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Are we going to have a TI Christmas?

Omega-TI

By Omega-TI
in TI-99/4A Computers

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save2600 Quadrunner

+save2600

Posted
Posted

 

Well, you did originally ask for Tutankham for the UberGrom, not the FlashROM99. :|

 

 

 

Your response, pointing to the FR99 thread had me all cornfused! Maybe you were thinking I do emulation? 'Cause I don't. :)

 

So… no way to play PB Tutankham without a GROM board on real hardware yet - which is why I was hoping to petition Santa Claus into making that a reality by Christmas. :love:

 

And just tried the Retroclouds version on my FR99 - screen produces all sorts of pretty patterns, then just freezes at light blue.

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PeBo Dragonstomper

PeBo

Posted
Posted

Don't see anything there compatible with FlashROM99 yet, so waiting on a cart to be made.

 

I am SOOOOO with you (I'm sure every single TI gamer without eprom burning / GROM programming skills agrees)

 

That would surely make it to #1 on my Xmas list with a bullet.

 

Thought for sure we'd have seen it by now! If using an uberGrom sounds like overkill for a single prototype game, maybe a complete "Parker Brothers" cart would seem less like a waste of the board.

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sometimes99er River Patroller

sometimes99er

Posted
Posted

Your response, pointing to the FR99 thread had me all cornfused! Maybe you were thinking I do emulation? 'Cause I don't. :)

 

So… no way to play PB Tutankham without a GROM board on real hardware yet - which is why I was hoping to petition Santa Claus into making that a reality by Christmas. :love:

 

And just tried the Retroclouds version on my FR99 - screen produces all sorts of pretty patterns, then just freezes at light blue.

 

I see. Should have extracted what is relevant for UberGrom. Sorry.:)

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Asmusr River Patroller

Asmusr

Posted
Posted

PB Tutankham seems to be written mostly in assembly with the GROM used primarily as a data store. A quick debugging shows that it leaves GPL and enters ordinary machine code soon after you have entered the number of players. So in theory it would be possible to hack it to read the data from RAM instead and eliminate the GROM. Only problem is that there's 40K GROM and it doesn't compress well.

 

It was never released, so how much of the game is there? Is it complete or just a demo? Has anyone tried to play it for long?

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Lee Stewart Quadrunner

+Lee Stewart

Posted
Posted

PB Tutankham seems to be written mostly in assembly with the GROM used primarily as a data store. A quick debugging shows that it leaves GPL and enters ordinary machine code soon after you have entered the number of players. So in theory it would be possible to hack it to read the data from RAM instead and eliminate the GROM. Only problem is that there's 40K GROM and it doesn't compress well.

 

It was never released, so how much of the game is there? Is it complete or just a demo? Has anyone tried to play it for long?

 

By using the black or red boards with large enough EPROMs, it should be possible to use ROM as the data store.

 

...lee

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jedimatt42 River Patroller

+jedimatt42

Posted
Posted

PB Tutankham seems to be written mostly in assembly with the GROM used primarily as a data store. A quick debugging shows that it leaves GPL and enters ordinary machine code soon after you have entered the number of players. So in theory it would be possible to hack it to read the data from RAM instead and eliminate the GROM. Only problem is that there's 40K GROM and it doesn't compress well.

 

It was never released, so how much of the game is there? Is it complete or just a demo? Has anyone tried to play it for long?

I loaded the GROM/ROM mixed version in Classic99 a couple days ago and tried to play for a while... there are some UX issues, and clearly unfinished aspects... when you die-die, it seems you have to press 'space' to restart, no prompting exists, F8 doesn't work like a typical TI game. Firing at the bad guys doesn't make sense... I'm not familiar with the game on other platforms, so I'm flying blind. Playability is pretty low. There are multiple stages ( I at least got to a second one ) It just seems like you have one bullet in your gun. And then you just have to run away from things as much as possible. Like ZERO effort was put into game balance, which seems odd for something that is a port to begin with.

 

-M@

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save2600 Quadrunner

+save2600

Posted
Posted

Would think TI Tutankham should play similar to this:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLu75DCEmIg

 

 

...can only shoot left/right and enemies are rather relentless, so yeah, seems as if you're on the run much of the time. Wouldn't mind playing a variation of the game that lets you shoot in 4 directions! But some would argue that's not Tutankham then. lol

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jedimatt42 River Patroller

+jedimatt42

Posted
Posted

Nice! It did not play like that. It looked strongly similar, except the main character. I could not shoot sideways while walking down, and couldn't seem to even shoot more than once per death. I'll have to try again now that I've seen what to expect.

