Jonathan Thomas @atariste.bsky.social

This is the latest build of the Atari STE game I am now provisonally calling "Cavey Taxi". Pick up passengers in a tight cave complex and drop them off elsewhere, fighting gravity, time and fuel consumption. With pretty parallax scrolling and particles. What's not to like? 😀

Introducing Pico3D Open World Game for #AtariST with SidecarTridge Multi-device. It's still very much a WIP, but it loads and runs, you can walk, look up (sometimes down 😅), and it even has a day/night colour cycle. 💾 github.com/neilrackett/md…

@indyjonas I wish I was that clever... 😁 The 960x600 bitmap (it's actually 640x600 now that I've checked it) is duplicated in memory and I swap between the two. UI and sprites are drawn and then erased from each 640x600 bitmap in what I assume is standard hardscroll practice.

@RetroRacing Blitter fills the background directly into that 960x600 bitmap... So no page flipping at all? How are UI and sprites done? Repainted during vblank? No visible tearing or flickering, mindblowing!

This is the latest build of the Atari STE game I am now provisonally calling "Cavey Taxi". Pick up passengers in a tight cave complex and drop them off elsewhere, fighting gravity, time and fuel consumption. With pretty parallax scrolling and particles. What's not to like? 😀

@indyjonas These pregenerated Blitter code blocks make use of endmask regs to avoid overwriting the foreground layer. The algo attempts to work out which spans are on screen on each frame and only update those spans. I hoped to get more than 17fps out of this, but there you go. 🤷 (2/2)

@indyjonas Glad you asked. 😁 The foreground layer is a double buffered 960x600 bitmap that scrolls around using the STE hardscroll. The background layer is drawn by a series of pregenerated and unrolled Blitter code blocks representing single-line horizontal spans. (1/2)

@indyjonas Witchcraft. 😀 Really looking forward to hearing you talk more about how you were able to use AI tools to aid reverse engineer the original code. I spent about 5 months on manually reversing the Pole Position code nearly 15 years ago but time is more scarce now. 😬

In the past months I've been working on porting Command&Conquer to the Atari STe. A 1996 game running on a 1989 home computer.

@indyjonas Nice - great to hear you're making progress. I'll look forward to hearing more about the approach when you're further down the line with things. 👍

@RetroRacing Yes it is and I’m finally making some progress! And while the AI is incredibly helpful, just like when handcrafting code, every little detail has to be looked at.

Mystery Atari ST project featuring dinosaurs in beautiful 16 colors.

🎁 Tunnel Panic by Into The Vertical Blank for Atari ST. Keep on flying as long as possible, slight Flappy Bird vibes here! Check: intotheverticalblank.itch.io/tunnel-panic-a… #homebrew #atarist #retro #game #tunnelpanic

@EGVroom I thought it offered a simplified control scheme as well as the weird two stick scheme? Although maybe nobody knows about it. Agreed that the world needs more arcade racers. Where are the contemporary equivalents of games like Burnout 3?

Screamer seemingly not doing well isn’t a reflection on the appetite for Arcade Racers. It might just be a reflection on the appetite for Arcade Racers with odd/unusual controls. People wanna zoom and steer like they’ve done a thousand times before. Don’t complicate going FAST.

@dantemendes See also: the Amiga OCS/ECS WIP port of this game that I hope to finish some day: 😬 x.com/RetroRacing/st…

FASTER (by Jonathan Thomas). Running at 50 frames per second, it's an incredible arcade racer for the Atari STE. Well deserved 1st place in the Silly Venture 2024 WE Atari ST/STE games competition. Free and available at retroracing.itch.io/faster-atari-s… So good it may persuade myself to get an Atari to run it on real hw (coming from an Amiga guy, that's something - but always wanted to experiment the famous serial cable multiplayer between Amiga and Atari and it's another interesting system to explore nevertheless).

@Sut1978 Yes, Lotus STE is my work. 😀 As is the 2017 conversion of Pole Position for the STE if you’ve not yet seen that. The biggest challenge I’d face with Lotus 2 is getting everything back on a single floppy. Lots of additional binary data on this enhanced version.

@RetroRacing I’ve no knowledge but wonder if you nail one stage, that the code may be transferrable to the others with a little tinkering ? Did you work on the Lotus 1 enhancement as well ? I started following you once I saw the awesome FaSTEr 👍

Latest work on my #AtariSTE enhanced version of Lotus 2, now with a sky gradient similar to that featured in the #Amiga version. Still loads of work to do in various areas but it's looking good and performing well. 👍 🚗 I'll probably release as a single stage proof of concept.

@Sut1978 I’ve been meaning to put a frame counter in place to accurately measure fps. The main objective is to increase graphical fidelity rather than increase fps though.

@RetroRacing What fps does it run as standard and what are you hoping to improve it to ?

@Sut1978 I’ll certainly aim to release a disk image that lets you play through an enhanced version of the first stage. I’m a bit daunted by the prospect of enhancing the entire game though!

@RetroRacing Love this game as it is, if you can improve it chefs kiss

@radres I’m struggling a bit to understand what you’re trying to convey here. Do you understand the context of this project, and are you aware of my previous work on the Lotus games?

@RetroRacing proof of concept? more like proof of wasted time. sky gradients don’t fix bad code. good luck with that “single stage” fantasy.

@JooRalha1 There are indeed a lot of glitches João - I still have a lot of work left to do on this. 😀 The only thing that will be very difficult to solve on the ST is the flickering raster bars - they could be made more stable, but at the expense of a large drop in framerate. 😞

@RetroRacing A lot of gfx glitches. Is it normal for the STE Blitter? I know I can disable the waitblitter flag on the Amiga, but the corruption that may occur is nothing of this sort. Seems like it's drawing odd lines and unbufering even ones in a frame...

@postinopazzoide Definitely a possibility on both counts. I'll look into it.

@RetroRacing Do you think it would be possible to add rear brake lights on STE, and maybe do the same in the Amiga version of Faster?

Spent several hours last night rewriting and optimising the 68k code that draws the rev counter on the #AtariST version of Lotus 2 to use the Blitter chip instead. These are the lengths that us ST folks are willing to go to in order to compete with that other machine. 😉

@000Angus000 The IBM PC, of course. 😛

@RetroRacing Which other machine? 😉

@AtariCrypt A floppy image will be forthcoming at some distant point in the unspecified future. 😄

@RetroRacing Thank you 💪🏻💪🏻💪🏻💪🏻💪🏻