retrodroid

Oh, one of those uppity "Intellivision" kids, were you?? 😆

It would be enough if the music tune only played once at the start of each level and then once after each time you drop an ingredient with a bad guy on it that will ride all the way down, as sort of a little celebration.

Played fine yesterday for me on both MiSTer and DS99. Not a bad implementation at all of the game. The music is far too repetitive, but is also on the arcade version. Kind of puts your mind into a trance-like state though, all part of the process. Much improved over the constantly restarting music of the original ROM for sure, so thanks!

Lack of difficulty was actually kind of a hallmark of TI games in that era, if you think about it. It's not that the games were initially "easy", but once you got the hang of the main play mechanic they often lacked ways to increase difficulty much beyond a point. Part of this comes from the fact that we played the living sn*t out of these games as they were often all we had. I remember playing a game of TI Invaders for hours, Munchman for a good long time, Parsec, of course. Alpiner until we lost interest. And one point I purchased Hen Pecked, which really lacks a difficulty curve and eventually the game just crashes. Returned it the next day saying it was "defective". 🙃

Parsec has just an excellent audio and visual presentation. The sounds effects and speech were fantastic. I appreciated the different tactics required for each type of enemy, and the variety of including the asteroid belt and refuelling sequences. It's only downfall is that the difficulty caps too early. I would disagree that they stopped developing it half-way through. Compared to the other offerings on the 99 when it came out, they had already "won" several times over. What other TI games at the time did you prefer? I'm guessing none.

I'd like to say "thanks" for your amazing work on this emulator and also for your sage advice on which DS model to use/purchase. I just picked up an nice Japanese DSi LL and installed Twilight Menu, etc. on it. Got it all working and I really do like the top screen, kind of feels semi-analog somehow (yes, I'm a CRT snob). It's amazing to see my project game running so well on the portable unit also. Also you've mentioned that with the DSi models, you can tap into faster process speeds (133 MHz?). Is this something that I can control as an end-user somewhere, or does it have to done by the emulator code itself? Finally, I was wondering if you thought there was much hope for a better running SNES emulator on the DSi platform? The current one has some significant issues. I've resorted to playing the GBA alternatives where available, which run really well.

The retro 8-bit styled "Shovel Knight" game does a great job of implementing 8-bit style graphics on modern hardware. Here is an interesting article where the devs discuss the 8-bit rules/limits they followed and the few places they decided to go beyond them for those interested in such things: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/breaking-the-nes-for-shovel-knight#close-modal

The PC Engine was really a hybrid 8-bit/16-bit machine, had dual 16-bit graphics chips. So I'd argue it's more 16-bit than 8, from a graphics presentation perspective: Wikipedia: 482 simultaneous colors! True 8-bit graphics never have more than 256 colours available (1 byte or 8-bits), and generally far less than that can be displayed at the same time due to memory limitations. ChartGPT says 8-bit graphics are primarily defined by the limited 256 value color palette, low screen resolutions, and quirky graphical techniques used such as dithering.

8-bit would be no more than 2 colors per sprite, single depth scrolling backgrounds (no parallax) also with 2 colors per character, from a 16 color pallette.

Well speaking just personally, I don't have the interest or time to dedicate to a hi-quality simulation of reality that I have to explore, construct, etc. I barely have time for real life. For example, I enjoy the Zelda games, but had to quit playing BoTW because I detest the cooking aspect. Doesn't respect my time. I guess I don't really enjoy open-world games that much, they are too overwhelming. Give me a nice linear progression that I can finish in 5-10 hours and I'm all in. I think the real 16-bit art style really does suffer without scan-lines and other CRT artifacts. If you play these games on a LED display they often look kind of cruddy. They were designed for CRTs. Having said that, I would think new art could be produce in that style that does look good on LED displays, but what do I know. ?

