A 1982 game that probably CANNOT be ported...

[Omega-TI]

I think I may have found a 'period' (1982) video game that cannot be ported to the TI, even with an F18A and the full use of an UberCART to hold the different levels (separate games actually that would share the score information between them). -- I have a question though, would a 1024K SAMS bring it into the level of possibility?

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXErtjerzYc

[+GroovyBee]

There is the recent CV homebrew :-

 

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/231706-tron-light-cycles-for-colecovision-work-in-progress/

[Omega-TI]

Wow, I didn't know about that. Heck, even a partial implementation would be fun. Thanks!

[Shift838]

i dumped tons of quarters in this game as a kid!

[Omega-TI]

Hey, I found this TRON related music video... it had me rolling on the floor laughing my a....

Anyway it's well done and you should get a laugh...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MP_G6arpVI

[BydoEmpire]

If the consoles and computers of the late 70s and early 80s have taught us anything, it's that there's nothing that can't be ported. Especially all these years later with more development tools and when done as a project without tight time deadlines. Will the port be exactly like the arcade? Probably not. Can it capture the spirit of the arcade game and be tons of fun? Absolutely.

[PeBo]

Memory could be an issues, but each level could be a separate program that loads the next from disk upon completion (yes, intervals would be s-l-o-w as molasses!), and access common score/data files from disc with each new level/game loaded.

 

I never say never anymore...

...Rasmus reminds us repeatedly that the word « impossible » should NOT be in the vocabulary of 21st century 4A users!!

[carlsson]

Do those minigames really take a lot of memory? It doesn't seem impossible, but perhaps the TI has memory limitations that come into play.

 

How about something like Lazy Jones, would that also be near impossible to convert from the C64 to TI-99/4A?

[Tursi]

There's nothing in Arcade TRON that would take too much RAM, and ROM is now essentially unlimited... what part were you thinking wouldn't be doable?

 

It's a simple "do-the-math" thing. Let's look at the Grid Bugs... what state do you need to maintain? X position, Y position, animation frame? Maybe a count-down to split (although that's probably a single global timer). So four bytes each. How many do we want to support? Let's say 50 is enough... 50 times 4 is 200 bytes. We have 32k.

 

Remember that games that run from cartridge do not NEED to load to RAM. They can run from ROM. We copy to RAM because it's simpler.

[+Ksarul]

Also, there is a Tron port that runs on the Geneve 9640. It is one of the Tomy Tutor ports. It was called Hyperspace on the US Tutor, but the Japanese version of the cartridge was called Tron (and properly licensed by Disney too).

[+OLD CS1]

Do those minigames really take a lot of memory? It doesn't seem impossible, but perhaps the TI has memory limitations that come into play.

 

How about something like Lazy Jones, would that also be near impossible to convert from the C64 to TI-99/4A?

 

I have thought about this one a lot. I do not think Lazy Jones would be impossible to convert. I even have some cuts of the soundtrack done