Activision Anthology for GBA (My first impressions)

[Assassin]

The menu music is pretty good, too; digitized, with voices and stuff sometimes.  How did they manage to fit this whole thing on a tiny GBA cartridge?

I'm pretty sure that this was a rhetorical question, but I can't resist being a smartypants. The whole cartridge size is 8MB. Since all of the Atari VCS ROMs in existence could fit on a single 1.44MB diskette, this selection of 50 ROMs, most under 4K, leaves well over 6.5MB for MusX-compressed sound, the little cartridge bitmaps, and the coporate logos. MIDI versions of the 80s tracks on the PS2 Anthology would have fit well, too. Maybe for Volume 2?

 

Actually, it's not even close to being that simple. Even though the original games average about 4-8K on the VCS, emulating them at full speed on the GBA takes WAY more RAM and ROM space than that. We're not doing just a straight emulation...that's impossible given the 16MHz clock speed of the ARM processor in the GBA. Each game probably takes up anywhere from 100K-200K of ROM space to emulate correctly. The sound has nothing to do with MusyX...it's a completely different subsystem. Also, each game has label artwork, box artwork, and the entire text for the manual. There are also the interface screens and misc. support code to run the interface as well as the emulator code itself. I can tell you that all of the code, graphics, sound, and music for the game was about 12MB without compression. With real-time decompression from the ROM into RAM, I barely managed to squeeze it down to fit on an 8MB cart.

 

So long story short, the question was completely valid.

[gavv]

HERO's pretty 'unplayable' on GBA AA, in that it runs slowly(frame skipping and slow pace) that it's so slow that there's not the challenge of the original.

 

Pitfall runs off 48 seconds off its 'clock' in a real-world 60 seconds (20% slower).

 

a bit disappointing....

 

any of the homebrews (which i haven't played elsewhere) on the cart running slower than 100%?

 

gavv

 

its also not getting too kind of reviews over in the retrogaming radio (www.retrogamingradio.com) forums.

[Flojomojo]

I can tell you that all of the code, graphics, sound, and music for the game was about 12MB without compression.  With real-time decompression from the ROM into RAM, I barely managed to squeeze it down to fit on an 8MB cart.

Whoa. So I guess dropping new ROMs into the pack is out of the question, since each one is heavily tweaked?

 

Can you shed some light on the non-appearance of Demon Attack?

[Thomas Jentzsch]

So I guess dropping new ROMs into the pack is out of the question, since each one is heavily tweaked?

AFAIK they are not tweaked but precompiled somehow so that emulation is easier. So new ROMs that don't do anything completely different should work to.

[SmileyDude]

Actually, it's not even close to being that simple. Even though the original games average about 4-8K on the VCS, emulating them at full speed on the GBA takes WAY more RAM and ROM space than that. We're not doing just a straight emulation...that's impossible given the 16MHz clock speed of the ARM processor in the GBA. Each game probably takes up anywhere from 100K-200K of ROM space to emulate correctly. The sound has nothing to do with MusyX...it's a completely different subsystem. Also, each game has label artwork, box artwork, and the entire text for the manual. There are also the interface screens and misc. support code to run the interface as well as the emulator code itself. I can tell you that all of the code, graphics, sound, and music for the game was about 12MB without compression. With real-time decompression from the ROM into RAM, I barely managed to squeeze it down to fit on an 8MB cart.

 

This is great stuff, btw. As soon as I happen to see it in the store, I'll be buying myself a copy (and maybe one for my kid if he wants one too ).

 

Any chance of some more technical details on this emulator? Considering that this is by far the slowest platform I've ever seen a working 2600 emulator on, I'm pretty sure that alot of people are interested in knowing some of the details. One question that came to mind for me was about Bradford Mott -- I know he is responsible for Stella, but as a lot of us on playing around with the GBA know, being able to write a good emulator in C/C++ and being able to write a good emulator for the GBA are two completely different things. Did Bradford already have ARM/GBA experience? I am just soooo impressed by this emulator, and I'm curious to find out more on his background

[SmileyDude]

HERO's pretty 'unplayable' on GBA AA, in that it runs slowly(frame skipping and slow pace) that it's so slow that there's not the challenge of the original.

 

Pitfall runs off 48 seconds off its 'clock' in a real-world 60 seconds (20% slower).

 

a bit disappointing....

 

any of the homebrews (which i haven't played elsewhere) on the cart running slower than 100%?

 

I'm going to wait until I have the actual cart in hand before making a judgement -- the GBA carts can run at different speeds, and while playing something like Mario or Advance Wars off a flash cart might not make much of a difference, something like this could easily be affected by cart speed. Of course, if everything is loaded into RAM, it wouldn't make any difference at all.

 

For the record, Pitfall II seemed a bit slow to me, but still enjoyable. I almost felt like a kid again, sitting on the couch playing Pitfall II. What I would've done for a portable 2600 20 years ago...

[Flojomojo]

OK, following up on my old question about Imagic titles. I see Assassin addressed it several months ago.

