Arkyology - New prototype discovered - Finished Game!

[classicgamer74]

Wow, you guys are talented! I wish I had the time and patience to do hacks and homebrews!

[CPUWIZ]

Wow, you guys are talented! I wish I had the time and patience to do hacks and homebrews!

 

Yep, the definition of a piracy driven echo chamber! Not a bunch of geezers, keeping retro gaming alive.

[Mitkraft]

Please dont destroy any Music Machine carts to make these. I thought you guys were joking because they are expensive and hard to find but some posters sound serious. I would love to have a Music Machine cart for my wifes pure nostalgia due to her strong childhood attachment to the Album but I cant spend the kind of money on one that they usually commanded so the thought of destroying one saddens me.

[Albert]

Please dont destroy any Music Machine carts to make these.

 

I can tell you that I certainly would not do that!!

[+save2600]

Could just 3D print a Sparrow cartridge shell today.

[classicgamer74]

I loved the video John Hancock did about this game. Does he ever hang out here? I've always wanted to meet him as he was one of those who inspired me to create my own YouTube channel.

[+stupus]

Could just 3D print a Sparrow cartridge shell today.

Oooooo.....I think we might have a project for my 3d printing obsessed son.

Although I don't know what the insides look like and I'm not taking mine apart.

But I guess the inside would need to be made to hold whatever common pcb would be used for the chips anyway....not a sparrow pcb.

[CPUWIZ]

Please dont destroy any Music Machine carts to make these. I thought you guys were joking because they are expensive and hard to find but some posters sound serious. I would love to have a Music Machine cart for my wifes pure nostalgia due to her strong childhood attachment to the Album but I cant spend the kind of money on one that they usually commanded so the thought of destroying one saddens me.

 

Personally, I hail Supergun for his purity, I have opened carts that nobody would even buy.

[Shawn]

Please dont destroy any Music Machine carts to make these. I thought you guys were joking because they are expensive and hard to find but some posters sound serious. I would love to have a Music Machine cart for my wifes pure nostalgia due to her strong childhood attachment to the Album but I cant spend the kind of money on one that they usually commanded so the thought of destroying one saddens me.

 

You are projecting. I don't have the cash to do such a thing either but I also know that many, many people view the cost of a music machine cart as a trivial amount of money to be spent on a daily basis. Using one for a donor shell to make a custom cartridge with would only make sense in that case. IIRC, The programmer has stated this was not to be released by Sparrow though so putting it in a Sparrow shell might not even be the right thing to do if chasing authenticity was the goal.

[+stupus]

On 1 with a trashed label it woulkd make sense as you can just swap out the pcbs. And if the label for the music machine is already shot your not destroying anything anyway.

[Supergun]

Well that would change matters then. (if Sparrow would not have actually released the game under their label anyhow) Maybe Paul can shed some more light on this.

[chas10e]

Well that would change matters then. (if Sparrow would not have actually released the game under their label anyhow) Maybe Paul can shed some more light on this.

I recall the original newspaper article said it was to be published by Sparrow

[Mitkraft]

Cost of a Music Machine cart notwithstanding, Id hate for there to be one less in the world just to hack together a what could have been cart.

[Shawn]

I recall the original newspaper article said it was to be published by Sparrow

 

Didn't that Paul guy say it was going to be released apart from them and directly by EntetTech if it did actually make it to market as Sparrow had concerns how the game worked? I could very well be wrong in how I read what he said, I cut and quoted below. If there was an ad with Sparrow attached to it that is good enough to go on to justify the use of one of their shells. Expensive, but understandable

 

 

EDIT: ADDED QUOTE FROM PAUL'S POST

 

The hardware engineer from the Unitronix project (odd coincidence I thought at the time) was working with him to release Arkyology -- this was probably 1986(?) as I had the equipment and source code from the EnterTech bankruptcy auction. They had some concerns about the timing when it ran in their prototype hardware cartridge. That was the last contact I had with any of the principals and the last time I heard about Arkyology outside of my copy.

