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Bosconian for the 8-bits


MrFish

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Well yes, a "moon landing" budget would have produced some very good games. :)

 

Atari messed up a lot of things and spent a lot of money in the wrong places. I'm just saying we can do more today than was practical back then and it's satisfying (to me, at least) to see what can actually be done.

Very true, and a perfect example of moon-landing budget in terms of 8-bit software back in the day is the legendary Lucasfilm, and with a team of programmers, artists and musicians and more than likely a lot more time than Atari was generous with and a lot more cash in the budget. And it shows.

 

But with a loving, compensation free, devotion to Atari 8-bits and the craft, a lot of knowledge and all the time they want with no restrictions on memory, etc., can achieve the same results, and we have people from different parts of the world doing exactly that today.

 

The Moon landing could have been completed for much less cost if it wasn't mandated to be done by the end of a very short decade.It was a rush job too, by mandate, and to beat the Russians.

Edited by Gunstar
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Very true, and a perfect example of moon-landing budget in terms of 8-bit software back in the day is the legendary Lucasfilm, and with a team of programmers, artists and musicians and more than likely a lot more time than Atari was generous with and a lot more cash in the budget. And it shows.

 

But with a loving, compensation free, devotion to Atari 8-bits and the craft, a lot of knowledge and all the time they want with no restrictions on memory, etc., can achieve the same results, and we have people from different parts of the world doing exactly that today.

 

The Moon landing could have been completed for much less cost if it wasn't mandated to be done by the end of a very short decade.It was a rush job too, by mandate, and to beat the Russians.

The so-called first moon landing has a dubious place in history. Retrospectively we can see clearly it was all politically driven - and not really driven by technical achievements etc. I'm more willing to believe these days it did not actually happen, as per the publicity - because if you think about it - what if it did go all terribly wrong? Wouldn't the USA preferred to have a guaranteed success - instead of a possible failure? Anyway the Russians were thought to be so very close behind, except that their rocket designer of that era died unexpectedly - and that's the only reason they lagged behind, although they had the more powerful and better (fuel efficient) rocket engine. It's only many years later this did come to light.

 

Anyways - if you do have the itching to do work to show off what the Atari 8-bit computer hardware can do - all it takes is the time and effort to do so.

 

Harvey

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The biggest advantage we have now over the programmers back then is information. Everyone can share instantly online what they discover, and collectively the developers nowadays can do some amazing things. Devs back then ofren had poor documentation, had to learn on the fly, or were reverse engineering the tech.

 

But really, the devs back then suffer the same ills as the professional ones do now. Producers who dont understand the market, force bad changes to the original design, rush games out the door before they are ready etc.

 

It wasnt just Atari back in the day. It's the industry in general. Look at No Man's Sky.

 

The real difference as to why homebrews are so much better than the original titles generally is that easily shared knowledge, resources, and the fact that the games are done out of love for the machine, and on the programmers own time schedule. You dont get that at a job, generally

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The real difference as to why homebrews are so much better than the original titles generally is that easily shared knowledge, resources, and the fact that the games are done out of love for the machine, and on the programmers own time schedule. You dont get that at a job, generally

Thats the essence of what I said in the beginning of this discussion, and all other of my replies since have been explaining that in detail. ;)

So I guess we have gone full circle and can move on...

Edited by Gunstar
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Bummer, only have a 800XL with 64k right now, can't you make it run on 64k?

 

If all the audio samples should end up being added to the game, I suspect 64K will not suffice (cf. Dimo's Quest cartridge edition with a whopping 16 megs of ROM, most of these being audio samples). The easiest (currently available) means of updating RAM is the €45 Syscheck V2.2 by ABBUC's tfhh, available through the store for club members. It runs on both PBI and ECI, has enough ROM space to store four Operating Systems (e.g. QMEG-OS, Atari OS-B, Highpeed-SIO OS, Bluetooth-SIO OS, that is if the latter already exists - Sijmen did work on some patches to accelerate Marcin's SIO2BT to 57k6 bps) and comes with a system diagnosis function as a bonus :).

Edited by Thorsten Günther
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I finally played this game on real hardware. Putting the game on a DOS disk allowed it to load on my 130XE, bypassing the problems I had with the SIO2SD loader.

 

It looks and plays great! It feels like the only thing missing is the test pattern from when the arcade hardware cold boots.

 

I assume the game hasn't been tuned yet for NTSC machines. On my TV, status GREEN is actually aqua, and status YELLOW is light green. Is the game timing the same on NTSC and PAL?

 

That's why it's called "Never Twice the Same Color". Star Raiders, according to the manual, will turn the screen bluish when shields are activated, while I know from first-hand experience and from Youtube that it turns dark green:

 

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Actually that old saying is "Never The Same Color," no twice in it. And it came about because you can look at all the different brands on demonstration at the store and they are all slightly different due to factory TINT settings, but all you have to do is adjust the tint a bit to your preference. Which also allows adjustment for close approximation of PAL colors when using a PAL ANTIC in NTSC machine. I totally prefer the ability to change the tint in NTSC than not in PAL and 60Hz refresh rate. But whatever. My 1200XL is fully converted to PAL for game compatibility but many games on it are too slow for my tastes now. So there is no superior TV encoding method to me, just ones with different advantages or disadvantages that average out, IMHO.

 

P.S. I absolutely LOATH the fact that high-res games that take advantage of NTSC color artifacting are butt ugly in PAL. High-res with artifacting colors is so much better, IMHO. Don't what them on NTSC? Then turn down the color to B/W It's still cleaner looking than god-awful PAL high-res which still has un-useful and weird artifacting of it's own.

Edited by Gunstar
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NTSC (and all other TV standards) had problems back when they were first implemented because consumer equipment lacked a precision timing reference for the color. So, with NTSC you tweaked the TINT knob until it looked okay*. The PAL solution was to reverse the error component on every other line. Today, TV's are more sophisticated and under normal circumstances they produce the colors they should. GTIA, however, produces color using analog delay circuits and must be manually tweaked for accurate color like the TVs of old. Even then, it may not be possible to get exactly the same results from unit to unit and obviously there was some debate as to what was the correct setting.

 

*If you read promotional literature on old TV's, especially in the '80s, you'll see references to new features like auto-color/auto-tint and auto black level. This is the time when IC's started to become more common in home equipment and the typical TV was able to perform some adjustments based on analysis of the incoming signal.

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Gunstar et al...

 

"a 16K cartridge, is no excuse for Sinistar's shortcomings, Atari could have chosen to make it bigger and better"

 

Absolutely - I think you conflate my post with corporate policy. I was not advocating size, merely stating the facts of mid 80's Atari cartridge game development...

 

Developing games for Atari UK in the late 80's I was offered 64K rom capacity for both XE and 7800 games - 128K was not on the table, and to start discussions on a larger capacity seemed to be a rather onerous undertaking.

 

sTeVE

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