Welcome to Plus/4 World! |  Sumplete! | | Posted by Csabo on 2023-03-14 |
 A game invented and coded by ChatGPT? It sure says so! We have to jump on this bandwagon quick, we're gonna make millions!...
Or, at the very least, we shall have a small new math-based puzzle game for Commodore Plus/4. Meet Sumplete, a somewhat Sudoku-like puzzle game. Your task is to delete numbers, so that the rows/columns add up to the sums displayed on the right/bottom. It might be a fun distraction for a few rounds. Enjoy! |
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| | Galaxian - The classic arcade game by Atari that could have been but wasn't | | Posted by Gaia on 2023-03-09 |
 Atarisoft was a brand name used by Atari, Inc. in 1983 and 1984 to publish video games for non-Atari home computers and consoles. It used a distinctive colour for each platform. Atarisoft worked solely with contractors and had no developers on its payroll. Although only existed for about two years and stopped operations when Warner sold its consumer division to Jack Tramiel, it had several dozens of popular titles in its catalogue. Unfortunately, going out of business coincided with the launch of the TED series so these Atari ports never made it to our platform.
During the haydays of the Home Computer era, the ports of popular arcade games was a big business, so it was no wonder that Atarisoft also jumped into the bandwagon by publishing Galaxian for the Commodore 64. Galaxian is a classic arcade game released originally in 1979. It was Namco's answer to the immensely popular classic, Space Invaders by Taito, but it could only reach a decent second place in popularity behind that.
Galaxian spawned many ports and conversions, the Commodore 64 version was written by Bill Bogenreif (of Designer Software). Interestingly, his company is still around today but it's no longer publishing video games. The game was originally released as a cartridge.
Although the title screen suggests 1983 as release year, the hidden text around the memory address $9DF0 tells a different story: the game was apparently finished and released in 1984 only, during the final days of Atarisoft. Despite the very capable hardware and some unused code chunks, the Commodore 64 port does not use any HW sprites at all, everything runs in multicolor bitmap mode, which made a plus/4 port quite straightforward. Admittedly, the game is quite rough around the edges, has a meager 6.1 score at Lemon64, but it has some of that genuine old-school touch that newer games don't and some folks do appreciate to this day.
The player assumes control of the Galaxip starfighter to protect Earth from several, increasingly difficult waves of alien ships. Gameplay involves destroying each formation of aliens, who are - as opposed to Space Invaders - are continuously launching descending attacks towards the player's ship in an attempt to smash it.
To remain as authentic as possible, the Plus/4 conversion is released as a cartridge dump as well. Enjoy! |
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| | Hey HVTC, You've Been cRTED! | | Posted by Luca on 2023-03-08 |
 HVTC had seen the light something like a dozen years ago. Although gathering executable .prg files which need a real machine or an external emulator, soon the main target of the project has become clear: have a modern player and a vast, near complete, collection of TEDsound music to be played on any nowadays PC. A proper format would have been needed first, and passionate coders like Gaia (TedPlay) and Siz (SIzPlay) gave their contribute to reach a valid choice which could include all the possible variables and data to convert every given music in a common, generic, dedicated format.
Today we present a new milestone in this long lasting mission, one signed by Hermit, former author of the famous TEDzakker. cRTED is a PC based music player running on both Windows and Linux OSes, playing TEDsound music converted to the brand new .TED format. The latter is actually an enhancement of the .TMF format introduced by Siz with the possibility to have the header/metadata at the end of the file, and this means that the new format can be both recognized by the cRTED player, and run as a normal .PRG file on any real machine or emulator! There's the possibility to use it as a command line with several options to input, but it obviously shines when used thru its GUI, featuring all the useful options which can be requested for this tool: infos display, restart/pause, fast forward, repeat/advance, volume control, switchable channels, fast/slow playlist scrolling all mouse and/or shortcut keys driven. The playlist in .TEL format is basically an editable text which can easily be edited by anybody, and includes both single files and entire folders.
The whole suite comes with the HVTC-ted source files, where the actual HVTC-ted converter can be used to re-create the HVTC collection into the new format, and the HVTC-ted (2023-03-08), currently a good selection from the whole HVTC (soon to be swapped with the complete one!).
This represents the 1.0 version of the cRTED project, which already includes shared and static library forms for a better inclusion in other TED-playback projects, looking forward to be ported to the largely used RockBox like its C64 cousin cRSID which is now the main SID-playback engine in RockBox.
