Treasure of Tarmin - Dungeon Maps

[SoundGammon]

Is there an emulator to play it on?

[+wavemotion]

JZ Intv is generally considered the best emulator for intellivision and will render Tarmin faithfully. 
 

I’ll also plug my NDS emulator Nintellivision which provides Tarmin in portable form with touch screen inputs. Shown here with custom overlay.

 

[mr_me]

6 hours ago, SoundGammon said:

Is there an emulator to play it on?

If you have an android phone, Jzintv4droid works well as it displays the overlay on the touchscreen controls.  On computer you can choose from several Intellivision emulators including Mame.   It's on the old Intellivision Lives collections and the Flashback as Minotaur.

[SoundGammon]

6 hours ago, mr_me said:

If you have an android phone, Jzintv4droid works well as it displays the overlay on the touchscreen controls.  On computer you can choose from several Intellivision emulators including Mame.   It's on the old Intellivision Lives collections and the Flashback as Minotaur.

Thanks!

[+wavemotion]

@Zendocon - thanks for all the great input here... I finally got some time to go back to my Nintellivision emulator to see how easily cheats could be added.

 

Turns out it's not too bad... took an hour just to get my head wrapped back around the 8-bit and 16-bit memory spaces here. 

 

As a proof-of-concept, I was able to take your 'Starting Weapon' cheat and poke in value 33h and you can see the (proper) result of a Platinum Crossbow at the very start of a game.

 

I plan on building out a full cheat-menu which you can enable/disable various cheats using touch-screen check-boxes or similar easy toggle method. By default, all cheats are disabled but the ones you enable can be saved into your configuration on a per-game basis so they come back up as you desire. 

 

I will probably need to re-work the individual .cfg method of loading these... that works well for JZINTV and similar but in the DS handheld world it will need to be modified.  When (and if) the time comes, I'll probably ask for your permission to pre-load a number of cheats into the distribution for people to immediately play with without having to load any other files (and point to your website via the README for updated cheats if you like).  

 

[Zendocon]

That sounds cool.  I knew Treasure of Tarmin was a game I would get around to hacking eventually.

[+wavemotion]

Zen - let me ask you another question... would there be any value to having a better set of macro capabilities at your disposal?

 

I haven't done a ton of investigation but on a quick glance of JZINTV, I see that the main tools of the [macro] area are for patching roms after loading (and before running). So 'p=POKE' and 'l=LOAD' seem to be the two main variants used... and you appear to mainly use 'p=POKE' to patch roms.

 

When I had a bug in Nintellivision that caused qBert to die after every screen clear (the bug was that the programmer moves QBert along with the "baddies" off-screen to the same location that should NOT cause a collision detection but my original buggy code did just that... since fixed). Anyway, before I figured out the real bug and fixed it, I had put in a hack to simply keep the life-counter refreshed in RAM once/second... which had the effect of infinite lives.  Having run-time macros of that sort are fairly trivial - that is: you could write to some RAM locations once per scanline/frame/second/etc.   It's also possible to add a trigger... when value X is written to location Y do Z (poke value).

 

I suspect I know the answer to this... given how limited our time is!  Unless "the" main Intellivision emulator (JZINTV) supports it, there's probably no real worth in effort expended here... but if I'm going to build cheat/hack capabilities into Nintellivision, I may as well not paint myself into a corner and allow for future expansion.

[Zendocon]

Macros, now that would be cool.  That would be a matter of adding the functionality into jzIntv, which is what I'm using.

[Zendocon]

I think I should bump this, because my Treasure of Tarmin map app might be better suited on another emulator besides jzIntv.  This one might be perfect for it.

 

jzIntv has "Gui Mode" which allows another program to pipe in and send commands.  As it turns out though, there are only three supported commands: pause, quit, and reset.  Also, it suppresses normal output to stdout, so even if I modify the source code to add a command for a memory dump, I would have to modify it further to get the output I want.

 

You can see the app in action on my Twitch livestream.  I can easily give you the information as to where the map data is stored in memory, along with the placement of items and monsters.

[The Eyeball Mural]

Just a friendly bump. Autumn is here and for me that is Treasure of Tarmin season!  🙂