So a couple weeks ago Matt Scott, a friend of mine who developed Lynx music for tons of released and unreleased games sent me some Lynx ROMs he found on floppies. This stuff always gets me excited. One was the Simpsons digitized sound demo the other was 720WS.ROM. I knew that 720 was in development while I was there (the coin op was in my office) and I got very excited thinking we might have an unreleased partially done ROM but you can't just run unprotected ROMs in Handy. I asked for some help in another thread and LX.NET introduced me to Harry_Dodgson. They helped me preview the ROMS in Handy and I now understand that they are both already in circulation. The 720WS.ROM is a silent display of just the skateboard character in the center of the screen rotatable with the joypad, but what happened next was awesome...
Some of you may recall that I went to great lengths to recover the RoadBlasters, Toki, and S.T.U.N. Runner source materials in 2011 (http://atariage.com/forums/topic/188836-some-pretty-awesome-graphics-for-the-lynx/page__st__25#entry2413123). After recovering those materials I recovered other batches of Amiga floppies with adfread, cleaning disks with alcohol, adapting my ruby script to extract files and folders from the various versions of Quarterback used to create the opaque disk images, and after all that I had the source code and .bin files for all the technology prototypes I developed.
I wanted to view the prototypes on Handy but they were in BIN format. For 22 years, the only way to see these demos was on a single VHS tape I made of them in 1991. Harry gave me a tool he wrote to convert .BIN to .O which Handy can read, but it didn't work, so he sent me the source. It was done a long time ago in a unix/mac/pc cross platform dialect of C that Visual Studio didn't like but the code was straight forward, well written and documented so I ported it over to standard C. I discovered that Handy jumps to the first byte loaded from a .O file and my code was written using several blocks with the start address typically somewhere in the middle, so I added code to patch the binary adding a 3 byte JMP START at the beginning of the code where needed (along with a couple other technical tweaks) and VOILA! My demos were now runnable on the Lynx! I can't tell you how exciting it is for me to see these demos come to life. These were all exploratory Lynx technologies I wrote for game concepts or just for fun that never found their way into released products (other than the sound drivers).
Here are the highlights of my exploits...
abtest0.bin.o was a true 3D drawing test (as opposed to pseudo 3D used in RoadBlasters and S.T.U.N. Runner) for a game idea called Alien Brigade, that temporary artwork is my head. The source is dated 11/20/91.
fractest0.bin.o, fractest2.bin.o, and fractest3.bin.o are fractal tests. I loved Rescue at Fractalus and wanted to do a terrain based game but that code was too slow. Source dated 11/18/91
polytest.bin.o is a combination of my triangle rendering routine and my Quartet digitized sample midi music driver, press a button to start the music.
quartest.bin.o is a simple sprite test and my Quartet digitized sample midi music driver, press a button to start the music.
rottest0.bin.o a sprite rotation test. Sprites can be skewed vertically and horizontally which is all that is needed to pseudo rotate a sprite up to 45 degrees. it is undated but was probably done around the time I did RoadBlasters.
showfroggy.bin.o shows a full color picture of a frog by multiplexing 4 bit (16 shade) red, green, and blue images. It looks better on LCD, I wish Handy had a "phosphor" setting that would simulate LCD ghosting. If I were to try to do it again, I would do it a different way.
testspri2.bin is a simple sprite test with my multivoice 7 bit digitized sound driver I wrote for Al Baker 7/12/1990, either for Pit Fighter or Bill & Ted. Pressing any button plays voices saying "replay", button A plays at subsequently higher pitches, B plays subsequently lower pitches.
textdemo.bin.o is a text demo I used to explore trying to improve text appearance by attempting to take advantage of the color masked pixels on the LCD to try to effectively triple the horizontal display resolution. Windows clear type does this for LCD displays now, I should have patented that one (http://www.microsoft...arTypeInfo.mspx). It is undated, I was inspired when I put the LCD into an unsupported monochrome mode - it looked terrible otherwise.
:-)
Some of you may recall that I went to great lengths to recover the RoadBlasters, Toki, and S.T.U.N. Runner source materials in 2011 (http://atariage.com/forums/topic/188836-some-pretty-awesome-graphics-for-the-lynx/page__st__25#entry2413123). After recovering those materials I recovered other batches of Amiga floppies with adfread, cleaning disks with alcohol, adapting my ruby script to extract files and folders from the various versions of Quarterback used to create the opaque disk images, and after all that I had the source code and .bin files for all the technology prototypes I developed.
I wanted to view the prototypes on Handy but they were in BIN format. For 22 years, the only way to see these demos was on a single VHS tape I made of them in 1991. Harry gave me a tool he wrote to convert .BIN to .O which Handy can read, but it didn't work, so he sent me the source. It was done a long time ago in a unix/mac/pc cross platform dialect of C that Visual Studio didn't like but the code was straight forward, well written and documented so I ported it over to standard C. I discovered that Handy jumps to the first byte loaded from a .O file and my code was written using several blocks with the start address typically somewhere in the middle, so I added code to patch the binary adding a 3 byte JMP START at the beginning of the code where needed (along with a couple other technical tweaks) and VOILA! My demos were now runnable on the Lynx! I can't tell you how exciting it is for me to see these demos come to life. These were all exploratory Lynx technologies I wrote for game concepts or just for fun that never found their way into released products (other than the sound drivers).
Here are the highlights of my exploits...
abtest0.bin.o was a true 3D drawing test (as opposed to pseudo 3D used in RoadBlasters and S.T.U.N. Runner) for a game idea called Alien Brigade, that temporary artwork is my head. The source is dated 11/20/91.
fractest0.bin.o, fractest2.bin.o, and fractest3.bin.o are fractal tests. I loved Rescue at Fractalus and wanted to do a terrain based game but that code was too slow. Source dated 11/18/91
polytest.bin.o is a combination of my triangle rendering routine and my Quartet digitized sample midi music driver, press a button to start the music.
quartest.bin.o is a simple sprite test and my Quartet digitized sample midi music driver, press a button to start the music.
rottest0.bin.o a sprite rotation test. Sprites can be skewed vertically and horizontally which is all that is needed to pseudo rotate a sprite up to 45 degrees. it is undated but was probably done around the time I did RoadBlasters.
showfroggy.bin.o shows a full color picture of a frog by multiplexing 4 bit (16 shade) red, green, and blue images. It looks better on LCD, I wish Handy had a "phosphor" setting that would simulate LCD ghosting. If I were to try to do it again, I would do it a different way.
testspri2.bin is a simple sprite test with my multivoice 7 bit digitized sound driver I wrote for Al Baker 7/12/1990, either for Pit Fighter or Bill & Ted. Pressing any button plays voices saying "replay", button A plays at subsequently higher pitches, B plays subsequently lower pitches.
textdemo.bin.o is a text demo I used to explore trying to improve text appearance by attempting to take advantage of the color masked pixels on the LCD to try to effectively triple the horizontal display resolution. Windows clear type does this for LCD displays now, I should have patented that one (http://www.microsoft...arTypeInfo.mspx). It is undated, I was inspired when I put the LCD into an unsupported monochrome mode - it looked terrible otherwise.
:-)
Attached Files
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DScottWilliamsonLynxTechTests.zip 77.71K
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