It is funny, isn't it? After watching consumer computer graphics radically improve over the years, always dreaming of the day that realistic environments would be possible, now that we're basically there it's all a bit dull in the end. Turns out that art-style is far more important to me in terms of the appeal of a game vs. graphical specifications. I absolutely abhor the trend to bulbous cartoony characters that is ever-present in mobile/casual games and Pixar movies these days. Immediate turn off. I'm much more attracted to more sophisticated "painterly" art styles, such as in the recent "Ghost and Goblins Resurrection" game on the Switch (though the character jump animation is annoying). What's the point of virtually limitless resolution if you only use it to draw basic shapes (round faces, etc.)? My favourite is still the 16-bit pixel art, just beautiful. Of course, really needs the CRT/scanlines for full effect. We've lost so much nuance along the way to high-res/flat displays. I guess I hope that soon displays and graphics technology will be advanced enough to perfectly simulate the original CRT characteristics on a modern display, as crazy as that sounds.

I like these changes. In my mind, at least, it became fairly apparent that given the original rules of the game there weren't a lot of options in terms of how to deal with cases where two tanks were within the same number of turns of getting an accurate shot on one another, it came down to turn sequence. Well a shot limit could change the math a bit on my strategy of firing a shot just to allow my tank to hold its current position for another turn, but probably not by much. Likely to just make sure you didn't waste your last shot or two. Simply amazing. Is anyone else kind of put off by the colloquial nature of ChatGPTs responses? I feel like it would be more appropriate if it didn't enact a humanistic conversational tone but simple returned the results without the "flourish". It really intentionally blurs the lines between interacting with a very sophisticated bot vs something more sentient, which can only lead to confusion around what's really going on by the users.

Brings back a lot of mostly positive memories! I first used the Apple II+ at school when entering Jr. High School. Played "Adventure" on it and was immediately hooked. I also used the TRS-80s at the local small town Radio Shack a bit. Any computer was a fascination back then. I asked a neighbour kid who was into electronics and computers which home computer to purchase that was under $1K Cdn and he recommended the TI. Spent all my savings on the TI and couldn't afford any accessories, so base model was it. Also didn't have even have cassette recorder cables as they were back-ordered. I think I wrote programs and typed magazine games into that thing for over 6 months before the cables finally showed up. That was a good typing skill builder. Eventually got the speech synthesizer during the "buy x games and get a free one" deal. A good friend of mine had a Tandy Color Computer (CC) and that was fairly comparable to the TI (16K, cassette storage), but had the chiclet keyboard. In some ways it was superior to the TI (PEEK/POKE in BASIC, load execute binary files from cassette without any expansion HW, much faster BASIC), but ultimately the TI had a slightly more sophisticated look to some of its games, and of course, better sound and sprite auto-motion. We spent many hours hovering over each other's computers, reading out magazine code for the other to enter, or playing various games. Most of my friends had TIs as well and we'd often get together to enter or play a new game, or work on our games and demos. I remember we each made Xmas and Halloween demos and put out TVs in the front windows of our houses to show them off, trying to one-up the other. Also many weekend nights where we'd play Tunnels of Doom together, taking turns controlling the game while the others yelled out what action their player should take each turn, often until dawn. It was a time of discovery, friendship, and seemingly endless possibilities. One time another friend bought a VIC-20 but after using it for a few hours with him I quickly convinced him to return it and get the TI instead. Strangely, I had no idea the C64 even existed until a few years later when I stumbled on one at the local Zeller's dept. store. We eventually got one at our school, as well as a TI, lots of Apple II+, //e's, and eventually a II GS as well. I remember typing in code to the C64 at school to make auto-moving sprites work like the TI without understanding a line of it. The teacher at school was impressed by Parsec on the TI, saying it showed that it could do regular bitmapped graphics modes like the Apple IIs, but otherwise wasn't much impressed with the TI. They had developed an extensive grade-tracking system on the Apple IIs that spanned multiple diskettes (in BASIC). Later I developed some regret that I hadn't purchased a C64 instead of the TI, given the ability to use PEEK/POKE and even code assembly on an unexpanded C64. No telling what might have been, but I certainly have no regrets over the shared experiences the TI fostered in my friend-group. The first time I saw the Amiga at a computer store in the city it completely blew my mind. Price was way out of my budget though, and by then I had mostly moved on to dirt bikes, electric guitars, and girls, of course.

I dare you to do it! 😁

Your rate of progress is astounding!