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[Melly]

As we get near the Chinese (or whatever other country you wanna choose) Bootleg Demakes Competition, I wanted to create this thread to talk about old consoles. More specifically their specs.

I'm seriously thinking about using the black-and-white (or black-and-green) gameboy as the target for my demake. Looking around a bit this is what I found about its specs:

Gameboy:
CPU: 8-bit Z80 CMOS (4.19MHz)
RAM: 8KB
Colors: 4 (Grayscale)
Sprites: 40
Sprite Size: 8x16 or 8x8 pixels
Resolution: 160x144 pixels
Sound: 4 channel audio

Also from Wikipedia:
CPU: Custom 8-bit Sharp Z80 core at 4.19 MHz which is similar to an Intel 8080 in that all of the registers introduced in the Z80 are not present. However, some of the instruction set enhancements from the Z80, particularly bit manipulation, are present. Still other instructions are unique to this particular flavor of x80 CPU. The core also contains integrated sound generation
RAM: 8 kB internal S-RAM
Video RAM: 8 kB internal
ROM: On-CPU-Die 256-byte bootstrap; 256 kb, 512 kb, 1 Mb, 2 Mb, 4 Mb and 8 Mb cartridges
Sound: 2 Square Waves, 1 programmable 32-sample 4-bit PCM Wave, 1 White noise. The unit only has one speaker, but headphones provide stereo sound (for further information, see Game Boy music)
Display: Reflective LCD 160 × 144 pixels
Screen size: 66 mm (2.6 in) diagonal
Color Palette: 4 shades of "gray" (green to (very) dark green)
Communication: Up to 4 Game Boys can be linked together via serial ports
Power: 6 V, 0.7 W (4 AA batteries provide ~35 hours)
Dimensions: 90 mm(W) × 148 mm(H) × 32 mm(D)/3.5 × 5.8 × 1.3 (in)

There are a couple of things that these bits of info don't tell, like if the Gameboy could do any kind of sprite scaling or rotating, how many sprites per scanline, amongst other things.

So I'm wondering if anybody would have more info about it. People are free to use this thread for their own questions. I'm also kinda curious about Atari 2600 specs.

[moi]

I know a bit of atari 2600 specs and they aren't pretty.
Cartridges were typically 4kbytes (don't know if it could take more), and you had something like two ships and two missiles (1 for each player) and the background had to be symetrical left/right (you could only draw one half of it in memory, the other part was symmetry).
Of course clever coders overcome these limitations as you can see with many games that don't seem to be affected by them.
I am at work right now but once I get home I'll try to find a more detailed link.

A for my entry I was considering MSX 1 , because they managed good things with that (MSX 1 had the same graphic chip than colecovision and a lot of computer/consoles from that era, hence the same capabilities), but I am also considering other options, less conventional ones.

[EDIT]Atari Specs links, have fun

http://www.atarihq.com/danb/a2600.shtml

http://www.atarihq.com/danb/files/stella.pdf

[Hideous]

How close to the real specs of a console do we have to make our games? 

[Melly]

I'd say probably only as close as you can manage. This will probably be the usual deal of fairly loose rule and no physical prizes. However I just think it'd be awesome to try and emulate an old console's specs when demaking a game. Like, with flickering sprites and stuff if you can manage.

[moi]

I think fun is the most important factor 

[Lukas]

Console System Specs for the:

Vinylotron   



Vinylotron
CPU: No processor, basically lots of tiny gears and springs
(clockwork performance equals a 8-bit Z80 CMOS (13.37MHz)-processor)
RAM: Basically just tiny little magnetic tapes.
(capacity and performance overall equals 10,35kb RAM)
Colors: The projector that can be hooked to the device can output natural colors (movie quality) but it's all black/white and a little bit blurred... with some slight glitches here and there (as we know them from the first movies made in the 19th century) (A film runs through the projector in an endless loop. it has the fantastic and wondrous abilty to let light re-expose it an endless amount of time. Developed by Prof. Dr. Dr. etc. Heinrich Wolfgang Kochmann in some german laboratory.)

Sprites: Endless. (like in old movies)
Sprite Size: (like in old movies)
Resolution: not very high but rather blurry.
Sound: output by the gramophon-shell-thingy on top of the device.


