Porting SOTB to the Falcon

[stormy]

Hey guys you know what ?
The Falcon is going to leave the desk to free some more room for the Archies and the Q68.

Bit of an over-reaction?

[Dal]

Steady on people!

I've seen threads like this in the past and my view has always been that we all get our own kicks from our hobbies. While some people may not agree with the merits of other people's projects, that does not mean those projects have no merit.

If you want to help Zarchos achieve the goals he has set out for himself, then support him. If it's not for you, then quietly move on. The guy simply wanted to dip his toe into Falcon development by taking something he's familiar with as his starting point to get going. All you've done now is demoralised the guy and the likelihood is that we've all potentially lost a new potential Falcon developer.

Well done.

[CiH]

A similar thread a little while ago, which also did not end well.

http://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=32772

[Zarchos]

Farewell Atari developments.
I choose the Q68 to learn 68000, and this machine only.
At least people on the ql-forum showed enthusiasm and I already have a partner.

Xavier Louis Tardy aka Zarchos

[shoggoth]

Farewell Atari developments.
I choose the Q68 to learn 68000, and this machine only.
At least people on the ql-forum showed enthusiasm and I already have a partner.

Xavier Louis Tardy aka Zarchos

Easy on the drama there, sailor

[leech]

Hey guys you know what ?
The Falcon is going to leave the desk to free some more room for the Archies and the Q68.

Bit of an over-reaction?

Well, instead of leaving it around to do nothing, if a little bit of criticism on what you wanted to port makes you just give up and move along, at least donate/sell the Falcon to someone who will use it!

[madaxe]

If you are interested, I can dig out the library...Ive actually forgotten the name of it now! lol

most likely "Graphics Library for 'C' Beginners" or just GLCB.ZIP as found in most FTP sites.

Hi fellows;

I am doing some experiences with GODLib and GLCB and I would like to know if the size of the sprites must be always 16x16? For instance I have a laser sprite that is 1x8 and some enemies sprites that are 24x16. How can define them?

[mrbombermillzy]

Its been a while since Ive used GLCB, but I believe the Render_GFX() function has the posx/posy variables which dictate the image size. Have a look for any vars. that are x/y pos and have the value =16

While we are here.... whatever happened to poor old Zarchos?

[Dal]

While we are here.... whatever happened to poor old Zarchos?

He seems to be focussing on his Archimedes port of SOTB from what I can gather:

[leech]

Didn't he get pissed off and bail out because everyone said they'd prefer if he worked on a different game to port, since while Beast looks and sounds fantastic, is kind of a demo pretending to be a game?

To me it'd be more impressive if he was attempting to port it to the standard STe, since it should be capable of having a proper port instead of the ST port which was limited to 512kb and seemingly only half-assed due to the decline of the ST as a platform.

[EmpireAndrew]

I remember reading somewhere that the developer got it working smoothly using pre-computed tables but needed 1MB RAM but that would have hit sales...

[calimero]

From Zarchos YouTube description:

Better watch in HD
Click 'SHOW MORE' below to read everything.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Note an even further enhanced port in 65536 colour screen mode could have reached your Atari Falcon too (it is a chunky mode, as are all Archie screen modes), but, unfortunately some morons-who-know-better-than-everybody decided for the entire Falcon community this project was too shitty for their great machine : viewtopic....
Most of the stupid comments and insults written by the Atari freaks have been removed by the moderators, but I have read them beforehand anyway.
I had some other projects in mind for the Falcon, to code along the Archie and RISC PC versions, they will never see the light of day (on the Falcon).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

He really can not realize that his attitude, at first place, was way off civilized discussion.

[christos]

The funny thing is that if i remember correctly the falcon can't do 1vbl horizontal scrolling in hi color. Not enough bandwidth.

[dhedberg]

Yes it can. Hardware scrolling has nothing to do with the bandwidth. The only restriction is that you have to set the screen address to an even word, so for horizontal scrolling in TrueColor you can't scroll an odd number of pixels per VBL, i.e., 2 pixels per VBL are the minimum.

[wongck]

He really can not realize that his attitude, at first place, was way off civilized discussion.

It's simple really..... people just cannot be told that they are wrong, and so those people just want to prove that they are right.
To prove in the endgame that they are correct and are therefore the greatest, greater than those that said they are wrong.
An ego thing. Nothing else.

[leech]

He really can not realize that his attitude, at first place, was way off civilized discussion.

It's simple really..... people just cannot be told that they are wrong, and so those people just want to prove that they are right.
To prove in the endgame that they are correct and are therefore the greatest, greater than those that said they are wrong.
An ego thing. Nothing else.

Exactly it. I prefer it when they do prove people wrong and produce something we can all enjoy instead of what happened here, which is he just buggered off to do something else.

