Lord of Biscay RPG demo for PlusCart/UnoCart

[+MarcoJ]

** The Lord of Biscay Demo alpha for PlusCart is now up on the Plus Store. Please find it under Public Roms->Pluscart Exclusives->ACE Demos->RPG_4K_ACE **
** The UnoCart build of Lord of Biscay demo is ready, thanks to @ZackAttack. The Unified Unocart firmware is required for it to work. See below download  RPG_4K_60HZ_UF_ALPHA_2022-12-09  **

 

This RPG Demo is a work in progress alpha for an upcoming game called "Lord of Biscay". It uses the ACE scheme and runs on the PlusCart flash cartridge. (https://pluscart.firmaplus.de/pico/). The game will now also work on the UnoCart with the Unified firmware upgrade by @ZackAttack. 

 

 

About

The game is a top down view action adventure RPG game. You control a character that can explore a town and countryside. There is a choice of Sword, Bow/Arrow and Hatchet for weapons. To speak to other characters on screen a speech action is selectable.

 

Graphics

The game is tile based and uses a venetian blinds drawing technique. Two video modes are offered - 1. 16 wide 30Hz/25Hz flicker type, suitable for LCDs. 2 - 10 wide Moviecart(TM) type, suitable for all screen types. 

 

Sound/Music

The game uses a new sound engine that provides General MIDI music playback and 16 kHz digital sound effects. The music synthesizer is based on square waves with variable duty cycle. It has 12 note polyphony. Up to 4 sound effects/drums can be played at the same time with the music. The soundtrack is included in MP3 format below. It is recorded out of a 4 switch Woody NTSC. There is also a bulk pack of all OST files. The soundtrack is comprised of historic music from composers Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, Johann Sebastian Bach and Antonio Vivaldi. There is also a track by Rage Against the Machine which demonstrates music with drums. 

 

Compatibility

The game works on both Atari 2600 and Atari 7800. NTSC and PAL versions are available. To run the game at 60Hz on a PAL console, please use the NTSC version and switch the tv type switch to B/W.

 

Controls

Player 1 fire attacks/performs action

Select/Player 2 fire selects weapon/action

Joystick controls the direction of movement

The left difficulty switch controls the screen mode.

The TV Type switch selects the PAL or NTSC colour palette. This is useful for running the 60Hz version on PAL consoles.

 

Instructions

Explore the world with your character.

The township has other characters including townfolk, guards and sheep.

It is possible to talk to guards with the speech action.

The guards are there to protect the peace of the Kingdom. While they protect the town from invaders, they will not be afraid to attack citizens who disturb the peace.

The doors on buildings don't do anything yet.

To discover your quest, speak to the town guards.

 

Downloads

PlusCart: The game demo is distributed through the PlusStore. From the PlusCart menu, please find it under Public Roms->PlusCart Exclusives->ACE Demos->RPG_4K_ACE.

UnoCart: The file RPG_UF_ALPHA_2022-12-09.ACE can be found below. Note, it must be running the Unified Unocart firmware to work.

RPG_4K_50HZ_UF_ALPHA_2022-12-09.ACERPG_4K_60HZ_UF_ALPHA_2022-12-09.ACE

 

Screenshots

GamePlay Clip

Original Sound Track

1568111524_MarcoJohannesAtari2600RPGPluscartACEDemoOST.zip

 

[Jamtex]

Working on a nice PDF manual just for the demo. Hopefully this will be up soon.

[+MarcoJ]

The old 2021 RPG demo I made is released below. I have released it here for history of the development. This is an early concept that uses 3E+ bankswitching and no ARM coprocessor. This can run on Unocart/Pluscart, Stella and Gopher2600. It shows smooth scrolling, the 16 wide flicker technique and TIAtracker music. On the surface it appears to perform OK, but underneath the Atari's 6507 processor is struggling at every step, especially whilst scrolling. There is a small delay before the screen scrolls after the player presses a direction in places - this is due to the need to re-calculate the tile update before scrolling the screen. The move to ARM based processing allowed smooth scrolling with no delays, digital sound effects and MIDI music, dozens of NPC characters per screen, time for AI processing, more ROM space, more RAM space and more advantages yet to be discovered.

 

16CHAR_NTSC_20210603.bin 16CHAR_PAL50_20210603.bin 16CHAR_PAL60_20210603.bin

[CrazyChris]

Really nice demo! I like the colors and music. :)

[+MarcoJ]

The Lord of Biscay demo is now available for UnoCart! All thanks to @ZackAttack's Unified UnoCart/PlusCart firmware. The newly written Unified UnoCart/Pluscart firmware allows both PlusCart and UnoCart to play ACE files.
Please see the top of the forum for download of the 50Hz/60Hz versions of the demo binary:

Cheers,
Marco

[+MarcoJ]

Original Sound Track

 

Introduction

Line-in recordings of the soundtrack are provided below. The game uses a new sound driver that plays general MIDI files with 12 notes played simultaneously and 4 drum/sfx channels.(12 note polyphony, 4 drums). This allows a wide range of harmony and sustained notes used in symphonic music, as well as concurrent drum sounds.