Yep...there are no Imagic titles in the collection. Yes, I know it sucks, but there were some licensing and legal issues that simply could not be worked out, so we had to remove them. Don't worry though, there are still plenty of games to keep everybody busy. The latest build is looking great, and we're taking lots of time to make sure there are enough features to make you all happy!

I guess we'll all have to buy multiple copies of this to assure retail success so that a Volume II can come out next year!

[cryptik76]

its also not getting too kind of reviews over in the retrogaming radio (www.retrogamingradio.com) forums.

 

I'm glad most game companies don't visit forums, because I think I'd lose my will to create anything for public consumption.

[oesii]

I'm glad most game companies don't visit forums, because I think I'd lose my will to create anything for public consumption.

 

lol, so true. When they do visit forums they get slammed for one thing or another. It's a vicious consumer base in the gaming industry

 

When I got my Anthology at Gamestop the two guys in front of me picked up SimCity 2000 and Atari Anniversary for the GBA. Nice to see so many retro titles being snatched up. Now lets optimize some of these games

[Assassin]

Attention all homebrew developers included in Anthology GBA!

 

I have FedEx'ed your copies of Anthology GBA to Activision, and they will send them out to you later this week. Thanks again for all your hard work and your continuing support of the community. One of the reasons that the GBA version is so special is because of your titles being included for the general public to enjoy. You guys rock!

 

-cnn

[Assassin]

As some of you may know, I was also the lead programmer on the original Deus Ex at Ion Storm Austin, so I decided to contract with the most excellent musician from that game for Anthology GBA as well. His name is Alexander Brandon, and he's an old-school mod musician as well as a modern day audio wiz. He created all of the tunes for Anthology GBA from scratch especially for this compilation. Since we couldn't easily include the retro tunes from the PS2 version (and they wouldn't sound very good on the GBA anyway), we wanted to create some original 80's-style tunes that mimicked some of the cooler 80's bands. See if you can tell which tune matches which band.

 

As a small technical note, all of the songs for the game fit into about one megabyte on the cart. The quality that Alex can fit into a small amount of space is simply amazing.

 

-cnn

[cryptik76]

As some of you may know, I was also the lead programmer on the original Deus Ex at Ion Storm Austin

 

Sweet! Deus Ex rocks! I bought it the week of its release, and it's never left my hard drive.

[oesii]

 

As a small technical note, all of the songs for the game fit into about one megabyte on the cart.  The quality that Alex can fit into a small amount of space is simply amazing.

 

-cnn

 

 

Great job on the tunes and of course, on the entire package. Have you seen all the songs they have crammed into the GBA American Idol game? That cart memory size must be huge

[Flojomojo]

Neat! Between you and "Mr. Stella," this game really got some star treatment, eh?

 

Bargain hunters: the Game of the Year Windows version of Deus Ex is on a DVD packed in with this month's Computer Gaming World.

[Assassin]

Some of you have figured out that you can use the L and R buttons in Kaboom as well as the D-Pad. You can also use the L and R buttons *combined* with the D-Pad to move super-fast.

 

Also, in Activision Decathlon, you can use the L and R buttons to run instead of using the D-Pad...this makes the game a little less painful.

 

-cnn

[Flojomojo]

Nice. Hey, did the publishers give you grief for wanting to add the highscore save option? It's GREAT, and really lends as much of a sense of purpose as is possible when diddling around with VCS games.

[bwmott]

Any chance of some more technical details on this emulator?  Considering that this is by far the slowest platform I've ever seen a working 2600 emulator on, I'm pretty sure that alot of people are interested in knowing some of the details.  One question that came to mind for me was about Bradford Mott -- I know he is responsible for Stella, but as a lot of us on playing around with the GBA know, being able to write a good emulator in C/C++ and being able to write a good emulator for the GBA are two completely different things.  Did Bradford already have ARM/GBA experience?  I am just soooo impressed by this emulator, and I'm curious to find out more on his background

 

This was my first experience with ARM/GBA programming. I’ve had experience with other RISC architectures before which helped out and I consulted the ARM Architecture Reference Manual a lot The emulator uses every “trick” I could think of to get things running as fast as possible in the development time we had. Some of these are standard things that every GBA program does like placing time critical routines in IWRAM, taking advantage of hardware scaling, and using Thumb/ARM code where needed. Others are more 2600 specific and I can’t go into the details of these.

 

It was a lot of fun working on the project with Chris and the team at Aspyr. I hope everyone enjoys it!

[Tempest]

It's nice that people can now play those two unknown activision prototypes. Please let me know if you find out any new information on these games and I'll add it to my webpage (with the proper credit of course).

 

Tempest

[oesii]

 

It was a lot of fun working on the project with Chris and the team at Aspyr. I hope everyone enjoys it!

 

 

well, I'm certainly enjoying it. I love all the timed, race against clock games like Barnstorming, Dragster, Grand Prix, and Skiing and this collection really keeps me trying to get better scores on the GBA

 

Thanks for the great game. I've bought several Asypr games for my Macs, good to see them expand into other platforms.

