| 16-Aug-04 |
Atari XL/XE Space Harrier Conversion Project
| Latest | Feb-09 | Mar-08 | Mar-07 | Aug-06 | May-05 | Feb-05 | Oct-04 | Aug-04 |
| Dec-03 | Jul-03 | Mar-03 | Jan-03 | Dec-02 | Jun-02 | Apr-02 |
27th Dec 2002
The past six months or so there have been too many other things going on for me to give an awful lot of time to Space Harrier. Things like me being ill for ages and massive changerounds and redundancies where I work, amongst your normal everyday "keeps you busy" stuff. Still that's not why you're here, so a small update is in order.
I've got myself a real Atari 130XE now. Thanks to Bruce and Cathy from B&C ComputerVisions for their excellent service. Also an APE cable so data can be speedily sent from the PC to the Atari, just as if the PC was a massive and superfast hard disk for the Atari. Thoroughly recommended. Now I should be able to get things like the colour palette, and colour interlacing techniques sorted out, amongst other things which are hard to test on an emulator.
There were quite a few changes made in the code, but nothing really visible. I wanted to compromise less on the two headed dragons, and have them wiggle up and down like the original. This meant changing the "Pattern Handler" which controls the aliens, quite a bit. Not that you'd notice (unless you're really handy with a disassembler), it had a few strange quirks anyway which needed rationalizing. Don't worry about the extra characters on the screenshots, they were just to help me debug the Pattern Handlers (I had a lot of grief getting that dragon working right!)
Whilst I remember, thanks to the Taquart guys for producing me a TIP version of the Space Harrier title screen. It's brilliant and very colourful, but I might not use it as I have some other ideas to try for the title screen. Be sure to check out Taquart's Numen Demo. Must be one of the best Atari 8-bit demos ever (if not the best). You'll get to see TIP pictures and the 3D engine developed by Fox, which was to be used in the Vector game, amongst many other cool things (the Vector site is down at the moment).
No promises for how long you'll have to wait to see the next update, but hopefully it won't be six months again.