 

Polyphony

Normally the Atari 2600 can only play 2 TIA tones at once(2 note polyphony). It also supports a mode where 4-bit samples can be played back fast on the Atari. By letting some of the 15 steps of each channel within the 4-bit range represent a square wave voice each, it is theoretically possible to have 30 square wave notes playing simultaneously! The driver uses 12 notes (6 per TIA channel), and reserves the rest for sound effects. The trick is being able to manage and update the tones fast enough, which is where the ARM coprocessor enables this by calculating tones in the background at the rate of around 1 million times per second. The update rate to the TIA for tones and SFX is around 16 kHz (15720 Hz).

 

Note modulation

The tone driver modulates the duty cycle of the square wave tones to imitate a volume envelope. It uses the ADSR cycle (Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release), a standard of the synthesizer industry. It is not possible to control the amplitude of the square wave directly, since the Atari has no circuitry to do so. A solution is to change the duty cycle (pulse width) of the square waves in sympathy with the volume envelope of each tones. When a note plays, it starts from a 0% duty cycle, and gradually increases to 50% duty cycle at the peak of the sound.  It then decays to a sustain level (0-50% duty cycle), and is held in that state until the note is released. After release, the duty cycle is gradually reduced until it reaches 0% (no sound). The approximation is not perfect; although volume is perceived to change, the tonal component of the tone also changes. When many notes are played together, the tonal component tends to be masked away and the volume component is more perceivable. The update rate for ADSR for each note is approximately every 24 scanlines, or around 650 times per second. 

 

Music Selection

The music pieces selected are by historical composers who used numerous parallel notes to create colourful harmony. It is common for their music to use 7th,9th,11th and 13th interval extensions to basic major and minor triads, and sometimes avoid basic triads completely. At times, the music uses 8 notes at once, also called parallel chords. By varying the amount of consonance and dissonance in the harmony, a wide range of musical moods and emotions can be expressed. 

 

Battle 1 - (Maurice Ravel - Alborada del Gracioso)

 

 

Battle 2 - (Antonio Vivaldi - Winter)

 

Battle 3 - (Rage Against the Machine - Killing in the name of)

 

Battle Victory - (Maurice Ravel - Noble and Sentimental Waltzes - End passage from Moins vif)

 

Celebration - (Maurice Ravel - La Parade)

 

Mouro Den - (Johann Sebastian Bach - Toccata and Fugue)

 

Mundaka Seaside - (Maurice Ravel - Menuet sur le nom d'Haydn)

 

 

 

Mundaka Town - (Claude Debussy - Prelude - Suite Bergamasque)

 

Overworld - (Claude Debussy - Passepied - Suite Bergamasque)

 

[+MarcoJ]

It brings me great pleasure to announce that Lord of Biscay has been nominated for Best Atari 2600 WIP Homebrew as part of the 5th Annual Atari Homebrew Awards. Many thanks to the Atari 2600 homebrew community for trying it out.

 

Voting has begun. If you've been a forum member for more than a month, you are welcomed to vote for your favourite games in this year's competition. Please head over to the Awards 2023 forums for more information.

[+MarcoJ]

 

 

 

Hooray! Lord of Biscay was voted 3rd for Best WIP Original Homebrew for 2022! Many thanks those who voted!

 

Lord of Biscay is an early adoptor of ARM coprocessor acceleration in Atari 2600 games for the PlusCart and now UnoCart platforms. The development started with making an ARM sound driver for playing MIDI music and has now evolved into a game. Originally the plan was for the game to be written in 6502 with a new bankswitching scheme, and some light ARM acceleration elements. Over time this evolved into the game being written in C with a tiny 4k 6502 driver with no bankswiching scheme, and vast ARM acceleration elements. The benefit is huge; the ARM processor runs 200 times faster than the Atari's 6507 processor. The game basically runs in the ARM processor and uses the Atari hardware to draw the screen, play the sound and collect the joystick inputs. The ability to have smooth scrolling graphics and simultaneous multi-channel music/digital sound effects is made possible only with the ARM processor.

