CommoDOre what NintenDONT! 😁

@@talideon bahahahah … good one ☝️

It isn't. Genesis does, Genesis.

came for this comment

@@talideon @Vandalyst Here, you both won the internet this week.

'blitter like' functionality provided by that expansion does really help a lot for making this possible. That would actually be fast enough to do realtime streaming of full motion video (just limited to 16 colors) which has actually been demonstrated in late 1985 already.

​@@c128stuff Is REU able to blit data to SID?

@@archieil yes, but you can't really pace at what rate it does that. So you could write approx 1mbyte/sec to a sid register, or to a cia register or vic2 register. You can also speed up writing all registers, or a select region of registers of all those chips. You can't do DMA to the cpu gpio registers at $00 and $01, beyond that, iirc there aren't any io registers you cannot access through DMA on a c64. On a c128 not all io registers are accessible with DMA, specifically the registers of VDC, and if I'm not mistaken the mmu, are inaccessible with DMA. The 1541 Ultimate cartridge and its successors use DMA for all register read/write operations when the 64 or 128 is 'frozen', which only works because all the io registers it needs can be used with DMA (not strictly true when using it on a c128 in 128 mode).

Honestly there's a lot that can be done with computers that we don't think are possible, people just don't put in the effort to optimize nowadays

hopefully will influence other C64 game authors to embrace the REU and start capitalizing on the extra memory and the DMA - could lead to a new era of C64 game play given what is evident in this Hedgehog port

Hell yeah!!

It certainly blasts every older way of doing this out of the water.. ;-)

the DMA is literally what blast processing actually is (on the genesis) so, yes

And Wintels don't!! (Ported from quote "Ninten-don't!")

Commie is in China dude. Not a great name

It was because Bob Yannes was a synthesizer enthusiast and knew what a proper synthesizer needed, waveforms, filter, ADSR, PWM, ring mod, etc... All the other sound chips around for the most part were designed by people who didn't know anything about electronic music, so they tended to just add square waves and a noise generator, nothing more. When Bob and some of his colleagues left Commodore they were going to do another computer but Jack Tramiel threaten to sue them if they did. So they set up Ensoniq and made synthesizers and samplers instead. The ideas Bob had for the SID which he couldn't get working ended up being realised at Ensoniq in the form of the DOC chip, a very versatile sound chip that was used in the ESQ-1 and the Mirage, it eventually made its way into the Apple II GS.

Hey another LTK BBS operator, we are a pretty rare breed. I too started with a REU to load all my pfile in before upgrading to C-Net 128 and a 20MB LTK. Man I wish I hadn't sold that drive now.

SID was a great sound chip but was not far ahead from the competition. The Pokey Chip that came 3 years earlier still shows off its teeth with its ability to emulate SID and to produce superior SFX and polyphony with 4 channels. I think its more a matter of preference without denying the more modern technical characteristics of the SID chip.

@@retrobitstv Me too. There's not a single video about it on youtube. It was a neat little piece of hardware. 20 megs on a commie 64? Yes pls. And it loaded FAST. I ran Image BBS, and with the memory card thing, would take about 45 mins to boot the board, cuz I would hafta lkoad the card up from floppy. but the Lt Kernal was 123, up and running. PLus you could multiplex it.

Thanks, same to you!

Thanks! I really do hope there's a patch in the future. I couldn't get it to play for more than a second or two on my 128 before it locked up using either the 1750 or UII+ REU. Others on Lemon64 have reported more luck, but the majority are in the same camp as us. Looking forward to your review!

The aspect ratio is wrongly though: You can tell because Sonic is not a circle when he's rotationg

@@souljastation5463 There was never a "correct" aspect ratio on the Commodore 64. PAL and NTSC TVs were slightly different sizes, and with 16:9 monitors now, things are even more confusing. However, the pixels were never square on my 64 or 128; they are slightly taller than wide. So anything that's square geometrically will be "skinny" on a 4:3 monitor and "fat" on a 16:9 panel. It's only "square" when mapped on 1:1 (which is actually incorrect.) It looks to me like he's capturing it correctly here, which will result in circles being slightly "oval."

Hey, I have a beamrider board. This corrects issues like that because it gives the 6567 it's own local bus getting rid of badlines problems. I will try it on my C64. I hadn't even installed it because I didn't really have a reason. This is definitely a reason to do it! If it allows the game to run smoothly on NTSC, I'll post back here. If it works, you may want to spring for one from protovision. I got it because of 'super CPU syndrome'. That fear that you'll really want that obscure performance boosting item one day and it won't be available anymore...so you just hope to find one at an outrageous price at some point in the future. I got it for this very reason. It would make codefixing games very easy.

