Llamazap by Llamasoft: Jaguar conversion possible?

[Gilby 4000]

Hey all, hope this is correct forum...

 

I'm sure you are familiar with Llamazap by Llamasoft, a somewhat lost gem from the 16-bit era.

 

Not only it's a technical marvel (requiring only a 1MB Falcon) but from a gameplay perspective it's almost like a 80s-90s Llamasoft best-of, mixing different styles from other Llamasoft games (Llamatron, Metagalactic Llamas Battle at the Edge of Time etc), and including a lot of the ideas Jeff Minter had for Attack of the Mutant Camels for the Konix Multisystem (was literally drooling over this one back in the days...).

 

Why I am writing this here?

 

Well, unless you have an Atari Falcon... Llamazap has not been ported to any other system and it's unfortunately unplayable via emulation, due to the lack of full "JagPad" support on both the available Falcon emulators (Hatari and Steem).

 

The game is in fact one of the handful designed to be played exclusively with the Power Pad joypads, requiring all 3 fire buttons along with 1 to 9 on the keypad for powerups.

Yes you can move your ship around and use fire buttons, but can't really do much without keypad support.

 

The version freely available on the Llamasoft website is not even the complete one, it's called "the llatest version" but it's a work in progress from January '93:

 

http://www.minotaurproject.co.uk/lc-16bit.php

 

Final version (initially produced for Atari UK, but finally published by 16/32 Systems in '95!) is either the "Elite Release" or the other cracked version (by Stratagem?), both floating around on Archive.org.

 

So, was wondering... Do you think is there any chance Llamazap can be ported to the Atari Jaguar?

 

I'm not a programmer, and do not know the similarities between the Falcon 030 and the Jaguar chipset (if any), or the amount of effort this would require, but with the ever expanding Atari ST games to Jaguar conversions list and the incredible achievements by the community such as Jeff Minter Classics, Speedball 2, Xenon 2, Gods and The Chaos Engine ports coming soon, I'm really curious to better understand what it would entail.

 

And also hear from you whether this would be of any interest at all, I can only dream of a physical big box release (with Jeff Minter's blessing), including a Steinar Lund poster, after a successful crowdfunding campaign 🙂

 

Cheers
 

[42bs]

Depends a lot, if the game use F030 specialties like the DSP.

Maybe easier to add gamepad support to Hatari.

[sirlynxalot]

Re: being able to use the full gamepad with existing emulators, You could use an external program like xpadder or joy2key to bind the joystick buttons to buttons on the keyboard. That way the emulator thinks it's getting the keyboard commands while you are rocking away on the joystick. 

Edited August 25, 2022 by sirlynxalot

[+Sauron]

Porting the game wouldn't be a simple task. The Falcon uses a very different architecture from the Jaguar, and I doubt any of the knowledge and skills that went into porting most of the ST titles to the Jag would translate to porting Llamazap. I'll concur, though, that it would be nice to see that game on the Jag, but I certainly wouldn't hold my breath.

[phoboz]

5 hours ago, Gilby 4000 said:

Do you think is there any chance Llamazap can be ported to the Atari Jaguar?

Is the source code available?

1 hour ago, Sauron said:

Porting the game wouldn't be a simple task. The Falcon uses a very different architecture from the Jaguar, and I doubt any of the knowledge and skills that went into porting most of the ST titles to the Jag would translate to porting Llamazap

If the source code is available, porting this game will be less about emulating the Falcon hardware, as calls to system dependent functions could be replaced with Jaguar custom functions that do the same thing (for example to draw an image on the screen).

 

In the end it may be much easier to port (depending on how well structured the source code is)

The programer may also be able to utilize the Jaguar's jardware much better, as there is no need to emulate things the Jaguar wasn't built for.

[jguff]

I think Minter kinda already did this.  100th level all camels.  It looks very similar.  Never knew of the Falcon game until today.

 

[Gilby 4000]

13 hours ago, sirlynxalot said:

Re: being able to use the full gamepad with existing emulators, You could use an external program like xpadder or joy2key to bind the joystick buttons to buttons on the keyboard. That way the emulator thinks it's getting the keyboard commands while you are rocking away on the joystick. 

Thanks sirlynxalot, but JagPad keypad input are not binded to any Falcon keys on Hatari and Steam, as it's not fully supported unfortunately (I'd say it's low-priority for these emulators Authors, as not many Falcon games are "Power Pad-only").

 

Cheers

[Gilby 4000]

13 hours ago, Sauron said:

I'll concur, though, that it would be nice to see that game on the Jag, but I certainly wouldn't hold my breath.

 

11 hours ago, phoboz said:

If the source code is available, porting this game will be less about emulating the Falcon hardware, as calls to system dependent functions could be replaced with Jaguar custom functions that do the same thing (for example to draw an image on the screen).