 

Edited September 10, 2018 by Shawn

[Swami]

 

Didn't that Paul guy say it was going to be released apart from them and directly by EntetTech if it did actually make it to market as Sparrow had concerns how the game worked? I could very well be wrong in how I read what he said, I cut and quoted below. If there was an ad with Sparrow attached to it that is good enough to go on to justify the use of one of their shells. Expensive, but understandable

 

 

EDIT: ADDED QUOTE FROM PAUL'S POST

 

 

This was the head of Sparrow 's games group and the former Unitronix guy working for the head to release the Arkyology game some two years later, after EnterTech had gone bankrupt and telling Paul, who owned the game rights, they were having difficulty with the timing of the game. It was still Sparrow in charge, as Sparrow has continued to exist to this day, but it sounds like it went into development limbo after that. I don't know, maybe it was the same mystery bug that just got fixed a couple weeks ago.

[Shawn]

 

I don't know, maybe it was the same mystery bug that just got fixed a couple weeks ago.

 

I'm thinking so as well.

[accousticguitar]

Nukey's version is better. I'll stick with that one.

Agreed. If the game in its original state is hard to play then I won't be playing it. After all, the reason the game was made in the first place was for people to play it.

[pwalters]

Interesting discussion going on about Sparrow... Unfortunately I wasn't on the business side of things so I can't give a definitive account on that.

 

Here's what I know.... along with some of the technical side that also played into the overall saga:

 

I don't recall the name of the company we were developing for. 'Sparrow' rings a bell, but I just can't be definitive as I don't recall. There was one individual -- whose name I cannot recall -- who was the 'customer'. He was driving the project as the customer and he was to take delivery of both Arkyology and David and Goliath. He spoke of his 'ministry' and who the targeted demographic was to be for this game -- which was mid teenage years (part of why the game play is on the challenging side). I do recall that there were problems with payment from our customer. At one point he told me that he had personally mortgaged his house to try to pay for the projects. This was is part of why Arkyology was not released and David and Goliath wasn't finished back then - and also why the copyright stayed with Enter-Tech, and eventually to me when I purchased it at their bankruptcy auction. It wasn't until after Enter-Tech was gone, that the original customer started up trying to make the ROM again, and contacted me.

 

The customer ended up not having the funds to move forward with the mask as it was quite expensive at $40k. The game was designed for a specific manufacturer's F8 masked ROM - not today's laissez-fair home brewed circuit boards. As such there were specific functionalities that we counted on. Such as guaranteed startup in bank 0, guaranteed timing on bank switching. One other thing that gave it faster timing was inside the ROM, the -CE was always on and -OE was what was toggled on a memory fetch cycle. (This is an old trick on the 6502 and later 65816 to get 20ns or so faster response from the ROM).

 

They were playing it with a hand-built F8 board. Propagation delays were non-standard, startup was not guaranteed in bank 0, and their board was a little heat sensitive meaning when it was cold the game would get a bit flaky. The problems they saw in their hand-built board disappeared with a short blast from a heat gun - which indicated they had a marginally too tight timing in their circuit.

 

Most, if not all of the 'bugs' I'm reading about here in the forum are what I would term 'modern' problems. Play on emulators, or newer Atari platforms either didn't exist, or were never the target have not a reasonable expectation of working 100%. I can tell you there were literally thousands of hours of play testing on our end. While the game was developed using an Kontron/Futredata In-Curcuit-Emulator, we also built our own 'f8' type board that was very close in timing to the masked ROM's specs that we were targeting.

 

One of the advantages of the Kontron was it had metering capabilities that were very nice to use in building a 2600 game. One was you could set it up to count -- in real time while running -- timing from a starting trigger point to and end point in the software. This allowed us to pretty easily get exact timing on the video loop.

 

--edited for clarity

Edited September 10, 2018 by pwalters

[Swami]

I did find these two articles. Nothing super-concrete. There are a couple big names with HomeComputer Software dropped in the second article. I used the quotes with "Sparrow Games" because I didn't know the exact name of the entity that was providing the game to Sparrow at-large. It sounds like HomeComputer Software developed games and Sparrow published and distributed them. How EnterTech would get involved is mysterious, but HSC may have wanted to farm out the task or Sparrow may have approached EnterTech directly. It's possible some other company was involved in a joint venture with Sparrow and other company was farming it out to EnterTech, but it's kind of complicated for a small-ish software spin-off at Sparrow. However, descriptions of The Music Machine game say it was published by HomeComputer Software, developed by Christian Software Development and distributed through Sparrow Distribution, so it's possible a whole other distribution-publisher-development branch existed from Sparrow in 1983.