The Vinylotron was developed some 200 years ago by some people in germany and great britain who loved to drink tea together in Denmark and have walkabouts in Scotland and Andorra. Sometimes in the lovely meadows around Yorkshire or Kent but mostly in Sweden.
Anyway, the Vinylotron was meant to be a gentleman's pleasure during the rainy days. The perfect companion to a round of fellow mates, some cups of tea and biscuits.
It doesn't use electricity but is rather built up like a clockwork. Players have to power it before playing by drawing them on for some thirty seconds.
The device outputs pictures and sound. The pictures are projected on a fabric screen with a cinematograph.
The players use relatively complex clockworks to control the gameplay.
Their functions are comparable to today's gamecontrollers: Summed up they have 7 buttons: "up", "down", "left", "right", "alpha", "beta" and "plumpudding button". 
Players can plug up to two controllers into the device which allows a fancy competition between two gentlemen. 
The games are stored on "DataLPs" which are basically Vinyl LPs the Vinylotron can read out and store to magnetic tape running endless slopes.
A dataLPs storage capacity approximately equals 19,5mb on each side.

As time went by the Vinylotron became forgotten. Just few devices were built and people didn't seem to be ready for such a modern type of media.
Still... some Vinylotrons still exist and work well. (I actually have one. Bought it for a fuckload of money in scotland.)
Since there are no known emulators or ROMs these devices offer the only way to enjoy classic games like: "Cricket for two. A game for rainy days.", "Brave Violin Player" (110 years before guitar hero) or "I kindly invite you to have the pleasure of being a scoundrel for some time. You may want to try exploring caves and searching for gold." (basically Rogue) 

I really love my Vinylotron. It's so b...eautiful. I'd like to see some demakes which take it's splendid little dogmas into concideration.


BaronCid 

[policedanceclub]

I think he just won

[Melly]

Well then BaronCid, I believe a demake for that console by yourself is in order?

[moi]

Console System Specs for the:

Vinylotron   



Vinylotron
CPU: No processor, basically lots of tiny gears and springs
(clockwork performance equals a 8-bit Z80 CMOS (13.37MHz)-processor)
RAM: Basically just tiny little magnetic tapes.
(capacity and performance overall equals 10,35kb RAM)
Colors: The projector that can be hooked to the device can output natural colors (movie quality) but it's all black/white and a little bit blurred... with some slight glitches here and there (as we know them from the first movies made in the 19th century) (A film runs through the projector in an endless loop. it has the fantastic and wondrous abilty to let light re-expose it an endless amount of time. Developed by Prof. Dr. Dr. etc. Heinrich Wolfgang Kochmann in some german laboratory.)

Sprites: Endless. (like in old movies)
Sprite Size: (like in old movies)
Resolution: not very high but rather blurry.
Sound: output by the gramophon-shell-thingy on top of the device.


The Vinylotron was developed some 200 years ago by some people in germany and great britain who loved to drink tea together in Denmark and have walkabouts in Scotland and Andorra. Sometimes in the lovely meadows around Yorkshire or Kent but mostly in Sweden.
Anyway, the Vinylotron was meant to be a gentleman's pleasure during the rainy days. The perfect companion to a round of fellow mates, some cups of tea and biscuits.
It doesn't use electricity but is rather built up like a clockwork. Players have to power it before playing by drawing them on for some thirty seconds.
The device outputs pictures and sound. The pictures are projected on a fabric screen with a cinematograph.
The players use relatively complex clockworks to control the gameplay.
Their functions are comparable to today's gamecontrollers: Summed up they have 7 buttons: "up", "down", "left", "right", "alpha", "beta" and "plumpudding button". 
Players can plug up to two controllers into the device which allows a fancy competition between two gentlemen. 
The games are stored on "DataLPs" which are basically Vinyl LPs the Vinylotron can read out and store to magnetic tape running endless slopes.
A dataLPs storage capacity approximately equals 19,5mb on each side.

As time went by the Vinylotron became forgotten. Just few devices were built and people didn't seem to be ready for such a modern type of media.
Still... some Vinylotrons still exist and work well. (I actually have one. Bought it for a fuckload of money in scotland.)
Since there are no known emulators or ROMs these devices offer the only way to enjoy classic games like: "Cricket for two. A game for rainy days.", "Brave Violin Player" (110 years before guitar hero) or "I kindly invite you to have the pleasure of being a scoundrel for some time. You may want to try exploring caves and searching for gold." (basically Rogue) 

I really love my Vinylotron. It's so b...eautiful. I'd like to see some demakes which take it's splendid little dogmas into concideration.


BaronCid 

Dear sir,
I just here intended to make use of a similar contraption for my submission.
 

