Rob 'n' Banks release thread

[+Ryan Witmer]

Alrighty, it's been a little while but I've finally got something new.

 

I'm calling this release Alpha 3, and it's marked with Alpha 3, 8/2/2022 256 bytes from the end of the file.

 

This release has the adjusted door trigger points, fixes to the trapped cop scoring, the first of @Synthpopalooza's sound effects, and probably a few other things I'm forgetting about.

 

It seems pretty solid, although I think I might drop the volume on the background jingle a little bit.  Any testing is welcome, as always.

robnbanks_a3.bin

[+Cafeman]

I just happened to be here when you posted and got to play a few rounds.    Testing feedback: 

 

1. The new sounds and music adds a lot of character. The higher pitched repeat riff gets a little repetitive.  Maybe mix it up and play those notes an octave lower sometimes, or add a 2nd chord to break it up?  Or as you said maybe lower the volume but I don't think that is the problem. 

2. Speaking of sounds, there is not sound when you grab each stage's bonus thing. I thought I was missing it until I noticed the +500 or whatever points indicator. 

3. The money bag and other prizes disappear so quickly, I rarely grab them.  Maybe that is part of the overall strategy, to stay close enough to grab them. 

4. I played about 5 or 6 rounds, some at the harder settings. The red cop is merciless and fast. The walls or doors you can throw up are great if you can plan it out.  I noticed if a cop was too close to me, the game wouldn't let me throw up a wall between us. 

5. Glitch!  The sprites got 2x or 4x wide and stayed that way across new games, until I did a cold restart on Altirra.  FYI. 

 

 

[+Ryan Witmer]

13 minutes ago, Cafeman said:

2. Speaking of sounds, there is not sound when you grab each stage's bonus thing. I thought I was missing it until I noticed the +500 or whatever points indicator. 

I don't have all the sound effects yet, but there will be one for those things.

 

16 minutes ago, Cafeman said:

3. The money bag and other prizes disappear so quickly, I rarely grab them.  Maybe that is part of the overall strategy, to stay close enough to grab them.

This is pretty consistent with the arcade game.  The bonuses appear after certain numbers of coins have been picked up, so you have to leave coins near the center and know when to go in to get them to trigger the bonuses.  It's very possible to grab all four cash bags and the two other bonuses in one stage.  Requires some planning, though.

 

18 minutes ago, Cafeman said:

4. I played about 5 or 6 rounds, some at the harder settings. The red cop is merciless and fast. The walls or doors you can throw up are great if you can plan it out.  I noticed if a cop was too close to me, the game wouldn't let me throw up a wall between us. 

If anything is obstructing the door junction, typically yourself or a cop, you can't close the door.  I may slow the red cop down a bit on higher levels, not sure yet.

 

20 minutes ago, Cafeman said:

5. Glitch!  The sprites got 2x or 4x wide and stayed that way across new games, until I did a cold restart on Altirra.  FYI. 

Whoa, do you have a reliable way to reproduce this?  I was testing for about an hour on real hardware and never saw anything like this.  I don't even touch the SIZE registers at all apart from zeroing them at game start.

[+Cafeman]

35 minutes ago, Ryan Witmer said:

Whoa, do you have a reliable way to reproduce this?  I was testing for about an hour on real hardware and never saw anything like this.

I hate these kind of things. I would say there is definitely an existing glitch that caused it but it may be very rare to trigger it. The only way you can catch these things is to play in an emulator with a debugger like Altirra and then look at memory after it has happened.

I was two or three levels in with a few coins left to grab and I was at the center right side moving and then it happened. I got caught and lost my last life. When the title screen displayed and then the next game levels,  the size register was still set incorrectly.

 

[+Ryan Witmer]

11 minutes ago, Cafeman said:

I hate these kind of things. I would say there is definitely an existing glitch that caused it but it may be very rare to trigger it. The only way you can catch these things is to play in an emulator with a debugger like Altirra and then look at memory after it has happened.