 

Could also be this publishing company decided to try to move Arkyology independently in 1986, without Sparrow Distribution. The Chicago Tribune article mentioned way back in the beginning of the thread might give more insight, through a closer look, if anybody has a subscription.

 

Edit: BTW, I wonder what ever became of "Name that Hymn", not that I would be much good at it, and HomeComputer Software after this article? Video game crash for obvious, but it looks like Sparrow had at least three games they were marketing: Arkyology, David and Goliath and Name That Hymn. I also wonder if The Music Machine video game had been released yet, since there is no mention of it.

 

http://gdri.smspower.org/wiki/index.php/Blog:Change_of_Heart:_Secular_Developers_Turned_Christian (a 2015 blog article)

HomeComputer Software

Under a joint venture agreement, HomeComputer Software, creator of the obscure Super Micro handheld system, made several titles that were distributed by Christian record company Sparrow (or rather, Sparrow Distribution). These included the Family Bible Fun line for Atari 8-bit and Apple II computers and The Music Machine for the Atari 2600, which was based on a series of children's records. Name That Hymn and a 2600 game, Arkyology, were also announced. (The programmer of Arkyology appeared on the AtariAge forums, and a finished prototype was uncovered in 2015. The game was developed by a different company, Enter-Tech.)

 

From June 1983:

https://archive.org/stream/softalkv3n10jun1983#page/194/mode/2up/search/sparrow

HomeComputer Software (Sunnyvale, CA), developer of Family Bible Fun Games, has split off from parent company Personal Computer Management Corporation and established new headquarters in Sunnyvale. John Tedesco, Former PCMC vice president and founder, is now president of and director of marketing for HomeComputer Software. Daniel Shafer, creator of the Bible games, is executive vice-president in charge of production. Sparrow Records, a Canoga Park, California-based gospel record company, is marketing the Bible Fun series through Christian book stores nationwide as part of a joint venture in which HomeComputer Software will create additional games for exclusive distribution by Sparrow, beginning with Name That Hymn.

[Swami]

More about Name That Hymn, which was supposed to be the first video game from Sparrow, but The Music Machine came out and NTH never did.

[DirtyHairy]

Most, if not all of the 'bugs' I'm reading about here in the forum are what I would term 'modern' problems. Play on emulators, or newer Atari platforms either didn't exist, or were never the target have not a reasonable expectation of working 100%. I can tell you there were literally thousands of hours of play testing on our end. While the game was developed using an Kontron/Futredata In-Curcuit-Emulator, we also built our own 'f8' type board that was very close in timing to the masked ROM's specs that we were targeting.

 

I'd like to chime in here. At this point, I'd dare to say that Stella (and 6502.ts) are very close to being perfect replicas of the VCS, and the remaining known issues in emulating the hardware are *very* specific edge cases. While there is always the possibility that a glitch is an emulation artifact, in almost 100% of the cases it is not.

 

In the case of this game, the "bugs" that people mention on this thread are the consequence of the incomplete startup code in bank 1, which I understand wasn't an issue during production as the logic on the cartridge would always power up in bank 0. This is arguably the consequence of the emulation not recreating the specific hardware your production boards would have used, but I'd like to stress that it is not an emulation glitch either --- if you'd burn EPROMs and build simple PCBs does that do not always start up in bank 0, you'd see exactly the same issues on real hardware

Edited September 10, 2018 by DirtyHairy

[Supergun]

Stella is what Stella is. (and all emulators in general for that matter) And those who depend & rely on them, wether gamers or programmers, must also live and die by them. They are imperfect. Period.

 

I think some of you here have amnesia. Every time some old long lost game surfaces, like an Extra Terrestrials or a Tank Blitz or whatever; modifications must be made to Stella, and a new update revision must be released before it will run it properly. This game is no different, and should be extended the same courtesy.

 

And if some Ben Heck portable hack rig job or some cheap fake Retron aftermarket garbage crap doesnt run a cartridge, the problem isnt the cartridge, its the system. Emulators SUCK. They are PURE shit. And if your not using original hardware to play your games at home, then your set up is trash. Man up and buy authentic & original hardware.

 

Regarding the F8 bankswitch comment, yes, I can say that Ive been experimenting with various 8kb eprom cartridges from different manufacturers, and they arent all compatible.

