24 replies to this topic

[GroovyBee]

The XM goes on a European tour!

I'll be demoing the XM and games at eJagFest 2011 held in Kaarst in Germany on Saturday the 19th of November. The XM mandatory games will be Apple Snaffle, Halloween, Monster! and Fruitarian. Unfortunately Dungeon! can't be demoed because its custom cart hardware won't be ready in time and the game isn't CC2 compatible.

Again, if any other 7800/2600 coders have PAL versions of their homebrew games they'd like to demo let me know.

Hopefully I'll have some more things to demo than I did at Replay.

[Wickeycolumbus]

Revised title screen for eJagFest

 MuncherEJagFest.bin   4K   31 downloads

[BassGuitari]

Very cool!

[vprette]

hello

do you have space for an INTV demo?

I would give you the playable demo of defender of the crown for Intellivision.... if you are interested contact me

Edited by vprette, Thu Nov 10, 2011 5:47 AM.

[GroovyBee]

vprette, on Thu Nov 10, 2011 5:47 AM, said:

do you have space for an INTV demo?

I would give you the playable demo of defender of the crown for Intellivision.... if you are interested contact me

Thanks for the kind offer. I'll only be demoing the 7800 and XM at eJagFest. Maybe next time?

[DracIsBack]

vprette, on Thu Nov 10, 2011 5:47 AM, said:

I would give you the playable demo of defender of the crown for Intellivision.... if you are interested contact me

You have a video of that? I remember seeing an early clip and was blown away!

[vprette]

DracIsBack, on Thu Nov 10, 2011 6:21 AM, said:

vprette, on Thu Nov 10, 2011 5:47 AM, said:

I would give you the playable demo of defender of the crown for Intellivision.... if you are interested contact me

You have a video of that? I remember seeing an early clip and was blown away!

not with me

[DracIsBack]

[GroovyBee]

I'll definitely be demoing some new XM things at eJagFest .

[AtariBrian]

the video i saw of the xm games only had a few second clips of each game. any chance we will get a bit longer videos in the near future? all things are looking good for the xm project !

[GroovyBee]

AtariBrian, on Thu Nov 10, 2011 3:57 PM, said:

the video i saw of the xm games only had a few second clips of each game. any chance we will get a bit longer videos in the near future? all things are looking good for the xm project !

More videos of the same games? Probably not. A few seconds? By my reckoning the video is 2 minutes 37 seconds (including information slides). Things have always looked good for the XM project.

[AtariBrian]

the video is 2 minutes 37 seconds. with all due respect each game shows 3 seconds of actual game footage. i was just asking to see for in the future so i can decide what games to buy is all.

[GroovyBee]

I thought you weren't buying an XM? Have you changed your mind since Sept 20th?

[AtariBrian]

i said i refused to buy one. that was from there being no updates, release dates came and went. it wasnt a knock on anyone or against anything, there just wasnt much info. so now with curt doing these great updates i know exactly what im putting my earned money into. so nothing against anyone as i know all the great work you and others put in to this.

Edited by AtariBrian, Thu Nov 10, 2011 6:22 PM.

[Curt Vendel]

Keep a very close eye on the demos of the XM at this show, Mark is going to show a hardware addon working on the XM that is going to freak people out!!!! Caught me really off guard today when I got the newest BIOs update.... This will get a lot of gears turning in coders minds on exploiting.

You can guess and speculate all you want, Mark and I aren't saying anything, you'll have to either see it in person at the show or wait for the demo video

Curt

Edited by Curt Vendel, Thu Nov 10, 2011 6:43 PM.

[Propane13]

I thought about how to respond to this post for awhile. Though I'm really glad to hear that there are a lot of "what could have been in a few years" type projects (and I have a high interest in purchasing them and offering my support in the community), it's also important to realize that anything that has special hardware may not be something that some programmers would want to use. I'll explain why.

There seems to be a deviation growing between the "what could have been" for the 7800 and the "what was". It's great to offer opportunities to developers to use these tools, but it is worth noting that if the 7800 community gets new programming blood, there might be some people that just want to try to program for the challenge of "what was"-- TIA sound, limited memory, no special hardware. Why? Because it's hard. Very hard. The TIA sucks. The limited RAM is tough to budget. Adding more hardware into the mix changes the game (no pun intended). This is why I like programming 2600 games with 128 bytes of RAM on occasion. It's a heck of a challenge. Some people may feel that programming for the 7800's base features and limitations may also be fun.

I don't want to sound unsupportive here, and I have a feeling that my comments may be taken that way. I DON'T want people to think I'm detracting from this thread's enthusiasm. I think this is a great idea, and a cool project, and I am excited about it myself. But, I can't really keep quiet on this weird vibe I'm feeling on these forums as of recently that if you don't support all of these new add-ons, your game could be considered garbage or insufficient because it's not taking advantage of all of these new things. HSC support seems to be becoming a standard instead of a "nice-to-have". I don't want the community to discriminate against those that are coding for the challenge of "what was", even if it's a game with less bells and whistles. The XM is cool, an extra-hardware demo is cool, but games that don't use those features are also cool. Providing the extra hardware support may attract more coders, and it may not. But, I definitely don't want this to become a mandatory standard in the community. Programmers should be free to use whatever they choose.