​@@souljastation5463 Right, the video seems to be 4:3, while the 'native' ratio is rather 16:10, according to 320x200 resolution (borderless "Hires" mode). Now it gets a bit complicated: On a 'classic' TV or Monitor, the 64's display area (320x200) sits inside a 4:3 (13.333:10) frame, known as border area of 384x272 pixels (PAL). Since the hires pixels were slightly 'talled', I estimate the effective ratio of the display area at around 15:10, respectively 3:2. If this is true, a 3:2 aspect video would show an undistorted view of the 'real', borderless C64 display.

It runs great in emulation!

@@retrobitstv Lets see if the Mister can handle this ^^

Same to you!

Thanks, glad you enjoyed it and welcome :)

Geos doesn't even do anything, stop larping

@@AgeofReason GOES memory expanders do something. They add more memory as the name implies. As I said, they do not have the REC chip's dazzling speed, but what you may not know is that the memory is addressable in one block pages. While no one did anything with this other than move the blocks for memory swapping or make ram drives, that doesn't mean no one can. GEObasic is one example. I had to disassemble it to learn the commands. It allows for almost instant access to programs once loaded into memory and saved to ram. Do you even know what LARPing means? i don't think you do. It's an acronym for Live Action Role Play.

Its not entirely a fair comparison tho. The hardware expansion required for this was introduced in 1985, and enables some very nice tricks to help overcome the lack of cpu power and limited hardware scrolling. Its not unthinkable a much better outrun version can be created like this as well. Problem in the 1980s was that few people owned such an expansion, but that has changed somewhat in the last decade, and of course emulators do emulate that expansion.

@@c128stuff most of the difference is really down to bad art on the C64. *Most* of the art in Europe on the 64 was created by teens and/or people with limited interest in and knowledge of graphic design. Console games was made by grown arse people with degrees and huge budgets. That’s why some of the early C64 games looks so surprisingly good. Because the 64 was the shit, and there was prestige and money in pushing the envelope on the platform.

@@Frisenette grown up people know how to make an argument without having to resort to the language and way of formulating that you did here. Go grow up and don't come back until you can make your argument in a normal way. As to your 'argument'.. in the early days of the 64, there were no big budget game developers, not on the 64, not on consoles. Many games during those days were indeed made by 'bedroom coders', on the 64 and consoles alike. by 1986 that had changed a lot. In case of outrun.. that is a release from a big budget developer not wanting to spend too much on ports, but also simply a matter of technical capabilities of the machine. If you go look at lots of the existing work of later 80s c64 coders which got released into the demo scene, you'd have found out artistic ability, knowledge of graphics etc, was quite present, among the exact same people who made many of the later European C64 releases. What is more, it is almost exclusively ports of 'big budget' games which suffer from bad graphics, sloppy coding, and overall not having spent the attention and budget to make it a good game, just hoping on the name selling it anyway.

@@c128stuff I take it you are playing prude with my use of “arse” and “ shit”? Grown up people are not overbearing and patronizing. That’s for smug children. Nintendo, Namco, Capcom and Sega etc. all where big budget game studios. Not as big budget as today of course. But just take Miyamoto, he has an actual design degree. I’m not saying there aren’t good looking games on the 64. Of course not. They are just few and far between. And more often than not what makes a game good looking is not code (though it can certainly help) but a deep grok of the limitations of the platforms graphics modes and how to work with them instead of against them. Plus great taste and knowledge of art going outside pixel art. Paradroid is an example of a such a game. Beautiful and very simple. Outrun for example could easily have looked much much better, as perfectly evidenced by Outrun Europe. Far better but I think it could have been even better than that in fact.

@@Frisenette "Grown up people are not overbearing and patronizing" Good call, now look in the mirror and take some of your own medicine. Outlook could have looked better? sure, not arguing that. But it was someone not wanting to pay for that, and not lack of ability of C64 game developers in general. For that matter, virtually all of the 8 bit versions were crap, unlike most 16 bit versions. It so happens many of the people who did c64 ports also did Amiga ports of things. They all of a sudden learned to be professional artisians and programmers? Sorry that makes totally no sense whatsoever. Most, but certainly not all 64 ports of games were better than outrun, but many 'quick' ports of arcade games were marginal still. Many original games were far from crap. Curiously, there is quite a lot of overlap in the people involved in those. For the record, I know a lot of people who were involved in such ports and originals, have had some involvement in it myself also. Budgets and wanting to cheaply have the title, regardless of quality, and selling just based on the name was far from unusual, and explains many of the marginal ports much much better than anything you have written. And just a suggestion.. demos also involve code, sure, but many of them involve art, both graphics and sound. Additionally, working around the system limitations requires very good coding skills, not just knowledge of those limitations and of graphics. I'm still involved in those things on 8 bit platforms, just like the people who created this version of Sonic.

