Thomas Jentzsch Posted September 9, 2003 Share Posted September 9, 2003 You must have somehow disassembled and ported the code over somehow. There is no way it's doing a real-time 6502/TIA emulation. I supppose they are doing some very clever JIT compilation and the code would be transfered into native GBA code that way. That should boost the performance quite a bit at the cost of a lot of memory (compared to the original 2600 ROM size) needed. Well, at least that's what I would try first. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cybergoth Posted September 9, 2003 Share Posted September 9, 2003 Hi there! Heya, it's the title story of Pocket.ign today! Greetings, Manuel Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gregory DG Posted September 9, 2003 Share Posted September 9, 2003 Heya' date=' it's the title story of Pocket.ign today![/quote'] Yup! And it's Right Here! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Nathan Strum Posted September 9, 2003 Share Posted September 9, 2003 Thanks for the feedback guys - much appreciated! Aspyr has just revamped their site, and now has the Anthology available for pre-order. And... I just picked up my Onyx (black) GBA-SP today at Toys R Us. It's spiffy! Sort of like a 'Darth Vader' version of the GBA. Now... to get some of those woodgrain stickers... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Andrew Davie Posted September 10, 2003 Share Posted September 10, 2003 You must have somehow disassembled and ported the code over somehow. There is no way it's doing a real-time 6502/TIA emulation. I dispute that assertion! My emulator was running about 10fps, and there was a lot of optimisation possibilities still available. Given a month's full-time (PAID!) work on it, I believe it would have been full speed and fully functional. I'm sure these guys used some of the same ideas and techniques. They may have used static recompilation - but its unimportant what they actually did. My point is that a real-time 6502-TIA emulation on GBA most likely IS within the bounds of possibility. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shannon Posted September 10, 2003 Share Posted September 10, 2003 Actually since it was brought up... I thought the pitfall 2 cartridges had a couple pokey chips on it or something right? Hence even more to emulate. To generate the music? Or was it pulled from a table. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
davidbrit2 Posted September 10, 2003 Share Posted September 10, 2003 I think it's some kind of DSP that generates TIA sound registers on the fly, thus mixing several audio channels together. I'm sure someone else can explain it better. But it's not quite a Pokey. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
foxglove9 Posted September 10, 2003 Share Posted September 10, 2003 What type of connectivity will it have with Gamecube? Any downloadable features or special items? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JB Posted September 10, 2003 Share Posted September 10, 2003 Pitfall 2 had an FM synth chip in it, if I recall. ... And logically a way to move the data into TIA, since the VCS had no provisions for external audio sources. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EricBall Posted September 10, 2003 Share Posted September 10, 2003 Pitfall 2 was an implementation of patent #4,644,495 known as the DPC chip. (Click the image link to get the figures.) Basically the chip contains three (16 bit?) counter based binary waveform generators which are put through a weighted adder to generate a 4 bit amplitude level. Once the counters are initialized, Pitfall 2 reads the adder output from a cartridge memory address periodically (every line?) and shoves that value into the TIA volume for one of the channels. Thus high quality 3 voice music at the cost of some silicon and CPU overhead. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted September 10, 2003 Share Posted September 10, 2003 cool... a must buy... for me... playing HERO,keystonekapers, pitfall1+2, etc... but IDG posted 1/2 speed of the original games? true? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jess Ragan Posted September 10, 2003 Share Posted September 10, 2003 I saw the footage of Activision Anthology on IGN, and I've lost some confidence in the quality of this collection. I sure hope the games are going to run faster than this... JR Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Albert Posted September 10, 2003 Author Share Posted September 10, 2003 I saw the footage of Activision Anthology on IGN' date=' and I've lost some confidence in the quality of this collection. I sure hope the games are going to run faster than this... [/quote'] Yes, that is old footage and I'm really surprised that it was given to IGN. It is not indicative at all of the current speed of the games. ..Al Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
israelg Posted September 11, 2003 Share Posted September 11, 2003 Hi Albert, will it be sold in Atari age store ? if yes, can it be send to israel ? 10X Israel Geron T. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted September 11, 2003 Share Posted September 11, 2003 albert... 100% speed or not??? hve Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gregory DG Posted September 11, 2003 Share Posted September 11, 2003 Interview with Chris Norden of Aspyr about Activision Anthology. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shannon Posted September 12, 2003 Share Posted September 12, 2003 Hi Albert' date=' will it be sold in Atari age store ? if yes, can it be send to israel ? 10X Israel Geron T.