rensoup

I don't know anything about those extensions though it doesn't seem that fixing a loader would work? Like I said, adding support for different cart schemes may be a solution if it's possible... megacart or sic! OR adding a a 256KB atarimax format (which would require a PoP update)

I think I used repositioning + graphics update in PoP during the text screens to get a 6th sprite for the yellow ornament... or perhaps it was a player and a missile... Looking at it now I could probably have saved myself the trouble and simply used the yellow color below the "M" And I think I used the trick during the cutscenes too... (I'm not 100% sure anymore) for the green cushion and the orange carpet... It's a lot more limited than on the 2600 as mentioned by others.

Didn't you mention you had a memory expansion ? In theory, like madness77 said it should be fine (the extra PBI cable is needed for the 800XL to use the AVG RAM.) The ATR will work (but you'll need the extra SIO cable too because PoP uses a custom disk loader) For the CAR, I don't know if the AVG can split its RAM into 2 so that one part is dedicated to storing the ROM file and the other part is used as extended RAM ? I'm guessing yes... The only difference (beside the ending picture) is the loading speed (which is just fine with the ATR) It may be worth checking out the AVG thread if you'd rather use the CAR version:

Nice version (even though I still prefer VinsCool's which is the pinnacle of 4 channel Pokey ) How about the in game tune ? anybody ?

The requirements are stated in the readme.txt but it's easy to overlook: I'd recommend the AVG cart because it's fuss free and I believe 100 %compatible with every known cartridge and disk format ... Shame though because the myIde2 seems to have all the required hardware to support PoP, but it just doesn't support 256KB carts. Anybody from Atarimax could perhaps tell us if a firmware upgrade could solve that ?

I would follow marauder & Stefan's advice... I've added a more comprehensive reply in the PoP thread...

So it looks like myIde is an Atarimax product ? I'm going to guess it only supports its own banking scheme (128KB/ 1MB) and not the megacart one(256KB)... which means it won't be able to keep inside its 512KB RAM (even though PoP only needs 256KB, it has to use the 1MB format for Atarimax) It's so weird that Atarimax only put 512KB of RAM in myIde and doesn't have a 512KB banking scheme. So like others said, try using the disc (ATR) version? I'm going to guess it will load at regular disc speed. The only difference between the CAR and ATR version is the beautiful ending picture featuring your friendly mouse. I drew it myself and it was unani-mously- approved by the AA crowds. Hopefully you'll find the A8 version enjoyable!

Indeed! Bank switching is fast and a lot less flexible (on the A8) If you want to update a character screen for instance, chances are your graphics chip won't be able to use those extended banks directly. So it needs to be copied back into the main 64KB. On the A8, that would be with a slow CPU copy. On the C64 with a REU it would be a lot faster thanks to its DMA. Usually DMA is non blocking (essentially free in theory) so you can do other things in the meantime. On the NES, it looks like the video chip can see the extended banks which is more flexible and allows for massive graphics cheats by just switching banks! Awesome NES char anims compilation: https://rabidrodent.neocities.org/nes-chr/

Agreed, must have been quite an effort to port all the z80 code too... Never was that much into Sonic myself... And those REU make the C64 a different beast altogether. I'd say extra RAM is fair but only if the original requires a lot of it.

Had never heard of it... looks a little peculiar and perfectly doable on the A8 (though I've got something else in mind) It's been mentioned a while back, but I believe anything beyond Maniac mansion would look terrible because of the 5 colours limit (sure you could use limited palette switches, it would still look crap) ( I found out recently that SCUMM was available on linux, the number of games it supports is staggering!)

Seems there's already a game by that name from Broderbund (which, I've come to realize, released really great quality software on the A8... and I'm not saying that solely because of PoP!)

96% yet ? Is it going to work on the 800 too ?

weird... doesn't work for me... Altirra sees "/home..." as a parameter. I tried with >'< and with >"< and without anything... Using Mint, Altirra 4.0 test 21 and Wine5 It's a little confusing, seems like z: is mapped to /home but that doesn't really help. I had to make a dumb script cmdl=$(echo "wine /home/a/Apps/Altirra/Altirra64.exe ") cmdl+=$(winepath -w $1) echo $cmdl $cmdl winepath just changes >/< to >\< where the input path is just a regular linux path... Doesn't work with spaces but good enough. yeah but that doesn't start Altirra when clicking on a .car/.xex right ?

