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Stop the Express - now available


cmadruga

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Stop the Express for Intellivision

(Digital release)

 

The evil Redmen have hijacked the ITA Express, and it's your mission to stop them!

 

Avaliable now at Intellivision Collector.

https://www.intellivisioncollector.com/roms/stop-the-express-rom.html

 

 

Q&A:

 

How come I never heard of this game?

This classic was originally released for the C64, ZX Spectrum, MSX and Sharp X1.

Stop the Express was rated as the 4th best Spectrum game by Your Sinclair, in their list of the top 100 Spectrum games.

 

Will there be a physical release?

No physical release is planned.

If you are interested in eventually seeing it happen, let your publisher of choice know.

 

How does this version compare with others?

This version was written from scratch, and preserves all key elements of the original.

In addition, it incorporates the following features:

1- difficulty ramps up more slowly and there are skill levels

2- randomized spawn of all the elements: instead of the scripted and memorized nature of the original

3- gameplay features: gates of 3 different heights, floaters on top of the train as well (instead of just inside), enemies that come in both directions, etc.

4- streamlined controls

5- title screen with music

 

What other games are you working on?

A couple others, but this will be a slow year unfortunately.

 

 

Big thanks to @carlsson (music / SFX) and @Eisengrim (testing).

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3 hours ago, sprazzi said:

Good game with nice graphics on the ZX spectrum. Kind of prequel to challenger on the famicom.

I remember videogiochi magazine thought it was set in Italy because of the "ITA" written on the train

Yeah “ITA” really comes from the original programmer’s name: Fumihiko Itagaki.


He did that again in at least one more game, called “Itasandorius” in Japan aka Driller Tanks from Hudson Soft.

 

And to think Western programmers had to hide their initials in Easter eggs, etc. This guy literally slapped his name in our faces!

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14 hours ago, sprazzi said:

Kind of prequel to challenger on the famicom.

Hm..

 

Stop the Express was developed by Hudson Soft in 1983, published by various companies like Kuma, Sinclair Research and Commodore (!).

Challenger was developed by Hudson Soft in 1985, and published by themselves for the Famicom.

 

Wikipedia notes that a Famicom port of Stop was planned, but in order to flesh it out they added the other levels. I suppose it is one indicator of the shift in video game complexity that Nintendo brought to the table.

 

Btw, for completeness, there was a homebrew port of this game for the Commodore Plus/4 in 2021 which would make the Intellivision the 7th format, unless I have overlooked yet more ports. I didn't find any conversion from MSX to e.g. Colecovision yet.

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This is the right way to do it, and should be done with All Intellivision games,digital only at first and then maybe CIB. Digital is so much cheaper to create than to have to manufacture circuit boards, ROM Chips and Cartridge shells, a box and paper manual, most people can't afford to spend $70 plus a pop on a old style blocky graphics game.  A LOT Flash cart is a 120one time purchase and then you can load a bunch of games on it and purchase a digital version of a game from 3 to 5 game for the price of one CIB game. This is 2023 the era of digital game that can be instantly downloaded, most people have switched to Digital versions of games and since Intellivision digital games are in ROM Format once you download them you own thrm for life because you don't have to log on to a server do verify you own the game every time you want to play it even if the company running the server decides to shutdown the server or they go out of business, you are out of luck and can no longer play a game you paid for. LTO Flash even supports DRM so a game file can be married to you particular cartridge only preventing piracy of games. 

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18 minutes ago, Taslim said:

Digital is so much cheaper to create than to have to manufacture circuit boards, ROM Chips and Cartridge shells, a box and paper manual, most people can't afford to spend $70 plus a pop on a old style blocky graphics game. 

From a programming standpoint however, the effort is the same and the return is much more modest than a CIB release. In part because digital does not sell nearly as many copies currently as CIB.

Good thing no one is making Intellivision games to get rich, right?

 

Anyway, digital-first still has the benefit of ironing out any possible bugs/issues with a game prior to an eventual CIB release.

