News

That is what happened on Pieces II this month:

NTSC fix finalized

Pressing space bar after entering player’s name for hi-scores did not work… Now it has been fixed!

Fixed correct message displaying of “Game Over”/”Well Done” in “The End” part

Entering player’s name for hi-score froze the game when a name was first typed, then deleted, and then confirmed by pressing the “RETURN” key – fixed!

Removed annoying blinking in the text area of “The End” part after user entered his name for hi-scores

Info screen and Protovision intro added

Successfully tested on the following hardware: C64 (PAL) with 1541, Oceanic, 1581, CMD-FD, CMD-HD, 1541U, IDE64; C128D (PAL) as well as C64 (NTSC) with 1541.

The Preview has been released by now and can be downloaded from CSDb.
Playing is done with a joystick in port 2. Alternatively, control also works via keyboard (WSAD keys and space bar). If you get stuck, you can give up the current attempt by pressing RUN/STOP.
Please feel free to leave comments at the CSDb entry.
CSDb entry

Tags: Games, Pieces II

Issue 10/2010 of the German language consoles mag “GamePro” (will be published in early September) includes an article called “Neue Spiele auf alten Konsolen” (“New games on old consoles”).
On four pages there will be an overview on games as well as three interviews, with Milo Mundt (MacGyver) of Protovision and Jason Mackenzie (Kenz) of Psytronik, among the rest.
The Cover DVD will be including a new, previously unreleased trailer for Protovision’s Jump’n'Run hit It’s Magic 2, created by Oliver Förster (Poison).

You can order the magazine as a trial issue under www.gamepro.de/shop now. Note, this leads to a subscription if you do not cancel within two weeks after receipt of the trial issue.

After the hardware section the time has come to relaunch the games section of our homepage as well. The links have experienced some small updates, too. Check it out:

• Games section
• Links section

Tags: Homepage

Last weekend GamesCom expo has been held in Cologne, Germany, where the RETURN magazine had a stall of its own. Among other games, Bomb Mania was running there, and again it proved to be a hit!
As part of the broadcast “Neues” (“News”) by the German language TV station 3sat, there is a video report entitled “Gegen den Trend” (“Against the trend”) featuring an interview with sign-set (Frank Erstling) from RETURN, and besides, one sees the Return stand and also Bomb Mania for a moment.
www.3sat.de/webtv/?100822_gegentrend_nes.rm

Further impressionens:
RETURN homepage
Clip by Videofreak
Photos by Brainstorm
RETURN at GamesCom – Forum64 thread (Viewing photos requires to have an account.)

Tags: Bomb Mania, Games

The “Contiki 2.4 binary release for Retrocomputing” has been released. It is available at

http://cbm8bit.com/contiki/

and at

http://a2retrosystems.com/contiki.html

This release was built using cc65 2.13.2 from (modified) Contiki 2.4 sources. The orginal sources are available at

http://sourceforge.net/projects/contiki/files/Contiki/Contiki%202.4/contiki-2.4.zip/download

and the modifications at

http://cbm8bit.com/contiki/contiki-2.4-addon.zip

Contiki 1.x integrated all programs into a common GUI as windows. Very cool but very complex to write programs for. In fact there was never a Contiki 1.x GUI program which was not developed by the Contiki core team – and as the Contiki core team doesn’t develop GUI programs anymore Contiki 1.x was sort of a deadend street.

So in order to ease development of 3rd-party Contiki program Oliver Schmidt modified Contiki 2.x to focus on individual standalone programs with a fullscreen GUI. This simplification significantly reduced the memory consumption thus allowing to replace custom “hacks” with generic cc65 components:
- C-library startup code
- Linker config file
- CONIO library
- Mouse driver

As a result, Contiki 2.x contains only very little assembler coding and even less target-specific assembler coding. This allowed for easy porting to targets beside the C64 namely the C128 and Apple II. Porting to other cc65 targets wasn’t done due to missing Ethernet hardware.

Contiki 2.4 is the first 2.x release to contain the following programs:
- dhcp client
- web server
- web browser
- wget
- smtp client
- irc client
- Twitter client

The Twitter client called BREADBOX64 proves that the Contiki 2.x approach was actual successful as it was independently developed by the 3rd-party developer Johan Van den Brande.

Another contribution to this release worthwhile mentioning is the CBM filesystem implemented by Soci which is both very compact and includes fast IDE64 I/O support on the C64.

Ontop of lots of other improvements, especially the following issues were fixed:
- Malfunctioning DNS lookup
- Missing PETSCII conversion for the smtp credentials
- Incorrect fixing of all disk I/O to drive 8

Tags: Hardware, RR-Net

Here is what Pawel has managed to accomplish this weekend:

Support for alternative device numbers (removed all hard-coded references to device #8)

IDE64 compatibility (verified on real hardware with Pawel’s own IDE64 device)

Removed some flickering at the lower border, which appeared on a C64C and has been a little disturbing

Tags: Games, Pieces II

NTSC fixing of Pieces II is almost done. Pawel has been testing the game today after the changes he made to the code, and it all seems good.

Tags: Games, Pieces II

Pawel has done another small fix for Oxyron’s game today. Namely, he has fixed the situation when the “hi.scores” file has been deleted from disk accidentally (or on purpose? ). Previously in such situation random characters were displayed on the screen and the whole high scores file handling (loading/saving) was broken. Now even if there is no such file on the disk, everything will work as it should (default hi-score data is kept in memory).

Tags: Games, Pieces II

Here is a summary of what Pawel has done on Pieces II last weekend:

Now using the Covert Bitops loader system (so that we can be compatible to most drives and NTSC)

Fixed a bug in the preview reported previously by JTR: “I played through all levels, entered my name into the highscore list and returned to the main menu. Now I cannot restart the game! It does not react on my fire button anymore! I think that’s a bug.”

Work on NTSC fixing the game has now begun.

Tags: Games, Pieces II

Oxyron has been hard-working! The following features have been implemented into Pieces II:

Possibility of using keyboard in addition to joystick (WSAD keys + space bar). Since space bar is now emulating joystick fire button, to give up a level you must now press RUN/STOP instead of space bar.

In the title screen, the 1×2 single color hires font has been replaced with a new 1×2 multicolor charset by Timo, see the new animated screenshot at www.protovision-previews.de.

More fixes are to come: The next task Pawel is going to work on is installing a decent IRQ loader system.

Tags: Games, Pieces II