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!

I use C99 on my M2 mac under Wine (you need the 64-bit C99 build). Works well enough, you do lose some of the fancy graphics features and such that really on windows libraries, but the basics are solid.

This is an interesting idea. My favourite word processor from back in the day was "Bank Street Writer", graphical word processing on 8-bit computers! Something like that on TI would be cool. Having said that, I would not use it beyond playing around.

Well I can't agree with you, I'm afraid! 🙂 Anyone who can produce the types of character art and game concepts (not to mention the math required to implement it) as you have in this thread alone is plenty capable of learning AL. The thing is, it's actually, simpler in some ways, than a more complex feature-rich XB environment. There are only a couple dozen different "commands" (operands) and in reality, you can get by with maybe 1/3 of them for most things. The trick is to have a conceptual model of what you are doing that is quite different from Basic. For example, instead of "call sprite()" to initialize a sprite, you add its attributes to the "Sprite Descriptor Table" section of VRAM (video memory) so the graphics chip will find it there on its next vsync cycle and draw it for you. So to some extent, you have to "think like the computer" a bit. Your code will work best as a state-machine (think game play loop), generally executed every 1/60th of a second (or 1/50th on PAL). So you are coding incremental changes that will happen 60 times a second. It's a different mindset for sure, and of course, almost everything is a hex number. Other than the Compute book, I haven't referenced those books of yours in many many years. The Compute book does have examples that show how to make colors, char defs, sprites etc. It would be nice if there was a tutorial series that started with extremely simple examples, like implementing a simple loop to increment a number (for/next equiv), stuff like that so you could get the gist of how the same concepts you are very familiar with in XB can be implemented in AL. In any case, it's certainly not for everyone, you do need a relatively high tolerance for writing what seems like a LOT of code to accomplish things that one statement would have done for you in XB.

I meant selecting "File->Cold Reset" in Classic99. My whole assemble to run cycle is about 5 seconds on a slow day. Well judging from the complexity and nature of this project I'd hesitate to classify the OP as a "beginner". Anyway, all I'm saying @Bones-69 is that you can solve your performance problems and meet your own goals with your project by using Assembly Language. Depending on your background, you might find it more approachable than you expect. I know I did.

It doesn't have to be that way though. As I've progressed in my Assembly Language project and learning, I'm now at the point where my game runs as a multi-bank ROM cartridge. I do all my development using the free IntelliJ IDEA with the XDT99 assembler and IDE plugin, press "build" and I have a runnable cartridge image in < 1 sec. Then I cold reboot my already running Classic99 emulator, which picks up the refreshed cartridge image, press "2", and I'm running in literally 4 or 5 keystrokes. Beat that! My only regret is not moving to the cartridge format sooner, it would have saved me many minutes/hours of assembling, linking, loading, etc. Esp. compared to the steps required to build a compiled XB project, it literally couldn't be any easier than what I'm doing now. Yes, debugging in AL can be a treat, but once you get the hang of things, working in something like Classic99, it's pretty decent, actually. And working on a project like the OPs one, that is well planned, with the "hard bits" already figured out, would make an AL port pretty straightforward, I would think. I know that learning and coding my AL project has been the most fun/rewarding coding experience I've had in years, I highly recommend it. Plus, you don't have to deal with all the complexities of all the various layers on the TI (which I know for some people is half the fun, but not I). NO XB, GROM, etc. Just turn off interrupts and go crazy, it's just you and HW now. Simple. 😎

I just wanted to mention that I "discovered" this fine utility via organic web search awhile back and have used it successfully for all my game sprite definitions, so thanks! It seems that all roads eventually lead back to @Asmusr!

Assembly Language is the way!

Hilarious! btw the effect to create the bad guys should contract to the spot they appear instead of moving away from it, iMHO. ..and then when you shoot one the effect you have now for when they are placed could be used.

Thanks for posting these. I found that not having a variety of opponents to test against made it difficult to anticipate my tank's weak points, having these examples available will surely make it possible for future contest contestants to implement more sophisticated tanks.

Structured Extended Basic (attached the PDF for you), comes with TiCodeEd editor. It allows you code XB or XB256 using more modern / efficient programming syntax and then translates it into pure XB for you that you can just paste into Classic99, or it will do it automatically for you. The ability to use SXB was a big factor in my deciding to enter, honestly. TICodEd.pdf