rensoup

hmm.. yeah I don't know how straightforward that would be actually... not sure how things are processed with Altirra pokey. Not sure if you just patch the 6502 RAM with the tune and just run the emu as a black box... meaning the 6502 emu produces Pokey data which gets passed on to the Pokey emu which produces the samples which get passed on to the audio driver without any kind of intervention. Normally you'd just run the 6502 emu continuously (without any kind of sync and no pokey emu) and grab the Pokey data into a buffer until reaching the loop point then you'd save that buffer.

That's quite a list but can't say there's anything that I fancy, but yeah I do agree that the A8 needs more (classic) platformers and shooters... I'm less convinced by 3D though ( except Elite ) Snack is potentially interesting as many classics remain unplayable without a 2nd button... I don't know if there are simpler alternatives that allow connectivity for Neogeo controllers and other multi button sticks. I'm not interested in going beyond stock hardware, I only went with 128KB for PoP because that's what the original A2 runs with. I'd rather stick with 64KB if possible (and potentially use more ROM space) Hi score cafe support would be cool too. Not sure what you mean, there are plenty of classics to choose from ? Subhunter was more of demo, a nice parallax doesn't make it a very good game. Defender of the crown was yet another disappointment on the ST (sure the catapult part was nice once or twice). I don't know why people would want games which looked great but played like garbage ported to the A8 as they'd look like garbage too. Never played Pirates! (too much text!) It stopped being about PoP 146 pages ago, now it's just pub talk ?

You could just output SAPR data ?

Some serious competition this year! For those of you who hated: my design choices the mouse picture xbios the color palettes the flickering the potentially non skippable demo the phantom hardware checks the memory requirements my programmer's ego the disk loading speed the turban the cart loading speed ... Here's your chance to get back at me! ?

That's not exactly a preview, just a bunch of static pictures displayed on the C64... an actual game wouldn't look like that. On the A8, that'd be like trying to display the PoP title picture with software sprites -and- H/V scrolling (MI & IJ do use fullscreen scrolling if I remember correctly) -and- run the SCUMM engine at the same time. If you still think that's doable, show us the way... (static G2F picture with scrolline and music doesn't count!) After 10 years, I'd say RD is up for grabs ? AW's already been mentioned in this thread... unfortunately, it's plays as well as Dragon's Lair on laserdisc. It was a big disappointment when I saw it on the ST. Great intro though. I'd be curious to know what you think of the Jaguar port now that you've played PoP... Would be cool indeed... I gave it some thoughts too but like Wrathchild said it would get shot down on release day ? I think I've read SCUMM is notoriously CPU hungry. I've got a bunch of ideas... current one that I'm thinking about already exists on the A8 and other platforms and although it's popular, some people hate it. It's simple enough technically but would require some form of kernel coding to look good. Actually, most projects I've got in mind would require a kernel... So I'd say I'm in the procrastinating phase ?

The only adventure games I'd consider porting would be Monkey Island and Indiana Jones but they're also those that'd look the nastiest on the A8 ?... A huge amount of work for a guaranteed crap result! My interest is in pushing the A8 for a result that looks good (including when compared to other 8bit plaftorms) There are still lots of games that stood the test of time and aren't available on the A8... I even took a look at Rick Dangerous and thought it could potentially look good. Then I played it again... ? (PC remake I think). It's outrageously unfair, a lot more than PoP so I quickly gave up on that idea.

I don't know how that'd be possible since the UNO has 128KB and the minimum PoP cart size is 256KB... unless there are different UNO versions ? or perhaps the game is able to partially run with only 128KB and will crash at some point but I doubt it.

I don't know about a cult but you're sounding like a nut right now... The game runs fine on a 65c816 (and the speed increase is a lot more than 20% if you change the frame limiter) As others have stated, just hit space/start when the music starts to skip the intro. The flying characters part doesn't use extended opcodes so you've got about 18 seconds before it'll crash on a non 6502c CPU.

