Niklas Jansson
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Galactic Adventures & Atari XE
🕑 Added 2024-03-19 21:08:54 +0000 UTCI finally drew some Galactic Adventures stuff. The lore for these aliens is a bit too full of silly references, but here's some excerpts from the manual anyways:
>>>EDIT: Added the Cygnian bigbird and fixed some stuff.
Cygnian Str-10, Dex-16, End-5, Spd-5, Int-19, Sen-7
The Cygnians are essentially 2 meter tall, brightly colored, thin, flightless birds. Their vestigal wings are now used only for display. To get some idea of the effect of a Cygnian in display, it should be noted that "feelies" of a Cygnian in display have been banned in three systems as an illegal narcotic. The Cygnians have come to be known as the practical jokers of the Galaxy, which is somewhat unfair, since ‘joking" is the highest value of Cygnian culture. This value does not, however, extend to the battlefield.
Froglodyte: Str-16, Dex-10, End-7, Spd-3, Int-16, Sen-1
Froglodytes are the one intelligent amphibian species. They are bipeds and have two long arms, but in addition, they have 2 short swimming arms and a retractable back fin. Froglodytes are mostly green and brown, but many have bright yellow and red markings. They are shorter than humans but much more massive. Froglodytes are great acrobats and have tongues that are capable of playing Beethoven's Emperor Concerto while standing 5' away from the piano.
Wodanite: Str-16, Dex-10, End-5, Spd-4, Int-10, Sen-16
The Wodanites are a genetic offshoot of the human race. Wodanites are slightly bigger than humans since their colony bred for strength over dexterity. Their culture is modeled on the Vikings, and through genetic enginnering, all Wodanites have large, real horns growing out of their heads. Their Viking culture is, of course, replete with a variety of "creative anachronisms", such as energy weapons, food synthesizers, and android wolves roaming the countryside. The Wodanites believe that the use of phasor weapons is a sign of cowardice.
Koraci: Str-7, Dex-19, End-4, Spd-6, Int-13, Sen-19
The small, fast Koraci average about 1 meter in height They are mostly purple and all three sexes have 7-10' long feathery sense organs growing out of the top of their slightly triangular heads. The Koraci have just recently invited human scientists to study their most secret social custom, the Death Party. Koraci believe that the high point of Galactic culture is found in Flash Gordon serials. Koraci tend to live fast, furious, and short lives.
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The Atari XE/ST cases were probably the best looking non-Japanese cases, aside from maybe the ZX Spectrum. I made this super compact version based on the Atari 65/130 XE. It was a C64-like machine (e.g. wide pixels) but capable of doing some copper/DisplayList effects, albeit with rather garish colours.
I don't really know much about the machine so I came up with some haphazard and generous specs for this instead. Went for low spec graphics and high end processing, a bit like with the Pico-8. 32 colours is a pretty nice restriction, whereas 256 feels like a bit of a burden to even set up well. However, since 32 colours is 5-bit it's tough to structure in memory without resorting to bitplanes... but I suppose one could pack/mask 6 pixels into a 32 bit word, with 2 bits probably wasted. This unfortunately means a bunch of coordinate division by 6 might happen (/8 is just a cheap bitshift). There's probably a reason why no one does things this way.
The RISC-V processors are interesting because the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) is open (unlike ARM, x86, etc), though I'd probably prefer to program them using something like Flat Assembler rather than using getting tangled with the raw confusing instruction names and syntaxes. Actually I'd rather avoid asm altogether.
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Also came across the Kolibri OS, which is a fully featured x86 OS (+productivity software and games) which fits compressed on a PC floppy and runs on old 8 MB PCs. A lot of enthusiast OSes are actually quite nice but sadly fail because the web has featurecreeped so far it's tough for a browser to even display text and images now.
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Oh, I just noticed that the Runequest /Chaosium guys have a little contest/sponsorship thingy for their D100 system, so maybe I should submit my Mutoid project...?
Comments
Andy Hu
Huge Atari guy here. The Atari 8-bit line is quite like the Amiga, minus the copper, and the blitter. Graphics mode is a chunky bitmap engine with 2 or 4 colors, at 320x200 or 160x200 respectively (line number is actually programmable). A narrow screen mode shrinks horizontal resolution to 256/128 wide (overscan) mode expands it to 384/192. The biggest bottleneck is 4 total on screen colors. Therefore, palette change using line interrupt is common practice on Atari. The palette uses top 4 bits to select one of 16 hues and bottom 4 bits are used to select 1 of 16 brightnesses. By cycling through the hue every scanline, one can create a rainbow effect at virtually no cost. Therefore, rainbow effects are VERY common among Atari 8-bit games and demos.
