Anyone have experience with the Atari 7800?

[Alex_the_Brave90]

This is like the difference between a developers first game, and later when they have a lot more experience with the hardware

https://youtu.be/j-DdjsyR1I0?si=vJ7m_1DMqdqknedC

A real Zelda Link's Awakening DX demo, the entire game could indeed be made for the 7800.

[segaloco]

A real Zelda Link's Awakening DX demo, the entire game could indeed be made for the 7800.

Could it? The graphics look pretty good but without even processing game logic the audio is struggling pretty bad. Throw in looping over actual game logic and I would be curious how much overhead that introduces. Admirable work though, and of course I'm paying no mind to how well this was optimized or if it's just a POC and what is there could be significantly sped up.

[Alex_the_Brave90]

The audio has no issues when I run the LsADX ROM on the 7800 Game Drive flash cart, and it runs at 60FPS. The guy who made it did some extra stuff behind the scenes, and said there were no technical limitations stopping him from just doing the whole game.

[segaloco]

Well again really cool and admirable effort, I wish him the best if he decides to do the rest! I have a comparable project taking form in my mind concerning Minish Cap and the SNES...but I'm backlogged for a few years so that'll have to wait until I crack open LttP.

[Alex_the_Brave90]

Well again really cool and admirable effort, I wish him the best if he decides to do the rest! I have a comparable project taking form in my mind concerning Minish Cap and the SNES...but I'm backlogged for a few years so that'll have to wait until I crack open LttP.

I hope he does continue it's development too, would be so awesome to play Link's Awakening on the 7800. And good luck to your endeavors

[Alex_the_Brave90]

https://youtu.be/z69RPFPjGUQ?si=BiJ-sirf6pgcrAzZ

Dragon's Havoc is another homebrew that has gorgeous colorful graphics, and beautiful parallax scrolling backgrounds.

[Pokun]

...but I'm backlogged for a few years so that'll have to wait until I crack open LttP.

Maybe you know this but the source of Alttp is available to the public.

[segaloco]

...but I'm backlogged for a few years so that'll have to wait until I crack open LttP.

Maybe you know this but the source of Alttp is available to the public.

Indeed it is but I want to work through a few other projects first. Dragon Quest and Mario still call ATM.

[Alex_the_Brave90]

Here is a really cool title screen someone made on the 7800 using different display modes and resolutions.

[dragonsbrethren]

Saw that over at AtariAge, it's very impressive!

0019.png (9.06 KiB) Viewed 162 times

This is a little stress test I ran on Black Forest. While the game runs at full speed with ~3 moving objects, any more slows it to a crawl and I get rendering errors at zone boundaries. This is disappointing, as I reserved RAM for 16 objects per screen and was hoping to have at least six moving enemies along with unmoving animated sprite decorations, projectiles, and magic effects.

I'm going to look into double buffering and see if I can get it to a more playable framerate that way, but none of the code has really been optimized yet, either. I also realized that it runs much faster without player input, so that gives me a hint towards what to look into optimizing. The wolves are hardcoded into their chase state for this test, so every frame they're calculating their position against the player's and moving towards her. Wolves can collide with the player and the map, but not each other.

Torches don't have sprite to sprite collision checks yet but it is something I want to add. They're intended to look like background elements, and shouldn't be overlapped, but are also breakable (think Castlevania), so I can't really just drop an unwalkable map tile behind them. I may do a hybrid approach where the torch runs a map collision check on its position and swaps the tile, rather than giving every mobj another thing to test against.

Scrolling is out, for the time being. I was given some examples over at Atari Age, but being new to the platform, it's all a bit over my head. I did have something functional using a 7800basic example, but it limited the background graphics to a single palette and that's not really a tradeoff I want to make. The NES version only scrolled between the two nametables to allow some rooms to be wider than one screen (I never got vertical scrolling working with my statusbar), so losing it isn't as big a deal as it might seem. The screen-by-screen approach feels very "Atari", which I suppose is fitting. I do need to code a quick fadeout when transitioning rooms, it's jarring right now.

The HP and MP bars were a learning experience. Back when this was an NES project, I did a sprite 0 hit status bar for the top of the screen. It was very Zelda-esque, showing HP, MP, current sword/spell, and the map. I really wasn't a fan, but it seemed the most practical at the time since a sprite-based HUD with horizontal bars was all but impossible on the hardware, and I needed to fill all that empty space with something. Since the 7800 is only limited by DMA time, I figured I'd go with a simplified HUD that just shows the player's HP and MP bars using sprites. I got them implemented easily enough, but some of the MP bar wouldn't render if other sprites were near the top of the screen. I realized my mistake was having the HP bar sprites, which were originally closer to the MP bar (making the whole setup only 16 pixels tall) cross a zone boundary. As soon as I redrew the graphics and made sure each bar was exclusively in its own zone, the rendering issue was solved, and I got a nice framerate increase as well.

I would still like to render a minimap on screen, I might experiment with this next. I currently have a debug hud (disabled for this test) which causes a framerate drop and some minor rendering errors when enabled. I imagine a map will cause the same issues, but I'd still like to try getting one working, for the player's convenience.

[Alex_the_Brave90]

Really cool to see how your game is coming along

https://forums.atariage.com/topic/37650 ... questions/

I saw this thread, and thought it had some useful info on how things work on the 7800.

If I may add, I do think Zelda style scrolling where the screen ratchets from one area to the next would be better then instantaneous switching, as that can be a little disorienting at times, especially for a game that is moves in all directions.