adamantyr

I recall someone asking me in the past if they could compile it and I asked them not to, because I felt the game was written for and balanced to the speed of TI-Basic. But I'm all right with it, so long as someone doesn't complain the game's too hard because certain puzzles relied on the slowness to give you time to react.

Latest version was released a few days ago.... I'm pretty sure the game is solid and stable now. Anyone who was holding off on playing, this is the time!

I would definitely focus on game play and what you find fun and challenging over "stupid and frustrating". That is the hallmark of a game designer over a copier.

Nice work! I would definitely test the speech out on hardware; the emulators all use a slightly later generation core. Also, please make sure music can be disabled. While I enjoy the tune, it's nice to have the option to not listen to it non-stop. Plus you could then add in some sound effects for the proton guns, the trap, etc.

I only ever played the C64 version myself. I think it really depends on if you want to implement all the various car upgrades and different models of car. If you do, I'd stick with the passive version. If not, then the small mini-game of dodging cars and grabbing fuel works.

I think model after the C64 but lose the center column, go single color, but have it rotate color rapidly between red, blue and yellow. I used color rotation in RoA frequently to zazz up single color sprites at low cost.

Excellent graphic work! I'm very excited to see the finished product. I would say using a consistent color for the tops of buildings will help users navigate the main map easier; most of the ports only use a limited number of colors anyway. Looking at the MSX screenshots, I'm surprised at how pedestrian it looks. Definitely shoot for the stars; the Sega Master System has a much better appearance.

Glad to see you are free, Gary! I almost put a reference to Oasis Pensive Abjucators in RoA, but I thought there was no real way to do it that would work. (A dreamy merchant at an oasis?)

I found that software sprite rotation... isn't great. I wrote a small test program and found that it caused a lot of blinking that was pretty harsh. FORTUNATELY you should be okay, because it's only horizontal that's the problem. If you only use four sprite (two proton streams and two for the target ghost) you should be okay. You DO have 32 sprites to work with, although I would warn you can't use half-bitmap/enhanced graphics mode in that case, only full bitmap, because the table masks mess up the sprites and you're limited to 8 unique sprites. (If you use 9 or higher, they just repeat the first eight.)

It does use the timer, but it's for random numbers. The clock runs so fast it's usable in any state. (I originally used the VDP timer, but it produced predictable patterns for battlemap generation.) I'm not sure if that would cause the game to not work, though, unless even trying to set the CRU bits to access it caused your emulator to crash. Also, for the 180K version, you have to use the cartridge binary, and put all the rest of the files from the game disk on a single disk, and split the world disks into four disks. And be sure to configure their location in the configuration menu.

Yeah, it runs on the 1mb version. It may even break on the 4mb version.

Yeah, developer of Realms of Antiquity here. In order for it to run, you will need to emulate the SAMS card, which provides 1024mb of CPU memory to the base TI. Hardware details can be found here: http://www.unige.ch/medecine/nouspikel/ti99/superams.htm

BLWP, by having an isolated register set, is useful because it's sort of like a method in a high-end language like Java, C, C#, etc. For BL/RT, I usually set up an internal stack and burn R10 as a pointer for it, so I can push and pop return addresses off if needed. That way BL routines can call other BL routines but still work their way back to the original caller. What I did find when coding Realms of Antiquity was that I'd frequently run into issues where I was using registers to hold specific values at the top of a return stack, and either I'd end up running out of registers to use or worse, accidentally use one and cause a bug. That's where I would convert some subroutines into BLWP versions, because then they operated independently. Also, I've used register sets in the regular CPU memory areas other than the scratch pad and not had performance problems. It's all about the context of what you're using them for.

Cool to see this available for the TI as well, thanks Evie!

A fantastic job, sir! I salute you. If Hell's Halls had been in the BASIC contest years ago, you'd have won, hands down! Sadly my game crashed with MEMORY FULL a bit ago, after I reached the 3rd level. I was playing in emulation; I guess loading the BIN file doesn't perform a call FILES(1) operation. *sigh*

Excellent! I just ordered a copy.

Great looking game! So Flooraway's only competition is Flooraway 2, hmm? (*cough* APERTURE *cough*)

Yep, build 4.20.043 released to address this. And I cleaned up some other potential issues.

Well done mapping the entire thing! I never got even close to the end.

Ah man, that Taxan monitor is sweet! Sadly I'm in the US so no go for me. Also looking at the connectors I don't think I have anything to hook it up to.

And we are ALL the better for that. I consider that the greatest achievement of the Mini Memory cartridge. Thank you, Mike. For all you do. Adam

Sheesh... I did not know Gary personally. Way back in the 90's I sent his company an inquiry about how to pay for a TIM chip for the TI and got no response. Shortly after he was "disinvited" to the Chicago Faire for numerous complaints of not shipping promised product. Much later on the internet I encountered him in the TI Yahoo Group and here. I spoke with him a few times about my XB3 supercart; it was good to get clarification of how many were shipped. I heard how he was doing XBox mods now and thought "ah, more of the same" and decided I wouldn't send any money his way. Despite the fact you can say justice finally caught up to a grifter, it's still pretty sad. I'm not sure why Nintendo is levying another 10 million fine, it just sounds like they are using him as an example to scare other pirates and hackers. Of course if he has the money to actually pay those fines...

Me Based upon Thomas Moran's "Grand Canyon in Yellowstone".

Well the file in question you have an issue with is MT0. I would start a fresh install and copy the SAV and SG0-3 files to it. That should fix the problem.

Hmmm I don't have a repro on my end... that particular text is from another file entirely in fact. I would reset your game and see if it repros consistently. If it does, zip up your entire game folder and message it to me. (You can do so here on the forums or in Discord.)