[dhowerter]

OK so Gamestop has this, but when is its release date for everywhere else? (in the USA of course)

[SmileyDude]

This was my first experience with ARM/GBA programming.  I’ve had experience with other RISC architectures before which helped out and I consulted the ARM Architecture Reference Manual a lot  The emulator uses every “trick” I could think of to get things running as fast as possible in the development time we had.  Some of these are standard things that every GBA program does like placing time critical routines in IWRAM, taking advantage of hardware scaling, and using Thumb/ARM code where needed.  Others are more 2600 specific and I can’t go into the details of these.

 

What a way to break into a new platform I hope we get to see this emulator used in some other products (Atari? ) I know you probably don't hear it too often (or even if you do, it doesn't hurt to hear it again), but thanks for your work on this. Definetly the best portable 2600 around

[MegaManFan]

I have thoroughly played all the games in the GBA Anthology and while some of them may not run full-speed, it's only the die-hards like us who would even notice the difference.     It is extremely difficult to get proper 2600 emulation running at full speed on the GBA. The GBA is not a very powerful piece of hardware (especially compared to computers and other devices that properly emulate the 2600), and the 2600 is not a very easy system to emulate accurately at all.  The fact that no public 2600 emulators have been released yet, despite the GBA's age, should say something right there.

 

While I would never dispute Al's technical expertise, something completely boggles my mind here. If the GBA is not a very powerful piece of hardware, and just barely able to emulate a 2600, what does that say about games like Metroid Fusion, Super Monkey Ball Jr. and Golden Sun? Are we being fooled into believing these games are "Advanced" by some sort of trickery pulling way more power out of a puny GBA than should be possible? But then, what does that say about Konami Arcade Classics, the Pac-Man Collection, Namco Museum i.e. GBA titles that perfectly emulate ARCADE games, let alone 2600 games? Shouldn't that be impossible if a GBA can just barely handle mimicking a 2600? Last but not least, SNES ports like Super Mario Advance 2 + 3 shouldn't even be possible at all. If it can barely emulate a 2600 it certainly can't be capable of emulating SNES games - yet it does!

 

That's why I'm totally confused.

[Justin42]

I don't think any of the other "emulators" are exact, either. The Konami set definitely isn't truly emulated; compare Gyruss on that to "real" Gyruss (MAME or the real machine) and it's totally different. It's close, but not the same. The other games fare a bit better, but since Gyruss was one of my favourite games growing up, the differences are very obvious to me.

 

The Atari Anniversary set has a credit about "meta-emulation"... not sure how that works. It seems pretty good, although does slow down in spots (Tempest drags a bit, IMO).

 

I've heard the Namco sets are just very good ports, not exact emulation.

 

As for the other native GBA games (Metroid, SMB, etc)-- those are written directly for the hardware. Emulation adds a layer of complexity that causes everything to slow down.

 

I'm still waiting on my official copy of Activision Anthology, but I can imagine forcing the GBA to do 2600 games (a system that STILL isn't perfectly emulated ANYWHERE), doing resolution scaling (on a system that uses each scanline to do work, so it probably has to render everything and then drop resolution as it goes), etc, is asking it to do a lot.

 

Disclaimer: I probably have no clue what I'm talking about since I have no experience coding for the GBA (or the 2600... or any game system for that matter.. .

[SmileyDude]

Well, it's not that the GBA isn't powerful enough to run Pitfall II -- but that it's barely powerful enough to run the 2600 version via emulation.

 

When emulating the 2600, there are sooo many timing issues to deal with, that it takes a lot of CPU time to handle them all. Just about every game that's more advanced than Pong for the 2600 used some kind of trick or two to get more out of that machine. So, emulating it isn't as simple as it would be for other machines.

 

To give you an idea about the complexity of the problem, this is the first complete 2600 emulator for the GBA after 3 years. There was a NES emulator for the GBA in the first year. Both systems used the same CPU, but programmers on the NES didn't have to use as many tricks as the 2600 programmers. And, as a bonus, the GBA's hardware is very similar (and much more advanced) to the NES hardware, so things like sprites and the backgrounds are much easier to handle. Since the 2600 hardware is so unlike the GBA's hardware, everything you see had to be done with code.

 

Another tidbit about the 2600 emu -- as I recall, the slowest PC that can run a 2600 emu at full speed is a 66mhz 486 -- this is running on a 16mhz ARM chip. Big difference speed wise. It also shows that clock speed isn't everything when it comes to computer speed.

 

In the end, this is one hell of a programming feat -- and hearing that it was done in 4 months makes it that much more impressive.

[israelg]

anyone can give us some more detailes about each game...

 

I already read that pitfall is running in about 80% speed, and there

are similar problems in hero... , what about chopper command ?

I will buy the collection only for chopper command ( if it works good

enough )

 

Israel Geron T.