The Codex Posted February 2, 2010 Share Posted February 2, 2010 Hello folks, a quick greeting to say how glad I am to be here. I'm the guy behind Dream Codex Retrogames and the only live TI remaker in captivity. I learned how to program on a TI-99/4A and the love of it has never left me. I've remade 3 TI games so far and have another 4 in the works, including one as a special favor to Brian Roppolo of RTM. Anyway, seeing these great contest entries is making me want to dust off Extended BASIC! But until I gather up that much courage, I'll be working on my remakes. Please let me know if there's any interest in those and I'll be glad to talk about myself the games ad nauseum. Folks who dig modern reworks of old classics can also check out Retro Remakes, a site that I'm an errant admin on and which can always use more TI boosters. Thanks for letting me come play with you! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Opry99er Posted February 2, 2010 Share Posted February 2, 2010 Your TOD work is part of what inspired me to start programming. Thank you for that, and I would LOVE to hear more about the process than what I read in your blogs (i've read them all). . Thanks again! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Codex Posted February 3, 2010 Author Share Posted February 3, 2010 Thanks Owen, and it's great to see you here. Your game is looking fantastic as well! More on my mystery project for Bryan as it develops. Hopefully it's a favorite of other 99ers as well. I hadn't played it before starting the remake, but now I'm hooked. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Opry99er Posted February 3, 2010 Share Posted February 3, 2010 You've peaked MY interest. . I would love to hear more when you are ready to dissiminate that information. If you DO decide to dust off the ol' TI programming again, let me know... I have a game that I've been designing in principle that you could really help me on with your CRPG experience. These are exciting times for the TI-99. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Opry99er Posted February 3, 2010 Share Posted February 3, 2010 You know, I bought the ToD adventure editor and created my own game. Wrote a manual for it, everything.... Just never got finished with the minute details because my crappy disk drive ate my editor. I still have the game, however. This was the precursor to the eventual CRPG I have on the docket to write. The name of the game was "The Legend of Beryl Reichardt.". I wrote a blog about this that you can look at on my website, Opry99er.com. Please read it and let me know what you think. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Opry99er Posted February 3, 2010 Share Posted February 3, 2010 On looking again at the blog, the story was tailored a bit specifically for the ToD version of the game... You can just disregard the ToD references, as the majority of the game will take place in a dark forest and inside a cave under the mountains... Anyway, carry on. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+retroclouds Posted February 3, 2010 Share Posted February 3, 2010 Hello folks, a quick greeting to say how glad I am to be here. I'm the guy behind Dream Codex Retrogames and the only live TI remaker in captivity. I learned how to program on a TI-99/4A and the love of it has never left me. I've remade 3 TI games so far and have another 4 in the works, including one as a special favor to Brian Roppolo of RTM. Anyway, seeing these great contest entries is making me want to dust off Extended BASIC! But until I gather up that much courage, I'll be working on my remakes. Please let me know if there's any interest in those and I'll be glad to talk about myself the games ad nauseum. Folks who dig modern reworks of old classics can also check out Retro Remakes, a site that I'm an errant admin on and which can always use more TI boosters. Thanks for letting me come play with you! Welcome! It's good to have you around and I really like the work you have been doing. Thinking about it, perhaps some of the remakes could be rewritten for the TI. Now would that be cool! Imagine playing MunchMates on the TI Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sometimes99er Posted February 3, 2010 Share Posted February 3, 2010 I'm the guy behind Dream Codex Retrogames and the only live TI remaker in captivity. You’ve done some amazing TI retro work there (Dream Codex Retrogames), and I especially enjoyed MunchMates. I’m becoming a TI remaker too. I’ve mainly done some TI assembler demos. In the future I’ll be doing full TI games (mainly 8K cart style) - both original ones and clones (don’t know about conversions). Also I’ll be turning to remakes. I’ve been looking a bit into the cross platform issues, and I like the idea of online play thru internet browsers. There seem good reason to choose either Java or Flash. Folks who dig modern reworks of old classics can also check out Retro Remakes, a site that I'm an errant admin on and which can always use more TI boosters. Is it possible to list games by original system ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Codex Posted February 3, 2010 Author Share Posted February 3, 2010 (edited) I've been reading your blog as well Owen, good stuff, as are the videos. (I really need to blog more like that and less like a "release/update list".) Your RPG looks fab, and I'm glad to lend whatever assistance I can. I've been thinking of eventually releasing all my code as open source at some point, in part for whatever dubious educational value it might have, but also so that all the reverse-engineering of the originals is preserved. I'd have to clean up a lot of code first though before putting it out there... Thanks retroclouds, and great job on pulling to