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...