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Kangaroo makeover !


TIX

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Hey,

 

a good surprise for a change,

I just found the Kangaroo sprites I have drawn a year and a half ago, and though lost after a disk crash !

I haven't touched the monkeys yet (I hate their heavy flickering), but I'm sure they can be improved.

A strange thing I noticed back then is that the tree leaves, are double wide sprites, and they are animated in 2 frames, that's another source of flicker.. maybe something can be done about this later on.

 

Now I must find the incentive to hack them in..  I have lost interest lately I'm afraid ?

 

Kangaroo-everything3.gif.f2cb992002352a5a70fbe1bd8f8879bd.gif  ..B column are the fresh bunch

 

 

 

 

Edited by TIX
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Very nice redone sprite images!

 

Well, below is the Display List for Kangaroo 5200 (same as A8 no doubt),  which basically is saying that the 5-color Antic Mode 4 is being used to draw the screen,  with a display list interrupt on each mode line -- thus the value of $84 for each Mode Line.   You have  5 bg colors available for bg graphics, but the 5th color replaces the 4th color  (PFCOL3 I think) within each tile/character of the set.  Thus 2 colors alternate on the same color reg using PFCOL3.   (PFCOL0 / PFCOL1 / PFCOL2 / PFCOL3  are abbreviations for the 4 color registers).   

 

I always assumed the following player/missile usage:    anybody can correct this if in error, I'm afraid I'm not good enough with Altirra to know how to turn off certain Players/Missiles (is this possible?) to know for sure and I haven't thoroughly reviewed Kangaroo by any means. 

 

Kangaroo was 1 of the 4 players (likely PLAYER0).  

Kangaroo's red Glove looks like a Player. It seems too big to be a 2-pixel-wide Missile, but its close.    And that would make it likely that the thrown apples are also using the Missile sprite for that associated Red-colored Player.  

Monkeys are comprised of the other 2 players. 

Fruits and Bell - could be players, but I assumed they were bg graphics.  The white of the strawberry seeds matches the white of the bg ladder, as evidence.  

I assumed the levels , ladders, and green leaves were all background graphics.   

 

Anyway, Kangaroo could have more detailed bg graphics using Antic 4 mode.  Not sure you could hack it though, you'd have to use the Antic4.exe tool or similar to redraw the levels.  

 

Not sure these theories help but this is my contribution! 

 

1606349919_Kangaroo5200pic1.png.4c1123eed4aac690ca58e57080c7931d.png

 


Altirra> .dlhistory
Ycoord DLIP PFAD H V DMACTL MODE
--------------------------------
    8: 0900 27c0 0 0   3e   70
   16: 0901 27c0 0 0   3e   f0
   24: 0902 27c0 0 0   3e   f0
   32: 0903 2400 0 0   3e   c4
   40: 0906 2428 0 0   3e   84
   48: 0907 2450 0 0   3e   84
   56: 0908 2478 0 0   3e   84
   64: 0909 24a0 0 0   3e   84
   72: 090a 24c8 0 0   3e   84
   80: 090b 24f0 0 0   3e   84
   88: 090c 2518 0 0   3e   84
   96: 090d 2540 0 0   3e   84
  104: 090e 2568 0 0   3e   84
  112: 090f 2590 0 0   3e   84
  120: 0910 25b8 0 0   3e   84
  128: 0911 25e0 0 0   3e   84
  136: 0912 2608 0 0   3e   84
  144: 0913 2630 0 0   3e   84
  152: 0914 2658 0 0   3e   84
  160: 0915 2680 0 0   3e   84
  168: 0916 26a8 0 0   3e   84
  176: 0917 26d0 0 0   3e   84
  184: 0918 26f8 0 0   3e   84
  192: 0919 2720 0 0   3e   84
  200: 091a 2748 0 0   3e   84
  208: 091b 2770 0 0   3e   84
  216: 091c 2798 0 0   3e   84
  224: 091d 27c0 0 0   3e   41
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12 hours ago, Cafeman said:

Kangaroo was 1 of the 4 players (likely PLAYER0).  

Kangaroo's red Glove looks like a Player. It seems too big to be a 2-pixel-wide Missile, but its close.    And that would make it likely that the thrown apples are also using the Missile sprite for that associated Red-colored Player.  

Monkeys are comprised of the other 2 players. 

Fruits and Bell - could be players, but I assumed they were bg graphics.  The white of the strawberry seeds matches the white of the bg ladder, as evidence.  

I assumed the levels , ladders, and green leaves were all background graphics.   

 

from the little I understand, and from my initial tests:

 

sprites/players

Mama Kangaroo, glove, monkeys, thrown apples, tree leaves

 

play-field graphics

bonus fruits, bell, little kangaroo

 

1 hour ago, Rybags said:

I suspect any flicker would be due to object reuse and redefining won't be any help there.

Yeah, in regard of the monkeys, the flicker is used to achieve the illusion of a second color, so we can't change that,

regarding the leaves I believe they tried to give them some animation, but the result is messy.. maybe something better can be achieved here!

 

we'll see.

 

 

 

 

Edited by TIX
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1 hour ago, TIX said:

Yeah, in regard of the monkeys, the flicker is used to achieve the illusion of a second color, so we can't change that,

regarding the leaves I believe they tried to give them some animation, but the result is messy.. maybe something better can be achieved here!

The leaves flicker to give a second color also. It might not look so good on PAL (although probably best using a CRT); but it looks perfectly fine on NTSC hardware. On NTSC, the leaves just appear as a darker green. If you're using Altirra, you can just turn on "Frame Blending" to get the best effect for either NTSC or PAL.

 

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Thank you for working on this. We never had many arcade machines around the tiny town I grew up in and Kangaroo was one of them. It is still one of my favorite games to this day. I still remember seeing it in an APX catalog way back when and saving up the $$ to get it. While it played pretty good, it was a bit disappointing to me. The thing that seemed most out of whack was the difference in the Kangaroo’s jumps. On the Atari 8 bit version the jumps were a little short horizontally and vertically. The way Mario jumps in the A8 Donkey Kong sets it apart from other home versions, IMHO, and something similar would make this version play so much better.

 

 

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  • 7 months later...

That looks incredible !

 

Don’t want to derail this thread but I have to ask:

 

I have always liked the Sierra On-line version of Frogger better because it has “all” the arcade tunes. However, Parker Brother’s version has the much better graphics IMHO, but because it’s a cartridge version, they cut out all the tunes.

would it be possible to “transfer” the Parker graphics into the Sierra On-line disk version ?

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