Jump to content
Have You Played Atari Today?
2600|5200|7800|Lynx|Jaguar|Forums|Store

roland p

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    2,451

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Posts posted by roland p

    Gameband updates

    in Dedicated Systems

    Posted

    Update #31:

     

    All,

    Wanted to drop a very quick update heading into the weekend (even though we do not have a lot of new details to share). Just a follow up to last week post to let you know we will be continuing to work with Partners post-CNY on schedule and development plans (and are not alone in doing so, with things starting to get back to normal there from this coming week). Meanwhile: we are still moving ahead on SW and everything else we can, as we work towards the next development breakthrough we all want to see.

    Also we wanted to say thanks a lot for all the feedback on the new website. We will be tweaking and expanding it in the months ahead, so thoughts and feedback on it still welcome!

    Hope you all have a great weekend! We'll be back within 2 weeks or less.

    The Gameband Team.
    PS: What sort of watch-faces would you like to see on Gameband? Drop a reply or DM with an Artist, Brand, Concept, that we might not have thought of. Maybe not be #1 priority, but we would love to start gathering ideas!

    What would U have done to make the Amiga succeed better?

    in Commodore Amiga

    Posted

    The wife said they spent too much time writing demos and not enough time making applications. This also seems to be true. When I had my A1000, that's all I could do with it! Watch demos. When I got my PC I was able to get into productivity instantly, out of the box, the same evening.

     

     

    I disagree. I don't think that the people who made demos are the same people that make productivity applications.

     

    The harsh truth is that, for productivity you don't need fancy sound/graphics. Behind every 'app' you use there could be a boring database running with tables and columns :)

    • Like 2

    Gameband updates

    in Dedicated Systems

    Posted · Edited by roland p

    Gameband update #30:

     

    All,

    It’s hard to believe we are already almost at the 2nd month of 2018, and we hope that for all of you the year has gotten off to a great start. For us it’s hard to know where the time has gone, it’s flown by in the blink of an eye.

    We know we have continued to struggle with communication, DMs and comments. We’ve been holding out on updates to try to have better news, and we know that is not a good strategy. We have said on several occasions we will get more consistent on this and have not managed to achieve that yet, much to everyone's frustration. Some of you are justifiably fed up with us and we fully apologize to you. We know we owe it to everyone to do better in communication in the weeks ahead.

    On to the Updates:

    • The weeks before Chinese New Year are hectic for development and manufacturing, as many companies push to get their last orders and work done before the holiday slow down (effectively for 2-3 weeks in the region). As a very small player, and with plenty of development challenges (expected and unexpected), attention levels on our project were even harder to maintain than expected. We are pushing ahead as hard as we can on getting Gameband through the next critical hardware phase, however we did not manage to make firm schedule progress before Chinese New Year with our partners. We are doing everything we can to fix that post-CNY holiday.
    • Core software continues to be on schedule, companion apps are almost bug-free at this stage.
    • The new SDK release coming along quite nicely.
    • We rolled out our new website yesterday: www.gameband.com (after a lot of "Murphy’s Law" issues in the past few weeks). Please check it out if you can and let us know what you think in comments or DM.

    Thanks as always for your patience and support; we will be back next week.

    The Gameband Team.

    • Like 2

    What is *YOUR* Biggest Retro-Computing Hardware Disappointment?

    in Classic Computing Discussion

    Posted · Edited by roland p

    I was never really disappointed, but in retrospect, the Amiga 1200, could be much better.

     

    It only had 8-bit sound. The video-upgrade wasn't much since using much color slowed down the machine a lot. I had a 68030, but that didn't help that much.

    Also, you needed a multisync monitor to make the video output really useful since the higher-res modes used 30KHz and the games still 15KHz which normal VGA monitors didn't like.

     

    On paper, the Atari Falcon looks much better (except for the 16-bit bus) with 16-bit sound and a fancy dsp which even plays MP3's. It's very sad that it was killed in favor of the Jaguar.

    • Like 1

    Retroblox

    in Classic Console Discussion

    Posted

    Thanks for the ‘update’ of the Nothing.

     

    Not a lot. They're still farting around and trying to figure out what to do. While the smell builds up in that corner over there, people over here are playing real games with real hardware & real emulators.

    I got the Nintendo minis so I emulate. They are good and perform flawless. Maybe that’s a market; something that emulates everything flawless, without the hassle.

    • Like 1

    50 Years of BASIC - TIME

    in Programming

    Posted

    I was helping a friend with a Java class a couple months ago.

    Java requires setting up a development system, some understanding of compilers, and some understanding of object oriented programming before you can output hello world.

    By that time several members of the class are wondering why anyone would want to do this for a living.

     

    HelloWorld in Java, here you have it :D

    https://gist.github.com/lolzballs/2152bc0f31ee0286b722

     

    Every time I hear someone say Strategy-Pattern, Solid-Principle, Dependency-Injection, Singleton, etc. I cringe a little.

    • Like 2

    BallBlazer framerate

    in Atari 8-Bit Computers

    Posted · Edited by roland p

    The only remaining question is, how many cycles will the lookup table update code take. I don't know that just yet- but getting there. I am hoping for 5,000 - 7,000 cycles...

     

     

    What table are you exactly referring to?

    BallBlazer framerate

    in Atari 8-Bit Computers

    Posted

    It is actually a complex routine by software to handle the "scrolling" line by line" . It's not like in much bigger machines with Megabytes of RAM where just a field of graphics could be re-rolled. It's just a 4K machine and the package has only 22K ...

     

     

    I can't believe that, the horizontal scrolling / skewing of the playfield can be done with a simple Bresenham like I did. It's like drawing one line with a certain angle.

    • Like 2

    BallBlazer framerate

    in Atari 8-Bit Computers

    Posted · Edited by roland p

     

     

    well... now that's nice but should we count that as AA in realtime? :) Did you do that in one of your 2600 ports?

     

    I would call it black magic :D

     

    Anti-alias is a fancy term. I would rather call it sub-pixel-scrolling.

     

    And I did that on one of my 2600 ports, but dropped since it uses cpu cycles, and cpu cycles are expensive as gold on the 2600.

    • Like 1

    BallBlazer framerate

    in Atari 8-Bit Computers

    Posted · Edited by roland p

    I don't see the problem. Can't we just agree that Ballblazer (at least atari 800 and 7800 versions) has some anti-aliassing visible in the horizontal borders of the tiles and some (fixed) smoothing of the vertical borders?

     

    Ballblazer_1.png

    • Like 1

    BallBlazer framerate

    in Atari 8-Bit Computers

    Posted · Edited by roland p

    My version (Atari 2600 version at the end of the comparison video) didn't really calculate at all. It just took a value and LSR'ed it. I got that from Chris' Juno-First. This is why the tiles are in heights (from far to close): 1px, 2px, 4px, 8px, 16px...

    The '3D>2D' calculations (for calculation of objects on screen) where also made easy that way. Just use LSR to zoom out. Only one 'expensive' 8-bit x 8-bit with the higher 8-bit value as result was used. As a result the whole thing (including unrolled kernel of 2KB) would fit in 4KB (but no sound/AI).

     

    The following demo could be interesting because it uses the same LSR method, but it uses the rest value for anti aliassing. It also uses a 256-byte correction table for smoother movement.

     

    I found the above checkerboards, where the tiles grow slower when they approach, prettier, but if you want something really cheap, here it is :)

    • Like 3
AtariAge
Forums
Store
General
Follow AtariAge

Copyright ©1998-2023 AtariAge

×
×
  • Create New...