[pwalters]

 

I'd like to chime in here. At this point, I'd dare to say that Stella (and 6502.ts) are very close to being perfect replicas of the VCS, and the remaining known issues in emulating the hardware are *very* specific edge cases. While there is always the possibility that a glitch is an emulation artifact, in almost 100% of the cases it is not.

 

In the case of this game, the "bugs" that people mention on this thread are the consequence of the incomplete startup code in bank 1, which I understand wasn't an issue during production as the logic on the cartridge would always power up in bank 0. This is arguably the consequence of the emulation not recreating the specific hardware your production boards would have used, but I'd like to stress that it is not an emulation glitch either --- if you'd burn EPROMs and build simple PCBs does that do not always start up in bank 0, you'd see exactly the same issues on real hardware

 

Not arguing any of that. An emulator has complete control over every aspect of the game so things like hardware ROM access timing aren't part of the equation. In fact in about 1998 or '99 I xfered the Arkyology binary from the Kontron dev system to my PC, and ran it on Stella to show my children (which is the only reason it survived till today). I remember it seemed to work pretty flawlessly and I saw no problems at the time other than the game play was slower than the cart in the 2600 was. Of course that was with a 266mhz Pentium 2 so it was impressive that it could run at a playable speed at all.

 

I suppose those of us who develop classify a 'bug' as an error, in design or implementation especially if it doesn't meet the design specifications. Where a user that just wants to play the game calls a 'bug' anything that interferes with game play?

 

My grandchildren have also played it but they got bored very quickly and went back to their tablets and phones...

[+stephena]

Stella is what Stella is. (and all emulators in general for that matter) And those who depend & rely on them, wether gamers or programmers, must also live and die by them. They are imperfect. Period.

 

I think some of you here have amnesia. Every time some old long lost game surfaces, like an Extra Terrestrials or a Tank Blitz or whatever; modifications must be made to Stella, and a new update revision must be released before it will run it properly. This game is no different, and should be extended the same courtesy.

 

Nobody is arguing not to extend the same courtesy. In fact only you seem to be trying to escalate this discussion.

 

The error with Extra Terrestrials was because of incomplete emulation of RSYNC, an undocumented feature. Once it was discovered, it was fixed. At no point did I or anyone else involved with Stella say it was a problem with the ROM. In fact, we used it as a test case to fix the RSYNC emulation. As of now, only Stella and 6502.ts properly support it, because we focus on emulation accuracy.

 

Regarding the F8 bankswitch comment, yes, I can say that Ive been experimenting with various 8kb eprom cartridges from different manufacturers, and they arent all compatible.

 

The issue here (note that I didn't say bug) is that some carts can start from any bank, and some must start from a set bank at all times. And it's not consistent even in the same scheme. So for the next release of Stella we will add the ability for the end-user to specify, per-ROM, which bank to use.

 

So the ROM and the original developer are not wrong. They chose hardware and specifications that assumed the startup bank would be 0, so that's that. A valid decision. Problem is, other developers have decided in other bankswitch schemes to use a different startup bank. And here we have diametrically opposed options. So the best that Stella can do is to allow the setting to be changed, per-ROM. So everyone is satisfied.

 

And if some Ben Heck portable hack rig job or some cheap fake Retron aftermarket garbage crap doesnt run a cartridge, the problem isnt the cartridge, its the system. Emulators SUCK. They are PURE shit. And if your not using original hardware to play your games at home, then your set up is trash. Man up and buy authentic & original hardware.

 

Well obviously the matter is now closed; you have spoken, and made sure that we know that the past 20 years of development on Stella was a waste of time. Time to pack it all up and throw in the towel, since you've deigned that all emulation is a complete waste of time.

 

Another bozo for the ignore list, I see ...

[DirtyHairy]

Emulators SUCK. They are PURE shit. And if your not using original hardware to play your games at home, then your set up is trash. Man up and buy authentic & original hardware.

 

 

I am amazed about how you seem to see fit to crap on the work of a whole team of people, including me, in a single sentence Do you have any idea about the time and effort that has gone into researching the hardware to the point where we are now? Are you aware about the way Stella enables homebrew development? Do you think the advancements in modern day homebrews could have been made without a reliable emulation platform? How do you think this piece of video game history will be preserved after the original hardware has died away?

 

I don't want to derail this thread, so I'll stop here and swallow the rest that I'd have to say on this subject.

Edited September 10, 2018 by DirtyHairy