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Well thankfully we have the backbit available.  more intellivision owners need to know this exists.. and developers should really be promoting it and testing on it as well..   the LTO is great, but there is no way of knowing when the new ones will come.. and to expect folks to pay $400-600 to play roms on intellivision is madness..   JLP is not fully implemented yet, but there has been some effort to make this happen and I believe with enough community demand we'll have it.  @evietron has done an amazing amount of inroads for this mostly with just me asking for it, imagine if we actually had all of the JLP using developers working with her as well as others.  

 

I see no reason why digital couldn't be a better business model than CIB if we can just give the community a reliable and readily available muticart..  the LTO was that for some time but it's been several years and the intellivision community has grown since then.. but with no option other than douche bag ebay prices. 

 

Now that the backbit is here and has come a long way in the relatively short time it's been available.. I still think people simply don't know it's even an option with a 2-4 week turnaround for orders..  and actively supported by a passionate developer..   AND it can be uses for more than just Intellivision so even if you get an LTO one day (and that could be this year.. or maybe next year?  there is no knowing when that will be, it's been two years already, what's another year?  That backbit can be repurposed to another system..  backbit.io

Edited by Caleb Garner
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14 minutes ago, Caleb Garner said:

Well thankfully we have the backbit available.  more intellivision owners need to know this exists.. and developers should really be promoting it and testing on it as well..   

Maybe you could discuss with evietron what could be proactively done to get Backbits in developers hands. Unfortunately I can't afford to have Backbits, Intellicarts, Cuttle Carts, etc.

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yea i think the best route would be possibly sending copies of games to @evietron with any technical dev insight you have about it.  I do understand the cost consideration to own all the devices..  i think a free copy to the multicart maker is a fair trade to get the game incorporated.. maybe cued up.  I'm also happy to be a tester / advocate.  as an aspiring developer myself, I understand how sharing roms is bad.  I'm working with an Odyssey 2 publisher printing enclosures for them and they have done trades for roms so I know and I believe this scene understand reasonably priced roms encourages supporting games rather than pirating them since we're only hurting the community we're wanting to see make more games for our beloved systems.  

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2 hours ago, cmadruga said:

to each hardware developer is not practical. 

how many active multicart makers are there?! :)    As far as I know we're looking at..   One..   if there are more out there, i'd love to know so we can inform everyone of their options.  

 

- LTO's is already done.. they are just not making them.. but the hardware is established..   just out of production for the last two years and no promise as to when they will resume..  no need to send anything to them, they are not fixing them since they are not making them..    

 

- Intellicart are no longer in production as far as i can tell so no need to send one to them..  

 

- Cuttle cart 3 is long since extinct in terms of producing any more and those too are established hardware..  even if they don't work.. there is no one to fix them..  no need to send to them.  

 

There is only the backbit that has an active developer able to and is testing / fixing things.  

 

I did learn though that production is a little backlogged due to chip shortages, but it looks like we're talking March-April right now.  While this is unfortunate, it's not that the developer is on break.. there is simply supply issues that many people are dealing with.  people will get what they order and not at ebay prices..  thankfully so far, the chip shortages haven't resulted in increased prices..  just time..  not money..  after i waited for about 2 years for LTO..  waiting a couple months didn't seem like a big deal.  

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3 hours ago, Caleb Garner said:

and developers should really be promoting it and testing on it as well

This sounds very impractical.

 

3 hours ago, cmadruga said:

Unfortunately the testing process involves many iterations, and I think having to send games to each hardware developer is not practical. 

exactly.

 

25 minutes ago, Caleb Garner said:

how many active multicart makers are there?! :)    As far as I know we're looking at..   One.. 

There are still people using CC3, but really there is just LTO Flash! and Backbit, and the new RTO.

 

But sending a ROM to the flash cart's maker just to see if it works on a particular cart is dumb.

 

A programmer doesn't want to be chasing their tail trying to get their ROM to work around a hardware/firmware flaw.

 

But as it stands, the LTO and Backbit are pretty solid as-is.  The RTO is new, so it may be playing catch up in the firmware, but that shouldn't stop it from being used for most games.

 

The trouble is that sometimes the consoles have timing issues like what we saw with the recent game recalls, so sending a ROM to a cart developer will not help in that case.  We need more beta testers using real hardware in their testing.

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