Bosconian clone comming to the Atari 2600!!!

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pacman000
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Bosconian clone comming to the Atari 2600!!!

Postby pacman000 » October 9th, 2017, 9:31 am

I know 3 exclamation points are a bit much, but this deserves them.

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/225044 ... try2982910

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scotland
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Re: Bosconian clone comming to the Atari 2600!!!

Postby scotland » October 9th, 2017, 10:16 am

Thanks for posting this.

I'm a big Bosconian fan, starting way back in the arcades. It was a great way to have an expansive playfield, with twitch action and still some strategy. It will be fun to see what a solid effort on the Atari 2600 can do.

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pacman000
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Re: Bosconian clone comming to the Atari 2600!!!

Postby pacman000 » October 9th, 2017, 3:39 pm

Thank you for responding. Bosconian is one of my favorite classic games, and it's sorely overlooked. It was probably too challenging to bring it ti the 2600 back in the day; I think this version uses an extra processor in the Harmony cart.

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Stalvern
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Re: Bosconian clone comming to the Atari 2600!!!

Postby Stalvern » October 9th, 2017, 6:29 pm

pacman000 wrote:Thank you for responding. Bosconian is one of my favorite classic games, and it's sorely overlooked. It was probably too challenging to bring it ti the 2600 back in the day; I think this version uses an extra processor in the Harmony cart.

Yeah, this isn't like that Star Castle port, where it was just a matter of time before someone figured out how to use the hardware sufficiently. This is a 2600 game in the same way that Virtua Racing is a Genesis game, maybe even less so.

Thomas Jentzsch wrote:Darrell's games are (not only) technically quite different beasts compared to other 2600 games. Almost all code besides the display kernel is directly executed on Harmony's/Melody's modern ARM CPU. Which is way more powerful than the Atari 2600 CPU. And the display kernel is turbo charged too by the ARM CPU. It is providing all data much faster than the Atari CPU can do.

So effectively you have an ARM game which uses the Atari 2600 for displaying graphics, playing sounds etc.

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pacman000
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Re: Bosconian clone comming to the Atari 2600!!!

Postby pacman000 » October 10th, 2017, 10:59 am

It's Bosconian! For the Atari Graduate!

3 former Commodore engineers began brainstorming a new idea to sell in large volume. Looking to Atari with its installed base of close to 12 million Atari VCS 2600 video game consoles they decided to create a computer keyboard add-on....The (add-on, named) Graduate is a remarkable little device which downloads a looping program into the 128 byte memory of the VCS and in turn, simply turns the VCS into the Graduates video support hardware.

http://www.atarimuseum.com/videogames/c ... a3000.html

SpiceWare
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Re: Bosconian clone comming to the Atari 2600!!!

Postby SpiceWare » October 11th, 2017, 11:28 am

Stalvern wrote:This is a 2600 game in the same way that Virtua Racing is a Genesis game, maybe even less so.


What we're doing in the homebrew community is just continuing the long tradition of putting extra hardware in the cartridge. It started off with extra ROM (the 2600's limited to 4K cartridges), figuring out how to add extra RAM (the 2600's cartridge port doesn't contain the required signal lines for RAM), and the addition of coprocessors like the DPC processor used to great effect in Activision's Pitfall 2. Sadly the 2600's market collapsed before Activision could pursue that any further as DPC has some interesting features not utilized by Pitfall 2.

Later consoles used it to great effect as well, I'm aware of a large number of options for the NES and the Super NES. I'm sure others used them, like the Genesis to pull of Virtua Racing, though I haven't looked into it.

Basically the homebrew community is not just doing homebrew software, we're also doing homebrew hardware.

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pacman000
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Re: Bosconian clone comming to the Atari 2600!!!

Postby pacman000 » October 11th, 2017, 12:30 pm

SpiceWare wrote:Basically the homebrew community is not just doing homebrew software, we're also doing homebrew hardware.

No real problem with that. :)

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astrodomekid
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Re: Bosconian clone comming to the Atari 2600!!!

Postby astrodomekid » October 11th, 2017, 12:47 pm

I love Bosconian! I first played it on the PS2 game "Namco Museum 50th Anniversary", and in my opinion is one of the most underrated arcade games of the 80's, if not of all time!

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scotland
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Re: Bosconian clone comming to the Atari 2600!!!

Postby scotland » October 11th, 2017, 1:39 pm

pacman000 wrote:
SpiceWare wrote:Basically the homebrew community is not just doing homebrew software, we're also doing homebrew hardware.

No real problem with that. :)


Applause is warranted, to me. My TI99 is better today because of homebrew hardware than back in the day.

This idea of expanding a system with a cartridge came up the other week in the thread on cartridge systems. The old school ROM carts, as we all know from opening them up, could add far more than game code.

Wasn't this (an expensive cartridge with hardware boosting components) also a direction Sega could have gone instead of a 32x add-on?

SpiceWare
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Re: Bosconian clone comming to the Atari 2600!!!

Postby SpiceWare » October 11th, 2017, 2:08 pm

scotland wrote:It will be fun to see what a solid effort on the Atari 2600 can do.


This is probably one of the better video captures, done using an RGB modded 2600 and a Framemeister. Be sure to specify a quality of 720p60 or 1080p60, else the flicker's pretty bad.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVyb-V0-B_c

scotland wrote:Applause is warranted, to me. My TI99 is better today because of homebrew hardware than back in the day.


Thanks! We've definitely pulled off some neat things; though sadly bus stuffing, which let us pull off things like this on the 2600, fails on a number of Juniors
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