LTO Flash! - Intellivision Flash Cartridge Information

[pimpmaul69]

I can haz derp, too.

thanks for the laugh.

[intvnut]

So.... I found another instance of the LTO logo road sign here in the D/FW metroplex. This time, it's in Irving, at the intersection of TX-114 and TX-161 (or Valley View, depending on who you ask).

 

Here's a Google Street View link: https://goo.gl/maps/7COK7

 

Google's blurred out the "One Way", presumably because they haven't signed a cross-promotional contract with my lucrative brand. ;)

 

EDIT: The LTO Corporate Logo appears multiple times at this intersection!

 

• https://goo.gl/maps/7COK7
• https://goo.gl/maps/xwaO5

Edited February 5, 2015 by intvnut

[Bodyshots]

Am I the only one who gets excited everytime I see a new post on this subject of the LTO flash?

[killersquirel]

No, you are not the only one that gets excited.

[pimpmaul69]

So now i understand tge meaning of these signs. Makes sense now. But still retarded as hell

[intvnut]

I'm inching ever closer. Finalizing the firmware is like death by a thousand paper cuts. But, that's nothing new. It was the same way with Space Patrol and every other game I've had input to, and the results were worth it.

 

On the plus side, LTO Flash! is field upgradeable, so even if I don't get everything perfect in 1.0, you'll be able to upgrade your units with corrected firmware, should that be necessary. Upgrading is quite painless. I'm sure intvsteve will attest to that. (Although he'll also likely attest to the fact that sometimes my development revisions have really annoying bugs.... Fact of life during development.)

 

I actually am doing the vast majority of my development work using the field-upgrade mechanism, as it's actually faster and more convenient than the dedicated programming pod. So, by the time everyone here gets their copy, the firmware upgrade feature will be thoroughly tested. ;)

Edited February 5, 2015 by intvnut

[+intvsteve]

It's been a godsend to have a solid firmware upgrade path. But death by a thousand cuts is so, so apropos. I think every time we feel like a feature is nearing done, we think of two new ones.

[freewheel]

What part of the firmware is coded as image-recognition software? :P

[intvnut]

What part of the firmware is coded as image-recognition software? :P

 

 

The part that decodes the ROM image. ;)

[Switchboard]

I also get giddy as I see the thread updated, I will also thank you with my wallet one the cart is released, but thanks again for all the efforts.

[Switchboard]

I also get giddy as I see the thread updated, I will also thank you with my wallet one the cart is released, but thanks again for all the efforts.

[Bodyshots]

I'm inching ever closer. Finalizing the firmware is like death by a thousand paper cuts. But, that's nothing new. It was the same way with Space Patrol and every other game I've had input to, and the results were worth it.

 

On the plus side, LTO Flash! is field upgradeable, so even if I don't get everything perfect in 1.0, you'll be able to upgrade your units with corrected firmware, should that be necessary. Upgrading is quite painless. I'm sure intvsteve will attest to that. (Although he'll also likely attest to the fact that sometimes my development revisions have really annoying bugs.... Fact of life during development.)

 

I actually am doing the vast majority of my development work using the field-upgrade mechanism, as it's actually faster and more convenient than the dedicated programming pod. So, by the time everyone here gets their copy, the firmware upgrade feature will be thoroughly tested. ;)

 

Translation: About 6-12 months, depends on how many fun summer outings I attend

[intvnut]

 

[...] depends on how many fun summer outings I attend

 

Outings? What are those? There's a world beyond my desk? The heck you say.

[daldude]

You got that Right, Space Patrol is Awesome, espeically if you have the ECS it even had the buzzing sound when you would jump , it would deffinitly have blown away any version during the time of Atari and Intellivision days in the early 80s and could have been the Offical Moon Patrol but probaly would have not been relased because the game manufactures exspected games to be copleted quickly and if you rushed through Space Patrol it probaly would not be as good because you can't rush perfection.

 

I'm inching ever closer. Finalizing the firmware is like death by a thousand paper cuts. But, that's nothing new. It was the same way with Space Patrol and every other game I've had input to, and the results were worth it.

 

[killersquirel]

You got that Right, Space Patrol is Awesome, espeically if you have the ECS it even had the buzzing sound when you would jump , it would deffinitly have blown away any version during the time of Atari and Intellivision days in the early 80s and could have been the Offical Moon Patrol but probaly would have not been relased because the game manufactures exspected games to be copleted quickly and if you rushed through Space Patrol it probaly would not be as good because you can't rush perfection.

 

I didn't realize that Space Patrol benefited from the ECS. Now I need to get my ECS from old place to where I am now. Can't wait for the LTO Flash!

