Retro : New ZX games , Magenta Sky, Hobbit and
Its amazing how many new releases you get by retro-fans for their favourite childhood friends ...
Looking at the intro for magenta sky some people maybe can relate ...
This is a re- or de-make from an older version but the Mojon Twins have quite the track record , and not just on the spectrum
the C64 probably spans the crown in frontline but i bet the speccy might actually have more releases monthly today ... its one of the stranger machines, definitely if you look at it today. "lord" Sinclairs filosophy (a very easy one btw) : let the devs figure it out, and then poke out a machine that would make Atari jealous on how much it lacks in options ( lol ? )
Despite that the cult following these boxes get ... Atari machines have nasty cultists that probably out-do amigans when it comes to fanaticism, but most of these , including the spec have a bit of a masochist streak ... the c64 is "easy" to program if you spend a few years in an underground bootcamp learning how to count cycles, multiplexing sprites and switching your screenmodes but the others have built in hurdles that make them pretty special to overcome . The spec has 2 times 8 colors which are created by changing the voltage, you have one backgournd color and one color per block (thats why overlapping sprites often "black out" a portion : there ARE no sprites and you cant raster your way out of a character block like you might on a c64 midway) - Atari ST's "shifter" (the gpu if you like) can basically draw no more than 60% of the screen in one cycle, at 50fps this makes it kinda hard to do turbo outrun : the arcade quality remake ...
Some people have done some amazing stuff though ... "chasing the beam" and what not , without the availability of cheatmachine chips like the amigas copper and paula and all that
my fav on the ST would be overlanders 1st love
Showing how on an ST without hardware scrolling, (it does use blitter and it needs more than 512kb ram but no hard drive) you can do some nasty stuff at 50fps full
you have the 0bitplane fashion in 2024
Which more or less use the full colour palette at the cost of resolution by creating their own using the equivalent of rastersplits you would on a c64
Where on the c64 you ofcourse have only 16 colours, but the use of dithering and fast switching sometimes makes it seem like theres an endless combo of palettes there
and ofcourse : the bad-apple-killer ... "ultimate" DMA-test for your real HW STe
In se not as impressive as a lot b/c of the use of A.I. , in this case more or less functional to tell a story in an attempt at poking fun at tribalism perhaps but what it DOES do is show off the capability of using an Atari STe with a hard drive as the equivalent of a CD32, seeing as you have cycles left for the fx on a soundtrack that sounds as good as cd quality ...
They didnt release the IDE and engine with compiled basic so everyone can make games like MPAGD with it though ....
sceners and Fort Knox mentality
... whats on your mind ? nutt'n
i just jumped downstairs (my knees still tell me i shouldnt) and as it turned out A SPIDER triggered the motion alert lol
and there you stand, cleaver and machine gun in hand in the living room ( I DONT HAVE A MACHINE GUN OKAY DISCLAIM'25 ... man, tsk ...)
"its a spider" ...
ssshhhhheeeeee
O yea, since seeing those 1 bitplane "0"-bitplane demos i wonder how much of an "ST-boy" you could simulate using big pixels and a full 4096 colour palette while still having cycles for game logic
but since asking questions on scene forums as a loner is a drag i dont bother anymore with that
Nyah, theres an endless room for debate on that i bet but ofcourse groups like FLT who at some point quit the 64k compo b/c they just kept winning no matter what with 40 years of xp and 40 years of libs (and probably prize money in a bank account so they can stick with the RTX 6090 too)
Most of the stuff that relies on "colour bleeding" or tricks the eye by fast switching, as well as the overlanders demo needs a CRT or a screeen that does 15khz (i think its 15 for the st) or you cant really get the real demo ... for instance if you run the overlanders demo on a mister FPGA through the HDMI upscaler it totally wont work, same goes for some games, it only works right if you use the analogue VGA output and theres another riddle i havent solved :
lots of these retro-buffs are people who are well in the money, not just the 8bit-guy, LOTS of them (you should see the prices a real retro box goes for these days) , things like an Atari Falcon or a Sharp 68k you simply cant FIND anymore on ebay, last time i saw a few they went between 5000 and 10000 euros
Even cult consoles like the Atari Jaguar, a few years ago they were still throwing them out for as low as €150 sometimes, now they fetch 2500 in some places
So WHY, i ask thee :
- no one seems to have picked up an old floppy factory to make new floppies (you KNOW theres gonna be people buying them), for one thing the STes we have here dont have Gotek drives installed, we just love the floppy sound too much, they're not the original drives from the 90s anymore but the replacements are 100% ... they're refurbished too, but the capacitors, the board and chips are 100% original so its like a new old machine
- no one is making CRT's on demand, b/c if you did, you KNOW some of these guys who fly to the other coast of the americas from where they lvie to pick up two monitors would buy them right
... why is that ?
