are we going to have "me to's" next?

Im not the owner of this list so don't take me too seriously.
<soapbox>
There has been a lot of talk about running different games on other game hardware here
lately followed by many many requests. I wanted to point out some general thoughts and
also share some general info just for some of the non-tech people here on vectorlist can
understand the process of doing these things and possibly the work involved. I think that
if there is an interest for this we should have more posts that include people offering
time to help (as many many vectorlister already do) instead of just proposing ways for
Clay to solve our needs.

Firstly, all the atari vector games use a *different* hardware platform (except
Gravitar<->BW and SW<->ESB, that I know of). While much of the hardware is simliar
and usually an improved upon version of the previous game, they are still different.

Here is sort of a summary....

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Game Name | LL | AST | RB | BZ | ASTD | TEM | SD | GRAV/BW | QUANT | SW/ESB | MH |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Microprocessor: | | | | | | | | | | | |
Single 6502 | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | | | |
68000 | | | | | | | | | X | | |
6809 | | | | | | | | | | X | |
Dual 6502 | | | | | | | | | | | X |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mathbox: | | | | | | | | | | | |
None | X | X | | | X | | X | X | X | | X |
Bit Slice | | | X | X | | X | | | | | |
SW/ESB Style | | | | | | | | | | X | |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Vector Gen: | | | | | | | | | | | |
DVG | X | X | | | | | | | | | |
AVG(b/w) | | | X | X | X | | | | | | |
AVG color | | | | | | X | X | | | | |
AVG color +
    linear scale| | | | | | | | X | X | X | |
AVG color)+
    linear +
    colorRAM +
    paged VROM) | | | | | | | | | | | X |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Backup Mem: | | | | | | | | | | | |
None | | | | | | | | | | | |
EAROM | | | | X | X | X | X | X | | | |
NVRAM | | | | | | | | | X | X | X |
EEROM | | | | | | | | | | | X |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Basically, you can see that there are many many differences. I did not even go into
specific player input differences or sound output differences.

Looking over the list, there really isn't one good board that qualifies or contains enough
hardware to cover all the games. Even picking one board that covers the needs
of more than two other games would be difficult. Add to this that all these 'units' are
located at different addresses in the games memory map. What this would mean is that the
game code would have to be 'adjusted'. This is a major task that would take some pretty
serious time and knowledge of the source code.
  Clay does seem to have an amazing knack for creating feats of vector wizardry with
hardware, but I don't think his wife will start to like vids any more if we keep begging
for more and more 'fancy' vector stuff.
  I can't speak for Clay (or Jeff, Zonn, Steve, Anders, etc) but I think they are
performing a great great feat of engineering and improvment on all this games. This list
is a great resource of people and instead of always asking for something *to be done*, we
should be asking *how we can help*.
  A great example is the Tempest Code Project (one of many sites I owe email too). Instead
of just asking for people to make cool changes, the author set up a really cool
SSI page that allows web browsers to add comments to the Disassembled code listing. He put
out some really neat effort to learn a bit of info before asking for something in return.
 I also realize that everyone can't dig in and learn assembly language on a whim.
</soapbox>

So whatever that wandering babble was worth. :-)

Also, Im going to make up a nice HTML table like above with hardware differences with more
detail, so if I screwed up anything on that table LMK (Im a bit vague on the B/W stuff and
will have to dig out my schems)

and hey... there is even more... since I have interjected some vector stuff and opinions.
Now I will pack in a question.....
   I need a part for my Xybots joystick. It is called the 'plunger' and is in the upper
housing of their joysticks. It is the white plastic peice that the spring pushes down into
the housing to give the joystick it's springyness. Im in need of two of them and my local
distrib doesn't have them anymore.

thanks
  jess

Eric Glanz wrote:
>
> >star castle.. ..on Tempest hardware
>
> That's totally cool. Can we run games like say Battlezone on
> Star Wars Hardware with recoding?
>
> -James
>
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Received on Mon Nov 1 18:11:43 1999