Getting started with Inty development - few qestions

[Darkhog]

Because I am quite visibly genetically incapable of learning assembly on a "real" machine (seriously, tried to learn C64 assembly, NES assembly and few others with dire results), I've chosen IntyBASIC. I have few questions though about it (and Inty coding in general)

 

- How performant it is. From my experience BASICs for old systems were terribly slow and I wonder if it can do any sort of realtime graphics, like demos or games.

- How powerful is it? BATARI Basic from what I remember wasn't very powerful and only could do very simplistic games, not sure about IntyBASIC.

- Can it use Speech module?

 

Now more about the system itself:

 

- Is there a way to break the 8 MOBs limit (flickering aside), e.g. by GRAM cards manipulation to get a pseudopixel display?

- Is there a tool like Famitracker for Intellivision taht then can be used to add music/sounds to the game you make with IntyBASIC?

[+DZ-Jay]

Because I am quite visibly genetically incapable of learning assembly on a "real" machine (seriously, tried to learn C64 assembly, NES assembly and few others with dire results), I've chosen IntyBASIC. I have few questions though about it (and Inty coding in general)

 

- How performant it is. From my experience BASICs for old systems were terribly slow and I wonder if it can do any sort of realtime graphics, like demos or games.

- How powerful is it? BATARI Basic from what I remember wasn't very powerful and only could do very simplistic games, not sure about IntyBASIC.

- Can it use Speech module?

 

Now more about the system itself:

 

- Is there a way to break the 8 MOBs limit (flickering aside), e.g. by GRAM cards manipulation to get a pseudopixel display?

- Is there a tool like Famitracker for Intellivision taht then can be used to add music/sounds to the game you make with IntyBASIC?

Welcome to the Intellivision Programming Community! It's always nice to see new people.

 

Now to your questions:

1. IntyBASIC compiles into Assembly Language, it is not interpreted like old school BASIC from the 8-bit era. It is very fast.

 

2. IntyBASIC is very powerful, it gives you basically the raw power of Assembly with the simplicity of BASIC. It offers access to the full hardware capabilities.

 

3. Yes, you can program the Intellivoice with IntyBASIC.

 

4. There are two ways to work around the 8 MOB limitation on the Intellivision: First is multiplexing. As you pointed out, this incurs flickering. Unlike some other consoles that give free access to the TV Raster timing, The Intellivision only gives you access to the VBLANK interrupt, so there is no way to multiplex faster than 30 Hz.

 

Second is painting sprites in the BACKTAB (background table, scenery) and animating them there. Moving them around can be complex, but very effective. Just know that background tiles are always 8x8 blocky cards, while MOBs can be 8x16 "double resolution," which makes a difference.

 

In short, a MOB has the ability of having twice the resolution of background cards.

 

A third option is always to avoid more than 8 objects at a time. Consider for example my game, Christmas Carol. It is a clone of Pac-Man inspired by similar maze games, but uses no more than two enemies (plus the player sprite) per level. It may seem like a crappy compromise, but it allowed me to focus on the personality and behaviour of those enemies, and it was very effective.

 

5. Unfortunately, not yet. A few people have posted ideas on how they do their own tracking, but it's pretty much using a standard tracker and then translating the output to IntyBASIC data using custom scripts or programs.

 

I hope this helps. If you have any other questions, don't be afraid to ask! There are a lot of knowledgeable people in this forum that are happy to help.

 

Welcome again!

 

dZ.

[Darkhog]

Thank you!