I don't know about tremendously difficult ?, the space allocated for art at runtime (background + sprites) on the A8 is less than 64KB. The ST runs at twice the resolution with twice the number of bitplanes, so no more than 256KB was needed. I doubt the in game samples required more than 100KB because there just isn't that much sound while the game is running. Even with 2 32KB screen buffers, that leaves a decent amount of memory for the game code/data. The lack of frame limiter really breaks the gameplay and feels amateurish, the frame rate limiter takes about 10 lines of code on the A8. I started asm coding on the ST way back and witnessing the release of so many rushed ports (THANKS US GOLD!) felt like a WTF experience, PoP ST being no exception. Thanks for rating the A8 versions a little higher than the ST version though ?

Thanks! I suppose the ST version uses some form of emulation (precompiled or at runtime) and something went very wrong. They might have unintentionally left the Apple2 6502 display code which is by far the slowest part and can be totally cut off. Most ST games used crap sprite routines too so that didn't help. Perhaps tight deadlines were a factor though...

I guess I didn't make it very obvious... With this, hopefully search engines will catch it: Prince of Persia for Atari XL (v1.0 & v1.01) cheat code:

.proc mul3 ldx val ldy #4 loop: ; ASL16 txa ASL tax LDA result+1 ROL STA result+1 ; dec loop dey bne loop stx result rts .endp seems a little too simple ?

If I recall correctly the code can be typed anywhere in the game ??

Something a bunch of you have been waiting for:

Indeed. Amply demonstrated in this thread, U1MB or no U1MB. I see you could not contain yourself and peed out of your diapers again.

I was curious if it happened on real HW which you guys confirmed but V1.01 like I mentioned earlier still has the problem. I fixed it locally but there's no immediate release planned.

Duh... it says "This game is not for sale" but it doesn't stop people from trying to make a quick buck... (Not taking a stab at you Vins, I understand the interest in getting a physical copy)

Thanks for the extensive testing! (You could have stopped after encounter the first corruption though ?) My guess is that it would happen with a stock 130XE because it's a somewhat simple mistake from my part, though I don't know why it doesn't seem to happen with the other textscreens (if my fix is right...)

I believe I have a fix... don't know when then next release will be though. It should happen on real HW, could anybody try ? it's quite easy to reproduce... just follow 2Tom's vid

Thanks, I got it to happen too using those same steps, pressing the button during the text screen after the cutscene... I'm going to investigate. @MrFish reported it a while back too...

New version! I honestly haven't tested it much but hopefully it'll be alright. There are plans for another potential release with stuff that'll remain undisclosed for now ?

Nope it's just for the mask and shift tables. Oh yeah I forgot it does mirroring as well so there's a table for that too! Preshifted copies would be impossible with 128KB of RAM (or without a cart). I think there's about 3.5KB of tables + a few hundred bytes of unrolled code ? Depends what your target frame rate is. A sprite as large as those in PoP easily takes 2/3 of a frame to plot, if not more ! I also take advantage of the fact that there are large empty areas in most sprite bitmaps: the sprites are split in up to 3 smaller slices with tighter bouding boxes. Sure, smaller sprites with lots of animations which are displayed just once per frame could be reasonable candidates (the main character for a platformer for instance).

Yes, reinventing the wheel and loving it! The sprite code in PoP could be considered usable for a generic modeE sprite routine but it takes several KBs so it may not be the best for your use case. The performance is about as good as it gets in theory but it's still really slow. Very few games need large sprites with lots of animations (I can only think of fighting games and most ones on the A8 don't draw over a background) so there may be other options. fcatrin started a PoP a long time ago and wrote his sprite routine, it's quite similar but his takes less memory while mine is a little faster and supports clipping. It's available here I believe: https://github.com/fcatrin/a8pop

Just to be clear, it doesn't mean it'll fulfill your expectations!

Patience, there may be one more release...