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peteym5

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Everything posted by peteym5

  1. I came across this documentary on YouTube. I hope everyone here find it as enjoyable as I did.
  2. I am not speaking just of myself here, but also speaking for other program developers, artist, and publishers that make games for the Atari community. For the last several months, I have been privately speaking to others, and among our own team. We have noticed the “Zero Page Homebrew” James O'Brien has not been giving some programmers, artists, developers, and publishers that work independently of a certain Atari forum website. At one point he said he was not biased, and the list of games he has been posted have been coming from anyone. The recent Zero Page Homebrew awards appear to have excluded people like Video61, Songbird, Wave1Games, and others that are not affiliated. It would be nice for people such as myself, Video 61 and others to be recognized for our hard work. We believe that there should be fair recognition for developers and publishers that have provided a great deal to the Atari community.
  3. I wonder if something like a 5200 controller can be hooked up to it, to play the 5200 games.
  4. Can someone else make 2600 cartridge boards with enhancements like bank switching, what the DPC does? I know there are several people making boards. I also had communication with another board maker there, private messages were deleted, and couldn't get other contact information. If you know someone, get other contact information like email, text#, or a social media with private messenger service.
  5. I need to know how to set the NMI vectors for the DLI routine on the Atari 7800. Not finding this information in any of the documentation. Thanks
  6. MOONBLASTERS X FOR ATARI 7800 WORK IN PROGRESS. VIDEO FOR NOVEMBER 19, 2023. This is the latest update for MoonBlasters X for the Atari 7800. This is what happened to the Laserblast X project, as myself and Video61 are going in a direction of more original content earlier this year. What happened during the summer of 2023 caused concerns with unlicensed ports from other game systems. Several games were already in development. Instead of cancelling development, we decided to change stuff to make them more distinct and original.
  7. Jungle Quest is now Jungle Jerry. Work in Progress for November 07, 2023. I made several changes were made to the creatures that you need to dodge while playing the game. This makes it more Pete Meyer's Jungle Jerry and less like Pitt Fall. As everyone knows, some of us programmers, we are being more careful about making unlicensed ports. Some of the frogs no longer hop left and right in front of the ladder, and the monkeys are used instead by the ladders. Jerry Looses a life new when contacting a creature, and the game ends when extra lives run out. Some bug corrections. It is still a work in progress.
  8. Megaoids Atari 7800 Work in Progress for Octoboer 16, 2023. Changes were made with the routines that plot the asteroids and other sprites on the screen. This is intended to reduce the sprites flickering and slow downs when many sprites are on the screen at one time. We were hoping to have Megaoids 7800 released sometime during the fall months of 2023. However, there were things that happened during the summer caused concerns about intellectual properties from my team and from others. Particularly, the discontinuing unlicensed ports being sold from a website, then later being sold to Atari. Therefor, some of our game designs needed to be altered. I also wanted to have the game perform better. We have been hard at work improving our unreleased games. I was concerned about releasing Megaoids for the 7800 with the way the Asteroids were flickering, as it may cause concerns and negative postings. Myself, Video61, and now others working tp bring the best games we could to market.
  9. Something that could always be done with these system is replacing the main CPU with a faster one, and add more RAM. That opens up the possibilities to run better games. What would happen to an Atari 2600 with a 6502 running at 20mhz with 64K RAM? A Sega Genesis or Super Nintendo running at 50mhz? A Jaguar running at 80 Mhz? A lot more stuff can happen. The graphics chips may need to remain on an independent buss, as they are geared to only run at a certain speed to output a TV signal. But manipulating registers on each scan line opens up some interesting graphical effects. Something that people did not realize about the Sega Genesis over the earlier systems, with the improved graphic processors that allowed more onscreen sprites at one time. I know from experience with working with 8-bit systems that a limiting factor is the number of onscreen sprites. Later, systems used blitters instead of hardware sprites that wrote data directly onto a bit-mapped screen. (Each pixel has its own memory address).
