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Hi all,

 

Do you guys know which games are in development for Atari 8bit machines (800 series in particular)

That are being currently

Developed((started 2017)?

 

Also As I was searching YouTube I came across the following games and wondered what is their current status, if anyone knows:

- contra

- ghosts n goblins

- zoro 2

- Rick dangerous

- prince of Persia

- super Mario world

- beavis and butthead

- outrun

- cybernoid

- IK++

- festers quest

 

And many more

 

Any of these games completed?

 

Cheers

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Well,

 

"Fester's Quest" had been completed some years ago (around 2011).

Alas, the gameplay is not that good in my eyes (good gfx, awful gameplay)...

 

http://www.atarionline.pl/v01/index.php?ct=katalog&sub=F&tg=Fester%27s%20Quest#Fester%27s%20Quest

or here: http://a8.fandal.cz/detail.php?files_id=6474

 

Think I created a shorter version with less intros (just a title picture and the game) and packed the whole thing.

 

Afaik, "Contra" was only a demonstration of what could be done on the A8 (just like Turrican) and it was never meant to be a full game. Wish I was wrong here...

 

"Rick Dangerous" is still being worked on, there should be two versions, one for 64k? machines without VBXE and one for machines with VBXE.

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Hobgoblin 2 :)

 

 

 

most of the work is for VBXE?

No, it's still rare to use VBXE in games.

 

Btw - little princes seems to use a nice set of colors (more than 4 per scan line) what kept me wondering if a VBXE was used ....

 

It's just 5 colours of text mode (plus PMG underlayer).

 

 

Regarding some of the titles you had mentioned:

 

- "Ghosts'n Goblins" (by Gonzo) - there will be no game from it. It's better to treat it as a sprite demo.
- "Beavis and Butt-head" and several other works from the same coder - they all look like simple sprite movement demos to me, not like something which could bring us a real game.
- "IK+" is still in production. Pavros works slow, but the results should be impressive :)

 

 

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What about Out Run and Dungeon Monsters? Abandoned?

Particular Out Run should make people thinking of "what's possible and what is not possible" . If a demo uses "99%" of the available resources, how could be any progress there?

 

 

To go more into detail:

 

 

contra

 

... is just some demonstration... a programming study?

 

ghosts n goblins

 

.... ditto

 

- zorro 2

 

.... possible

 

Rick dangerous

 

.... this game is a lucky shot for the Atari, as the 32 byte screen makes it all possible, but VBXE support makes the game for the real thing an endless wait...

 

prince of Persia

 

.... never... as it's in a phantasy role . Possibly some other development will eventually result in a working game

 

super Mario world

 

.... programming study...

 

- beavis and butthead

 

.... nothing but some experimental stuff

 

- outrun

 

never... and the coder knows it!

 

cybernoid

 

... nope ....

 

- festers quest

 

... programming experiment, just a little advanced

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Particular Out Run should make people thinking of "what's possible and what is not possible" . If a demo uses "99%" of the available resources, how could be any progress there?

 

 

To go more into detail:

 

 

contra

 

... is just some demonstration... a programming study?

 

ghosts n goblins

 

.... ditto

 

- zorro 2

 

.... possible

 

Rick dangerous

 

.... this game is a lucky shot for the Atari, as the 32 byte screen makes it all possible, but VBXE support makes the game for the real thing an endless wait...

 

prince of Persia

 

.... never... as it's in a phantasy role . Possibly some other development will eventually result in a working game

 

super Mario world

 

.... programming study...

 

- beavis and butthead

 

.... nothing but some experimental stuff

 

- outrun

 

never... and the coder knows it!

 

cybernoid

 

... nope ....

 

- festers quest

 

... programming experiment, just a little advanced

 

well, you've summarize it pretty well :)

 

i still believe the best is yet to come ;)

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well, you've summarize it pretty well :)

 

i still believe the best is yet to come ;)

I really wished, things were different. But it's always the same: People do "experiments" that run into an edge of the possibilities the Atari has to offer.... stumbling there, and stop any progress to make the program using the A8 better.

Seems like a curse... ;)

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Particular Out Run should make people thinking of "what's possible and what is not possible" . If a demo uses "99%" of the available resources, how could be any progress there?

 

can you elaborate more ?

I checked the YT vid, and it looks like there are many tunes and backgrounds, so I suspect the current build is approaching 64 KB - hence the 99% you mention.

 

But if that's the case, then on a stock 130 XE, you get additional 64 KB, which would surely be enough for the sprites and base gameplay.

 

Of course, question remains on the performance hit with multiple sprites on screen, but it should still get to around 12-15 fps, I'm guessing, which would still be respectable.

What's the current frame rate? 20-30?

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can you elaborate more ?

I checked the YT vid, and it looks like there are many tunes and backgrounds, so I suspect the current build is approaching 64 KB - hence the 99% you mention.

 

But if that's the case, then on a stock 130 XE, you get additional 64 KB, which would surely be enough for the sprites and base gameplay.

 

Of course, question remains on the performance hit with multiple sprites on screen, but it should still get to around 12-15 fps, I'm guessing, which would still be respectable.

What's the current frame rate? 20-30?

This Demo (?) is based upon how the C64 could handle it. As it owns a 256 char screen and simple positionable moving objects, it is at least fast enough "looking" on the C64 .... playing is another chapter.

Using this tech-demo ! , results into a street looking background that jumps left middle right without any purpose and the PMg based car leaves no cpu space... and it is already boring slow.