Thanks Sauron and phoboz, I guess asking nicely to Jeff Minter? If the source code still exists and The Man is willing to share that would be a nice first step then! 🙂

[Gilby 4000]

7 hours ago, jguff said:

I think Minter kinda already did this.  100th level all camels.  It looks very similar.  Never knew of the Falcon game until today.

Nice one jguff! Speaking of which, have always loved Defender Plus, waaay more than Defender 2000, Atari should have swapped the two title names IMHO!
 

Back to Llamazap, do you think – IF the source code is obtained – there would be enough interest to setup a crowdfunding campaign for a Jaguar conversion (something on GoFundMe, Indiegogo or Kickstarter or similar), with "tiers" such as digital only version, physical cartridge, limited edition (with poster, ships miniatures (!) etc)?

Cheers

[agradeneu]

7 hours ago, jguff said:

I think Minter kinda already did this.  100th level all camels.  It looks very similar.  Never knew of the Falcon game until today.

 

I agree, Llamazap looks like a proto of Defender 2000. 

[42bs]

Some sources are available, but not this one.

https://github.com/mwenge/llamaSource

[42bs]

17 minutes ago, Gilby 4000 said:

Thanks sirlynxalot, but JagPad keypad input are not binded to any Falcon keys on Hatari and Steam, as it's not fully supported unfortunately (I'd say it's low-priority for these emulators Authors, as not many Falcon games are "Power Pad-only").

 

Cheers

I guess he means if LlamaZap can be controlled by ordinary keys you can map a JagPad button to such key.

So if keyboard A is fire, you can map button A to the key A.

[Gilby 4000]

33 minutes ago, 42bs said:

Some sources are available, but not this one.

https://github.com/mwenge/llamaSource

Amazing, thanks! Just sent the Llamasoft Source Code Project author a link to this thread, maybe he'll take a look if interested 🤞

[Gilby 4000]

32 minutes ago, 42bs said:

I guess he means if LlamaZap can be controlled by ordinary keys you can map a JagPad button to such key.

So if keyboard A is fire, you can map button A to the key A.

Thanks 42bs, but unfortunately Llamazap cannot be fully controlled by ordinary keys (only directions and fire buttons can be mapped, but no powerup keys – from 1 to 9 on the keypad - which are essential to play the game).

[sirlynxalot]

2 hours ago, Gilby 4000 said:

Thanks 42bs, but unfortunately Llamazap cannot be fully controlled by ordinary keys (only directions and fire buttons can be mapped, but no powerup keys – from 1 to 9 on the keypad - which are essential to play the game).

If I understand correctly, the game would let you use 1-9 on your computers keyboard to control the power ups.  If that's the case then you can simply use one of the external pc programs I mentioned to bind those keys to buttons on a joystick, and if you get the right USB adapter that supports every button on the jag pad, then you can bind those keyboard inputs to the Jaguar pad and all of it's telephone buttons.  As a result you will press 5 on the jag pad and the emulator/game will think you pressed 5 on the keyboard.

 

[Gilby 4000]

38 minutes ago, sirlynxalot said:

If I understand correctly, the game would let you use 1-9 on your computers keyboard to control the power ups.

 

No, it doesn't. JagPad only, no keyboard unfortunately.

[sirlynxalot]

Oh I see.  Seems like an odd decision for the developer to make it so his game required not only a rare computer, but also a very rare peripheral.

[Gilby 4000]

40 minutes ago, sirlynxalot said:

Oh I see.  Seems like an odd decision for the developer to make it so his game required not only a rare computer, but also a very rare peripheral.

Indeed! That's why I'm so bummed out it cannot be played properly nowadays (well, at least it adds to its mystique :-))

Edited August 26, 2022 by Gilby 4000

[sirlynxalot]

Have you contacted the PC emulator author/dev team to see if support for all buttons on the pad can be added?  Sometimes when an emulator is at an advanced state, developers become interested in this kind of "cherry on top"/make a special effort to get full functionality for a peculiar game kind of thing. It could also be the case that they simply aren't aware of this very rare game that actually requires this unusual setup. 

 

By way of analogy, I have to imagine the various genesis/megadrive emulator authors had to put in a good amount of work to emulate the SVP chip, which is used in exactly one game, the genesis version of Virtua Racing.  Similar concept with the various special in-cart chips used in SNES games - some of them were esoteric and only used in 1-2 games, like whatever the chip was in Dragonball Z Hyper Dimension.  Hopefully adding functionality to the emulator to recognize additional joystick buttons of the power pad wouldn't be as huge a task as these, which involved emulating additional processors and stuff.

Edited August 26, 2022 by sirlynxalot

[Gilby 4000]

Thanks for the suggestion sirlynxalot, have reached out to two of the active Hatari developers, here's hoping they'll have some time to look into it!

[Jagman]

Would be amazing to see this ported to Jag so this could finally be playable (especially since it already has the correct controller obviously). .  Was hoping it would show up on the Jeff Minter Story compilation..