Wrathchild Posted November 27, 2003 Share Posted November 27, 2003 Hi, Following on from the Barbarian work I'd done a while back, I've had a chance to play with another game that some of you will know and love By laying the Atari screen out as 8 & a bit fixed fonts in Antic mode 4 (using a few DLIs) and then writing solely to the slightly re-organised screen memory, as the C64 would do, very little conversion was required to get this to work other than stripping out the C64 specific bits, e.g. music, background colour areas. Now... I wonder if the game works the same way?... Enjoy, Mark PS: A couple of bits to tidy up - the company logo should be blue and there's a couple of underbars appearing at the end of the last verse, oh, and I should put the tune in too bt_intro.zip 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Goochman Posted November 27, 2003 Share Posted November 27, 2003 Pretty cool - in ATariwin 3.1 it craps out right after the fighting man picture appears. Neat to see atleast something from Bards Tale on the 8bit Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wrathchild Posted November 27, 2003 Author Share Posted November 27, 2003 it craps out right after the fighting man picture appears. Odd, works OK for me using a 64K XL with basic disabled. Tested on 2.7b and 3.1 (including the Flash support version). Regards, Mark Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Goochman Posted November 28, 2003 Share Posted November 28, 2003 My bag - Ive been playing the 5200 conversions and didnt get my 800 settings reset properly - Got everything to work Now for the whole game Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lord-Chaos Posted November 28, 2003 Share Posted November 28, 2003 My bag - Ive been playing the 5200 conversions and didnt get my 800 settings reset properly - Got everything to work Now for the whole game The C64 graphics of Bard´s Tale are not very good. With Graph2fnt the ATARI can do the AMIGA graphics, these pictures are 16 color pics at 112*88 pixels and could look almost like on the AMIGA on the ATARI at 56*88 (160*200). I once ripped all the pictures,but without animation.Maybe a complete conversion of animated graphics with Graph2fnt is possible. The 3 Bard´s Tales and the Construction Set are available as AMIGA disk images on various ROM sites, I have them,too, if anyone needs them. Thimo Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cybergoth Posted May 25, 2008 Share Posted May 25, 2008 Is it save to assume that this very promising project is dead? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wrathchild Posted May 25, 2008 Author Share Posted May 25, 2008 Indeed, after doing the intro (minus the music) I then went about getting the expanded graphics out of the C64 code (this time minus the colour). Aside from that I did take a look at how some of the code worked (e.g. code overlays) but overall there's a lot of work in there! If anyone wanted to take a stab at progressing this then I'll lend any help I can Regards, Mark Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shamus Posted May 26, 2008 Share Posted May 26, 2008 (edited) I had toyed with the idea, only I started with BT3 and I got that splash working as well. I've always thought that a BT1 conversion of the Apple2 version would probably be *much* easier as there would be much less hoops to jump through going that route. Plus you could do things like enhanced graphics, sound and whatnot. It's a cool project, but not for me. Instead, I've written an A2 emu to play it on. Yes, I know about AppleWin, but it doesn't do TV artifacting right. Mine does. Edited May 26, 2008 by Shamus Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cybergoth Posted May 26, 2008 Share Posted May 26, 2008 If anyone wanted to take a stab at progressing this then I'll lend any help I can I'm a bit toying with the idea, since it seems to be a very doable game on the 64K machines. Plus you could do things like enhanced graphics, sound and whatnot. I checked the C64 version last night and it already is very big, some 244K. I thought it should nicely fit into a 256K cartridge, but that probably doesn't leave too much room for improvements then. Of course I didn't research yet, wether there's any cartridges this big doable/available (read: ready to go) these days. I thought Space Harrier was aiming at such a target size as well though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
urborg Posted May 26, 2008 Share Posted May 26, 2008 Intro looks fine, but which key do I have to press to start the game? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wrathchild Posted May 27, 2008 Author Share Posted May 27, 2008 (especially after my Elite demo's issue with pressing a key ) FYI: here was the other thread with the graphics on a cartridge image to use under emulation Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wrathchild Posted May 27, 2008 Author Share Posted May 27, 2008 @Cybergoth - I too would say its definitely a 'do-able' on the A8 As far as cartridges go, the 8Mbit FlashCart would be your best candidate, especially if you have a burner that can write to the Am29f010 or Am29f040 micros (e.g. I have a cheapish Willem variant from Tomsad). I'd recommend going for the 8Mbit cart with just one 040 inside, or you can actually mix and have an 040 and an 010 inside and it'll still work with the exception of the 010 being 'seen/repeated' across the other banks (I can elaborate on this if anyone needs more details). Using this method I think is nice as you can use the larger 512K chip as a 'read-only' area, but then have the 128K chip as a 'writeable' device, e.g. for character states. This works well as the 128K chips have a 16K block-erase footprint (so 8 banks of 16K = 128K) wheras the 512K chips have 64K blocks (again 8*64=512). 256K chips (e.g. 020s) seem scarce, I seem to only find 28f020 chips on Ebay but they need 12V to re-program and so the programmer is required. Therefore you could use 2 of the 010 chips in the 8Mbit board to give you the desired size. