Albert Posted July 22, 2018 Share Posted July 22, 2018 I'll wait for Al to sound in on timing. He had manual text that I looked over not long ago, so things are in the works. Yep, we're working on the manual, hope to have that done soon and add the game to the store. Here's the cart: ..Al 13 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+sramirez2008 Posted July 22, 2018 Share Posted July 22, 2018 (edited) Sweet! Count me in for one. BTW, the silver label looks great! Edited July 22, 2018 by sramirez2008 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RevEng Posted July 22, 2018 Author Share Posted July 22, 2018 Looks great, Al! OK... one more thing I thought about concerning POKEY support [...] The game defaults to TIA sound, and only uses a POKEY if one is detected at $450. (ie. if you have an XBoard or XM) I worked hard on the TIA sound, and I believe hardly anybody will notice a difference between the two modes, other than a somewhat higher key to keep the TIA music in-tune. In fact I wonder why the binary is 48K... I think the C-64 cartridge version is only 16K and still has all the 20 mazes of the original Apple II version. But of course on the C-64 they could decrunch quite a bit to the big 64K RAM which is always there while the 7800 doesn't have nearly that much... The cart format is 128K because it needs on-cart RAM, and that's a common hardware format to get it. The game code itself uses somewhere in the 24k neighborhood. That's with 2 different sound engines, SaveKey+AtariVox+HSC high score saving, and the ROM providing the "OS" font. I'm pretty sure I could squeeze that down a fair bit, but nobody would see the difference, and my time is valuable to me. 6 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+DrVenkman Posted July 22, 2018 Share Posted July 22, 2018 Just now noticing this. Wow. I gotta stop blowing my hobby money on hardware projects and start buying carts and homebrews again. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kurt_Woloch Posted July 22, 2018 Share Posted July 22, 2018 The game defaults to TIA sound, and only uses a POKEY if one is detected at $450. (ie. if you have an XBoard or XM) I worked hard on the TIA sound, and I believe hardly anybody will notice a difference between the two modes, other than a somewhat higher key to keep the TIA music in-tune. Well, I think your TIA sound is great! I actually like it better than the sound of the released C-64 version because it's more varied. On the C-64, aside from the slithering of the snakes, you only hear blips and blops of various types, but in the same timbre. The SID definitely could have done better than that! The frog sound could have been replicated with a square wave with a narrow pulse width (e.g. $10 or so), but they didn't do that, they only used the triangle wave for everything. In fact I think they cut a few more corners on the C-64 version in order to keep the size under 16K because it should fit in a cartridge. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TrekMD Posted July 22, 2018 Share Posted July 22, 2018 Looks great! Count me in! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Neogeoman Posted July 24, 2018 Share Posted July 24, 2018 Will this be available in the atariage store? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Albert Posted July 24, 2018 Share Posted July 24, 2018 Will this be available in the atariage store? Yes. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Neogeoman Posted July 25, 2018 Share Posted July 25, 2018 Thanks Al Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gorfcadet Posted July 25, 2018 Share Posted July 25, 2018 Al, I messaged you, but I'm sure your message screen moves fast; do you still need cart shells? I have 4 and my local shop has another 5 I can pick up. Let me know about this and the other question if you get a chance. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Albert Posted July 25, 2018 Share Posted July 25, 2018 Al, I messaged you, but I'm sure your message screen moves fast; do you still need cart shells? I have 4 and my local shop has another 5 I can pick up. Let me know about this and the other question if you get a chance. I've responded to your PM, thanks. ..Al Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Trebor Posted October 28, 2018 Share Posted October 28, 2018 Part of the showcased games at PRGE last weekend, can't wait to see this great title hit the AA store! Thanks to mmervine's status update, linking his blog post, for the above pics! 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Albert Posted November 4, 2018 Share Posted November 4, 2018 Serpentine is now available in the AtariAge Store! As is Froggie. ..Al 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kurt_Woloch Posted November 4, 2018 Share Posted November 4, 2018 I think there's a mistake on the shop page... you write that Serpentine is an 128K game, but at the same time its size is 32K... Serpentine is now available in the AtariAge Store! As is Froggie. ..Al Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RevEng Posted November 5, 2018 Author Share Posted November 5, 2018 I think there's a mistake on the shop page... you write that Serpentine is an 128K game, but at the same time its size is 32K... I'm probably to blame for part of that confusion. The game proper is 32k, but it uses the 128K+RAM ROM layout, because it's a common format with RAM. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SlidellMan Posted November 5, 2018 Share Posted November 5, 2018 Fun game, nothing else needs to be said. