Eight Bit Berzerk

[Goochman]

I discovered with digital sounds IRQ, it is best to write a custom IRQ and NMI routines. That requires disabling the OS ROM and use the RAM under. You have much more CPU time available to be able play digital sounds with a moderate size VBI for your game.

 

I have been considering doing "FRENZY" on the Atari 8-bit because I have experience working with Digital Sounds, Character Mapped Screens, and Sprite Multiplexers. We could do a very accurate port. PACMANPLUS did this game on the 7800 and feel we can do the same for the 8-bit/5200. Might use Antic-4, but the arcade seems to have more "Rows and Columns" for those pieces of walls you have to shoot. I can do some character set manipulation to get it close to what the arcade is. Since it also has steady a playfield, "Super-IRC" could be used if we need to go over 5 colors.

Would be great to see Frenzy on the 8bit. Never understood why this got such a limited release. Kinda like Mappy (mentioned in another thread). The changes PacManPLus did on the 7800 version are also pretty cool and make the game more interesting.

[Stormtrooper of Death]

Okay, its a bit off topic, but just wanted to tell you this:

 

Did you folks know, that Atari also made a special Battlezone variant for the US Army ? Yep. I also read that one Atari game designer did not want to program the game for the military, because the Atarian was / is a pacifist ! yep.

Edited March 12, 2014 by Stormtrooper of Death

[Level42]

Yes that is very well known but that was about the arcade version. IMHO vector games are the hardest one's to convert. You can _never_ reach the fantastic visual effects of a real vector monitor on a raster screen. Think about it this way: if they had to use a vector monitor to get the game running smoothly on (much more powerful) arcade hardware, there is NO way that home hardware could ever run as smooth because it was raster. Even though the basics are the same (Battlezone uses 6502 and POKEY too) there is still some powerful dedicated hardware for doing the 3D calculations on the arcade hardware that the A8 can never match. After all you can't use the Antic or the GTIA...but well....there's no vector monitor output anyway

 

This _would_ be a very cool thing to try, to build an interface that would enable (f.i.) an A8 to output vector graphics.....you could use a vectrex as monitor (or a scope or best, an arcade vector monitor)....but I guess that will remain just one of my wild dreams, just like someone writing some awesome new games that will run on original vector arcade hardware...imagine what you could do with the horsepower of a Star Wars PCB set....4 Pokeys, 1 speech synth, couple of 6809's....some of the guys who wrote the later demo's/games on the A8 would be able to make that hardware do stuff we could never imagine, but it's probably never going to happen....

 

The only thing I know to exist are a breakout vector version on Tempest hardware I believe and maybe a vector Pac Man ? But both of these games are rather pointless to do in vectors...

 

Anyway, we're drifting off

 

Does anybody know how the words were stored in Berzerk A8 ? Are they proper samples like we used today, I can't imagine that because that would require a lot of ROM/RAM. In some way, they must have done in software what was done in hardware on the speech synths.