He became wounded by just some small criticisms too.
Edit: shouldn't type on my phone...

[mikro]

Yes it can. Hardware scrolling has nothing to do with the bandwidth. The only restriction is that you have to set the screen address to an even word, so for horizontal scrolling in TrueColor you can't scroll an odd number of pixels per VBL, i.e., 2 pixels per VBL are the minimum.

Actually, even this can be worked around at no cost -- don't know if he was the first one to discover it but I saw a great trick by Patrice Mandin in his Street Figther demo/port - using the Videl horizontal setting registers to simulate the missing word.

[Cyprian]

Yes it can. Hardware scrolling has nothing to do with the bandwidth. The only restriction is that you have to set the screen address to an even word, so for horizontal scrolling in TrueColor you can't scroll an odd number of pixels per VBL, i.e., 2 pixels per VBL are the minimum.

Actually, even this can be worked around at no cost -- don't know if he was the first one to discover it but I saw a great trick by Patrice Mandin in his Street Figther demo/port - using the Videl horizontal setting registers to simulate the missing word.

there are a lot so called "myths" about the Falcon.
would be cool to prepare a FAQ about them

[dhedberg]

Yes it can. Hardware scrolling has nothing to do with the bandwidth. The only restriction is that you have to set the screen address to an even word, so for horizontal scrolling in TrueColor you can't scroll an odd number of pixels per VBL, i.e., 2 pixels per VBL are the minimum.

Actually, even this can be worked around at no cost -- don't know if he was the first one to discover it but I saw a great trick by Patrice Mandin in his Street Figther demo/port - using the Videl horizontal setting registers to simulate the missing word.

Cool. I wasn't aware of that. We used TrueColor for Willie's Adventures in the very first prototypes, but later switched to 8-bitplanes as the Falcon is simply just too slow for a 16-bit chunky mode. Atari should have kept it 8-bit. What I've heard they did have an 8-bit chunky once but removed/replaced it with 16-bit. 16-bit is (were) of course great for showing images and image processing, but for games/demos an 8-bit chunky would have been awesome!

[calimero]

Yes it can. Hardware scrolling has nothing to do with the bandwidth. The only restriction is that you have to set the screen address to an even word, so for horizontal scrolling in TrueColor you can't scroll an odd number of pixels per VBL, i.e., 2 pixels per VBL are the minimum.

Actually, even this can be worked around at no cost -- don't know if he was the first one to discover it but I saw a great trick by Patrice Mandin in his Street Figther demo/port - using the Videl horizontal setting registers to simulate the missing word.

Patric Mandin port/demo of Street Fighter for FALCON?
Where that can be downloaded?
(I see STe version but never version for Falcon)

[christos]

Yes it can. Hardware scrolling has nothing to do with the bandwidth. The only restriction is that you have to set the screen address to an even word, so for horizontal scrolling in TrueColor you can't scroll an odd number of pixels per VBL, i.e., 2 pixels per VBL are the minimum.

Actually, even this can be worked around at no cost -- don't know if he was the first one to discover it but I saw a great trick by Patrice Mandin in his Street Figther demo/port - using the Videl horizontal setting registers to simulate the missing word.

Patric Mandin port/demo of Street Fighter for FALCON?
Where that can be downloaded?
(I see STe version but never version for Falcon)

http://pmandin.atari.org/en/index.php?p ... ngines-sf2

[calimero]

Actually, even this can be worked around at no cost -- don't know if he was the first one to discover it but I saw a great trick by Patrice Mandin in his Street Figther demo/port - using the Videl horizontal setting registers to simulate the missing word.

Patric Mandin port/demo of Street Fighter for FALCON?
Where that can be downloaded?
(I see STe version but never version for Falcon)

http://pmandin.atari.org/en/index.php?p ... ngines-sf2

I know this demo.
I get impression that Mikro talks about some special Falcon version...

[mikro]

I know this demo. I get impression that Mikro talks about some special Falcon version...

There is a special Falcon binary in the archive, that doesn't qualify? :)

[calimero]

My mistake!
I only watch that demo on YouTube. I will try it on my Falcon.

So Falcon can freely scroll entire screen per pixel i! truecolor? Nice

And you can copy around 2MB/s of data per second? It is something like 1/3 of screen at 50fps.

[Cyprian]

My mistake!
I only watch that demo on YouTube. I will try it on my Falcon.

So Falcon can freely scroll entire screen per pixel i! truecolor? Nice

And you can copy around 2MB/s of data per second? It is something like 1/3 of screen at 50fps.

In case of Falcon, the CPU can copy ~ 3,3MB/s, and if I remember correctly the BLiTTER copy: ~ 2,9MB/s