Atariboy2600 Posted November 16, 2006 Share Posted November 16, 2006 Atari Charles ack me to do a label art on ET Book Cart so I found some old ET photos of ET readding a newpaper but its soo small that I had to re-draw it plus replace the paper with a book here ET i painted on Gimp and soo will add a classic ET backdrop and all. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SeaGtGruff Posted November 17, 2006 Share Posted November 17, 2006 Atari Charles ack me to do a label art on ET Book Cart so I found some old ET photos of ET readding a newpaper but its soo small that I had to re-draw it plus replace the paper with a book here ET i painted on Gimp and soo will add a classic ET backdrop and all. Cool! Thanks for making the label, Atariboy2600! Michael Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Atariboy2600 Posted November 21, 2006 Author Share Posted November 21, 2006 (edited) Heres a FULL label art of ET with the backdrop and all. Edited November 25, 2006 by Atariboy2600 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Albert Posted November 22, 2006 Share Posted November 22, 2006 That looks great! ..Al Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SeaGtGruff Posted November 22, 2006 Share Posted November 22, 2006 Heres a FULL label art of ET with the backdrop and all. Holy cow, that looks fabulous! Michael Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zach Posted November 22, 2006 Share Posted November 22, 2006 I searched the forums for "Book Cart", and found a few references (including this thread), but didn't find any explanation of what this is. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SeaGtGruff Posted November 22, 2006 Share Posted November 22, 2006 I searched the forums for "Book Cart", and found a few references (including this thread), but didn't find any explanation of what this is. It was hush-hush while it was being worked on (and I'm *still* working on it), but a small demo of it was shown at the recent expo, and obviously the label artwork has been posted for all to see-- plus, Atari Charles has changed his avatar to be the title screen-- so now I can tell you about it without having to kill you afterwards. "E.T. Book Cart" is the brainchild of Atari Charles, who contacted me several months ago to ask if I was interested in programming it. It's a book in cartridge form-- each screen (or page) can display up to 13 lines of text, with up to 24 characters on each line (each character being 4x8 pixels in size). There are four or five chapters-- a collection of sayings or quotes, a new (unpublished) interview with Howard Scott Warshaw, an ode to Howard Scott Warshaw, instructions on obtaining all of the easter eggs in the Atari 2600 E.T. game, and an epilogue (which may be part of the fourth chapter, or it may be a separate fifth chapter). Plus, there will be a game that Atari Charles hacked for the cart, and *probably/possibly* also an audio file ("E.T.'s Transmission"). Some of the technical details are as follows: The cart will be 32K, using F4 bankswitching, with *no* Superchip RAM (so that all 32K of the ROM can be used). The text uses 12 player sprites (flickered at either 30Hz or 25Hz, depending on the frame rate). It features an ASCII character set with 96 displayable characters (but two of them fit together to get the copyright symbol), plus four special control characters to help compact the text-- horizontal tab (equivalent to two consecutive spaces), line feed (causing the remainder of a line to be space-filled), vertical tab (equivalent to two consecutive line feeds), and form feed (causing the remainder of a page or screen to be space-filled). The cart is designed to be compatible with all three TV types for which Atari 2600 consoles were created-- NTSC, PAL, and SECAM-- and PAL users will be able to select either a PAL/50 or PAL/60 display. The "tv type" switch is used to select between a 262-line or 312-line display, and the two "difficulty" switches are used to select between four color palettes-- NTSC color, PAL color, SECAM color, or NTSC/PAL black-and-white. You might say there are really five color palettes, because the SECAM palette will be black-and-white on NTSC or PAL 2600s, but the contrast will be muted compared to the contrast in the NTSC/PAL black-and-white palette. (I know the chances of anyone ever running the cartridge on a SECAM 2600 are probably slim-to-none, but I also know that there are at least a few SECAM 2600s out there-- at least, I've seen the SECAM 2600 discussed on AtariAge on a few occasions-- so purely in the interest of "completeness," I thought it would be neat to go ahead and include SECAM support.) Following are two screenshots, plus a screenshot showing all 96 displayable characters: I don't know how it will be received, but it's been a lot of fun-- as well as challenging (which is what made it so much fun for me)-- to work on, and I'm pleased with the way it's shaping up, especially considering that it uses no extra RAM and no fancy Chimera queues. Plus, Atariboy2600's label art looks absolutely fabulous! Michael Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Uzumaki Posted November 22, 2006 Share Posted November 22, 2006 That'd be interesting, an eBook cart for a 30 year old system. How much ROM space needed for Hamlet for example? