TGA - The Great Adventure

Kananga · Post by **Kananga** » Fri Sep 24, 2010 1:33 pm

Yesterday, I decided not to buy a sword and became a hero after 121 weeks. New personal record!

BTW, I copied your little "BOOT" program for "VINBOOT". I hope you don't mind. I was a bit in a hurry today to put everything together.

orion70 · Post by **orion70** » Sat Sep 25, 2010 3:55 am

Kananga wrote:Yesterday, I decided not to buy a sword and became a hero after 121 weeks. New personal record!

I never did it without one! Congratulations.

Kananga wrote:BTW, I copied your little "BOOT" program for "VINBOOT". I hope you don't mind. I was a bit in a hurry today to put everything together.

I don't mind - it's not even mine, it's Mike's (originally done to load VICtoria Gold)

.

hawk · Post by **hawk** » Tue Oct 19, 2010 11:28 pm

I wanted to add my thanks to Orion for a great game. I've been playing it on real hardware and find that the loading times allow me time to do two things at once.

I was struggling to win until I upgraded to V7 today and finished in 86 weeks. Starting with above average stats makes a difference.

I really enjoy the game balance and find that it continues to get more difficult even though my character improves. I noted the healing potion glitch in the earlier versions, but now it seems to work fine.

Thanks again.

orion70 · Post by **orion70** » Wed Oct 20, 2010 2:42 am

Hey Hawk, you're welcome. As I said before, I'm happy that people enjoy this game as much as I did (in both versions, C64 and VIC's). I should add that all the problems coming from the original version were corrected thanks mainly to e5frog, Tokra, Kananga, Kweepa, and of course Mike, who also provided Minigrafik

.
With their help, we can now say that the VIC version is the best one

.

robinsonmason · Post by **robinsonmason** » Sat Nov 27, 2010 2:37 pm

Wow, amazing how far this game has come since I last checked on it. Fantastic!

orion70 · Post by **orion70** » Sun Nov 28, 2010 4:27 am

Thanks - happy you like it. I think the difficulty is well balanced in the last version.

Pedro Lambrini · Post by **Pedro Lambrini** » Tue Dec 28, 2010 2:54 pm

This is a great game. I've been playing it all afternoon! It's like a text only Roguelike and I love those games! Makes me want a proper roguelike on the Vic though...

PS: Is there a way to check my character stats at any time? I haven't found a way but I'd like to to.

Also, can I use a potion when I want? Again, I haven't found a way to do that either...

orion70 · Post by **orion70** » Wed Dec 29, 2010 12:37 am

I'm afraid both things are not possible, Pedro... Sorry for that, maybe in future versions with enhanced graphics, speech (!) etc - you never know what the VIC can do, right?

Glad you enjoyed the game!

Pedro Lambrini · Post by **Pedro Lambrini** » Wed Dec 29, 2010 6:10 am

Oh well, I'll wait for the Director's Cut then.

Still enjoying the game though.

e5frog · Post by **e5frog** » Thu Jan 13, 2011 5:05 am

Pedro Lambrini wrote:PS: Is there a way to check my character stats at any time? I haven't found a way but I'd like to to. Also, can I use a potion when I want? Again, I haven't found a way to do that either...

You can STOP the program, and then print the variables out yourself and then continue the game with CONT hopefully. It doesn't seem like it would be too hard to add another key-press option to all screens to print the stats out, it would be very handy.

I would buy this game as a cartridge, that would be really neat not having the load times for the pictures. Perhaps a limited edition of 30?

orion70 · Post by **orion70** » Thu Jan 13, 2011 7:06 am

I'll work on a TGA_V8 some day in the (hopefully) near future.
I have little spare time, and currently I'm using it contributing to the VIC Office Suite and TNT's Z-machine project.

As for a TGA cart, well, it would be great, but I can't see how this could be done - at least, I have no means to do it.. Maybe using the emulator without true drive emulation is the best way to enjoy the game (for now).

e5frog · Post by **e5frog** » Thu Jan 13, 2011 4:03 pm

I guess it would perhaps require built in ram in the cartridge for the expansion. A 32kB CY62256 RAM (you can buy 5 for $10 on eBay) can perhaps be used. Instead of loading things from disk it could load from the cartridge. Just copy everything down from the cart to the correct memory area as if you had loaded it from disk.

I'm thinking the Behr-Bonz platform with added RAM, should be entirely doable.

Perhaps something I (or anyone else knowledgeable about this) can look into when you have finished it. If I'm the only one interested I guess I could get a Behr-Bonz cart and hack it... like I hacked my Mole Attack cart into a multi-cart...
It would need to be seriously error free of course, changes aren't very fun to do after the chips are soldered.

Mike · Post by **Mike** » Thu Jan 13, 2011 5:02 pm

e5frog wrote:Just copy everything down from the cart to the correct memory area as if you had loaded it from disk.

When MINIGRAFIK displays graphics from a loaded file, it does a little bit more than just copying one memory chunk to the right place.

It would need to be seriously error free of course, changes aren't very fun to do after the chips are soldered.

In any case, the main program, all images, and the supporting ML routines together require ~57K, so a banked solution is necessary. The FE3 could serve as interesting platform for you to implement your idea.

e5frog · Post by **e5frog** » Thu Jan 13, 2011 5:20 pm

When MINIGRAFIK displays graphics it must fetch data from somewhere and place it somewhere, it could very well fetch that from ROM just as from IEC. I don't know how much has to be edited though.

Yes, or as I mentioned the Behr Bonz or my own bank switching design but perhaps FE3 already has the ram designed in as well, the Mega Cart can be looked upon as well, don't know if all of them are open for view.

Mike · Post by **Mike** » Thu Jan 13, 2011 5:55 pm

e5frog wrote:I don't know how much has to be edited though.

When the file has been loaded, the bitmap data is already at the correct place.

To display the picture, MINIGRAFIK also initialises the colour RAM from extra data in the file, reprograms several VIC registers, and writes the address generating "text" screen to $1000. All actions done in one @LOAD command.

It uses the standard load kernal vector, so if you could provide a ROM based filing system, which wedges into the vector, that would provide you with a plug-in solution.

The FE3 has 512K RAM and 512K Flash EPROM built-in. OTOH, with SJLOAD the loading times for the pictures are around 1 second only. It is just a FOR loop in line 9905 after the prompt 'Please wait ...', which slows down the process a little bit more - for another 2 seconds ...