New DML ports: PS2 and GP32.

DML has 2 new ports ready: The GP32 handheld and the Sony PS2. The latter one is still incomplete at the time of writing (audio is missing). I've also done a better WIN32 port
with some new features and fullscreen support without usage of any library like DirectDraw/Direct3D.

New Dreamcast for demo at Retrocomputer event

I've been demo-ing my new Dreamcast games at the Retrocomputerdag in Schiedam / The Netherlands. The Games on display were Hokey Pokey, Z-quence and Radium. I also made a smalls scroller demo for the event. The feedback i got has been pretty positive so far.

Back from London - Tons of updates

Hi Everyone,

I just returned from a trip to London (which partly explains the lack of updates :p) and I bought myself 3 nice t-shirts on the trip (all game related ofcourse).

Anyways, good news: The DML system is completed now and the site will soon be opened to public. The 1.2 version has been tested succesfully at a gamedesign college in the netherlands and by various beta testers. With the completion of DML, a final list of all planned projects by Karma Studios/Revival Studios for platforms like the Dreamcast, GP2X, etc.

Here's the list, more information on the projects themselves will be announced shortly:

- Radium - 3D action/adventure - completed
- Zquence - Addictive puzzle game - completed
- HokeyPokey - Addictive puzzle game - near completion
- Junior - Platform game targeted at kids - in development Q4/2006
- Triple Play 1 - 3 small games in one package - in development Q4/2006
- Triple Play 2 - 3 small games in one package - in development Q4/2006
- I:Type - Collection of educational and fun typing tutor games.
- E-Zone - An action-packed platformer - in development Q1/2007
- EFX - Semi 3D sci-fi shooter - in development Q1/2007
- Stip! - Well animated and fun platform game - in development Q1/2007
- Cybores - Futuristic Operation Wolf type game - in development Q1/2007
- Stip! minigames mayhem - A collection of minigames based on the Stip! franchise
- G-loop - A sort of 2D monkeyball type game
- Undercover - First person shooter based on Radium technology

Quite a long list, i know.. but so far simulanous development on all of these titles runs smoothly.
The above games will most likely see release on Dreamcast, GP2X, PocketPC and possibly other platforms as well.

More updates on the games themselves will follow shortly, as development progresses.

HCC/Retrodag event

Hi all,

I've just returned from the HCC/Retrodag event held in Maarssen/The Netherlands today.
It was a very small event, but i have been able to demonstrate some new Vectrex stuff i was working on. I wanted to demonstrate the upcoming Dreamcast stuff as well, but i didn't have enough time to prepare everything in time.

Radium announced for Dreamcast release

Revival Studios and GOAT Store Publishing today announced that Radium, a third person action adventure game originally slated to be published for the Game Boy Advance has been upgraded and will be making its way to the Dreamcast for this holiday season.Radium is a futuristic-styled 3D action/adventure game, using a third person perspective. The game features a total 16 levels with 3D environments in 4 different scenarios. The game will also feature high quality graphics, a multitude of weapons, bonuses and upgrades and nicely balanced gameplay.Gamers play as Nova, a female cyborg-experiment who has been captured and awakes inside a laboratory. You must escape from the lab that you are being held in, make your way to the city and figure out who or what is behind your kidnapping, and stop them before their plans can be spread any further.More information about Radium will be revealed in the future. Information can be found at the official Radium Online web site at http://www.radium-game.com/ or GOAT Store Publishing at http://www.goatstore.com/publishing/

Retrobeurs Arnhem

Hi,

I've just returned from exhibiting at the Retrobeurs in Arnhem / The Netherlands. It was the first time they held this event in Arnhem, and it was well organised imho.

Unfortuanately i haven't been able to demonstrate any of my retro stuff there, but i have been able to sell some of my collection there.

Next event is: HCC/Retrodag held on the 21st of October in Maarssen / The Netherlands

Back online!

Hi everyone,

I'm glad to be back online. My cable-modem burned out a few weeks ago and i had to have it replaced by the ISP, but unfortuanately they f*&ked up, so as a result i was netless for a few weeks, so it was complete chaos juggling my mail at strangers, etc.

However, i didn't let it interfere with the creational process, so here are the latest updates:

- Wonderworld completely finished now.
- DML 1.1 nearing completion: Various fixes/speedups/additions/etc.
- DML ports: Dreamcast 100% finished, WinCE version completed.
- DML website done. Announcement soon.
- New DML game ready: Z-quence
- Started work on 2 DML games: G-loop and Hokey Pokey.