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|  A tape turbo in 2023? Why not, it's the authentic retro feeling! Check out Speedy V3 by mc68k. |
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| | Elite +4: Circle Closes | | Posted by Luca on 2023-02-28 |
 Habemus "fixum" maximus! Mark Moxon turns back to the coding scene, and improves the flicker free version of the super classic Elite +4 released some months ago by (almost) fixing the planets' flickering too! The cleanest version of the "game of a lifetime" (cit.) is now here.
Elite +4 Flicker free Π (pron.: Elite +4 Flicker free Pi) is the title of this new and apparently ultimate hack of the famous 3D space trading simulation, where, after the first fix regarding the ships, the planets have been (almost) fixed too. Why we say "almost"? Well, in all the versions, including the BBC original where those patches have been based, planets still flicker a bit when partially off-screen. This is because of the way the ball line buffer works: it's a consequence of the way the circles are stored as sequential arcs, forcing the erase/redraw sequence to involve slightly different segments. So this isn't strictly flicker-free, but it's way better than the default. On C64 and Plus/4, this is even more evident due to the slower processor.
This was the best moment to celebrate the genius of Pigmy, the man who converted the game when he was 15, in less than a week, using only a Datassette and the internal ML Monitor of the machine. That's why Luca took his time to give the original intro a cooler aspect. Overall, with a modernized titlescreen and a stable wireframe 3D, *this* is the Elite +4 version worth to be run on your hardware. |
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| | Midi Expansion For The Plus/4! | | Posted by sabe on 2023-02-26 |
| Chizman has made a MIDI OUT expansion card based on Arduino Nano. Have a look at the demo on the hardware section here. |
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| | Usagyuuun Kniffel! | | Posted by Csabo on 2023-02-26 |
 The newest member of Plus/4 World is Sirhadisen, and our new friend from Germany is here to gift us his first game: Usagyuuun Kniffel! It's a multiplayer Yahtzee game with some elements from the "Quan Inc." franchise (Usagyuuun and friends).
This project was a long time coming. Sirhadisen writes:
I started programming back in 1987, but I was too young to comprehend machine code in the limited time I was allowed to sit in front of a 60Hz screen. In April 2022 my nephew found an old book on machine language for the Plus4 and I decided to make up for what I missed in my childhood using the great resources that can be found on the internet nowadays XD.
The result of that work is now here for all to enjoy. Be sure to check it out! |
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| | Sir Knight (Loves) C16 | | Posted by Luca on 2023-02-25 |
 Thee needeth not 32kB to saveth thy beloc'd princess!
C64Mark, the main and most important C16/Plus4 streamer known to date, the versatile C64 and C16 game developer with an attitude for the player-torturing games, the naive consumer of exotic flavoured beers, is back for his C16 sophomore production, dedicated to the not-that-famous Tynesoft classic Sir Knight title.
Basically, Sir Knight C16 fixes the debatable usage of the bitmap graphics which forced the noble predecessor to only work with a minimum memory of 32kB. C64Mark's complete rewriting of the game moves the field of action onto a less wasting screen RAM environment and softsprites, to make your C16 the perfect scenario for your own medieval heroic tale of jumping, dodging, running and princesses-saving.
As sometimes happens, less is more: in less memory, here come more levels (30!) with related names, the proper joystick control it deserved, a vanity board to start a challenge against both your and the other players, a real ending and much more! The addition of well greeted music, jingles and sfx is once again a worthy dmx87's affair.
Who is't'll succede to saveth the princess and triumph in the hisc're board? |
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| | TEDzakking Everywhere | | Posted by Luca on 2023-02-22 |
 Perfecting perfection? Yes, Hermit can! You need to compose sophisticated TED music for your forthcoming productions, but you aren't properly at home, so you can't handy have the proper emulator or the real machine, right? Now you can!
Hermit has released TEDzakker 1.2, the third incarnation of the TED music editor which pushed the sound editing capabilities on the TED machines beyond their limits, easily becoming the darling of 8bit music composers and demo makers. And from this 1.2 version, it's going crossplatform! As you can see into our Tools section, there are now two new distributions of TEDzakker 1.2 to be directly used on modern OSes: TEDzakker WIN for all of you Bill's BFFs, and TEDzakker Linux for the Rebel Alliance out there.
From now, you don't have any valid excuse for not experimenting on in your composing skills: use it literally anywhere. |
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