Again, I don't want anyone thinking that I am not supporting these projects-- and regardless of how I express myself, I've noticed hyper-sensitivity on some subjects in these forums, and I could frustrate some people with my comments, and I'm trying really hard not to convey that. I'm just expressing a thought, that I think needs to be said.

These are "tools of what could have been", and they're cool. It should be up to an individual developer whether or not they want to use them.
If we get more people because of this, then great. But, if we get people that don't use the hardware-- also great.
At the end of the day, more games, regardless of what category they are in means that everybody wins.

I hope everyone's kind of on the same page about this.

-John

[GroovyBee]

Propane13, on Fri Nov 11, 2011 7:09 AM, said:

These are "tools of what could have been", and they're cool. It should be up to an individual developer whether or not they want to use them.
If we get more people because of this, then great. But, if we get people that don't use the hardware-- also great.
At the end of the day, more games, regardless of what category they are in means that everybody wins.

Nobody has said that the XM is now the "default" 7800 platform. Programmers can choose whatever they want to do (as they always have).

[Underball]

GroovyBee, on Thu Nov 10, 2011 4:18 PM, said:

AtariBrian, on Thu Nov 10, 2011 3:57 PM, said:

the video i saw of the xm games only had a few second clips of each game. any chance we will get a bit longer videos in the near future? all things are looking good for the xm project !

More videos of the same games? Probably not. A few seconds? By my reckoning the video is 2 minutes 37 seconds (including information slides). Things have always looked good for the XM project.

The majority of the 2:37 is spent showing Title Screens, programming credits screens (tacky), and High Score Screens. The gameplay shown is not more than 2-3 seconds long for each game, like AtariBrian pointed out.

Judging from what little gameplay we actually see in the video, Halloween looks like a re-skin of Wasp!(right down to a big wasp being one of the "bad guys"), and Frutarian and Apple Snaffle look to be graphically similar bomberman clones. Outpost 26 looks like a rework of Harry's Hen House with fancier title screens.

They showed more actual gameplay in the Atari 7800 commercials from the 80's that were 30 seconds long, than this nearly 3 minute video.

[philipj]

I don't see anything wrong with the new XM add-on... In fact I wouldn't mind seeing better games with better graphics and sound for the Atari 7800. If anything interesting ever come of this project I think it would probably drum up more attention to the 7800. It is after all a hobby project more than it is a new-system-on-the-market thing. Being that I've always wanted to see more capabilities added to the 7800 via the cartridge connector, I think it would be cool to see the 7800 and the XM pushed to the max on creative level and if I ever get to a place where I can take advantage of that hardware I will definetly do so. It's a great way to program the extra hardware using standard 7800 cartridge without adding any new chips to the old cartridge designs. They only added more ram and more sound to the system so you still have to work the 6502 in order to make the most of it; personally an extra atmega 8bit chip would've certainly added a new dynamic to the XM, but there's always room for improvement on a 7800 cartridge. I'm still waiting on my XM order so I look foward to the new hardware.

[petik1]

Curt Vendel, on Thu Nov 10, 2011 6:41 PM, said:

Keep a very close eye on the demos of the XM at this show, Mark is going to show a hardware addon working on the XM that is going to freak people out!!!! Caught me really off guard today when I got the newest BIOs update.... This will get a lot of gears turning in coders minds on exploiting.

You can guess and speculate all you want, Mark and I aren't saying anything, you'll have to either see it in person at the show or wait for the demo video

Curt

An add-on for an add-on? I hope it has something to do with Atari floppy drive compatibility!

[The Usotsuki]

The floppy drive support in hardware is already there, not? With the SIO port? It would just need software support (a DOS).

[Allan]

We need a keyboard with a basic 'computer' OS first before we get an Atari 8-bit drive compatible DOS. Once we get a keyboard (as long as it is compatible with the original 7800 keyboard) we can see how far GCC and OSS got on there computer software. Hopefully the word processor that Curt has is compatible with some of the Atari printers.

I'm guessing this new hardware thing that GrooveyBee made has something to do with controllers.

Allan

[sh3-rg]

Underball, on Fri Nov 11, 2011 11:35 AM, said:

Halloween looks like a re-skin of Wasp!(right down to a big wasp being one of the "bad guys")

lol : arse/elbow

Halloween features a Wasp bad-guy because GroovyBee's gfxer is lazy and doesn't make time to help him out - it's called Work In Progress for a reason. Halloween is nothing like the same kind of game as Wasp. But then you probably already know that and are taking yet another opportunity to whine about GB and/or the XM. I suggest you stick to watching 7800 videos from the 80s & fap yourself silly in raptures of nostalgia if that's what gets you off. 1UP.

[Wickeycolumbus]

So... How did it go?

[GroovyBee]

It was a good weekend. I didn't have time to prep my CC2 before the show. I loaded up my laptop with 2600 and 7800 stuff (I was hoping to get some coding done) but we arrived at the hotel at 4AM (German time) after a five country road trip covering the UK, France, Belgium, Holland and Germany and so we only had 4.5 hours sleep before having breakfast and heading off to the show. Nobody asked about 2600 stuff at the show otherwise I could have shown things running in Stella. If you look in the jag forum there are quite a few photos and videos of the event. Roll on next year!