Re: [stella] H*R RPG Demo

Subject: Re: [stella] H*R RPG Demo
From: Albert Yarusso <albert@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2004 07:43:43 -0600
Hello,

On Mar 24, 2004, at 7:30 AM, Thomas Jentzsch wrote:

Paul wrote:
Cool, glad there was a lot of interest! Unfortunately, that was the demo
from the Austin Gaming Expo and not the latest one. There were some weird
problems getting the latest one working on a real board. The new demo is
attached (and it works fine on Z26 and my Cuttle Cart).

What is happening on a real board? Maybe, if you post the sourcecode we could help you.

We build two boards before the show. The demo running on the first board would crash after taking a few steps in the map. You'd just get a black screen and the game was frozen. I'm glad I actually tried it out before leaving it running on a demo machine. :) The second board we built exhibited a different problem--when you press the button from the title screen to play, the map would consist of you in the middle of a sea of water, and no other types of tiles. This prevented you from moving at all. You could still bring up the spiffy inventory screen by pressing (I believe) the joystick button. I tried these on several different 2600 systems and the same behavior was exhibited on all of them (so it wasn't a system-specific issue). Also, the parts used to build both boards were the same--same type of PLD, same type of EPROM, and the same discrete parts, so the actual hardware shouldn't account for the difference we saw in the two different carts.


After the second bad board, I figured something was amiss and couldn't afford to take any time troubleshooting it before the show. Fortunately, Paul send me the old demo and I was able to make a cartridge of that Saturday night. Since many people attending PC5 had not seen this demo, it was still good to have on hand, and we had it running on a 56" Sony television at the front of our booth (facing into the crowd, and visible from the entrance!) I think more people asked me about the Homestar Runner game than anything else. ;)

..Al

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