Favorite 8-Bit Game Never Ported To The Atari Series

[TMR]

looking good - backup plan or not!

 

Sneaky is my middle name... well, really it's James but three letters match! =-)

[emkay]

Time to change the topic... the "goto page" function cannot handle more than 10 pages

 

 

 

curios...

 

 

 

Now its working

[Bryan]

TMR,

 

The game is looking good.

 

You know what I wanted to try... to do a full screen kernel and see if I could change to GTIA mode 9 a little way into each line and then stx and sty to change the color every 12 pixels to make 16 shade blocks. 3 cycle instructions should land on 12 pixel boundaries (Each CPU cycle is 2 pixels, and DMA is every other pixel, once refresh cycles end). Make the side borders out of players and it should look incredible, but it would take some serious time to write and it would be CPU consuming for most of the visible screen. I just wanted to see if it would work.

 

-Bry

[analmux]

PM Multiplexing needs much less color changes and by setting the PMg to fixed positions, you never have to use logics in programs for this.

 

Well I don't see much use of PM multiplexing. With DMA on, only ONE Pmbase (--you want to change the PM-shapes I suppose--) is usable each scanline. With DMA off, you need too many cycles to make it look good. Don't forget that in coarse PM you must reload the data of the first PM's on the left of the screen every other scanline....Great for static pictures, but horizontal colour-changing kernels are VERY time consuming, or you should make halfscreen games or something.

 

... to do a full screen kernel and see if I could change to GTIA mode 9 a little way into each line and then stx and sty to change the color every 12 pixels.....

 

I'm not sure, but it should be possible to mix colors with PM in GTIA 9

(only PM 0 & 1 I'm afraid)

 

----------------------

 

But I've done some stuff in the 90's too. I've made a simple turbobasic mario (which I never finished). You may download SMPDEMO.ATR (using turbobasic, which you can find on hscroll2.atr) and type:

 

run "d:smpdemo.bat"

 

run

 

You can enter a levelnumber between 0 and 15 and play. It's rather slow, has a few bugs too (mario can't face left, etc.), but it's an idea of what my new game will look like, but the new game will off course contain many PM overlays, better colorbalance, smartfonts, dynamic sounds, multilayer SCROLLING !!! (Hor. + Vert.), Machine Code instead of basic, and a big choice of levels.

 

I think (I hope) I just found the right balance between quality and speed.

 

 

there is another turbobasic program on the same ATR, which just shows a titlescreen of Mario3. Just type:

 

run "d:mariotit.bat"

 

run

 

--Enjoy the stuff--

 

analmux

[analmux]

Well here's another production of mine. You guessed it right, it's mario again. These are screenshots from some of my levels in debug-mode (no sprites/no playing). The main idea, graphics and all levels originate from 1995-1998. Then I finished highschool, started studying, but now I'm ready to finish the coding. The game will be available as freeware soon (possibly this year). It's still Antic 4 with flickering sprites, but I think it's a nice start for a beginner. It uses in fact almost the same spriteshapes from the SMPDEMO.

 

-mux

[emkay]

PM Multiplexing needs much less color changes and by setting the PMg to fixed positions, you never have to use logics in programs for this.

 

Well I don't see much use of PM multiplexing. With DMA on, only ONE Pmbase (--you want to change the PM-shapes I suppose--) is usable each scanline. With DMA off, you need too many cycles to make it look good. Don't forget that in coarse PM you must reload the data of the first PM's on the left of the screen every other scanline....Great for static pictures, but horizontal colour-changing kernels are VERY time consuming, or you should make halfscreen games or something.

 

 

 

As TMR said ....for Puzzle games or else.

And as emkay said ...change colors where needed

The Reaxion Screen has 32 Scanlines (Border) without a complex colorusage.

So... to make a color resolution, that is needed to fulfill the C64s ingame screen, 168 lines of DLIs or a resulting kernal was needed.

[Goochman]

Thats a nice looking Super Mario Bros clone - I always wondered if that could be done on the ole 8bit

[jindroush]

Because I recently did some hocus-pocus with cycle counting, here comes some heavy nitpicking:

 

Ok let's calculate the amount of available CPU cycles on the Atari.

 

1789790 cycles/second:

35795 cycles/frame (50 fps Europe!!  60 fps is worse)

-8640 cycles/frame DMA Antic mode 4 (40 * 24 * (8+1) reads) screen and fontdata

-1280 cycles/frame DMA Players & Missiles (Hi-res)

25875 cycles/frame remaining for the CPU

 

First, one PAL frame takes exactly 312 x 114 cycles, that's 35568.

Character DMA = 40 x 24

Graphics DMA = 40 x 24 x 8

DLIST DMA = 32 (not 100% sure right now)

PMG DMA = 5 x 240 (does _not_ matter if hi-res or not)

 

Then you've noticed:

 

 Silly me!