I was two or three levels in with a few coins left to grab and I was at the center right side moving and then it happened. I got caught and lost my last life. When the title screen displayed and then the next game levels,  the size register was still set incorrectly.

 

Alright, thanks.  It's somewhere to start.  If anything, it seems like there would be a glitch in the transition from the game to title screen, so I can focus there.  It's just really weird, since I never touch those size registers.  I can only think that I'm indexing something and it goes nuts and hits those locations somehow.

[+Cafeman]

Oddly enough, that was the only out-of-place thing, all but 1 player sprites was 2x or 4x.  The game was still playing alright from what I could tell.  But it was hard to tell which corridor plus-size Rob was "in" as he physically resided in at least 2 simultaneously.  

[+Ryan Witmer]

1 hour ago, Cafeman said:

Oddly enough, that was the only out-of-place thing, all but 1 player sprites was 2x or 4x.  The game was still playing alright from what I could tell.  But it was hard to tell which corridor plus-size Rob was "in" as he physically resided in at least 2 simultaneously.  

Fat Rob is hard mode.

[+Cafeman]

19 hours ago, Ryan Witmer said:

Fat Rob is hard mode.

You know, this reminded me that I put in a secret Fat Characters mode in 5200 Adventure II.  Enter 1982 at the Title Screen.  I'm not sure anyone ever found it. I removed the logic for the XE version. 

[+Ryan Witmer]

59 minutes ago, Cafeman said:

You know, this reminded me that I put in a secret Fat Characters mode in 5200 Adventure II.  Enter 1982 at the Title Screen.  I'm not sure anyone ever found it. I removed the logic for the XE version. 

I need to go try that now.

 

Sorry for the quick version turnaround, but I've decided to do an alpha 3.1.  Watermark is Alpha 3.1, 8/3/2022.

 

Here's what's up:

• Found a stack usage error in the death code.  This almost certainly wasn't responsible for any problems, it would take somewhere around 60 deaths to show any effect.  There are also parts of the code that would have corrected the problem, but it's fixed anyway.
• The first intermission was changing the sprite priority and never changed it back, so after that intermission the cops would appear to walk under the coins.  Fixed.
• Intermissions can now be skipped by pressing the fire button.
• Found a memory corruption bug related to closing doors on top of the moving green gates.  I believe I've fixed this, but I never had a reliable reproduction case.  If this problem is still there, it will cause garbage to appear at some of the door junctions.
• Decreased the volume on the background loop.  I think it's much better now.
• I have now personally witnessed the problem that @Cafeman reported.  I saw it once in emulation and once on real hardware.  The second time I saw it was after the door fix I mentioned above, so something else is going on here.  Still researching this.

 

So here it is then, a slightly improved version.

robnbanks_a3_1.bin

[BIGHMW]

Just played the new build, I even got to the first intermission after the second screen!!! Hey you know guys between this and the all-new 5200 VX controllers both @Ryan Witmer and @Lucas Lac124 have done more than their part to make the 5200 pretty much the best she's ever been in the past 40 years of her history, Boy am I glad I kept Big Sexy in my lineup all these decades!!! Well done guys!!!

 

BTW, this Rocktober will be the 5200's 40th Birthday so somebody oughta make or order a custom cake (in the form of a 5200, what else) for this special celebration, I remember watching the 1982 World Series on NBC between the Cardinals and the Brewers at that time and in-between innings the 5200 made her world debut on one of the commercials. The journey started not that long ago, when did YOU first hear of/see the world premiere??? Who would ever have thought that one of the most maligned consoles of our time would have such an incredibly passionate userbase (although not the biggest) to the point that we all made Warner regret ever discontinuing Big Sexy after a short 18 month stint like they did, it's because of people like all of us (not just us here on AA although we do more than our part) that she is alive and well to this day.

 

Someone should, especially since it has been 40 years, come up with (not only a thread of it) a 5200 2.0 with Flashback-style HDMI out and SD card slot capability, but also full capability and backwards compatibility with all existing OEM and third party controllers as well.