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cybergoth Posted May 27, 2008 Share Posted May 27, 2008 I was more talking of releasing a game complete on cartridge, not about releasing a flashcart ready binary. So I'd be more interested in a big EPROM based bankswitching board. Kinda like the 512K cartridge the "Last Ninja Remix" was released on for the C64. I think the Atari line had that too in the form of XEGS cartridges, I'm just not sure wether they went as big as the here required 256K. EDIT: Wasn't there something like that available, a big cartridge with the whole Synapse back catalogue or so? I thought MaO was showing me one, I seem to remember playing Claim Jumper against him. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted May 27, 2008 Share Posted May 27, 2008 well... Atarimax flashcarts could be preloaded with an image so why invent the wheel twice? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cybergoth Posted May 27, 2008 Share Posted May 27, 2008 well... Atarimax flashcarts could be preloaded with an image so why invent the wheel twice? Maybe it actually is what I want, but I have a feeling the use of flash is kinda overkill when the content it ships with is supposed to stay on it forever anyway? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wrathchild Posted May 27, 2008 Author Share Posted May 27, 2008 (edited) Wasn't there something like that available, a big cartridge with the whole Synapse back catalogue or so? That would be (have been) the Sunmark board, which itself may have used a flash chip (is the old site mirrored anywhere?) You can write-protect the flash chips, either by hardware or software - I guess those inclined could go and circumvent this if desired. My thoughts on production would be on the availability of boards, e.g. AtariMax boards are readily available, Sunmark has stopped producing (AFAIK) and XEGS boards you'd have to buy existing ones in bulk and I think these tend to be limited to 64K/128K (depending on the title) and would require modding to support anything larger. Nir's switchable XEGS is another good model and I think can go up to 1024K, e.g. 128 * 8K banks with bit 7 controlling access to ROM or RAM under cart, but these aren't produced. I'm not sure how unit prices compare between EEPROMs and EPROMs or PROMs for say an 4Mbit chip, but comparible to the cart as a whole it might not make too much difference. I agree though that there seems to a general (mis?)conception with 'why would I want a flash cart' when purchasing a fixed title on one of these boards, more so if someone already owns a flashcart Regards, Mark Edited May 27, 2008 by Wrathchild Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MEtalGuy66 Posted May 27, 2008 Share Posted May 27, 2008 WHy not just release a disk based version first? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wrathchild Posted May 27, 2008 Author Share Posted May 27, 2008 er, to avoid writing disk swapping routines and nice 'Please insert Disk X' messages Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MEtalGuy66 Posted May 27, 2008 Share Posted May 27, 2008 (edited) So make it run off of on huge disk image.. Disks can be up to 16megs now that everybody uses SIO2PC... I wish someone would do that with all the alternate reality disks.. Edited May 27, 2008 by MEtalGuy66 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cybergoth Posted May 27, 2008 Share Posted May 27, 2008 WHy not just release a disk based version first? I don't like the media. Games are supposed to reside in cartridges. Besides, were there actually any disk based A8 releases within the last 10 years or so? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MEtalGuy66 Posted May 27, 2008 Share Posted May 27, 2008 WHy not just release a disk based version first? I don't like the media. Games are supposed to reside in cartridges. Besides, were there actually any disk based A8 releases within the last 10 years or so? I want to be able to sector copy the whole thing into my ramdisk and boot from it.. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cybergoth Posted May 27, 2008 Share Posted May 27, 2008 WHy not just release a disk based version first? I don't like the media. Games are supposed to reside in cartridges. Besides, were there actually any disk based A8 releases within the last 10 years or so? I want to be able to sector copy the whole thing into my ramdisk and boot from it.. Why would you want to do that, when you could have a superior cartridge version instead? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MEtalGuy66 Posted May 27, 2008 Share Posted May 27, 2008 WHy not just release a disk based version first? I don't like the media. Games are supposed to reside in cartridges. Besides, were there actually any disk based A8 releases within the last 10 years or so? I want to be able to sector copy the whole thing into my ramdisk and boot from it.. Why would you want to do that, when you could have a superior cartridge version instead? cuz I am not really a cartridge person.. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fres Posted May 31, 2008 Share Posted May 31, 2008 I used to be a cartridge person, but now that I have my-ide, no looking back... I still like carts, but they take up a lot of room. I like MetalGuy's idea of creating a mega disk for this project. This idea seems to be RARELY approached (unless I've missed something). If HDD images were used, some of the mega disk swapping games (like the sierra ones) could easily have been adapted to the 8bit. I remember playing many of these in CGA on a PC which was barely an improvement over GR.8. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fröhn Posted May 31, 2008 Share Posted May 31, 2008 So make it run off of on huge disk image.. Disks can be up to 16megs now that everybody uses SIO2PC... Yeah great, 16 MB disks. Why not skip the whole atari thing at all then... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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