 

You also can look through all games on the A8. It will not work that way.

 

What could work is still using the graphics 7 mode or some other modes at a lower resolution.

Particular Gr. 7 (Antic Mode D) leaves a lot of free CPU . You can do fast action on the screen AND put PMg over it to enhances details and/or colors.

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This Demo (?) is based upon how the C64 could handle it. As it owns a 256 char screen and simple positionable moving objects, it is at least fast enough "looking" on the C64 .... playing is another chapter.

Using this tech-demo ! , results into a street looking background that jumps left middle right without any purpose and the PMg based car leaves no cpu space... and it is already boring slow.

 

You also can look through all games on the A8. It will not work that way.

 

What could work is still using the graphics 7 mode or some other modes at a lower resolution.

Particular Gr. 7 (Antic Mode D) leaves a lot of free CPU . You can do fast action on the screen AND put PMg over it to enhances details and/or colors.

1. Char mode ? Does Atari version use chars too? It doesn't look like there's any gains to be had except for last few scanlines and I seriously question if even those beat the cycle overhead. Plus how would it handle curves and strafing with chars without using.antic scrolling? It would have to be able to brute force redraw each frame.

On A800 I see two fast ways of doing such road:

- 1. Dli : let Antic via table set the scanline color and just draw manually the two middle lines, but Sta wsync across screen will take away majority of performance

- 2. Scanline fill: unrolled scanlines code will make a very fast fill and preserve all the cycles compared to dli - in something like 160x96, this would only take 1 frame, and we would spend second frame on sprites/pmg, so it could still run at 30 fps. Curves would be handled on Antic via scrolling. Plus, without dli messing with colors, we could have car sprites combined with pmgs, but that would most likely use another frame and drop to 20 fps. It could look real good and detailed though...

- 3. Textured road - I am pretty sure an unrolled code for scanline texturing would finish under 75,000 cycles- e.g. 3 frames. We could spend another frame on pmg/input and get 60/4=15 fps, which would still be ok.

 

Was there ever a demo or game with a textured road for 6502?

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Was there ever a demo or game with a textured road for 6502?

Well, not really :)

 

But there is much more not hitting the floor... as EVERY game that play like Out Run never made it to the A8. Thinking of the "road" one should keep in mind that there were a lot of zooming objects to handle.

 

Gr. 7 will give the possibility of free "software" usage, creating the screen as on the Spectrum.... or BBC Micro, while "E-Type" is at least a port that allowed to have a "real street" on the Atari.

So DLI and Scanline fill will never get the needed result...

Some "3d" based "view" at a low resolution of 4x4 with added PM for more details, could be one solution.

 

To get something "hardwarespecific accelerating" it is the best to create the street on the PM Graphics and use the char-modes. There some DLI fx could do the needed changes on the screen, to build the car on characters, but also having "zooming objects" around. But that's depending on how the coder wants to do that...

Edited by emkay
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- "Zooming Objects" - you mean tree/car/whatever sprites ? They need to be pre-scaled and pre-shifted for max.speed, which reduces their total count drastically, especially given the fact that every single road scanline is unrolled (no loop whatsoever). I'd guess you could fit 4-5 different ones into 64 KB, probably not much more (but the 130XE version could have more environments)

- Road fully via PMG ? The middle yellow line is a good candidate for a missile, but whole road ? Possible, but would look ugly, I think. Even at 4x width, you'd get nasty edges (at the transition edge to 2x), so not sure how you'd want to work around that. But yes, then you would only have to deal with sprites, and for that, the char mode would be great. I don't think you can get full road without DLIs, though, as you'd have to change parameters on the fly, and then we have the same problem again (STA wsync killing all CPU cycles) - but this could be an interesting experiment...

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...

Using PMg for the road doesn't need very much. Starting with a top down view on the street, just set the shape of a Player to full width, fill it set it to the middle of the screen.... no CPU at all, as shapes don't need DMA...

 

The biggest load might be to place DLIs logically, to change the position and size, when needed, to present some movement of the road.

WSYNC was not really needed, as it would only cause a drawing failure for one scanline, while on the "race" this wouldn't disturb the view.

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Wait, I thought we were talking about road with perspective like in Outrun / Pole Position. Not the simple 2D rectangular road like in FireChief :)

Try using PMGs for an Outrun road. I don't think you can design one that either would not look like crap or use WSync :)

And let's not forget that to animate pmg road we would have to move up to 128 bytes for each pmg. I don't know-seems like too much work for too little benefit (if any).

 

I really think the software scanline approach has potential to be most universal-no limits on how it looks due to HW constraints- it's all software rendering. The upper visual limit is basically unlimited- you decide how many frames you want to spend on road rasterizing and adjust visual complexity and effects accordingly.

I've seen C64 racing games that ran at 6-7 fps. That's 10 frames - e.g. ~250,000 cycles in 160x96 ! Imagine you unroll all loops and spend 250,000 cycles on road. That would look insane...

 

When I was doing the Road Rash prototyping on jaguar, I wrote about 10 different versions of road rasterizer - which is the beauty of software approach as unlike Hw (e.g. PMG here), you are not limited by anything other than algorithms.

 

Actually, thinking about it, I just realized one of the first jaguar 's road versions might work on Antic too- I am just unsure if 64 Kb Ram would be enough - I need to spend some time in excel, but have a feeling that pretextured road at 128x96 might work at almost zero CPU computational time - the only time would be spent on moving texels to second frame buffer - which can be unrolled very well...

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