[+Ryan Witmer]

After a lot of detective work, I think I might have fixed the "Fat Rob" problem, which didn't always result in Fat Rob, but whatever.

 

I tracked the issue down to a specific area of the code and found something there that was definitely not right.  To use one of my favorite sayings, it's what Sherlock Holmes would call "an explanation that fits the facts."  Hopefully I finally nailed this bug.

 

Unfortunately, this was a very difficult problem to trigger so I can't prove it's fixed.  The best I can do is keep testing and see if it comes back.  I'm not going to release another build quite yet.  I have some other things I want to do and I'd like to get some more of the sound stuff in there first.

[+Ryan Witmer]

OK, here we go.

 

I'm calling this release beta 1, because the game has no bugs that I'm aware of.  I'm pretty sure I've fixed the big memory corruption issue.  This version also has the complete set of sound effects.  @Synthpopalooza is graciously putting together some short music pieces for the intermissions, and I don't have those yet.  I've also added a title screen logo, which is a scaled down version of the one from the box art.  I haven't shown the box art yet, and I'm not going to, since Albert always posts that when he has it ready.

 

As always, the build is marked.  The string Beta 1, 8/27/2022 can be found 256 bytes from the end of the file.

 

So, what's left?

• The intermission music.
• Fixing up the title logo.  This was a first run at it and I need to do a lot of cleanup on it.  So yeah, I know it looks like crap.  I'm working on it.
• Possible difficulty adjustments.

Once these things are in, if no bugs have popped up I'll be pretty close to calling this thing done.  It's been mentioned a few times before, but we're planning a physical release at this year's Portland Retro Gaming Expo, which I will be attending.  It will probably hit the store a few months after that.

robnbanks_b1.bin

[BIGHMW]

I love how this is coming along, indeed if I had a "Desert Island collection" of games to where if I could only own 10 of them (in the case there was no Atarimax cart to put hundreds of them on) this would definitely be one of them, along with Intellidiscs, in which I reviewed earlier on on the old Atari Report. When this now-instant classic is finished I'll make sure that I review this on one of my first episodes of The Atari 5200 SuperReport, in which will be making its series debut on September 10th on my official Ray Jackson YouTube channel!!!

 

ColecoVision EXTRA!, in which I'll be doing the same exact thing only for ColecoVision, will also debut this coming month, on that same channel, when I acquire another Atarimax multicart for it, that is TBA, so stay tuned!!!

[phuzaxeman]

On 8/4/2022 at 3:42 PM, Ryan Witmer said:

After a lot of detective work, I think I might have fixed the "Fat Rob" problem, which didn't always result in Fat Rob, but whatever.

 

I tracked the issue down to a specific area of the code and found something there that was definitely not right.  To use one of my favorite sayings, it's what Sherlock Holmes would call "an explanation that fits the facts."  Hopefully I finally nailed this bug.

 

Unfortunately, this was a very difficult problem to trigger so I can't prove it's fixed.  The best I can do is keep testing and see if it comes back.  I'm not going to release another build quite yet.  I have some other things I want to do and I'd like to get some more of the sound stuff in there first.

Ryan, I finally got the chance to play the recent version. You've done a great job.  My local arcade has Lock and Chase and I've been playing it the last 4 months.  @Synthpopalooza has done a great job staying true to the original.  The feel and look of the maze are reminiscent of the arcade.  Your version tops the Intellivision or Colecovision easily. The controls feel good too.  If there was one thing that I wish you could change would be the size of the dots.  The arcade has tiny dots.  That's about it.  Looking forward to the final version. Keep up the great work!

 

Ken 

Edited August 29, 2022 by phuzaxeman

[+Ryan Witmer]

Glad everyone's having fun with it, always the best I can hope for!

 

On 8/28/2022 at 10:10 PM, phuzaxeman said:

If there was one thing that I wish you could change would be the size of the dots.