Thats about it for now, more announcements soon!

Wonderworld preview

Here's a preview of the wonderworld editor. Wonderworld is a 2D game editor that plugs into DML. It will allow both programmers and users without programming experience to create 2D tile-based games. More information about Wonderworld and the DML system will be published on the DML website soon.

DML - Running on Atari Jaguar

Today i've been able to succesfully complete the Atari Jaguar port of DML. It took a lot of effort to get it running, as there were no basic systems or libraries available for the Jaguar. After some pingponging back and forth with Charles Doty and the development of a memory manager and I/O routines, the port finally running.

While i didn't expect the port to run all that fluently on a 13mhz jaguar, it turns out the situation is much worse than i anticipated. The current framerate for the test program is about 2-3 FPS !!! :-( Very unusable indeed. I'll let the port be as it is for the moment, and will look into High Level Emulation (HLE) for some of the DML functions in the future.

Tons of updates

Sorry for the blog-gap :D Just been too busy with a lot of stuff, so here we go:

- Did a LOT of work on DML ports.. built a working Xbox, Jaguar and PS1 skeleton, fixed the soundsystem and did work on a XM/S3M/MOD replayer.
- Wonderworld bitmap editor is nearing completition, release soon. More info soon.
- Fixed sound in Radium. Radium is now ported to PC,Dreamcast and GP2X.
- Designed website for the DML system, which will be launched soon.

I'm hoping to make some progress on the Atari Jaguar soon. a memory management system is already in place and i'm hoping to have a working (and no doubt slow at 13mhz) DML port soon :p

Building a house

I'll be spending most time this weekend on fixing my house. I bought my house about a year ago in shall we say 'less than mint' condition (a.k.a. major pile of crap), so it needed a lot of work. Luckily i've been able to most the big stuff last summer, but still a lot of small stuff like paintjobs, installing small windows and installing a proper mailbox needed to be done. Its been nagging me for a while, so i decided it was time to do a bunch of those small things.
More news next week.

DML - Undercover

Now that the Radium engine (this is the engine used to create Radium) has been succesfully ported over to DML, i thought it was time to dig up another project i started on about 3 years ago. It was done as a small preview/demo for a game based on the Miami Vice license. However, the project fell through because the publisher was unable to get the license for Gameboy Advance. It was done using a very early version of the Radium engine, so i had to write a bunch of tools to get some of the data-files available in the demo converted to proper formats. So far i've been able to get the demo levels running. Unlike radium, the game will have a first-person perspective. I'll post some screenshots soon, as soon as i've implemented first person view, overlay/gun graphics,etc.

Videopac - First efforts

Today i started my first efforts into Videopac/Odyssey2 development. Yet another impossible platform ;-) This machine is a quirky little machine based on the intel 8048 processor. It is able to display 14 single color 8x8 character and up to 4 sprites (again 8x8 single color). On top of that you have 32 bytes of processor RAM available and a few bytes more in external memory.
I haven't been able to do much interesting yet (other than displaying a few characters and outputting some bleeps to the speaker), but i'm focussing on getting a proper development environment set up for this machine first. So hopefully i'll have some more videopac news soon!

Dreamcast - Radium

Radium, a 3D action-adventure game from my company Karma Studios, has now been ported to Dreamcast. If all goes well, it should have an official release around Christmas.

Radium is a futuristic-styled 3D action/adventure game, using a third person perspective. The game features a total 16 levels with very realistic 3D environments in 4 different sceneries. The game will also feature state of the art technology, high quality graphics, a multitude of weapons, bonuses and upgrades and a nicely balanced gameplay.

DML - Junior! (a.k.a. coming full circle)

Back in 1995/1996, i was doing my first commercial game project together with a friend of mine. The project was called "Junior" and it was a cute platformer game aimed at a young audience. We had a blast creating it and it was a valuable experience for me going through the whole process beginning to end.

Now, 10 years later i've decided to remake the game using the DML platform. Since the original game was done for MS-DOS and no source-material whatsoever is available anymore, i had to boot up some old EXE files to screencapture the graphics and get a sense of the level-design.

Anyways, i set for myself the task to create the game in a weeks time, this includes new graphics/leveldesign and music. So far i've been able to capture some of the original graphics and do a little work on the title screen and title music. Here's today's result:

DML - New ports: Dreamcast & Nintendo DS

2 New ports for DML have been completed. The port for the Sega Dreamcast and for the Nintendo DS. I will post images of the various DML ports in action soon, but for now you'll have to do with this image of the dreamcast in action.