Ah, still can't get it to work but that could be an issue with Wine maybe I just don't know how to set file associations properly in Linux... Anyone figured this out ? How to make clicking on a .car/.xex launch Altirra in Wine with the file as a parameter ?

The ST was a decent design, it didn't require extra time I think, just some rewiring inside the Shifter (the ST's video chip). They went with bitplanes because everyone else did. 8bit computers were incapable of doing large block copies with the CPU. So you couldn't move the whole screen at 50fps, that's why HW scroll was invented. Moving a modeE screen (8KB) with the 6502 on a XL would take about 3 frames I believe... The ST was different with a beast of a CPU: much higher clock frequency combined with a more efficient instruction set. The ST was capable of moving a block of memory the size of the screen (32KB) in about 2/3 or 3/4 of a frame if I recall correctly. This means the ST could do software vertical scrolling easily, as well as horizontal scrolling in 16 pixels steps (which is way too fast to be practical). Due to the bitplanes layout, it was also notoriously impossible to do fast 1 pixel horizontal scrolling on the 520ST because that required keeping 16 preshifted copies of the screen wasting 16x 32KB, or all the 520ST's memory . ( Some games managed to get around that by preshifting 16x16 tiles pairs but it was still a pain ) The same had to be done for sprites, keeping 16 shifted copies in memory. A super modeE, 16 colors at 320x200 (similar to the CPC but at 160x200 ?) would have involved rewiring the ST's video hardware slightly differently, keeping most of the design identical to the final HW. My guess is that the cost/complexity for that would have been identical (this was old tech after all) The difference ? Fast vertical scroll, fast 1 pixel horizontal scroll (at the cost of 64KB instead of 512KB) costing the same amount of CPU time as the real ST. Fast sprite display (much lower CPU cost and much lower RAM requirements)... ...and faster 3D as well (because drawing lines slopes without bitplanes is easier/faster)

I thought I used spaces all over the place in many pictures I tried but perhaps that was just in filenames and not directories... Small request, any chance of supporting filenames with "/" on the cmd line, so that xex could be associated with Altirra in linux ? Have to say it works really well under Wine.

I wouldn't say SJ is that impressive... it just has a lot of colors but I guess that's not difficult on the C64 (limit of 4 colors per 4*8 tile and that's it) ? There's very little moving ?

I can never tell if you're trolling or not

Weird that a guy who worked on the C64 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiraz_Shivji) designed the ST in such a way... But apparently the ST's code name was "Rock bottom price" Rambling again but yeah Dual pokey instead of the YM as well as a super ModeE (4bits per color at 320x200) would have made the ST a much better competitor compared to the Amiga and at a bargain price. Pure CPU power has that flexibility and can beat custom HW as long as the graphics memory layout makes sense (think VGA 256 colors which was the simplest design ever... unfortunately they forgot to give it bandwidth !) I don't know, I enjoy this one though

To play SFX, you could simply override the LZSS unpacked data for selected Pokey channels... @xxl has written a fast SFX engine: RMT2LZSS is based on the 1.28 RMT engine so yeah it doesn't work with newer versions...

somewhat related to the topic: PoP Megadrive hack to make it feel more like the original... Makes me wonder if there's a 6502 emulator powering that version And apparently there's an unreleased PoP2 on the MD from Microids (who did the CPC version)

It might only be available in the updated ASMA zip archive ( http://asma.scene.pl/ which seems to be down right now) ...or I might have ripped it off straight from the XEX (which can be done in a few clicks with RMT2LZSS too!) Not at all, Makary wrote the tune years before I even started coding on the A8 . Basically I had ideas for a bunch of effects and tried to figure out how to make them fit to the tune's tempo. I find good tunes to be a powerful source of motivation for creating demos... There are still a bunch of tunes I'd like to use too

of course, LZSS just encodes/decodes raw pokey data

https://demozoo.org/music/165122/ Worth checking out as the original runs @200hz which help the bass a little. The RMT file might be available on ASMA too?