was the stunning graphics and audio from laser disc. I think it was bad that any non-laser disc ports were done back in the day. The only way to do a port that I think is worth doing it is to build a driver plugged into a Joystick port that controls an external DVD player. The original 7800 console has a special accessory port on the left side for driving a laserdisc player that was never released.

 

A DVD player can already play Dragon's Lair without needing a computer hooked up to it.

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This was discussed within Atari at one point. To equipment a 2600 with an IR remote and control a laserdisc player to play a game such as Dragon's Lair.

 

 

Curt

 

The whole point of Dragon's Lair was the stunning graphics and audio from laser disc. I think it was bad that any non-laser disc ports were done back in the day. The only way to do a port that I think is worth doing it is to build a driver plugged into a Joystick port that controls an external DVD player. The original 7800 console has a special accessory port on the left side for driving a laserdisc player that was never released.

 

A DVD player can already play Dragon's Lair without needing a computer hooked up to it.

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This was discussed within Atari at one point. To equipment a 2600 with an IR remote and control a laserdisc player to play a game such as Dragon's Lair.

 

 

Curt

 

 

Even though I find that hard to believe I still realise that Atari had some pretty fantastic ideas in their hey day. Which Atari group though toyed with this idea Curt? ;)

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