 

-mike

[intvnut]

I didn't realize that Space Patrol benefited from the ECS. Now I need to get my ECS from old place to where I am now. Can't wait for the LTO Flash!

 

It sure does. It sounds as close as I can get it to the arcade game that inspired it. The arcade version has 2 PSGs + 1 ADPCM chip for the explosions. An Intellivision + ECS has 2 PSGs. That means the only real difference is in the explosion sound effect.

 

If you listen closely to the arcade explosions, they sound like a sample of someone blowing into a mic. I wouldn't be surprised to find out it is.

 

 

 

About 6-12 months, [...]

 

If it's going to be that long, I'm going to demand a full refund. ;)

 

 

 

You got that Right, Space Patrol is Awesome, espeically if you have the ECS it even had the buzzing sound when you would jump , it would deffinitly have blown away any version during the time of Atari and Intellivision days in the early 80s and could have been the Offical Moon Patrol but probaly would have not been relased because the game manufactures exspected games to be copleted quickly and if you rushed through Space Patrol it probaly would not be as good because you can't rush perfection.

 

 

Well, if we had been working on it as our day job, it wouldn't have taken as long as it did. I had the initial technology demo up and running in just a few days, amazingly enough. Then it sat on a shelf for a few years when my personal life pulled me away from my desk and out into that big blue room with the giant yellow light more often than it does now.

 

Once we got down to the hardcore work of laying down the engine and the world data, it took us just over a year to really nail it. The initial checkin (when I checked in the core engine that I had spent maybe a month or two on total) was Aug 8, 2006, and the final cartridge release version was checked in Oct 20, 2007. The last 3 or 4 months took us from "really good with a few rough edges" to "polished perfection." Also in that time, we were putting together the box, manual, overlays, etc. The last meaningful code checkin was actually July 7, 2007. After that it was mostly checking in other collateral.

 

In case folks were wondering: I track all of my development in a Subversion repository as of 2006 or so, and so I have full revision history of my major projects—jzIntv, SDK-1600, Space Patrol, JLP, Locutus, etc.—going back to then.

 

For fun, I've attached the SVN logs for Space Patrol (the 2006 - 2007 stretch). As I said before, prior to 2006, there was a bit of development on the engine, but no more than a month or two. This log captures the real meat of what it takes to put a game together. It's reverse-chronological, so start at the end and work backwards.

 

If you go through the log, you'll notice that the "Beta 1" was waaaaaay before the release. Originally, this was going to be called Lunar MP, and just have 2 courses: Beginner and Champion. Then we decided to massively increase the scope. (And, in case you're wondering, MP means Military Police.) And a handy key: im14u2c = me, arnauld = Arnauld, and svn = intvdave.

 

EDIT: And then there's these gems in the logs. (Flipped back to forward chrono.) :rolling:

.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
r331 | im14u2c | 2006-12-13 00:19:38 -0600 (Wed, 13 Dec 2006) | 1 line

hide some dead bodies.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
r332 | im14u2c | 2006-12-13 00:24:25 -0600 (Wed, 13 Dec 2006) | 1 line

come on; you gotta hide 'em better than that!
------------------------------------------------------------------------
r333 | im14u2c | 2006-12-14 07:52:59 -0600 (Thu, 14 Dec 2006) | 1 line

bury them deeper.

.

With LTO Flash!, intvsteve and I are trying to keep a much stronger discipline, tagging speculative features as "2.0" features that we could maybe roll out with firmware / GUI updates. That keeps the feeping creaturism at bay, in theory. But, we still find the occasional bundle of complexity that looked simple at the outset. We haven't tripped on one of those recently, thankfully. At least, not a huge one.

spacepat_log.txt

Edited February 6, 2015 by intvnut

[Jeffrey Bouchard]

Keep up the good work and thanks for constantly updating the community.

[First Spear]

Will there be any time-keeping circuitry and/or battery (CR2032) included?

[intvnut]

Will there be any time-keeping circuitry and/or battery (CR2032) included?

 

 

No battery or real-time clock, sorry. All persistent storage is flash, with a ~20 year lifetime.

[+Tarzilla]

No battery or real-time clock, sorry. All persistent storage is flash, with a ~20 year lifetime.

 

Only 20 years? I might actually still be playing games with an LTO Flash! In twenty years!

And what about my great grand children? They might want to use it in 40 or 50 years from now

Edited March 15, 2015 by Tarzilla

[intvnut]

Only 20 years? I might actually still be playing games with an LTO Flash! In twenty years!