Glad you enjoyed it!

Remember the Mario reskin of Giana Sisters?

Thanks for the update! I wasn't able to get 1.1 to work on my C128 with either 1570 or UII+ REU, and I don't have a SCPU. I do need to try 1.2 at some point. Agreed, I was perfectly happy running it on a breadbin though, even with a few graphical/sound glitches the game played really well!

I look forward to seeing what others will do with the REU now that the gauntlet has been thrown down!

@th And the NES does not have a mapper. But who is complaining about those built onto every second cartridge.

@th Replace the first '.' with a ':' and your comment makes that much more sense... 😁

@th they're not prepared for reality. As long as they can fanboy larp online there's no hope for them.

@th all I know is I liked your show and some of these comments. Did you code this sonic port? I don't think you said you did but I may have missed something. I was on the bus afterall.

Champ Games are using an ARM chip in their cartridges so that’s what’s doing the heavy lifting, not the original 2600 hardware. Mind you, Activision started that process with their cart-based DPC chip for Pitfall 2 back in the day. Since it’s not economical to reproduce the chip today, the enthusiasts at AtariAge decided to first use a cheap ARM to emulate the DPC. But others have since decided to fully embrace modern ARM capabilities in order to do things on the platform that were impossible to do back then.

You'll have to enable the REU option using a filename flag. The R5 flag enables the 512KB REU emulation.

I sure hope so. Commodore themselves demonstrated DMA-based graphics capabilities with their own Globe demo when they released the REU back in 1985. I'm surprised more devs haven't taken advantage of similar techniques in games/demos until recently, but I'm excited to see what comes next. Maybe an inexpensive 3rd party REU cart for the masses too? 🤞

Well, it is based on the original data. The map layouts are mostly identical to the Master System version. I did some changes in parts where tile combinations where obviously rushed (for examples stones that were cut in half), but no map data corresponding the gameplay. I modified unused tiles and the charsets because of c64-specific restrictions - mostly because of the animations and the mix of hires and multicolor modes.

You can't. It has to be a modified c64. This is important to keep noted.

kzfaq.info/get/bejne/bqp-rKtlmrObgH0.html :)

@@retrobitstv thank you soooooo much!!!

re: Starfox, check out the recent release for c64 called Gates of the Ancient - it doesn't do anything fancy with REU tricks, but imagine what could be done with that game engine + 512k of RAM and DMA. Bitmap textures maybe?

@@retrobitstv I'd just be amazed with a good use of vector graphics. I used to see so many amazing tricks with the Amiga's Blitter chip, surely there, must be a way of replicating something with this hardware. I recall the BBC Microcomputer could do vector graphics quite well given its limitations. Elite did well. Personally, I like this limitation

One stage would be about 2 or 3 screens long due to memory constraints, lol Probably have a separate disk for each stage/boss! 🤣🤣🤣

The game only requires one button (jump) so pretty much anything will do!

Download link in description also has a .sid file of the game soundtrack!

minimum firmware version 1.5.1 and adding _R5 (number depends on the REU memory) to the filename

Use a 16:9 monitor?

@@Frisenette I hate that you're taking for granted that a display having a certain aspect ratio implies that the input will be stretched to fill that screen, input aspect be darned -- but that's not a dig on you; I hate the REASON you're taking that for granted: This kind of crappy display (firmware) design is frightfully common, and often impossible to override even if you know what you're doing.

None of my real hardware have dual SIDs, but the MiSTer core and UII+ cart can both emulate a second chip. Not sure the game actually supports two or not, it was never mentioned by the devs that I know of. PAL machines only have to render 50 frames per second versus NTSC's 60, so even tho the CPUs are slightly slower, they have more cycles per frame to get things done. Since everything's timed to the refresh rate of the display, the gameplay and music are just about 17% slower on PAL machines. The 8726 has DMA capability, so while perhaps it was not designed to be used in this fashion, the game devs are using it much like a blitter to move graphics data around at high speeds. Not the first use of the device this way, but maybe the most advanced we've seen so far?

😜

Check out the download link in the description, it includes a .sid file of the soundtrack!

It will work, but the Genesis pad can damage the 64 in certain cases. When used with an adapter like the 64JPX, it's safe to use and the other buttons can be mapped to different functions.

Mega Drive*

The rings are essentially your "health", so you pick them up when you need them, but generally try to finish the level as quickly as possible (to get a time bonus). And you try to keep as many rings as possible, because if you have 50-99 at the end of the level, you get a bonus stage...