Interest in a System 6/7 version of Attack of the Petscii robots?

[Mu0n]

David Murray, aka 'The 8-bit guy' is building an EMPIRE of ports for his latest game 'Attack of the Petscii Robots', originally released and sold as physical media for C64 + Vic-20 + PET (all 3 together) computers. Check out the current progress chart posted over this weekend. The x16 platform is the still unreleased off-the-shelf computer project he spearheaded himself, meant as a throwback to the era of 8-bit computers with swappable parts and easy to understand architecture, with some modern frills (Vera chip for graphics was a hard achieved compromise).

(C64 screenshot)


I'm tempted to offer my help for a vintage Mac port (iOs is fine, but *you know what I'm talkin' bout...*) but things definitely have to die down at work here first and it highly depends on how much assembly code has to be ported away from the original version. As I understand it (don't take this for truth, I'm not sure), if you petition to offer your help in a serious way, he may accept you as a collaborator and hand out the source code. As the game is tile based, it's not the longest game project ever.

(tile information corrected on 2021-11-12, corrections in bold)
AFAIK the tile area is 11x7 tiles², each tile being 24x24. If you went pixel perfect, it'd only use 264x168 pixels of the 512x342 of the B&W screen real estate. If you go for doubled chunky pixels and/or highest res patterns where it mattered, you use 528x338, overflowing on the width and leaving only a piddly 6 pixels in height for all the interface.

Next up is the commander-x16 screenshot:

(Commander x16 screenshot, from this video)

My rationale: this project is gaining so much momentum and David's game making tends to cover a large amount of platforms and video cards/resolutions, which makes it an easy, quick and thorough machine tester for graphics and sound. The System 6/7 platform gets so little new releases compared to other vintage machines. After all, a lot of platforms in the chart above are also getting some much needed love (the plus/4 and C128 come to mind).

 

[Nixontheknight]

Yes, it would be nice to see it, but there is an NES emulator for PPC, so it would be nice to make it for 68k

 

[Mu0n]

Yes, it would be nice to see it, but there is an NES emulator for PPC, so it would be nice to make it for 68k

So far, unless I've missed it, there's no information on how he plans to release the upcoming NES port.
You can venture a guess in how he released his previous game, Planet X3, the MS-DOS port which I'm familiar with. The physical box contained a 1.44 mb diskette formatted properly for the era but you also had a downloadable image.

The NES release will probably face a much higher challenge in securing the means to produce physical cartridges to match the very high interest - it's safe to assume it'll be cheaper in ROM file form. I don't follow the homebrew NES game scene enough to know if it's common and easy to make real cartridges today.

If your goal was to run it on a Mac through emulation, then the SNES version might be better - both for the graphics and the control scheme. The additional SNES buttons allow the gameplay controls to be fully mapped. The NES version is challenging to map through select-start-B-A only. The details are still unknown. Also, the graphics on the NES version will be mostly in grayscale and 1-2 colors (I don't remember the exact reason, I'm not familiar enough with the limitations)

 

[Freshestcream]

I'd love to see a Mac port with higher resolution graphics. Probably target base 68k processors.

 

[Mu0n]

Made a pixel perfect mock full screen test with the regular 24x24 tiles:

As you can see, there's way too much room, but not enough room that you can just pixel double your way to a solution. I'm wondering if they encountered this problem in other ports and went with 32x32 tiles (occupying 45% of the real estate instead of 22.5%)

 

[Nixontheknight]

Made a pixel perfect mock full screen test with the regular 24x24 tiles:

View attachment 969

As you can see, there's way too much room, but not enough room that you can just pixel double your way to a solution. I'm wondering if they encountered this problem in other ports and went with 32x32 tiles (occupying 45% of the real estate instead of 22.5%)

The bottom would be enough room for the console/action text and you could make a slim stats gui for the right side, and you also have to consider 512X384, 640X480, and 800X600 (I know the actual resolution of that last one is slightly bigger) for later 68k macs

 

[Nixontheknight]

And there’s always 560x384 for the color classic and LC machines

 

[Mu0n]

My rationale is: the b&w macs get very little attention in the homebrew community and I'd spend my efforts propping them up first and foremost. Can't start targeting a common denominator that only few own, but they can certainly have a slightly adapted version as an afterthought.

 

[polluks]

My rationale is: the b&w macs get very little attention in the homebrew community and I'd spend my efforts propping them up first and foremost. Can't start targeting a common denominator that only few own, but they can certainly have a slightly adapted version as an afterthought.

Indeed, a PET was always monochrome.