Vectrex - Spike Supersports

Some of you have been waiting for this for a while now, so here it is..
The first screens of Spike Supersports for the Vectrex.

Spike supersports is a sports game based on the Spike characters.The game features 5 different events: 100m dash, long jump, archery, 110m hurdles and key toss and can be played in single player mode, or multiple player. Each player canchoose any of the Spike characters (Spike, Molly and Spud) to play with. The game also supports the VecVox.

The game is making steady progress, but there is no expected release-date yet.

Atari 2600/Vectrex - Expandable!

I've just returned from holiday!.

While i've enjoyed the warm weather and nice atmosphere for most of the times, i've still been able to do a little work on a small game-project i came up with about 2 months ago. It is called "expandable" and its an unique game-concept i think. You're a spaceship and you'll have to pick up bonus-items while dodging the enemies. as the game progresses the size of your shield starts to increase, making it harder and harder to dodge the enemies. If the enemies penetrate your shield, you will loose energy.

During the vacation i was able to do a little prototype for the atari 2600 an vectrex. See the screenshots below. Let me know what you think.

Atari 2600 - Empire Strikes Back remake

While struggling to master the 2600, i figured i'll try to do a remake/update of a known 2600 game. One of the games i enjoyed playing on the 2600 was the 'empire strikes back' game by Parker Bros, but i was always annoyed by the very blocky walkers. So i did a little test on my version of the game. Its far from finished, and so far it only features a ship you can control and a scrolling background. I hope i can add some smoothly animated walkers in the future, but first i have to find out how to clip them properly on the edges. Anyway, here's a screen.

Gameboy - From the vault

I was browsing through some old cds today searching for some graphics and i stumbled upon some old sources of some gameboy things i worked on way back (1996-1999). I wasn't able to get a lot of it compiling, but i was able to assemble a small collection of early gameboy demos:

- techflex.gb - Techflex effect (DMG, 1996)
- parallax.gb - parallax scrolling demo (DMG, 1996)
- plasma.gb - plasma demo (DMG, 1996)
- dudewave.gb - Image wave effect (DMG, 1996)
- vectdemo.gb - 3d vector demo (DMG, 1996)
- matrixtrailer.gb - the matrix trailer (GBC, 1999)
- glowdemo.gb - glowdemo (GBC, 1999)

You can download the package here

Colecovision/MSX - Streetbrawl concept art

I've recently started work on the game streetbrawl for the MSX and Colecovision platforms. It will be a sidescrolling beat'em up game in the lines of vigilante and kung fu master. However, because of the technical limitations of the platform the game will be more or less and experiment to see if its doable. You can click here for a quick preview.

DML - DML 1.1 finished

DML 1.1 is now finished for WIN32, SDL and GP2X platforms.
The Dreamcast port is now in the works, however the dreamcast architecture poses some problems to i/o reading and such, so hopefully all will run smoothly. Sega Saturn development was also started, but testing the binaries is problematic. (I used to have a good solution for this, but this required an ISA card, which aren't compatible with todays PCs).

Devroom chaos!

Things are getting out of control in my devroom. At the moment i have no more power-sockets available, and my poor tv-set is hooked on 3 RGB scarts and 5(!!!) RF plugs :s
Find below 2 photos of the development room in current state (please note that this is the development room and not my collection room, all consoles are being used for developent :p). The room currently consists of 2 development PC's, 1 notebook, a vectrex, colecovision, MSX2, Commodore 64, Atari2600, GP2X, Sega Dreamcast and Sega Saturn.

DML - Audio driver finished

I spent most of today finishing up the Audiodriver for my soon to be release media library called: DML . The library is a portable graphics&sound library, much like SDL, that allows direct-porting on a large range of platforms. It is set up in a way that it completely seperates the hardware layer from the modules that lay on top of it (modules for handling bitmaps, sprites, fonts, audio,etc.)

I hope to have the first public version 1.1 completed by next week. After that it will be porting mayhem :p Platforms planned are Win32, SDL, WinCE, Dreamcast, GP32, GP2X, Nintendo DS, PSP, PSone, Sega Saturn, Atari Jaguar, PS2, NGC, GBA and more.