And what about my great grand children? They might want to use it in 40 or 50 years from now

 

Well, it's 20 years for a single programmed bit-cell. If you re-program that bit cell, then the clock starts over. In simpler terms: When you copy a game onto it, that copy is good for 20+ years. If it does get corrupted after that point, you can put a fresh copy on board, and 2 copy is good for another 20+ years, in theory. (Subject to the decay that all electronics seems to have over time.)

 

So, as long as you can find a computer that talks USB 2, you can keep refreshing that as long as you like. If a game ever gets corrupted due to its bit-cell flipping, you can upload a new copy and get another 20 years.

 

Of course, if the firmware itself ever gets corrupted, you might have a problem there. As long as the portion that holds the "reflash firmware" code and "launch secondary" code keeps working, you can refresh the firmware too.

 

I suppose I could add something in the firmware to slow-refresh all of the blocks. Then, in theory, it would last 'forever' as long as you keep playing your Intellivision.

 

Note that 20+ years is nominal, and is similar to what you see advertised for EPROMs. Thankfully, EPROMs seem to have held up better than that, as we're still able to dump arcade games and prototypes from EPROMs from the 1980s. You could very well get 30, 40 or more years out of it without any refreshing. The 20 year limit is over the full temperature range of the device. If you keep the equipment indoors, instead of locked in a hot car, you'll get much more life out of it.

[freewheel]

Huh. An RTC is actually kind of a neat idea. This way you can abstract away from the game code and not worry about cycle-timing to keep track of time. Probably non-trivial to add, however.

 

Not sure what a battery would bring here, given than it's non-volatile storage. I guess if you wanted to save actual time and date - that seems a bit overboard. I was thinking RTC just in terms of relative clock time. And you could use the onboard storage to save the date and time if you really wanted to.

 

Although I do have a general curiosity as to the state of "game saves" on Intellivision: are things mature enough on the hardware side (physical releases, multicarts) and software side (emulators) that it's worth thinking about saving games? I know Ms. Pac-Man and others do high score saving, but is that writing yourself into a limited set of use cases?

[intvnut]

Huh. An RTC is actually kind of a neat idea. This way you can abstract away from the game code and not worry about cycle-timing to keep track of time. Probably non-trivial to add, however.

 

Not sure what a battery would bring here, given than it's non-volatile storage. I guess if you wanted to save actual time and date - that seems a bit overboard. I was thinking RTC just in terms of relative clock time. And you could use the onboard storage to save the date and time if you really wanted to.

 

Although I do have a general curiosity as to the state of "game saves" on Intellivision: are things mature enough on the hardware side (physical releases, multicarts) and software side (emulators) that it's worth thinking about saving games? I know Ms. Pac-Man and others do high score saving, but is that writing yourself into a limited set of use cases?

 

 

Getting picky with the nomenclature here: An RTC keeps the real time (ie. time and date), and would need a battery or a large capacitor, depending on how long you wanted it to remember. And yeah, that was more complexity than I felt was justified by the project. The only program I've seen make real use of time/date is IntyOS.

 

A free-running time stamp counter that just keeps track of relative time passage for you is far simpler, and I could add that to the firmware. (I actually have something in there right now, for benchmarking the firmware.) It'd just give you "milliseconds since reset" or similar, but would be more than adequate for relative time keeping. That doesn't require a battery or special hardware of any form beyond what's already on the board.

 

As far as game saves go: At least for JLP and LTO Flash, that technology is mature. And with LTO Flash, each game has a private game-save storage space separate of all the other games on the board, so you can go nuts. :-) Right now it's limited to 1MB, but is that really an issue yet? :-)

 

Does Ms. Pac-Man really save high scores on the cartridge? I got the impression it just saves them across reset, but they get lost on power down. Compare that to Caves of Kroz, which saves your entire game to the flash.

Edited March 15, 2015 by intvnut

[pimpmaul69]

As far as game saves go: At least for JLP and LTO Flash, that technology is mature. And with LTO Flash, each game has a private game-save storage space separate of all the other games on the board, so you can go nuts. :-) Right now it's limited to 1MB, but is that really an issue yet? :-)

 

Does Ms. Pac-Man really save high scores on the cartridge? I got the impression it just saves them across reset, but they get lost on power down. Compare that to Caves of Kroz, which saves your entire game to the flash.

so does jzintv have the same capability of "saving the game to flash" to make a game compatible between cart and rom if the programmer wanted to do it?

[intvnut]

so does jzintv have the same capability of "saving the game to flash" to make a game compatible between cart and rom if the programmer wanted to do it?

 

It does!