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zach Posted November 22, 2006 Share Posted November 22, 2006 That'd be interesting, an eBook cart for a 30 year old system. How much ROM space needed for Hamlet for example? Indeed interesting. My first thought was porting Zork. You'd need one of the advanced bankswitching designs with major ROM and RAM (File that under "Yes it's possible, but is it worthwhile?") Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Uzumaki Posted November 22, 2006 Share Posted November 22, 2006 Dark Mage is a text based adventure game, it may be possible to adapter that to play Zork. One question: would it be festiable to have a 2 cart system? Like the Sonic & Knuckle type, one part holds the font and code, second add on is just the text data. Yeah it'd mean completely new cart shell for pass through connectors, extra connectors, and some fancy bankswitch design to toggle between 2 (ep)rom chips. But if this can be done, add on ebook could be made a bit cheaper. Probably not practical though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SeaGtGruff Posted November 22, 2006 Share Posted November 22, 2006 My first thought was porting Zork. You'd need one of the advanced bankswitching designs with major ROM and RAM (File that under "Yes it's possible, but is it worthwhile?") A text game would require an input method, and I don't think joysticks would be adequate for that. (Yes, I'm familiar with Dark Mage-- I even own a cart-- but it has a very simple vocabulary, which would not be sufficient for a Zork-like text game.) I was thinking that the keypad(?) controllers used for Star Raiders or BASIC Programming might work as a 24-key keyboard, but I don't know how easy they are to obtain for those people who don't already have them. And you'd definitely need more than the 32K ROM that the E.T. Book Cart is using. Michael Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SeaGtGruff Posted November 22, 2006 Share Posted November 22, 2006 How much ROM space needed for Hamlet for example? To determine how much ROM would be needed for the text, you could just take a file containing the ASCII text of Hamlet and look at how large it is in bytes, but that will just give you a starting figure. You will need some tables to look up the bank, lo byte, and hi byte for each page of text, so you can add 3 bytes for every pageful of text. The size of each page (in bytes) will vary (if you're using control characters for things like line feed and form feed), because the amount of text in each row will vary-- most rows will contain fewer than 24 characters-- and some pages will have fewer than 13 rows of text (or however many rows your kernel can display on a page) due to blank rows, but you could probably assume an average of about 218 actual characters per page, out of a maximum of 312 characters (i.e., about 70%). So take the original text file size, divide the bytes by 218 to get an approximate page count, then multiply the page count by 3 to get the approximate table size, and add the table size to the original text file size, to get a (very) rough estimate of how many bytes of ROM would be needed just for the text and text pointer tables. Of course, that would just be for the text data; you can pretty much assume that the character set data, kernel, and various subroutines will take up a 4K bank of their own. Michael Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Uzumaki Posted November 22, 2006 Share Posted November 22, 2006 Hmmm.... one of my favorite book series (almost 2 million words across 7 books) would be tipping at 10MB of ROM space for 2600.... I think I'll stick to plain text on my PDA, far less space. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Godzilla Posted December 2, 2006 Share Posted December 2, 2006 this is too strange for words. i cant wait to own it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jpfalcon2003 Posted December 2, 2006 Share Posted December 2, 2006 i can't wait to get this one too. i'm getting the original E.T. in the mail soon also. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jbanes Posted December 3, 2006 Share Posted December 3, 2006 Interesting. Those look very similar to the text screens I used in Deimos Lander. I take it you used the same trick of drawing a page of text using a 6 sprite kernel with PF1 and PF2 set and mirrored? Atariboy2600: I love it! You shouldn't have waited so long to start doing labels. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Foxsolo2000 Posted December 3, 2006 Share Posted December 3, 2006 I just wish I had that much talent Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