competition together. As for converting games back to the TI, I was reading the thread about doing Bejeweled on the TI and was thinking that I could probably "demake" Cartouche with a reasonable level of effort. It would mean getting a TI again, and an Extended BASIC cart, unless there is a convenient way to develop in emulation. I'll read the Resources thread again and see, now that my interest is waxing. sometimes99er, it would be great to have another TI remaker out there! And judging by your postings you're clearly a skilled artist and game designer as well, so I'm looking forward to your original efforts too. As for the RR game list, I wrote three different web applications that let people show off the development status of their games, view games by a number of different criteria, and even leave comments. But they decided to go with the minimal-overhead forum scraper, which doesn't let you do much. I'll dig out the code I did and put it back up if anyone is interested, though it looks like AtariAge has it's own Project Tracker in place already. Thanks again for letting me join the cool kids club! Edited February 3, 2010 by The Codex Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Opry99er Posted February 3, 2010 Share Posted February 3, 2010 One word, 2 numbers.... CLASSIC99!!!! I do 99% of my XB game development on that emulator... The best out there, IMHO. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Codex Posted February 3, 2010 Author Share Posted February 3, 2010 Thanks mate, I'll definitely look into it further! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Opry99er Posted February 3, 2010 Share Posted February 3, 2010 If you haven't done it recently, DL the newest version of Classic99... The new features are unmatched anywhere.... The Development environment is great!!! With the copy and paste function, you can copy code from an email or off this forum and paste it into XB!!! Also, you can save your program to "CLIP", copy it there, and paste it HERE. . Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Codex Posted February 3, 2010 Author Share Posted February 3, 2010 (edited) Sweet, that's the main thing that kept me from getting back into TI development - file management. If I can write code in my text editor of choice and just paste it over, then it's a deal! Now I'm kind of wishing I still had the games I wrote on the TI back in the day. But only a little, as (a) they were crap, and (b) they were all on tape, which would likely be unrecoverable now anyway. The only one I remember clearly was a rather dreadful Frogger/Jawbreaker kind of affair with a bunch of sprites whizzing by in horizontal lanes. I don't thing the game world lost anything when that disappeared. Edited February 3, 2010 by The Codex Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Opry99er Posted February 3, 2010 Share Posted February 3, 2010 This is a big conversion project I've been working on to recover tape programs..I go tape to disk... Then disk to PC via serial transfer--then run on Classic99, then upload to my website where they are now downloadable. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sometimes99er Posted February 3, 2010 Share Posted February 3, 2010 Owen, you say that Classic99 is the best out there and that new features are unmatched anywhere. I guess you must know all of other emulators very well. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Opry99er Posted February 3, 2010 Share Posted February 3, 2010 Forgive me... I am not the author of any emulators, nor have I written any reviews of them. I have, however, tried MESS, Win994a and the ancient V9T9. MESS is great... But does not have the debugging system Classic99 has, and no CLIP function. Win994a is a good emulator as well, but I have the same thoughts about it as well... Also, as far as I know, Win994a is not being actively supported or added to at the moment. Michael Zapf does a great job of supporting the 4a in MESS... No doubt about that. As a user of Classic99, the FIAD format makes all my tasks easier. It is opinion... That is all. But for development, I prefer Classic99. Not disparaging any of the others---they are all important to the community. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Codex Posted February 4, 2010 Author Share Posted February 4, 2010 Sounds like Classic99 is the way for me to go for ease of development, at least by my preferred path of "learning the least new tools". MESS is likely to remain my favorite for regular TI gaming use because I'm comfortable with it and it's easy to get game carts up and going for a quick play. I use MESS to emulate other old systems as well, but can definitely appreciate the extra finesse of dedicated emulators. Vice64, UAE for Amiga, Stella, PSX, and Gens are all fantastic emulators that I use regularly, and I'm always open to hearing about others that people recommend. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Opry99er Posted February 4, 2010 Share Posted February 4, 2010 "Sometimes" prefers MESS. It truly is an awesome piece of software. . When I first saw it, I could not fathom the scope of all the emulators!!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Codex Posted February 4, 2010 Author Share Posted February 4, 2010 MESS is great for gathering a lot of systems together, especially ones that I largely just want to play games on (like the MSX, Spectrum, or ColecoVision). But I like having the dedicated emus as well, particularly when I want to go deeper into a specific system. Especially ones like UAE, which pretty much puts an Amiga on your desktop. And like I said before, the cut-and-paste features of Classic99 are about the only thing right now that could entice me back into developing on that platform directly. They've definitely all got their individual merits, and I'm sincerely grateful that we've got such an embarrassment of riches to choose from. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Opry99er Posted February 4, 2010 Share Posted February 4, 2010 I agree... The new Classic99 is wicked. You should also get TI99Dir. Essential program. It allows you to view the contents of any file in a .DSK and change file formats to/from TIFILES format. That way you can transfer to/from the real TI for testing and whatnot. . I'll make up some instructional videos on programming on emulation to add to my YouTube TI instructional videos channel, Opry99er. . Go forth, young man, and PROGRAM!!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
