Can someone test this on a CC2

[kenfused]

Had a little time to move over some of the 5200 code. No enemies yet and currently only POKEY sound is supported (well maybe that is a good thing).

bd7800.zip

[CPUWIZ]

If you keep it at 32K and keep the Pokey sound, I reckon a lot of Ballblazer carts will lose their lifes.

[kenfused]

Had a little time to move over some of the 5200 code.  No enemies yet and currently only POKEY sound is supported (well maybe that is a good thing).

By the way, it will run too fast on MESS but will be semi playable but runs at a nice speed on a CC2

[ubersaurus]

If you keep it at 32K and keep the Pokey sound, I reckon a lot of Ballblazer carts will lose their lifes.  

 

This is why it's such a travesty that there's no chip one could use to do POKEY sound without, well, all the other POKEY crap.

[+-^CrossBow^-]

Someone want to add the Mess header to Ken's latest demo please?

 

[Shannon]

If you keep it at 32K and keep the Pokey sound, I reckon a lot of Ballblazer carts will lose their lifes.  

 

This is why it's such a travesty that there's no chip one could use to do POKEY sound without, well, all the other POKEY crap.

 

Hehe... I have an extra ballblazer if need be...

[+Allan]

Had a little time to move over some of the 5200 code.  No enemies yet and currently only POKEY sound is supported (well maybe that is a good thing).

 

Don't forget to add the code to make it work with the High Score Cart. Looks great so far!

 

Allan

[kenfused]

Someone want to add the Mess header to Ken's latest demo please?

 

bd7800.zip

[+-^CrossBow^-]

This is awesome! The burger parts all seem to have been enhanced a bit with more color or added shading, minus the lettuce.

 

However, Chef Pete still needs tweaking someone. I know this is a port, but with so much work already going into it so quickly, why not make all the characters look better. You already have all the levels back in again as well! Maybe we will all be lucky and be able to have an extra level or two even on this version making it that more unique and fun? But then to keep the 5200 side honest, I guess it should be pretty much the same level wise ehh?

 

Anyway, great work Ken this is really coming along much faster than I expected and I know I will be finally getting a copy of this game when the 7800 version comes out!

 

[DracIsBack]

If you keep it at 32K and keep the Pokey sound, I reckon a lot of Ballblazer carts will lose their lifes.  

 

Yikes: I killed my only BALLBLAZER cart to get a POKEY for my CUTTLE CART 2. Ended up killing the BALLBLAZER and the POKEY chip in the process. Now I have no sound in Ballblazer. <sigh>

[Rockin' Kat]

If you keep it at 32K and keep the Pokey sound, I reckon a lot of Ballblazer carts will lose their lifes.  

 

Yikes: I killed my only BALLBLAZER cart to get a POKEY for my CUTTLE CART 2. Ended up killing the BALLBLAZER and the POKEY chip in the process. Now I have no sound in Ballblazer. <sigh>

 

What is all this talk of killing carts for Pokey? Best sells Pokey chips for $5. Nutty people.

[Rockin' Kat]

by the way, when I say best I mean best electronics.... I ment to link that.

[Bruce Tomlin]

Actually, getting a board that takes both a Pokey and an EPROM is the important part to making a real cartridge. There's two ways: desolder the ROM from a Ballblazer cart and rewire it (some difficulty, but I could probably average 10-15 minutes a board with a nice assembly line of bare boards set up), or have new boards made up and put a Pokey on that.

 

Also, due to the dimensions of 2600 carts, the Pokey would either have to be soldered, or a low-profile socket would have to be used (as in the CC2). There's just not enough clearance to put a chip in a "regular" socket and have the board fit back in the case.

[CPUWIZ]

If you keep it at 32K and keep the Pokey sound, I reckon a lot of Ballblazer carts will lose their lifes.  

 

Yikes: I killed my only BALLBLAZER cart to get a POKEY for my CUTTLE CART 2. Ended up killing the BALLBLAZER and the POKEY chip in the process. Now I have no sound in Ballblazer.

 

What is all this talk of killing carts for Pokey? Best sells Pokey chips for $5. Nutty people.

 

But they don't sell 7800 Pokey PCB's now, do they?

[ubersaurus]

Someone should design a PCB that could take a POKEY and cartridge RAM unless one exists already...I dunno. I forgot entirely that Best sold POKEYs, but then, I don't know how many they actually have. I don't know exactly what resources I'd need for my project, but both of those would be ever so nice. Just something that'll have to dealt with whenever the hell I start on it.

[kenfused]

Maybe we will all be lucky and be able to have an extra level or two even on this version making it that more unique and fun? But then to keep the 5200 side honest, I guess it should be pretty much the same level wise ehh?

Well there are already four extra levels and mirrored modes available for all levels for the 5200 cartridge (MORE and MIRROR mode as mentioned in the manual). Just no one has asked for the codes to enable them yet :-)

[kenfused]

Someone should design a PCB that could take a POKEY and cartridge RAM   unless one exists already...I dunno. I forgot entirely that Best sold POKEYs, but then, I don't know how many they actually have. I don't know exactly what resources I'd need for my project, but both of those would be ever so nice. Just something that'll have to dealt with whenever the hell I start on it.

4K of RAM is a real killer. I am not sure if I will be able to support a two player version unless I come up with a compact way to save the screen state than I do in the 5200/8-bit version.