Other than that i can see the world being super as it was since the 1980s, everythings great, there's just less of it and it costs more, but nothing much has changed from what i can see, the last time something did was kennedy on the moon and for some reason they quit after that ?
Just un-bugged something in the jag game too this week , an issue you would have with high-syntax-low-level coding : some objects had the edge_kill flag set in the object list and i kept wondering why they didnt appear when i reactivated them , WELL
the flag doesnt reset, it stays on so if i set sprite[x].active = R_is_active and the edge_kill flag is ON, then if i do a vsync and the coordinates are off screen it triggers and it sets the object inactive right away
thats jag-speak so it might not make sense to most
and it makes lots of sense in hindsight, as most things would
but its really something you would get with highlevel-syntax / low-level coding engines and frames as you overlook it
ofcourse i wont anymore now
...
we still think if this were not the pits of belgium we might have had a shot at a life using these things instead of "real work" ...
eeehm
we say "tribalism is for mundanes"
we often use the word mundanes and refer to i as we which is not royal plural like janes ondergrond is not just a doompatrol metafor, theres definite damage over time from too much living in a hole made of kryptonite ... have my life and watch doom patrol and Bester from babylon 5 to get a slight notion if you dont, not that we care much about being understood anymore
theres a few things ...
no matter what you say : someone's gonna be offended so you might as well just say what you say and see who's left, there might be someone there you can actually get along with who doesnt yank behind your back at every occasion
and such ...
an A.I. that can't even swear or say fuck and turns "mary poppins at gunpoint" into "we can do it if we work together" will more or less suck at analyzing real humans and the real world , somehow someone somewhere is missing that point
being the main A.I. hub leaders of the world is pretty pointless if you still rely on the other side for the resources to build it since you dont have them
and other stuff that makes it an 80+ % certainty that
Still no reason to roll over and die, the chances at coagulating into this skitzo-collective they have turned the kid into on a universal ... cosmic? even galactic or solar scale are pretty small so it might be a while until we get back once this run is over so i think we'll sit it out
... so asking how can you have a c64 and an Atari ST in the same room ? is like "why do you listen to slayer when you go to DJ shadow concerts?"
... ?
i dont eat potatoes every day
i eat rice
bread
and pasta ...
heh sometimes quinoa but tahts been a while, DUDE ...
its time to cycle .... nights are wasted anyway lately on anything but the cat we dont get anything done anymore in second cycle, a bit o dishes and
TIME SPENT WITH CATS IS NEVER WASTED, dear ...
thats not the issue , this planet has ONE issue and its name is
homo
(sapiens ... eh, im sure some american was already calling it bigot and bashing ...)
i would but inufuto ( http://inufuto.web.fc2.com/8bit/ ) is so obscure if youre not a retro junk you might get lost and the site keeps crashing my pi5 as its too heavy with all the vids ... that guy is like a mad scientist, not sure how but i think he has some kind of personally developped frame that lets him code basic blocks (not the language) which can be compiled to multiple systems at once (otherwise its hard to understand how one guy would do all that heh) but the thing is, the games are basic in visual and audio but the gameplay is usually good, they're like "REAL GAMES" that dont rely on fancy stuff, but i bet compiling all that in one go for 15 or 20 platforms by itself is fancy stuff
Like i said, just like a football hooligan i could probably yap on for another hour about stuff i like but
ITS TIME ...