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Posted By
Lavina
on 2018-08-06
09:42:32
 |  Re: Baby Berks on Atari 8bit
It is good news, it means that the master is active on the retro scene. Might be a good idea to encourage him to turn his attention to our machine again. 
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Posted By
Rüdiger
on 2018-08-06
13:24:05
| Re: Baby Berks on Atari 8bit
I currently have contact with Jon Williams through the Forum of AtariAge. It will soon be followed by information from himself.
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Posted By
nojeee
on 2018-08-08
13:46:47
| Re: Baby Berks on Atari 8bit
I've been really pleased to see what a great community the Plus 4 has after all of these years.
I recently managed to rescue all of my old source code from the 1980's and converted it to assemble with the WUDSN PC IDE. How things have changed! It's so much easier to write and test code now.
Anyway, I just wanted to say a quick hello.
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Posted By
Gaia
on 2018-08-08
17:59:56
| Re: Baby Berks on Atari 8bit
Holy moly, Mr Jon Williams himself...! What a great moment, great to see you here in our humble shrine  Berks and Major Blink were two of the first games I have ever played with on the Commodore 16 and now you're here! Warm welcome, make yourself comfortable
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Posted By
Acrid
on 2018-08-09
06:55:37
| Re: Baby Berks on Atari 8bit
Wow! Hi, Jon. Great to see you here. I love your games and they are part of a video, which I made a few months ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hw4LNTvkpkc
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Posted By
Csabo
on 2018-08-09
09:15:58
| Re: Baby Berks on Atari 8bit
Acrid, you could have added the timestamp to your video, Berks and the rest starts at 13:30. Nicely done BTW, I don't speak German but I understood "sehr, sehr schön"
Playing Major Blink is one of my earliest memories with the C16. IMHO it's a perfect game; smooth controls, good sounds, colorful graphics and most of all fun! I guess I also just want to say: "thanks for the games and the memories".
(BTW, to the rest of you guys, the HOF awaits your scores!)
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Posted By
nojeee
on 2018-08-09
10:10:38
| Re: Baby Berks on Atari 8bit
Thanks for the kind words, I'm flattered that the games were included in the video.
I have to say, I've just run some of the demos on here and I'm still trying to work out how they were done! There are some very clever people around.
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Posted By
Lavina
on 2018-08-09
11:14:44
| Re: Baby Berks on Atari 8bit
I can't express my feelings properly seeing here the living gods. So here is an anecdote.
Shortly after we bought our Plus4 (not from Vienna but already at Budapest just as it got deleted from the COCOM list) I woke up once in the middle of the night. There was a loud, awful noise from next door where my plus4 was. I went to see what was happening. It turned out that it was my father playing Major Blink and hitting SPACE like hell. The button still works, crazy how much it can endure!
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Posted By
carrion
on 2018-08-09
11:31:35
 | Re: Baby Berks on Atari 8bit
believe it or not only game my father played ever was Major Blink.
and actually he was quite good at it
we had C1116 at that time - my first computer ever 
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Posted By
MMS
on 2018-08-09
11:39:54
 | Re: Baby Berks on Atari 8bit
Hi Jon,
Thank you checking out this scene too! Major Blink was one of my early favourites! For me it was a rather challenging game...
Even now, I am not too good :-)
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Posted By
Lavina
on 2018-08-09
14:50:23
| Re: Baby Berks on Atari 8bit
Can we ever hope for a return from Jon just like from Doug??
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Posted By
Ati
on 2018-08-10
06:57:59
| Re: Baby Berks on Atari 8bit
Hi Jon! I'm a long-time plus4 user, and I'm a new Atari 800xl owner. I'm happy, I can play with a classic Plus/4 game on Atari. Thank you. I tried wudsn too, it's very professional stuff. Could you port another of your old Plus/4 games to Atari?
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Posted By
nojeee
on 2018-08-10
12:57:16
| Re: Baby Berks on Atari 8bit
I'm so glad people liked Major Blink as that was quite different from the other Berks games. I'm probably going to do a quick conversion of Major Blink to the Atari 8 bit in order to get back up to speed with the 6502. I was then thinking of writing an expanded version of Berks 3 (Berks 4?) that would make use of the extra memory of the Plus 4. I was always annoyed that I was only asked to write for the limited memory on the C16.
