Cousin Vinnie Posted August 23, 2004 Share Posted August 23, 2004 I suspect it will be Track and Field. Mitch Great minds think alike. Cousin Vinnie Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Eckhard Stolberg Posted August 23, 2004 Share Posted August 23, 2004 Then how are the emulators getting it right? Are there any emulators that are getting it right? If you are looking at the emulator screenshots on the Fractalus page here on AtariAge, you'll notice that only 8 double-scanlines at the top and bottom of the landscape display are there. The lines in the center are missing completely. This is because the extra RAM wasn't emulated when the screenshots were taken. If you enable the extra RAM support in MESS for the Fractalus ROM, you'll probably get the same display with every second line missing that you are getting on the CC2 in 78SC_R16 mode. The 8 double-scanlines at the top and bottom are displayed correctly on a real 7800 as well no matter if you have extra RAM at $4000-$4FFF or not. I think this part of the landscape display gets stored in the 7800's internal RAM. But we'd have to have a closer look at the disassembly to find out for sure. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bruce Tomlin Posted August 24, 2004 Share Posted August 24, 2004 Ah, now I see. The difference was that when I first ran it, NOT on an emulator, I had bus float to work with. An emulator generally isn't going to emulate the subtler electrical effects of bus float. So instead of a solid orange band, I had a mostly orange band with some vertical stripes and a few flickery pixels. I didn't see that crap on the emulator screen shot and didn't realize that I shouldn't have. Now that I've looked back at the original picture, I see the orange band. That's certainly a damn cheap-ass way to do line doubling. So if the CC2 was to have a bank switch mode to run RoF properly, it would have to somehow mask out A8 from RAM accesses. I'm not sure that it even has this level of control available. I wouldn't be surprised if A0 through at least A8 of the RAM were directly connected to the address bus. And I'm not sure how one would go about patching the code to work the "right" way. It was probably done this way for speed reasons. It *might* be possible to do a whole bunch of OFFSET=0 or OFFSET=1 display lists, if that doesn't run afoul of the 512 byte maximum DLL. But then the rollbar graphics DLs would have to be redone. The wierd RAM mapping probably played an important role in killing this title. 1) at some point, Atari issued a "no RAM" edict for new 7800 games, and 2) it would have needed a custom cartridge board made, where the A8 line didn't go to RAM. No way would Atari have gone for such custom stuff when they were convinced that the video game market was completely dead. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bruce Tomlin Posted August 24, 2004 Share Posted August 24, 2004 This one should be less ugly for CC2 folks. The reset warp is almost perfect, and the main viewscreen now only has orange lines in the sky. Includes .bin, .a78, and .asm based on a disassembly with all address references changed to H() and L() for ease of code changes. CC2 info: Fractalus (cleaned up) / rescue2.bin / 78SC_R16 / 78BIOS / 816C450B rescue2.zip Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ubersaurus Posted August 24, 2004 Share Posted August 24, 2004 Badass...this was agame I wanted to see surface on the 7800. Totally badass flight game. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bruce Tomlin Posted August 24, 2004 Share Posted August 24, 2004 Okay, I found the fix to the warp screen that I overlooked, but it's not important enough for a new upload. But I thought I'd mention that after watching this thing before the patch, it's clearly double-buffering the viewscreen. The unitialized RAM was switching back and forth between two different random patterns. So what kind of speed is this thing getting anyhow? 4-6fps? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mayhem Posted August 24, 2004 Share Posted August 24, 2004 Cheers for that Bruce, I'll see what my PAL 7800 makes of it Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cschell Posted August 25, 2004 Share Posted August 25, 2004 Use this with the binary Mitch posted earlier in the thread. ROF / RESCUE / 7800_ROF / 78BIOS Enjoy, Chad 7800_rof.zip Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Mitch Posted August 25, 2004 Share Posted August 25, 2004 Thanks Chad! Goes to test it out. Mitch Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bruce Tomlin Posted August 25, 2004 Share Posted August 25, 2004 Use this with the binary Mitch posted earlier in the thread. ROF / RESCUE / 7800_ROF / 78BIOS Enjoy, Chad Kick ass... I guess the CC2 RAM address lines weren't directly connected to the 6502 after all! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Mitch Posted August 25, 2004 Share Posted August 25, 2004 Well, I was testing it out a little earlier and I decided to try it out with a keypad but there was no response. A second joystick didn't affect anything either nor did the difficulty switches. Pause worked and Select seemed to drop it into some kind of an unfinished screen. The Reset button or the player one primary joystick button worked to start the game but neither joystick button worked in the game. I tried looking at the disassembly to see if anything was coded but not "turned on" yet but I really have no idea what I'm looking for, I thought I'd ask some of the real coders. Is there any sign of a second controller like a keypad in there? Or any sign of a Pokey chip being referenced? Mitch Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SS Posted August 25, 2004 Share Posted August 25, 2004 Use this with the binary Mitch posted earlier in the thread. ROF / RESCUE / 7800_ROF / 78BIOS Enjoy, Chad SWEET! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lauren Tyler Posted August 25, 2004 Share Posted August 25, 2004 OK, does anyone have some basic instructions on what to do? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SS Posted August 25, 2004 Share Posted August 25, 2004 OK, does anyone have some basic instructions on what to do? As far as I can tell, the only thing to do in this prototype version is to fly around and look at the pretty scenery. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bruce Tomlin Posted August 25, 2004 Share Posted August 25, 2004 I tried looking at the disassembly to see if anything was coded but not "turned on" yet but I really have no idea what I'm looking for, I thought I'd ask some of the real coders. Is there any sign of a second controller like a keypad in there? Or any sign of a Pokey chip being referenced? Mitch Pokey goes at $6000. No references to $600x anywhere. Also no reference to sound except for clearing AUDV0 and AUDV1 to zero. The right joystick is completely ignored. The left joystick fire button doesn't seem to do anything except start the game going, and that's only if you have a Proline or other 2-button stick. For those wondering what you can do in it, you can 1) zoom around the map a lot, trying to fly toward the bases and grounded ship (the right radar display shows the grounded ship), and you can 2) watch the blinkenlights. Because it's only a nice demo. If you don't do anything, it starts turning the ship on its own. The messages probably don't correspond to anything and are probably random. The clock and frame counts in the upper right corner let you compute the frame rate, which is around 6fps. That's not bad for a 6502 doing barebones 3D rendering during the time that the video chip isn't hogging the bus. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tempest Posted August 25, 2004 Share Posted August 25, 2004 What's the fps of the 5200 version? Tempest Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Mitch Posted August 25, 2004 Share Posted August 25, 2004 Thanks for the info Bruce, I kind of figured that's what it would be. Mitch Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cschell Posted August 25, 2004 Share Posted August 25, 2004 Pokey goes at $6000. No references to $600x anywhere. Also no reference to sound except for clearing AUDV0 and AUDV1 to zero. I assume you mean the Pokey would have gone at $600x. (Thus the no references to $600x.) So unlocking the Pokey at this address would not help. Chad Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mayhem Posted August 25, 2004 Share Posted August 25, 2004 A specialist banking for RoF? You spoil us ambassador I guess I will go try that and see what happens... the game worked "fine" under the other technique on my PAL 7800 at least... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bruce Tomlin Posted August 25, 2004 Share Posted August 25, 2004 I assume you mean the Pokey would have gone at $600x. (Thus the no references to $600x.) So unlocking the Pokey at this address would not help. I mean that of the two games that actually did support a Pokey, both of them put it at $6000. RoF doesn't access $600x. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
oky2000 Posted September 4, 2023 Share Posted September 4, 2023 I noticed somebody had made some boxes for this, is it just the prototype version or did somebody later go in and add to the prototype game hence the box for it? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Allan Posted September 4, 2023 Share Posted September 4, 2023 In all likely-hood it's just a box for the original prototype. The source code for ROF was never made public or found that we know of. And without that, you would have to start from scratch. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Stamos Mullet Posted September 4, 2023 Share Posted September 4, 2023 Holy necro-bump, Batman! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Trebor Posted September 4, 2023 Share Posted September 4, 2023 In case anyone views this old thread and is confused about the POKEY reference, POKEY is at $4000 for Ballblazer and Commando. It would have been present at that address for RoF as well, if leveraging POKEY was intended. There is no POKEY@$6000 ever utilized. There is an alternate dump of RoF, but nothing further respecting game programming completion. A corrected header: In the case of this game, instead of POKEY@4000, Mirrored RAM@4000 is present, and not accounted for correctly until relatively more recent years. Both of the aforementioned dumps are a part of the PROPack, and posted here for convenience: Rescue On Fractalus (Prototype) (xx-xx-84) (9A74FBF2).a78 Rescue On Fractalus (Prototype) (Alt 1) (xx-xx-84) (ABE19E33).a78 2 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+sramirez2008 Posted September 5, 2023 Share Posted September 5, 2023 20 hours ago, oky2000 said: I noticed somebody had made some boxes for this, is it just the prototype version or did somebody later go in and add to the prototype game hence the box for it? Marc O has a box on his Etsy site and the back of the box mentions the unreleased prototype. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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