[Shaggy the Atarian]

It would be cool if someone was able to develop a sort of RAM/Pokey cart, sort of like that prototype that Curt has (the 16k RAM cart). That way if any games in the future wanted to use more RAM and have POKEY sound, then we wouldn't have to rip apart Ballblazer carts for each new game that comes along...just produce say 250 of these "ProCarts" and then developers could make a game that will use a regular PCB, but that also uses POKEY and the extra RAM. Would this be possible?

[kenfused]

This is awesome! The burger parts all seem to have been enhanced a bit with more color or added shading, minus the lettuce.

 

However, Chef Pete still needs tweaking someone. I know this is a port, but with so much work already going into it so quickly, why not make all the characters look better. You already have all the levels back in again as well! Maybe we will all be lucky and be able to have an extra level or two even on this version making it that more unique and fun? But then to keep the 5200 side honest, I guess it should be pretty much the same level wise ehh?

 

Anyway, great work Ken this is really coming along much faster than I expected and I know I will be finally getting a copy of this game when the 7800 version comes out!

 

Currently now each moving object is limted to 3 colors (any color you want) plus background. I could probably extend that so all of the objects can use 12 shared colors by using the same color mode as the background and use the last 4 palettes. If anyone is really good at working on making nice looking objects with a resolution of 8x16, and want to volunteer their services, I would be willing to use them. There are higher rez modes but they have limitations in transparency, and the background/burger parts would probably not be able to be as colorful.

[Bruce Tomlin]

4K of RAM is a real killer.  I am not sure if I will be able to support a two player version unless I come up with a compact way to save the screen state than I do in the 5200/8-bit version.

And currently there are no circuit boards which have room for both a Pokey and extra RAM. (other than the CC2, that is)

[gdement]

Someone should design a PCB that could take a POKEY and cartridge RAM   unless one exists already...I dunno. I forgot entirely that Best sold POKEYs, but then, I don't know how many they actually have. I don't know exactly what resources I'd need for my project, but both of those would be ever so nice. Just something that'll have to dealt with whenever the hell I start on it.

 

I second that, but the features I'd like is bankswitching, POKEY, and a serial EEPROM socket. The POKEY is most important, almost everybody is going to want that. If serial EEPROM doesn't make the PCB expensive, I think everybody will have stuff they want to save. There might not be much demand for bankswitching.

 

I wonder if it would be practical to make the POKEY only respond to a small set of addresses. Then a flat-addressed PCB maybe could be wired to use nearly 48KB from a single 64KB EPROM.

[ubersaurus]

Someone should design a PCB that could take a POKEY and cartridge RAM   unless one exists already...I dunno. I forgot entirely that Best sold POKEYs, but then, I don't know how many they actually have. I don't know exactly what resources I'd need for my project, but both of those would be ever so nice. Just something that'll have to dealt with whenever the hell I start on it.

 

I second that, but the features I'd like is bankswitching, POKEY, and a serial EEPROM socket. The POKEY is most important, almost everybody is going to want that. If serial EEPROM doesn't make the PCB expensive, I think everybody will have stuff they want to save. There might not be much demand for bankswitching.

 

I wonder if it would be practical to make the POKEY only respond to a small set of addresses. Then a flat-addressed PCB maybe could be wired to use nearly 48KB from a single 64KB EPROM.

 

I'd say its arguable that everyone would want cartridge RAM. Even the atari programmers wanted that, badly. I mean, I can deal with weak sound, but if a game needs RAM to be great, then by all means.

[gdement]

It would be nice if the RAM and POKEY could interchangeably use the same socket. But I doubt they have a compatible pinout.

[Shannon]

Someone should design a PCB that could take a POKEY and cartridge RAM   unless one exists already...I dunno. I forgot entirely that Best sold POKEYs, but then, I don't know how many they actually have. I don't know exactly what resources I'd need for my project, but both of those would be ever so nice. Just something that'll have to dealt with whenever the hell I start on it.

4K of RAM is a real killer. I am not sure if I will be able to support a two player version unless I come up with a compact way to save the screen state than I do in the 5200/8-bit version.

 

When I turned a game called goldrush into a two player game on a 16k atari computer I had to resort to directly swapping the current screen with the save screen (one byte at a time) in order to get it to fit. As opposed to each having it's own mem space.

 

Does the 7800 have a screen buffer like the atari 8-bits.

[EricBall]

Does the 7800 have a screen buffer like the atari 8-bits.

Nope, completely different paradigm. The 7800 is based on sprites. Hmm, let's see if I can do a quick summary.

 

Each frame the MARIA GPU loads it's internal display list list (DLL) pointer from the DPP register. The DLL is made up of a sequence of 3 byte headers which contain the number of lines in the zone (1-16), some flags, and a pointer to the display list for the zone.

 

Each scanline, the GPU reads the display list, which is a sequence of 4 or 5 byte headers with a 2 byte terminator. Each header contains a pointer to either a sprite or a tile list along with an X position, a width (number of bytes/tiles), a palette (0-7) and some flags. Each byte in the tile list is used as the LSB of a sprite pointer with the MSB being a GPU register.

 

The sprites are bitmapped graphics stored (in ROM) upside down with each line on a separate 256 byte page. The bit to pixel color relationship depends on the graphics mode and can be quite bizarre.

 

The display lists and display list list are stored in RAM for access speed reasons. (RAM takes 2 cycles/byte to access, while ROM requires 3 cycles/byte.) The DLL is typically static, but the display lists are often completely recreated each frame (a CPU intensive process). The display lists also chew up a bunch of RAM.

 

A 7800 game could create a bitmapped display by using RAM as one very big sprite, but it would need more than the 4K RAM in the 7800. (10K for a 160x240x4 color display)