 

[Ron's Computer Videos]

So far, unless I've missed it, there's no information on how he plans to release the upcoming NES port.
You can venture a guess in how he released his previous game, Planet X3, the MS-DOS port which I'm familiar with. The physical box contained a 1.44 mb diskette formatted properly for the era but you also had a downloadable image.

The NES release will probably face a much higher challenge in securing the means to produce physical cartridges to match the very high interest - it's safe to assume it'll be cheaper in ROM file form. I don't follow the homebrew NES game scene enough to know if it's common and easy to make real cartridges today.

I always assumed it would either be released exclusively for flash carts, or they'd go the Aliexpress "486 in 1!!" manufacturing route.

 

[Byte Knight]

Count me in for a copy - I'm all for more vintage Mac games!

 

[ajacocks]

I'm definitely interested. Let me know what your plans are.

- Alex

 

[Mu0n]

I'm not committing myself to this for the time being, I'm swamped as usual as a college teacher until June and I have other projects to attend first. Who knows in the future, or as an assistant to someone else?

 

[lauland]

FYI Over at https://macintoshgarden.org/ an attempt was started, but didn't get too far, using the Sprite Animation Toolkit.

So I got a wild hair, and decided to try a proof-of-concept sort of hack, putting together the SDL version of PETSCII with a fake SDL shim of sorts that I have, which runs on a cross platform library I'd written...a REAL inefficient mess of code...but it could get a native classic MacOS version running. The idea would be MacOS X Carbon first and then downsizing, eventually getting all the way to System 6 on a Mac Plus.

Obviously this is NOT the right way to do a port, but more "just because it'll probably work", I had the parts lying around, and a way for me to improve my SDL shim on the side. But I'm hoping once people see it running (if it gets finished) on classic MacOS as a proof of concept, it'll spur others to "do it right".

Follow along...

https://macintoshgarden.org/forum/the-petscii-robot-challenge

 

[lauland]

I've pivoted to a different approach, as it turned out my SDL "shim" was VERY limited and my cross platform library couldn't handle some obscure pixel format issues, as SDL normally hides all that.

Instead of reinventing the wheel, and needing to handle everything SDL can, I'm going for a "wafer thin" approach with all new code. "#define SDL_Surface GWorldPtr" for one! Working on Carbon version first...

https://github.com/laulandn/PETSCIIRobotsMac

 

[Mu0n]

So that will target which systems? late OS9 early OSX?

 

[lauland]

I'm starting with a Carbon version, using CodeWarrior 6 pro and XCode 2 on Tiger. This is so I can use decent debuggers and be able to force quit it without taking the system down until I get to a stable point. Once there, I'll work my way backwards from there to classic PPC and M68k on MacOS 8.

But the end goal is a MacPlus running System 6...which will be a far greater leap!

I was able to squeeze Arashi down to that, although I never optimized it enough to run decently without an accelerator.

https://macintoshgarden.org/forum/calling-all-programmers-arashi-in-black-and-white

(Which is certainly playable, but not wonderful, on an unexpanded SE/30 or Classic II)

PetRobots was designed to run on a cpu of the MacPlus's speed (an unexpanded Amiga), so it might fare better.

Or once it runs at all, I might leave it to others to get it running well.

 

[lauland]

Anyone willing/able to help is MORE than welcome! First step'd be cloning the repo and trying a build in XCode on Tiger.

I've got something really stupid going on with pointers vs handles to GWorlds/CGrafPorts/Windows right now, so don't expect it to work, and you'll NEED to force quit it, as it thinks it's drawing the intro screen and there's no event handling yet! Don't try the CodeWarrior versions yet...

But that'll get you looking at the code...

 

[lauland]

Scratch that...in XCode it only displays a tiny box of garbage pixels...but I tried an M68k CodeWarrior build and...see https://macintoshgarden.org/forum/the-petscii-robot-challenge?page=2#comment-101385 for more info...

 

[lauland]

Huge progress. Game now starts, but not playable (keypresses not fully handled), colors not right (256 color palette needs coding). CodeWarrior 6 and 7, and XCode 2. M68k, PPC and MacOS X Carbon.

https://macintoshgarden.org/forum/the-petscii-robot-challenge?page=2#comment-101409

Source is at https://github.com/laulandn/PETSCIIRobotsMac

I'm not really interested in finishing this solo, but would like to use this to teach a little, and think it'd be a great opportunity for anyone wanting to learn classic Mac game programming.

Wanna help?

Any level welcome.

There's no such thing as a stupid question, so ask away...