InfernalKeith Posted February 4, 2010 Share Posted February 4, 2010 You bunch of sissies. I'm finishing Herding Cats on REAL GEAR!!! ARRRRRRRRR!!!! Actually, I really am doing that, but I may move to Classic99 after this project. I sorta feel like I'm betraying the old girl, working on my PC instead, but it's simply more convenient to work on my main computer, to be able to work on my laptop elsewhere, etc. I admit to a sort of weird "purity" standard I was trying to maintain for a while... but that's such an arbitrary, self-imposed line to draw in the sand. If I use a 99/4A with a Rave99 keyboard and a compact flash drive, am I really programming on a "true" TI? I think I've decided that for me, as long as my program will run on a stock 99/4A, how it's made isn't as important. When "keeping it real" gets in the way of having fun, or getting work done, then I'm just being ridiculous. Speaking of which... back to work! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sometimes99er Posted February 4, 2010 Share Posted February 4, 2010 But does not have the debugging system Classic99 has, and no CLIP function. No, but MESS has another debugging system with commands like hotspot 1,40,#1000 Looks for hotspots on CPU 1 using a search buffer of 64 entries, reporting any entries which end up with 1000 or more hits. wp 23456,a,w,wpdata == 1 Set a watchpoint that will halt execution whenever a write occurs in the address range 23456-2345f AND the data written is equal to 1. MESS might not have CLIP, but then I could name dozens of things the Classic99 does not offer. And I’m not trying to put either emulator down. Win994a has the wonderful cross assembler that even Tursi and Mark uses from time to time. Sure Classic99 is also my preferred emulator when it comes to XB. "Sometimes" prefers MESS. It truly is an awesome piece of software. . When I first saw it, I could not fathom the scope of all the emulators!!! Hmmm ... Did I really say that ? I don’t think I as such prefer Toyota over Ferrari, but I drive Toyota all the time. Oops, there goes the pedal again ... MESS is great for gathering a lot of systems together, especially ones that I largely just want to play games on (like the MSX, Spectrum, or ColecoVision). But I like having the dedicated emus as well, particularly when I want to go deeper into a specific system. Especially ones like UAE, which pretty much puts an Amiga on your desktop. Ahh, me too ! You bunch of sissies. I'm finishing Herding Cats on REAL GEAR!!! ARRRRRRRRR!!!! I gave my TI-99/4A (Mini Mem + 32K) to some neighbours in the mid eighties. Still it must be first love or something. And I’m trying to stick with my decision not to have any old hardware in the house. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sometimes99er Posted February 4, 2010 Share Posted February 4, 2010 I gave my TI-99/4A (Mini Mem + 32K) to some neighbours in the mid eighties. Still it must be first love or something. And I’m trying to stick with my decision not to have any old hardware in the house. Rediscovered the TI-99/4A in 2004 and then using V9T9. That’s probably why I’m stuck with “TIAsm” as a cross assembler (source is available). And I’m really trying to minimize TI time and also use new methods and technologies. Having to justify myself. And keep the wife at a distance. She looks interested, asks a few questions and then says I’m wasting my time. Should I do the same to her ? PS. Just realized I'm the only old hardware around the house ... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
InfernalKeith Posted February 4, 2010 Share Posted February 4, 2010 I am lucky there. We have a house with a big basement, and as long as my antique 'treasures' live down there, and not where she has to see them, my wife doesn't care what I do. Since I also buy and sell my non-wanted stuff on Ebay, it brings in a little extra $ which she also likes. I wonder if my hobby will turn into 'collecting' at some point, though... I never wanted to be the guy who wants EVERY cart or game for each system, but I find myself keeping a lot more stuff lately. :/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Codex Posted February 4, 2010 Author Share Posted February 4, 2010 Thanks Owen, I do use TI99Dir, it was a big help in getting data off the Tunnels.dsk for ToD. But my aptitude with it ended when I tried to create blank floppy images and discovered I could only write one file to each. I'll definitely check out your tutorials, as if I do get back into XB I'll need to know how to save my code in local TI format inside the emu. And Keith, more power to you if you can code on the original iron. I tried that for a while with an Amiga 500 I picked up in auction but discovered the passage of time had eroded my tolerances too greatly for me to get any serious development done. It would be nice to have the old systems around for testing how the final product plays, though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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