 

I used this config in Classic99 to add a user module:

 

[usercart1]

; *** Tut - works

name="Tutankham"

rom0=C|6000|2000|MODS\TUTANKHAMC.bin

rom1=G|6000|A000|MODS\TUTANKHAMG.bin

 

 

-M@

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jedimatt42 River Patroller

+jedimatt42

Posted
Posted

Ok... it's not as bad as I thought... but there is a weirdness about shooting... seems like you can't shoot after you succeed to shoot something, unless you try to shoot the other direction first... then if you try to shoot while going up, it uses a magic lantern to obliterate all the monsters.

 

It might play better on real-iron with a good joystick.

 

-M@

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jedimatt42 River Patroller

+jedimatt42

Posted
Posted

Anyone have hints on how to get this on an UberGrom?

 

I've put the TUTANKHAMC.bin in all 8k banks of the 512k flash chip.

I've split the 40k TUTANKHAMG.bin into 5 8k files, 1 thru 5. The cartridge menu header appears to be in the 5th chunk.

 

So I go into recovery mode for the UberGrom, and load GROMCFG off disk.

 

I configure base 9800 with 5 grom slots. >6000, >8000, >A000, >C000, >E000

 

Then I loaded split file 1 into >6000, 2 into >8000, etc... I do not skip GK headers as there are none in the G.bin file, I don't believe. The 5th split portion starts right at the GROM header so I take that as confirmation that there are no headers to skip, or else it would be skewed.

 

Power off, and on... and the console just stairs at me with a cyan screen.

 

I then went back into recovery, and fiddled... turned off grom bases this time. So now I get a 'PARKER BROTHER'S GAME' menu item, but selecting it just flips back to the TI boot screen.

 

Is there a piece of theory that I'm missing? or did I just make a mistake along the way?

 

-M@

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Asmusr River Patroller

Asmusr

Posted
Posted

What you're doing sounds right. When you select PARKER BROTHER'S GAME, does it quit immediately or ask you to select the number of players? I'm asking because the player selection appears to be running from GROM/GPL before it jumps into the ROM, so if you don't see it this would indicate that you still have a problem with the GROM.

 

I tried to reproduce your steps in Classic99, but for some reason I cannot make the GROMCFG behave as it used to. It won't load the files into the viewer, at it wouldn't allow me to map any devices until I played around with the GRAM options. It's all very confusing. I have attached the files I tried to use.

 

 

Tut-ubergrom.zip

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jedimatt42 River Patroller

+jedimatt42

Posted
Posted

I had to turn off recovery to see the first few groms in the gromcfg viewer, otherwise it would just show the recovery bytes. I've used the classic99 debugger to verify that I have the same grom blocks in the same addresses as works in classic99... :( so no clue there.

 

And yep, I don't get the player count screen... Depending on the advanced options, I don't get the cart selection menu either.

 

Since I tried turning recovery off too, I made the mistake of exiting gromcfg in that state... so now I have to figure out how to get gromcfg loaded again with the ubergrom inserted... :( I think I have to pull the chip and reprogram it with the epromer... Maybe this time around I'll grom-pack gromcfg and load it into an alternate base....

 

I'll diff your files against mine... It would be nice to use Classic99 for this, but I couldn't figure out how to start that process... I suppose I need to set a pre-programmed ubergrom dump to be the file that goes with the 'U' rom entry in classic99.ini...

 

-M@

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Tursi Quadrunner

Tursi

Posted
Posted (edited)

Remember that GROMCFG won't work correctly in Classic99 unless you have configured the UberGROM to be active with a Classic99 cartridge entry.

 

If you boot from recovery, you won't be able to fully program the cartridge layout using GROMCFG, no, because it hard overrides the first few entries. Bad planning on my part. The BASIC loader is the ideal answer, or you can drop an Editor/Assembler GROM into the second base and use EA to load it. :)

 

(Edit: you don't need to use a real uberGROM dump, either... just load /anything/ to enable the emulation. I actually usually use a configuration that replaces TI BASIC with my relocated Editor/Assembler, just so it's available, but you could also load a U file with Editor/Assembler and a T file that contains an appropriate EEPROM config.)

 

[test32]
name=Ubergrom test
rom0=U|6000|2000|C:\classic99\MODS\EA2k.BIN
rom1=G|2000|2000|C:\classic99\MODS\EA2k.BIN

Note that having EA2k.bin in the U slot does not provide any benefit other than enabling the emulation, it was just convenient. Having it in the G slot is what makes it work. This is a version of Editor/Assembler that I relocated from >6000 to >2000 for this purpose.

 

EA2K.zip

Edited by Tursi
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