  10. I am reading the documentation on 7800 Display Lists and something stumbled me about 4 or 5 byte entries. How does the Maria chip know if it is a 4 or 5 byte entry? I am trying to formulate better ways to move objects around on screen and switching over to use Assembly and C. I am getting away from using another programming language.
  11. I agree that Turbografx 16 is on par with Genesis and SNES, and it had a microprocessor that is derived from the 65C02. As I said before, clock speed of the system buss and CPU are more of a factor than the number of bits the CPU can handle. Along with the memory address space, the system. Something else that did help systems like the Genesis and later is the fact that the 68000 processors has more processor registers that allow program space reduction and increase speed. Less need to store registers in temporary memory locations.
  12. I grew up using Commodore and Atari 8-bit. I had friends who were into Video Game Consoles. Went from Atari, Coleco, Nintendo, and Sega. They did not know what a bit was. When Sega released the 16bit Genesis (MegaDrive), they believe "16Bit" was some video game super power. Later, Atari came up with 64bit Jaguar. This was the "Bit Wars" era. As programmers, we know there are many other factors involved in making systems play better video games. Memory Address Size. The Program Counter, and how much memory the Central Processing Unit can address, is one of the important factors in making good video games. The 8-bit 6502 based machines, can address only 64 Kilobytes without bank switching. These machines had a 16bit program counter and address space. If bank switching is used, it must be managed in a way as to not to bog down the Central Processing Unit (CPU). Some of that memory needed to be used for display memory and put a limit on the graphics resolution. The other part of memory was needed for programming and data. That put a limit on how much you can do. Later CPUs such as the 68000 and 80x86, had larger address space. 32bit program counter and address space, that can go up to 4 Gigabytes without bank switching. So, higher resolutions are possible and having more space for programs and data. Clock Speed of the Central Processing Unit. This was much more important with consoles after the "bit wars" and was one reason why the Sega Genesis appear to be playing better games than other machines around the time when it was actively sold. The 68000 ran at 7.16 mhz on the Genesis vs 3.52 on the Super Nintendo. This is a major factor when moving objects around the screen while playing music, sound effects, and other things. Some may notice a few games slow down when the program tries to move too many things at once. "Blast Processing" was Sega's way to make it easier to understand that their system had a faster CPU. Video Processor. The Video Chipset or Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). The graphics resolution, bits per pixel, memory available and just some things that make a difference. How things are displayed, layered, and managed are important factors. Earlier video processors used hardware sprites overlaid on top of a background. Later units would be using "Blitters" to render moving objects. 3D accelerators came into use around 1995. As we know, the faster these things ran, the better and more realistic something looks. The video processors operate independent of the CPU and may have their own dedicated memory. So the # of bits of the main CPU may not matter. There are other factors like optimizations of the programming, using compiled programming languages vs assembly. Management of graphics and data. There are people that make games on 8-bit machines with near 16 bit performance because they learned how to manage things, use optimized code, and pre-calculate things and store them inside tables.
  13. peteym5

    Frogger

    I really look forward for you to complete this game and wish you the best of luck. You have the support of the community here at Atari.IO.
  14. MEGAOIDS for ATARI JAGUAR Today I am announcing we have been developing Megaoids for the Atari Jaguar. This will be taking advantage of the system's advanced features and will play unlike any of the 8-bit versions. It will feature full rotating asteroids, colorful space scene backgrounds, overlaid score, shield bar, additional power ups, and more types of enemy ships This is still a work-in-progress and many more changes are scheduled to happen. We have different types of boss stages going on, and other original ideas are being developed and added into the game. We hope to have the game released soon and hope there will not be any problems. Here are some screen shots.