(But I am not totally decided right now, so many options)

[Melly]

By the way, who takes dibs on THE ODEGRON?

[Chainclaw]

Atari 2600
More or less what you need to know is, the system supports 2 player sprites (at 8 pixels wide each), 2 player missile sprites (at 1 pixel wide, but you can stretch it to be a wider pixel), a ball graphic (at 1 pixel wide, can be stretched), and a playfield (at a horizontal resolution of 32 pixels).
For real Atari 2600 game development, you don't have to go straight assembly anymore. You can code entirely in Batari BASIC, and not need to know much more about the hardware than what I said above. Here's the page for Batari BASIC : http://bataribasic.com/
The nifty thing about homebrew for the 2600 is the emulator is in awesome shape, if you want to test on actual hardware there are plenty of ways to do that ( see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starpath_Supercharger , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuttle_Cart ).
Development for the 2600 is also much easier for one person to do all the art, design, programming, and sound for.
Getting your game on an actual cart is really easy, and you can even do it without using donor carts ( http://pixelspast.com/homebrew/ is making new PCBs for the system), and if you get a board pre-socketed, you don't even need to know how to solder.
For Atari development, see also : http://atariage.com/ , http://www.qotile.net/minidig/ , http://www.alienbill.com/2600/ , http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showforum=65

Channel F
I haven't done much research into homebrew on this system yet, aside from knowing that apparently some guy somewhere is making homebrew. One of the nifty things about this system is the controller, it's vertical, with the only input being a little triangle thing on the top. You can push the triangle forward, back, left, right, twist it left and right, and pull it up and down.
If you are unfamiliar with the system, see here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_F , http://youtube.com/watch?v=7b4WPwYE2Ow
Here are some resources : http://members.cox.net/seanriddle/chanf.html , http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=59248 , http://www.veswiki.com/Main_Page

NES
This is where things start getting really tricky for homebrew. Making an early NES game (think Duck Hunt) isn't a big deal, but doing anything complicated involves some really tricky hardware on the cart. Most homebrew / repro carts are done with donors (old, "real" games dissected), which upsets a segment of the community. This is also the point where games start getting a lot more complicated, and need a significant amount of art done, as well as levels created. This is a tough job for one person to do. Here's some links on the NES homebrew scene :
http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=78401 , http://nesdev.com/ , http://www.retrousb.com/index.php (make your own carts with less donors!)

This post is getting long, and my knowledge of a lot of these systems is pretty low, so I'm gonna throw a handful of systems at you rapidfire :
Colecovision
http://pixelspast.com/homebrew/
http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=110409
http://www.atarimax.com/usbcoleco/documentation/
http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showforum=55
Intellivision
http://www.schells.com/cc3.shtml
http://www.intellivisionworld.com/
Bally Astrocade
http://gamingmuseum.classicgaming.gamespy.com/bally.html
http://www.riffraffgames.com/cgi-bin/aboutriff/ballywar.cgi
Atari 5200
The handy part about this system, is the hardware is very similar to old Atari 8 bit computers
http://pixelspast.com/homebrew/
http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showforum=51
The Vectrex has a surprising amount of homebrew for it, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vectrex#Homebrew
There's also homebrew scenes for the 7800, the Lynx, the Jaguar, the Master System, the Game Gear, Sega Genesis, et cetera
SNES homebrew is really tricky, unfortunately, see http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Super_NES_Programming/Homebrew_SNES_games and these guys have ported one game to about 8 systems (including SNES) : http://shop.rastersoft.net/

If you're just curious on the specs for a system, and don't want to go through hoops trying to run it on actual hardware, Wikipedia, and http://www.videogameconsolelibrary.com/ looks like it is shaping up to eventually be a great source for data (it's got the most information on the Panasonic M2 that I've seen anywhere)

Sorry for the giant pile of information, but homebrew for old systems is just so much fun.

[moi]

Nice list ChainClaw
Of course doing a real homebrew might not be really necessary IMHO. Designing your sprites and background in the flvour of an old system is IMO sufficient.

Another little system I'd like to add to the abov list is the Odyssey 2 a.k.a Videopac.
It used sweet simple graphics(with many sprite shapes built in memory).
It has the sweetest Lo-Fi graphics I have ever seen
http://www.videogamecritic.net/oddfl.htm

[Melly]

Very informative post Chainclaw. You should be aware however that this will most certainly not be a homebrew competition (though nothing stops you from doing just that, and you'd be hailed as incredibly awesome as long as an emulator played it easily enough, of course), just a computer game competition in which the game would emulate the graphical/audio/control style of older consoles, possibly minding memory and ammount of content you can have, though obviously those would be subjective since it'd be quite unlikely that anyone could test that stuff for real.