A.J. Franzman Posted December 4, 2006 Share Posted December 4, 2006 Following are two screenshots, plus a screenshot showing all 96 displayable characters: Got anyone to proofread it yet? I see a few errors in the second screenshot. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SeaGtGruff Posted December 4, 2006 Share Posted December 4, 2006 (edited) Got anyone to proofread it yet? I see a few errors in the second screenshot. Yes, I know about "trichotomy," "an otherworld," and "traverses"! I've been keeping the text as-is (despite my obsession with spelling), since it was written by different people (none of the text is my own), so that raises the issue of whether to quote accurately from the sources (including any spelling errors or grammatical errors), or to clean up the text. I really should ask Atari Charles what he wants me to do about that sort of thing before I send the final BIN to Albert later this week. Michael Edited December 4, 2006 by SeaGtGruff Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Albert Posted December 4, 2006 Share Posted December 4, 2006 Got anyone to proofread it yet? I see a few errors in the second screenshot. Yes, I know about "trichotomy," "an otherworld," and "traverses"! I've been keeping the text as-is (despite my obsession with spelling), since it was written by different people (none of the text is my own), so that raises the issue of whether to quote accurately from the sources (including any spelling errors or grammatical errors), or to clean up the text. I really should ask Atari Charles what he wants me to do about that sort of thing before I send the final BIN to Albert later this week. Michael I would be unhappy to publish the title with obvious spelling and grammatical errors, so I would prefer that they be fixed for the final BIN. ..Al Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Atarifever Posted December 4, 2006 Share Posted December 4, 2006 This has to be the weirdest classic gaming related thing I've ever heard of. I'll take 2. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Atari Charles Posted December 8, 2006 Share Posted December 8, 2006 Actually all three words are spelled correctly giving them the meaning I have intended. "trichotomy" is correctly spelled http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichotomy "otherworld" is corectly spelled but space could be put between "other" and "world" but is not neccessary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otherworld "traverses" is correctly spelled http://www.thefreedictionary.com/traverse Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Atari Charles Posted December 8, 2006 Share Posted December 8, 2006 (edited) This E.T. Book Cart is the intersting idea of taking current technology and retrograding it. Without Michael's(SeaGtGruff) work on this project, it would not have happened. He is truly a gifted programmer. I think it is great when people of different disciplines can get together and create something new. I think you'll like the game included within the E.T. Book Cart, but I don't think Albert will be too happy getting a bunch of E.T. carts from the landfill of the 80's transported to Atari Age headquarters in 2007. You have to read the instructions and play the inluded game to understand what I mean. The cart may be available for order within a few days. You'll know more by the News Item section. Edited December 8, 2006 by Atari Charles Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
A.J. Franzman Posted December 8, 2006 Share Posted December 8, 2006 (edited) Actually all three words are spelled correctly giving them the meaning I have intended. "trichotomy" is correctly spelled http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichotomy "otherworld" is corectly spelled but space could be put between "other" and "world" but is not neccessary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otherworld "traverses" is correctly spelled http://www.thefreedictionary.com/traverse They're correct in SeaGtGruff's post # 19 and here in your post # 22, but not in the screenshot in post # 7. Also, the main issue with "otherworld" was the preceding article, "a" in the original vs. the correct "an". I was also thinking of the confusing structure of the second sentence; while technically correct, it is worded a bit awkwardly. Edited December 8, 2006 by A.J. Franzman Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Atari Charles Posted December 8, 2006 Share Posted December 8, 2006 I see. The text has been gone over so hopefully we fixed all the spelling mistakes. With the quotes, sometime things are worded awkwardly, but we have decided to keep them as they are as they exhibit the spirit and itnent of the quote, even if the quote is a bit awkward or clumsy. In the program itself, we have fixed the spelling mistakes. Thanks. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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