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Trebor Posted November 5, 2018 Share Posted November 5, 2018 Fun Buy the game, nothing else needs to be said. FTFY 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+ZeroPage Homebrew Posted January 25, 2021 Share Posted January 25, 2021 (edited) Heya @RevEng, just a point of interest. I was recently trying all the Pokey enabled games with my Concerto cart and I discovered that Serpentine has a white background when playing through the cart. (Timestamp: 38:56) From what I can tell, it looks like games that don't set the the background colour explicitly to another colour are taking the white background from the Concerto Cart and using it in the game. This also happened when I tried Knight Guy on Board, the title screen had a white background as well (Timestamp: 1:11:01). It's now been fixed in his latest update for the game. - James Edited January 25, 2021 by ZeroPage Homebrew 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+ZeroPage Homebrew Posted January 25, 2021 Share Posted January 25, 2021 4 minutes ago, ZeroPage Homebrew said: Heya @RevEng, just a point of interest. I was recently trying all the Pokey enabled games with my Concerto cart and I discovered that Serpentine has a white background when playing through the cart. (Timestamp: 38:56) From what I can tell, it looks like games that don't set the the background colour explicitly to another colour are taking the white background from the Concerto Cart and using it in the game. This also happened when I tried Knight Guy on Board, the title screen had a white background as well (Timestamp: 1:11:01). - James Hahah, I just re-watched the Knight Guy on Board footage and you were in the chat and made a comment already when that happened so you already knew about the issue. Never mind! ? - James 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RevEng Posted January 25, 2021 Author Share Posted January 25, 2021 17 minutes ago, ZeroPage Homebrew said: Heya @RevEng, just a point of interest. I was recently trying all the Pokey enabled games with my Concerto cart and I discovered that Serpentine has a white background when playing through the cart. (Timestamp: 38:56) I really do appreciate the heads up, so thank-you. Honestly I'm not sure it's entirely warranting a new release here. IMO Concerto is actually the correct place to fix this one. Both the NTSC and PAL BIOS explicitly set the background color to black before booting the cart ROM. 7800 games shouldn't need to replicate things the BIOS has already done on their behalf, simply because a flash cart has inserted itself into the boot chain and left things otherwise. I'm not talking about memory patterns that happen to be left behind by the bios, but rather, registers the BIOS has intentionally hit with specific values before jumping to the cart. I'm not objecting to explicitly fixing this in the future with new releases. I've already updated 7800basic to default to black, since it costs a few bytes of ROM in a reserved area. But it's a work around for a situation that's the fault of the loader. 5 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+ZeroPage Homebrew Posted January 25, 2021 Share Posted January 25, 2021 12 minutes ago, RevEng said: I really do appreciate the heads up, so thank-you. Honestly I'm not sure it's entirely warranting a new release here. IMO Concerto is actually the correct place to fix this one. Both the NTSC and PAL BIOS explicitly set the background color to black before booting the cart ROM. 7800 games shouldn't need to replicate things the BIOS has already done on their behalf, simply because a flash cart has inserted itself into the boot chain and left things otherwise. I'm not talking about memory patterns that happen to be left behind by the bios, but rather, registers the BIOS has intentionally hit with specific values before jumping to the cart. I'm not objecting to explicitly fixing this in the future with new releases. I've already updated 7800basic to default to black, since it costs a few bytes of ROM in a reserved area. But it's a work around for a situation that's the fault of the loader. That's an excellent point. It makes sense that a loader should replicate the experience of booting a game from a retail cartridge as much as possible. Sounds like something that could easily be fixed in a future firmware update on the Concerto. Thanks for the information about the BIOS, very interesting! - James 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+ZeroPage Homebrew Posted April 15, 2021 Share Posted April 15, 2021 ZeroPage Homebrew is playing SERPENTINE on tomorrow's (Fri Apr 16, 2021) stream LIVE on Twitch at 6PM PT | 9PM ET | 1AM GMT! Hope everyone can watch! ZPH Twitch Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/zeropagehomebrew/ Games: Boulder Dash Engine (2021 Exclusive WIP Premiere) by Andrew Davie @Andrew Davie Serpentine (2016 | 7800) by Mike Saarna @RevEng Jr. Pac-Man (2009 | 7800) by Bob DeCrescenzo @PacManPlus 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bikeguychicago Posted April 15, 2021 Share Posted April 15, 2021 On 1/24/2021 at 6:48 PM, ZeroPage Homebrew said: Heya @RevEng, just a point of interest. I was recently trying all the Pokey enabled games with my Concerto cart and I discovered that Serpentine has a white background when playing through the cart. (Timestamp: 38:56) From what I can tell, it looks like games that don't set the the background colour explicitly to another colour are taking the white background from the Concerto Cart and using it in the game. This also happened when I tried Knight Guy on Board, the title screen had a white background as well (Timestamp: 1:11:01). It's now been fixed in his latest update for the game. - James I also noticed this with my Concerto. It made the game look like an O2 one. Hopefully this gets addressed soon. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+sramirez2008 Posted April 17, 2021 Share Posted April 17, 2021 On 4/15/2021 at 4:39 PM, ZeroPage Homebrew said: ZeroPage Homebrew is playing SERPENTINE on tomorrow's (Fri Apr 16, 2021) stream LIVE on Twitch at 6PM PT | 9PM ET | 1AM GMT! Hope everyone can watch! ZPH Twitch Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/zeropagehomebrew/ Games: Boulder Dash Engine (2021 Exclusive WIP Premiere) by Andrew Davie @Andrew Davie Serpentine (2016 | 7800) by Mike Saarna @RevEng Jr. Pac-Man (2009 | 7800) by Bob DeCrescenzo @PacManPlus Just watched the replay (through Serpentine, need to finish and watch entire episode). Serpentine is a very challenging game. I prefer to play it with my Edladdin Supreme 78 All Play4/8 joystick. As mentioned during the episode, this game definitely has that "one more try" to it. @ZeroPage Homebrew this deserves to be added to your 7800 library. I love the gameplay and graphics of this game. The mazes have a very nice look to them. <Edit> Forgot to mention the nice manual with “Tips” section. I always like when the developers add a “Tip” section. Gives their games a BITD feel. 4 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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