Collection - Protector LE & Cubequest

I finally have been able to add these 2 rarities to my Vectrex collection:

Protector LE & Cubequest
(sorry, just had to share this moment of hapiness)

Collection - New Videopac games in

Today was one of those getting yourself a present days.
I received 3 new Videopac games for my collection: Satellite Attack+, 57 - blobbers and the rare 59 - helicopter rescue !!!

Now i only need a few more games to complete my videopac collection:
#48 backgammon, #58 air battle, #60 rally will complete the collection for me.
Also, i'm still looking for some language variations on #31 musican, #41 conquest of the world and #42 quest for the rings. If you have any of these games, or other interesting videopac objects let me know.

Atari 2600 - Fullcolor images working!

After a coding-spree now/last night (its 5.33am now) i managed to get the Atari 2600 full color images working properly. I even went as far as also including direct binary exports in WonderPix (you just click and it will spit out a runnable Binary image containing the full color image, which you can run on an emulator or the real thing).
It took some effort to get everything working, but i'm very pleased with the results.
Find some images attached:

Dreamcast setup & Protector LE

I was able to get my dreamcast dev. setup up and running today. Using a so-called coders-cable to connect between the PC and the Dreamcast you're able to upload and test programs. I'm now working on porting over my generic graphics/media system called DML. When this is done, i should be able to get some of my projects ported over to the Dreamcast quite easily.

Also, i've received my copy of Protector LE for the Vectrex system today. With a limited release of 100 pieces and good production quality, its a rarity in the vectrex scene. I've been able to get my hands on #42 of 100. My copy of Cubequest (another Vectrex rarity) should arrive later this week.

Atari 2600 - Stella wrestling

I spent the last few days working on some atari 2600 stuff, mainly making a good titlescreen/menu structure, which will serve as a basis for future games. I spent quite some time adopting Wonderpix to export my atari 2600 title screen properly.

The 2600 was mainly designed to run 2 games: combat (i.e. 2 tanks shooting a missile at eachother) and pong, therefore all the hardware is oriented towards having 2 monochrome playersprites of 8 pixels width, 2 missiles and a ball. In fact Registers on the 2600 TIA chip are litterly called P0 (player0), P1 (player1), BALL, MISSILE0, MISSILE1. in addition to these sprites you can have a playfield (PF) which consists on a 1-dimensional row of 24 blocks of 8 pixels width, which has to be refreshed each scanline. In short: horror!

The soundchip isn't much better with 2 channels of linear frequencies... thats right LINEAR, so it is very hard to have it output a sound that ressembles a western musical note :s Which is why most music on atari2600 is either not present or completely out of tone/key.
While i've tackeled the music problem last month with a music converter that converts proper note data to interleaved linear notes (e.g a D-2 note, would alter between frequencies that for example approximate C#2 and E-2) which, when you take these limits into account, gave a fair result.

So now it was time to get a proper title screen. The titlescreens are done by using the 6-sprite trick on 2600, which normally can only handle 2 monochrome sprites (as described above).
Basically its a trick used in other 2600 games as well to either display a 6-digit score or a small logo, where you'll be refreshing the sprite data of the second sprite while the first is drawn and visa versa. This way you can have a titlescreen with a maximum of 56x192 pixels. I'm now working on a way to display full color images, so that the title screen will actually be a nice addition to the game other than just a boring monochrome logo before starting the game.

To be continued...

Back in Action / Wonderpix

Back in action...

After a small vacation, on which i've worked a little on a new vectrex project "Spike supersports" (more on this soon), and the hectics of getting my previous vectrex project out the door, i'm back at juggling the development of mutiple classic systems (mainly vectrex, coleco, atari2600 and msx1 at the moment).

One of the side effects of developing for classic systems, is the time you need to invest in proper tools and systems, which in my case is at least as much as the time i spend on the actual project itself. I spent quite a lot of time creating and setting up proper environments for Coleco and Vectrex development. One of the tools i use for graphics management is called "WonderPix", which is a multi-platform graphics tool. It basically supports every classic platform available, like: atari2600, colecovision, msx1, msx2, commodore 64, atari st, commdore amiga, zx spectrum, nintendo nes, sega mastersystem,gameboy, and ofcourse the somewhat newer 64/256-color platforms.I've attached a few screens of the tool in action for your pleasure.

Welcome to my blog

Hi everyone,

And welcome to my online blog. From now on, you will find all information on my day to day struggles with classic game development on various systems (like the vectrex, atari 2600, colecovision, msx, and more...). Since i'm working at least SOMETHING on either one of these systems, i expect regular updates. So keep yourself posted!

Kind regards,

Martijn