 

Yeah, this was an unfortunate consequence of the screen layout.  One of the problems you run into over and over again with this console is that the pixels aren't square.  If I could start over again, I might be able to find a way to lay out the screen that allows me to make the dots both square and centered in the pathways.  I chose centered dots over small dots.  Going to 7 pixel wide players and cops might have helped too, but 7 pixel wide pathways create their own problems in this graphics mode.  This was my first crack at a Pac Man style game, so I wasn't sure what sort of issues I was going to run into along the way.

[+MrFish]

22 hours ago, Ryan Witmer said:

Yeah, this was an unfortunate consequence of the screen layout.  One of the problems you run into over and over again with this console is that the pixels aren't square.  If I could start over again, I might be able to find a way to lay out the screen that allows me to make the dots both square and centered in the pathways.  I chose centered dots over small dots.  Going to 7 pixel wide players and cops might have helped too, but 7 pixel wide pathways create their own problems in this graphics mode.  This was my first crack at a Pac Man style game, so I wasn't sure what sort of issues I was going to run into along the way.

In Pac-Man Arcade, @tep392 used small dots with 8-pixel wide corridors. As you can see, the issue of centering is not very noticeable.

 

 

[ALEXANDER]

On 8/27/2022 at 1:46 PM, Ryan Witmer said:

OK, here we go.

 

I'm calling this release beta 1, because the game has no bugs that I'm aware of.  I'm pretty sure I've fixed the big memory corruption issue.  This version also has the complete set of sound effects.  @Synthpopalooza is graciously putting together some short music pieces for the intermissions, and I don't have those yet.  I've also added a title screen logo, which is a scaled down version of the one from the box art.  I haven't shown the box art yet, and I'm not going to, since Albert always posts that when he has it ready.

 

As always, the build is marked.  The string Beta 1, 8/27/2022 can be found 256 bytes from the end of the file.

 

So, what's left?

• The intermission music.
• Fixing up the title logo.  This was a first run at it and I need to do a lot of cleanup on it.  So yeah, I know it looks like crap.  I'm working on it.
• Possible difficulty adjustments.

Once these things are in, if no bugs have popped up I'll be pretty close to calling this thing done.  It's been mentioned a few times before, but we're planning a physical release at this year's Portland Retro Gaming Expo, which I will be attending.  It will probably hit the store a few months after that.

robnbanks_b1.bin 32 kB · 25 downloads

Awesome Ryan ! Well done.

 

 

[RB5200]

This is a really great game, so glad its on the 5200, Witmer has done a super job with this, can't wait till this on cartridge

[David Alexander]

@Ryan Witmer Looking forward to buying this game soon. Thanks for your continued of the 5200 by bringing us these great games.

[BIGHMW]

Since Ryan has cornered the market on doing 5200/8-bit ports of Intellivision staples I woul love to lobby to try and get him to port either Astrosmash, Diner, Thin Ice, or Night Stalker as his next project, any other ideas of INTV (those 4 were my favorites when I had an Intellivision II BITD) titles you would love to see ported, I'll guarantee you that if and when Ryan puts out yet another one it pretty much like every other title he has put out will be a smash!!!

[BIGHMW]

...OK, couple of things since @Ryan Witmer has got Intellivision ports down to a science, and since @glurk has his now-famous 2600-to-5200/8-bit conversions down, and Paul Lay @playsoft and @Wrathchild have the A8-to-5200 conversion market down pat, who's gonna fill the void of making ColecoVision ports for Big Sexy, I'd to see our title total grow exponentially of conversions as well as some all-new, all-original ideas to make the 5200 great for the next 40 years  of her lifetime, WE, here on AA hold the keys to that opportunity, so let's make it count!!!

[OldSchoolRetroGamer]

[+Stephen]

 

[RB5200]

Or we could just let @Ryan Witmer decide on his own, which project it is 

 that he wants to do.

[+Ryan Witmer]

Sorry guys, I'm done with ports for a while.  I have some interesting projects in mind, and I'm itching to get started on the next one.  Hoping to have a possibly final version of Rob very soon.