[/quote'] If not. I'm sure somebody here would be willing to buy it for you and send it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shannon Posted September 12, 2003 Share Posted September 12, 2003 Interview with Chris Norden of Aspyr about Activision Anthology. I can't give you any specifics about the way it actually works' date=' but I can tell you that the guy responsible for writing the emulator code is Bradford Mott. Bradford is the guy that wrote one of the first Atari 2600 emulators called Stella, and he knows more about the Atari 2600 than almost anybody else. [/quote'] That's neat to hear and all. But just a couple observations. I dont remember the stella sound being all the great. There were some glitches (with video pinball for example). Both of which didn't get fixed for a long time. I always used other emulators cause they were better (z26). Of course stella is the grandaddy of them all... Cool to hear an emulator author was involved and got it right (*cough* sega classics *cough*) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shannon Posted September 12, 2003 Share Posted September 12, 2003 A little off topic, but I was just reading the ign review of the activision anthology for the playstation two and found two very interesting comments. Sound Since the games on this collection were made near the beginning of 1980' date=' the sound effect selection is nothing more than a few blips and bleeps. In fact, the majority of the titles shares the same noise pool, and unless you're a true fan, probably couldn't tell the difference between these games on audio alone. Not having a soundtrack on a per-game basis contributes a lot to that. [/quote'] Although true to some extent. I thought the similarity to the sounds was more a result of the nature (or limitations) of the 2600 sound chip then a common library of sounds. My my how far things have come these days. They are right about soundtrack games. Games on the 2600 seem pretty quiet compared to games these days. It's funny how alot of early video games used stock tunes (classical diddies, and alot of songs one learned in elementary school). Part of the charm if you ask me. The emulation is damn near spot-on; the pole vaulting glitch in Decathlon' date=' for example, can still be pulled off on the Anthology version, and probably the most complex game on the Atari, Pitfall II, is absolutely perfect. And I broke my personal best Pitfall record in my first sitting...years of professional gaming really do pay off. [/quote'] I wonder if this guy was having hallucinatory flashbcks cause the music in this thing is way off. Plus no mention is made of the difficulty of the kaboom controls. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
foxglove9 Posted September 12, 2003 Share Posted September 12, 2003 I saw that Activision Anthology Remix is coming out for the Mac. I wonder if this will be the same as the PS2 version. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cybergoth Posted September 12, 2003 Share Posted September 12, 2003 Hi there! Can't remember when I heard an excuse more lame than this: Since it only requires a single copy of the game, we couldn't display the game screen on the second GBA, so you'll need to look over your friend's shoulder to see his screen. Greetings, Manuel Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
davidbrit2 Posted September 12, 2003 Share Posted September 12, 2003 WHAT??? That is weak. Will it at least be GBA Player enhanced to support two controllers? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thomas Jentzsch Posted September 12, 2003 Share Posted September 12, 2003 Can't remember when I heard an excuse more lame than this: I don't know the speces. Is it possible to transfer the game via the link cable? If yes, then the excuse would be really lame. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
israelg Posted September 12, 2003 Share Posted September 12, 2003 10X Shannon, I just can't wait until I will have a copy... playing kaboom in GBA should be very nice ... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Assassin Posted September 12, 2003 Share Posted September 12, 2003 Just wanted to make a couple of quick comments based on some of the recent posts. First of all, the video and screenshots that IGN posted were quite old for some reason...not sure how they got footage of a version that old. As Albert said, the games are running very fast...most are at full speed, and the ones that aren't at full speed, are 90% of that and you won't notice the difference unless you play them side-by-side with a real 2600 (or you're a hardcore fan (such as the people on this site.)) Like I've said before, getting the 2600 to run at full speed on a 16MHz processor is no small task...nobody has ever done it before. Also, to the people that think it's a "lame excuse" that we only support single pak multiplayer and we don't transfer the entire emulator across the link cable, consider this. The GBA link cable is a very slow (115Kbps at its maximum speed) serial cable, and anything that is transferred across for single pak play must be sent across the cable at runtime, and must fit entirely in the 256K of RAM that the GBA has. To transfer the full 256K of memory across the cable at the fastest possible speed takes just over 20 seconds. This would have to be done for every game when you wanted to play. Adding to that problem is the fact that most of the games simply do not fit in 256K of memory (remember, there is a lot of code and RAM required besides just the size of the ROM), so it would be impossible to play all of the games via this method anyway. Why didn't we do a two game pak mode you ask? Well, this entire project was done from start to finish in less than four months with a team of two programmers. Unfortunately, our schedule was very tight, and multi game pak multiplayer was just not a priority...single pak works very well, as all of our testers have agreed. In order to do multi pak multiplayer there's a ton of issues that have to be dealt with, and we simply didn't have time to deal with them. There is no "enhanced" GameCube Game Boy Player support simply because it's not necessary. You plug it into your Game Boy Player, and plug in a 2nd GBA via the Link Cable port, and you're playing two player games on the big screen...easy as that. I appreciate the need for feedback on this forum, but let's try to keep our unfounded negativity to a minimum until the game comes out and you can actually back up your claims with facts. After all, I know for a fact that nobody on this site has played the final verison except for Albert, so any comments that are made based on speculation are just that. A couple of the IGN guys were at our recent (yesterday) Aspyrworld conference and they got a chance to play the final version, and they were all blown away by how cool it was and how fast everything ran. I know everybody will enjoy the final version when it comes out, and I can't wait until everybody can play it for themselves! -cnn Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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