  15. Megaoids Atari 7800 Work in Progress for June 29, 2023. Changes were made to indicate how much you have for shields in the upper right corner. Now, a bar represents your shield strength that will flash red when shields get low. We hope to make Megaoids available for the Atari 7800 soon. I am aware of what is going on with the Atari community. I have seen the announcement, reading posts, and seen the YouTube video. People believing something is happening with copyright infringement. Myself, and Video61 had made efforts to ensure what we are now doing is original and different enough from someone else's work to be called our own. There has not been any real indication that anyone is coming to crack down on those who ported unlicensed games and duplicated intellectual properties within the retro community. I know we are also guilty of making some games and using titles. I was once working with someone that did music for Tempest and Venture. Believed ports make more money. Even made unconfirmed claims that he did talk to the copyright holders and got permission. Found out later, it was a lie. He was demanding and wanted things done his way. So far, no one has anything to us. Even during development of Venture, I was looking at the programming I had already did for these games, and started experimenting to see if I can come up with something original. It did not take much to turn the Venture source into an RPG top down adventure game that eventually became Secretum Labyrinth. I also applied some programming to improve my Jungle Quest project. I hope to release the most recent form of Megaoids available for the 7800 without further delays. Edit: there is now an update for June 29, 2023. I decided to apply the new spaceship shape design I have been working on for the last few days, and make it part of the official 7800 version.
  16. I will look into this as the game is still a work in progress. I choose the current color scheme to help avoid making it appear too close to something else. I know it is very unlikely someone will come over to us to do anything. Maybe I can do something with the next build. The game is using the 3 color player/missile overlay mode where the 3rd color is the result of the other two color registers calculated as a binary or, and it is sometimes difficult to control the 3rd color.
  17. I accidentally uploaded the video from an earlier state of progress. This one shows the ship moving with the code I plan to use with the game.
  18. Here is my latest progress with Delta Space Arena on the Atari Jaguar. Thankyou guys for guiding me on setting on Linux on my system and getting these Libaries to work.
  19. Jungle Quest Work in Progress Video for June 11, 2023. I completed setting up the levels I planned to have in the offical game. They my need further tweaking, because some things may be discovered in the wrong location, or something may be impossible to get past. So, there is going to be further testing. The game is going to be targeted for 64K to 128K Atari 8-bi computer. It will include several mega levels to be played on the 130XE. Does this by combining sections of other levels to make a big level. I have been busy with other projects, some of them still Atari related. I plan to continue to support the Atari 8-bit, 5200, and 7800 with new games. I hope things do get patched up with myself and Atari community members, however they have their own agenda that makes them difficult. Most of the news I view lately is some hack of a game that already exists. Maybe something new like Prince of Persia being released.
  20. OpenLara is a Tombraider clone. I would like to see the programming.
  21. Maybe do something similar, if there are issues with the copyright owner. I am just getting started with learning Jaguar programming.
  22. I am looking to set up a tilemap engine that I can use to make Jaguar versions of games I previously developed for Atari 8-bit and 7800. I will be C++ programming. Has anyone done anything similar yet?
  23. Delta Space Arena for the Atari 7800. Work-in-Progress for April 25, 2023. Bug fixes mostly. There had been delays with testing and making sure games work properly during the Winter months in Minnesota where Video 61 operates from. Tests are done with real hardware with what the end user has. Hopefully, we will be able to get a few more game cartridges on the market this year.
  24. Jungle Quest Work in Progress update for April 15, 2023. Been working on what is needed to make this a multi-level game and have it look different for each level. I am trying some different graphics to see what looks good and what doesn't. Been trying to iron out the music, and making everything working correctly before preparing the game cartridge.
  25. Looks like the video being reposted on other forums had provoked some interesting comments, and I would like to start with a general response here. I believe posting on another forum is not self-promotion, as I can go through the main index and see posts by programmers discussing their own game projects. I do wait between each work-in-progress for a few weeks to avoid over saturating things, and allows me to get work done. When I mark a game as work-in-progress, everything is subject to change as progress is made. Including graphics, sound, music, and game play. Nothing is final. How good stuff looks is a matter of opinion, and I am aware of what other artists do. Sometimes graphics are temporary to stand in order to write programming that position and move stuff around the screen. It is not unusual for myself when the majority of the programming is done, I edit character set, sprite, sound, and music data to improve the aesthetics and improve the presentation game. Video61 and I do privately consult with others while games are being developed. If this was about my ego, I would not be making public posts with screenshots and videos before the game is complete. I do like to read about what people like to see with my games.
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