I forgot the 9 D-RAM refresh cycles on almost every scanline, performed by ANTIC on horizontal (PM) positions 16,24,32,40,48,56,64,72 and 80.

 

Ref DMA = 1 on first line, 9 on other lines in mode 4.

So, it's 312 * 9 - 24 * 8.

 

Total DMA: 12488 cycles

Free CPU: 23080 cycles

 

So you were (just) cca 2000 cycles off.

 

Also please note, that refresh doesn't always start on the same positions. It depends on graphics mode and HSCROL register (at least).

[emkay]

 Also please note, that refresh doesn't always start on the same positions. It depends on graphics mode and HSCROL register (at least).

 

 

 

 

Happy C64... only one graphicsmode and no one recognizes any DMA cycles

 

After all that DMA and RAM refresh the whole computer has no longer any Time to put graphics on the screen... what a mess

 

 

[TMR]

Happy C64... only one graphicsmode and no one recognizes any DMA cycles

 

Two modes with two resolutions (the lower res modes can mix) and a 40 cycle overhead 25 times a frame that moves if you use the vertical scrolling register - it's not exactly a utopia either, you try timing a split between vertical scroll and static! =-)

[emkay]

Happy C64... only one graphicsmode and no one recognizes any DMA cycles

 

Two modes with two resolutions (the lower res modes can mix) and a 40 cycle overhead 25 times a frame that moves if you use the vertical scrolling register - it's not exactly a utopia either, you try timing a split between vertical scroll and static! =-)

 

On the C64 you have the same memory usage... even with 320 res. or 160 ...

On the XL you can change the memory usage and minimize DMA by using a real lower res.

 

20x12 Charmode for example with only 80 Bytes of screendata + chardata of 1024 bytes

... or Antic mode 8 with a res. of 40x24 but only with 4 colors... usefull for nothing, but ANTIC can show it.

 

 

All I can say is that on the 40 Bytes Charmodelines the first is the DMA Line on which only are ~40 cycles available

the other seven lines still having around 120 cycles available...even after the RAM-refesh.

[jindroush]

All I can say is that on the 40 Bytes Charmodelines the first is the DMA Line on which only are ~40 cycles available

the other seven lines still having around 120 cycles available...even after the RAM-refesh.

 

I'm not sure I understand these statements

 

Let's compute:

 

First line: 1 (dlist), 40 (chars), 40 (graphics), 1 (ref) = 82. 114 - 82 = 32 free cycles.

 

Other lines: 40 (graphics), 9 (ref) = 49. 114 - 49 = 65 free cycles per line * 7 = 455 free cycles.

 

Where did you get that '120 cycles' number?

[Sheddy]

Well here's another production of mine. You guessed it right, it's mario again. These are screenshots from some of my levels in debug-mode (no sprites/no playing). The main idea, graphics and all levels originate from 1995-1998. Then I finished highschool, started studying, but now I'm ready to finish the coding. The game will be available as freeware soon (possibly this year). It's still Antic 4 with flickering sprites, but I think it's a nice start for a beginner. It uses in fact almost the same spriteshapes from the SMPDEMO.

 

-mux

 

It'll be great to have some more modern platformers for the old 8-bit.

Good luck with it!

[analmux]

It'll be great to have some more modern platformers for the old 8-bit. Good luck with it!

 

Thank you very much

 

---

mux

[Thelen]

Great graphics ! looking forward to see this game for the 8 bit !

 

 

Thelen

[Wrathchild]

After such a great job with "Hardball" did Accolade plan "4th & Inches" for the Atari?

[Tickled_Pink]

Just about all the games that were advertised for release on the Atari in the mags. The Last Ninja being just one example. System 3 were particularly bad at getting our hopes up.

 

Zoids is another I can remember being advertised as 'coming soon' for the Atari 8-bit.

 

Of course ... there's Elite, Xenon, Bubble Bobble. That's just quickly off the top of my head, though.

[Wrathchild]

System 3 were particularly bad at getting our hopes up.

 

Very true, I just recovered "Computer + Video Games" mags from End 95 to 98 from my parents loft, these tell some tales...

 

Was any work done on the proposed 'Twister '? The game idea looked OK.

 

Mark

[TMR]

Was any work done on the proposed 'Twister '? The game idea looked OK.

 

i don't think Twister made it to many platforms (i can't even remember a C64 version!) but it wasn't much cop as a game on the Speccy - the biggest thing about it was the scantily clad shop dummies System 3 put out at a show that got them banned for a few years... =-)

[AtariDude]

Definitely would have loved to have played the Wizardy series on the Atari 8 Bot. A friend of mine used to have one of the early IBM PC compatiables and was always talking about Wizardy. I did finally get to play one of the Wizardy series game #7 (the one prior to last Wizardy game which I think was Wizardy 8 from Sir Tech Canada) and enjoyed it. So it would have been nice to play the early versions just to compare just like I can compare Ultima I vs. Ultima IX:Ascencion.