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Posted By
Csabo
on 2018-08-10
14:38:09
| Re: Baby Berks on Atari 8bit
Is it weird that reading the above post makes me so supremely happy?
Yes, Berks 4, using the full 64K... Pretty please!
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Posted By
Gaia
on 2018-08-11
04:43:25
| Re: Baby Berks on Atari 8bit
Although I liked Major Blink I have to add that my actual favourite was Timeslip what a game! And what a well fitted feast of colours! Actually I've always been contemplating whether or not some of the objects were originally meant to be in multicolor (rather than hires)?
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Posted By
nojeee
on 2018-08-11
05:56:52
| Re: Baby Berks on Atari 8bit
Well spotted ... the trees were designed to be multicolor - I've no idea why that wasn't noticed at the time.
When I played it again recently I found it SO hard and wished I'd made it easier. With later games I would gradually ramp up the difficulty to give a more balanced experience.
The Atari version made use of their hardware Player/Missiles for the main objects which allowed the player to adjust their position right and left within a small window of movement. It did make it slightly easier. I also added some gradients to the background colours on the Atari which I really should have done on the original C16. It was probably all down to available memory ... I know it was a struggle getting it to fit.
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Posted By
Lavina
on 2018-08-11
07:34:26
| Re: Baby Berks on Atari 8bit
Timeslip was way too difficult for me. Berks III, I have always liked the mission style gameplay. Even now every one or two years I complete that mission. It is still big fun. So I am thrilled and chilled to the bone to hear about Berks IV! Wow.
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Posted By
KiCHY
on 2018-08-11
15:35:39
| Re: Baby Berks on Atari 8bit
Sorry guys, I can't resist
http://kichydesign.blogspot.com/2018/03/timeslip-wannabe-remastered.html
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Posted By
Gaia
on 2018-08-11
16:26:43
| Re: Baby Berks on Atari 8bit
@Kichy: ah that was cool indeed
BTW placing
>2F77 6D 6D 6D
in the MONITOR before starting the game will just fix the tree colour to proper multicolour
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Posted By
nojeee
on 2018-08-11
17:58:05
| Re: Baby Berks on Atari 8bit
How on earth did you find that? 
Here's the original .... missing the multicolor bit as you found.
2F76 65 .BYTE $65 ; 24 TREE
2F77 65 .BYTE $65 ; 25 TREE
2F78 65 .BYTE $65 ; 26 TREE
NB: This is from the source I recently converted to assemble in MADS which accounts for it being a slightly different address.
@Kichy: I've just checked and I only had 10 bytes free - which is why there were no background gradients. I must revisit the game (for Plus 4) to add the gradients, make it easier ... and fix the trees
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Posted By
Rüdiger
on 2018-08-13
01:48:08
| Re: Baby Berks on Atari 8bit
About the gameplay at Timeslip: Does the player character in Zone 2 end up with a graphics bug at the end or what does it depend on?
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Posted By
MMS
on 2018-08-13
01:55:21
| Re: Baby Berks on Atari 8bit
BTW when I was a kid I did not understand, how 3 games could fit into the 16K memory? :-)
(unfortunately the game was too hard for me, like many others. It seems I have really slow hands...)
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Posted By
nojeee
on 2018-08-13
09:45:34
| Re: Baby Berks on Atari 8bit
I haven't heard about a graphics bug on Zone 2 (Jet Boot Jack) but would be interested in knowing if there was a problem.
It's clear I made the game a bit too hard
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Posted By
retroscener
on 2018-08-22
10:28:28
 | Re: Baby Berks on Atari 8bit
Timeslip is a bonafide classic. One of the most original shmups I’ve played on any system. I’ve beaten it on Normal difficulty so personally I feel that the difficulty is just right. But then I beat Dirty Den and that’s as tough as old boots.
Graphics are among some of the best I’ve seen on the C16. Didn’t notice any problems with the trees, but a more optimised remastered version would be great.
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