[Someone made Tail Gunner for GBA]

I was looking for any new homebrews for the GBA and found this nice little Tail Gunner remake. (Click the GBA link on his site) Unfortunately it plays too slow to be usable so I'm hoping the guy makes some fixes.

But what I can't figure out is why no one has made Tail Gunner yet for the Vectrex. That seems like such a perfect fit!

I appreciate this is a very old thread but with old posts being so easily findable nowadays, I'll add this info anyway in case anyone bumps into it again...

 

The port above started as my port of Tailgunner to the gp32 - it was written in C and produced by a static binary translation of the original Cinematronics game. Later the C core was reused by Norbert Kehrer to produce a Java port for the web. I'm fairly sure that the GBA version above is the Java port somehow encapsulated with a java interpreter for the GBA. If it's slow it's because of the Java stage being involved. If he were to modify the original C port instead ( http://dl.openhandhelds.org/cgi-bin/gp32.cgi?0%252C0%252C0%252C0%252C38%252C428,0,0,0,30,203), it would likely run at full speed.

 

However these translated binaries are pretty large, and there is no way that they could port to the 6809-based Vectrex - also the vectrex can't display as many vectors and as quickly as the Cinematronics hardware, so a straight port of the original rom is out of the question. However at the moment I am writing a new clone of Tailgunner for the Vectrex from scratch, and although the performance requirements are rather tight, I think it will be possible... (although maybe not in time for the self-imposed Christmas 2017 deadline I set myself for getting it done - I'm having to learn a lot of new coding tricks to get acceptable performance on the hardware and development is progressing slowly...).

 

 

Graham

[Tailgunner homebrew underway]

When it was in Arcades, I played Tail Gunner every chance I got...my favorite game at the time. I love that smooth, flowing movement you get into when shooting the ships. I've always thought it's a perfect game to port to the Vectrex; the controller is exactly what you need.

 

I used to be a programmer, but don't dabble much anymore. Seems like it should be fairly straight forward, but the details of how the ships move is very important, I think.

 

I bet the original code would be very helpful. Especially if the source code is still around (probably not likely)...

 

Good luck!

I did disassemble the Cinematronics ROM at one point (a by-product of generating a static binary translation of the machine code to C and Java) but not commented in enough detail to understand the algorithms. However I have reinvented enough of it from scratch over the years to know how to duplicate the behavior (see http://phosphorus.github.io/app.html?id=33089150&turbo=false&full-screen=truefor my previous effort). What I'm looking for help with is more the low-level vector performance stuff. Having someone implement the various sound effects too would be very welcome. I think for performance I'm probably going to have to replay pre-defined flightpaths and pre-calculated vectors for the ships - however if it is possible to rotate the 3D ship vectors and draw three ships fast enough in real time, then that would be the sort of thing I'ld like help with.

[Tailgunner homebrew underway]

I don't know how much crossover there is between this forum and the vectrex area at proboards - in case there are homebrew programmers here who aren't aware of it - I've (re)started a project to write a Tailgunner lookalike which I started about 15 years ago and then shelved. This time I am determined to finish it and have got a lot farther than I did before - WIP can be seen at http://gtoal.com/vectrex/tailgunner/main.bin- I've been building it piece by piece and am now getting to the hard bit - the ships.

 

I may have to cut a couple of corners but from experiments so far I think it should look enough like the original to evoke some of the same feeling when playing it.

 

Anyway... I am coding this in public view - a recent (if not up to the hour) source will always be posted in http://gtoal.com/vectrex/tailgunner/main.c.html(or http://gtoal.com/vectrex/tailgunner/main.c ) and suggestions and collaborations are (extremely) welcome. Even criticisms :-) (Very thick skinned, I won't take offence. However some limitations I do already know about and were either expedient to get something started or are shortcuts to avoid computational overheads)

 

I know people have wanted Tailgunner on the Vectrex for a long time, so if you're one of them and a programmer, feel free to contribute. This will be open source and free in all senses. I've set myself an informal deadline of Christmas (this year ) and one of the reasons I'm working on this in public view is so that there's pressure on me to finish it this time :-)

 

 

Graham

 

[Interesting there is no Vectrex here yet...]

There are a few games if you search for Vectrex, but no curated and collected page. Definitely looks like an oversight. I wonder if Rantmedia asked them not to do one so their commercial Vectrex on IOS emulator wouldn't be impacted?

https://archive.org/details/vectrex

[Battlezone KO for Vectrex?]

Yes - Stramash Zone - http://www.clockworkrobot.com/?p=58- Don't know if it has been released yet...