 

I would like to thank people for enabling Lord of Biscay to become a reality. @ZackAttack laid the ground work for ACE (ARM Custom Executable) format and more recently the ELF format (a more portable version of ACE), and adapted Lord of Biscay's bus driver to run on the UnoCart. Thanks to @Al_Nafuur for enabling the ACE bootloader on the PlusCart, required for loading the game. @Jamtex has been reviewing the development from day one and providing direction for the story of the game. He has also written a sprite editor for the game. Additionally in this category of reviewers and supports are @ZeroPage Homebrew and @Armscar Coder who have been reviewing, commenting and supporting the game with snippets of video footage and testing of the game of their systems, over a truly extended period of time. Along the way, @JetSetIlly entered the ACE emulation space with the Gopher2600 emulator, making it support ACE. Thanks for the invaluable angle the emulator can debug to, and it's improving all the time. Thank I'd like to thank my ever tolerant wife Mary Candice for letting me live out my passion for Atari game development. And finally thanks to all who voted and played Lord of Biscay, you are what brought the game to be in the spotlight today.

 

Lord of Biscay represents the possibility for more games with enhanced graphical and sound capabilities on the PlusCart and UnoCart platforms. I hope to help more developers with the ACE/ELF concept in the future. I am motivated to push the Atari 2600 to do more things than ever. I want the Atari 2600 to be able to play the kind of graphical scrolling games with amazing music I grew up with on the NES and SNES.  My most proud achievement has been being able to make the Atari 2600 play music with many notes, allowing a rich extended harmonic pallette, something i'm very passionate about in music. I'm looking forward to taking Lord of Biscay to it's next level of completion, shortly after another homebrew I'm going to release in the next month or so.

 

Thanks to everyone who played and voted for Lord of Biscay!

 

 

 

 

[+Yurkie]

@marcoj this will not run on the Harmony cart?

[+SpiceWare]

18 hours ago, MarcoJ said:

Along the way, @JetSetIlly entered the ACE emulation space with the Gopher2600 emulator, making it support ACE.

 

I've just started using Gopher2600, is there some trick to getting it to run LoB?  I've tried this:

~/Projects/Atari/Gopher2600-joysticks/gopher2600 Lord\ of\ Biscay\ RPG_4K_60HZ_UF_ALPHA_2022-12-09.ACE 

 

 

which results in this:

 

 

I tried clicking Show all files and see Lob, but when I select it the Load button goes away:

 

 

 

 

[JetSetIlly]

4 minutes ago, SpiceWare said:

 

I've just started using Gopher2600, is there some trick to getting it to run LoB?  I've tried this:

~/Projects/Atari/Gopher2600-joysticks/gopher2600 Lord\ of\ Biscay\ RPG_4K_60HZ_UF_ALPHA_2022-12-09.ACE 

 

ACE support is patchy in Gopher2600 at the moment. Some builds of Lord of Biscay work and some don't. I'm working towards full compatibility but work on this has taken a back seat for now.

 

The problem is synchronizing the 2600 and ARM. It's very difficult to get right and because of how Marco has implemented his engine there are no emulation shortcuts that can be made, like with CDFJ and the other ARM strategies. This also means it emulates much slower than other ARM games.

 

The newer ELF format also suffers from the same problem but in practice I imagine most ELF games will use the StrongARM functions. Judging by current tests, using the StrongARM functions as synchronization points works well.

 

Whatever the emulation issues, Lords of Biscay is a triumph and it's well worth the time to load onto your PlusCart 🙂

 

[+SpiceWare]

3 minutes ago, JetSetIlly said:

ACE support is patchy in Gopher2600 at the moment. Some builds of Lord of Biscay work and some don't. I'm working towards full compatibility but work on this has taken a back seat for now.

 

No worries, I've distracted you enough with Stelladaptor support as it is 😆  Just thought I'd try out Lob after seeing @MarcoJ's post.

 

1 minute ago, JetSetIlly said:

Whatever the emulation issues, Lords of Biscay is a triumph and it's well worth the time to load onto your PlusCart 🙂

 

I still need to get one. Holding off until I've finished Frantic though as my new PS5 is distracting me enough as it is 😉

 

[+MarcoJ]

1 hour ago, Yurkie said:

@marcoj this will not run on the Harmony cart?

Hi Yurkie. No, it’s won’t work on a Harmony Cart. It’s written for the STM32 ARM processor used in the PlusCart and UnoCart. 

[+MarcoJ]

25 minutes ago, SpiceWare said:

 

No worries, I've distracted you enough with Stelladaptor support as it is 😆  Just thought I'd try out Lob after seeing @MarcoJ's post.

 

 

I still need to get one. Holding off until I've finished Frantic though as my new PS5 is distracting me enough as it is 😉

 

Thanks for trying @SpiceWare. With some tailored builds I’ve had it running on Gopher2600 before for non real-time debugging. The way the game’s bus driver is written is taxing to emulate; needs a middleware driver written. It’s early days.

[+Al_Nafuur]

On 2/26/2023 at 8:05 PM, SpiceWare said:

I still need to get one.

If you want to have one, you can contact me via PM.