You could probably go as far as inventing your own fantasy console and demaking a recent game to it. In fact, now that I think of it, that sounds like a nice idea for me to try.

[Chainclaw]

Thanks. I can't believe I forgot the Odyssey 2!

Here are some suggestions to help up "authenticity", aside from the obvious make your game visually look like an old game. I imagine most of these would just be mock-ups for the threads for each demake.

Some of my favorite bits of the old school flavor include crazy box art, see
http://www.atariage.com/box_page.html?SoftwareLabelID=134
http://www.rfgeneration.com/cgi-bin/getinfo.pl?ID=U-031-S-00730-A
http://www.atariage.com/cart_page.html?SoftwareLabelID=349 (see the screenshots for this one http://www.atariage.com/screenshot_page.html?SoftwareLabelID=349 )
http://www.atariage.com/cart_page.html?SoftwareLabelID=520
http://www.atariage.com/cart_page.html?SoftwareLabelID=692

Manuals were also hugely important at the time. Unfortunately I got a ton of dead links trying to find NES manual scans, but Legend of Zelda for the NES had a pretty awesome manual for a classic game.

For those looking to make something feel like an old PC game, mimicking the copy protection of the era could lead to some awesome results, as well. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_prevention#Copy_protection_specific_to_old_games

Leisure Suit Larry's "age verification" is pretty hilarious : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure_Suit_Larry_in_the_Land_of_the_Lounge_Lizards

Feelies could be fun to mock up, and these often doubled as copy protection in some older games. See the letter from StarTropics : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarTropics

If you really want to make your game feel like a pirated demake, don't forget all the goofy things pirates used to do, like "X GAMES IN ONE", where the games would often repeat, with slight variations. Pirate box art is also usually pretty awesome, with weirdly scaled, copy and pasted art from other games, often completely unrelated to the pirate cart itself. See these google search results:
http://images.google.com/images?um=1&hl=en&q=famicom+pirate+cart&btnG=Search+Images
http://images.google.com/images?um=1&hl=en&q=game+boy+pirate+cart&btnG=Search+Images

Another suggested hardware platform to mimic are those old LCD handhelds. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_Handheld
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_And_Watch

And often forgotten systems from the '90s, like
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_boy

And prototype systems that never got off the ground
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Cosmos

And for some inspiration, see these often forgotten Atari 2600 ports of more popular games on other systems :
Donkey Kong http://www.atariage.com/screenshot_page.html?SoftwareLabelID=149
Pac-Man http://www.atariage.com/screenshot_page.html?SoftwareLabelID=342
Rampage http://www.atariage.com/screenshot_page.html?SoftwareLabelID=397
Double Dragon http://www.atariage.com/screenshot_page.html?SoftwareLabelID=152
Mario Bros http://www.atariage.com/screenshot_page.html?SoftwareLabelID=286

[Melly]

Still waiting on someone who can tell me if the original Gameboy could do anything at all fancy with sprites, like scaling/rotating/distorting. Otherwise I'll simply assume it can't.

[moi]

I am not sure but I would be surprised if it was able to do that.

[Chainclaw]

Here's some info on the original gameboy.
The No$ line of emulators is amazingly awesome for helping development. While this might not seem to matter if you're not making games designed to run on the real hardware, you can actually pull a lot of useful information for speccing out your game design to more closely match the real hardware.
http://nocash.emubase.de/gmb.htm
Specifically this page :
http://nocash.emubase.de/pandocs.htm
I am nearly positive there is no hardware rotation, and pretty sure there is no hardware scaling.

[twohalf]

So having made several GB emulators before, I can tell you that the gameboy does not have hardware scaling, rotation, etc. (you have to remember it's quite old), but the gameboy color had some cool extra features built in for things like better scrolling.
For the most part, the rendering done in the gameboy were with various tricks like using its "Window" tiles that don't allow any transparent part of sprites but can loop across to the other side of the screen and so forth. I can help explain more about the gameboy in detail if you would like but it is really about as simple as it gets in terms of blitting sprites onto the screen. Zelda: Link's Awakening is imo the best example of the capabilities of the original GB...

[Melly]

I guess I'll just have to keep it simple. Very very simple.

[Melly]

By the way, I have somewhat decided (my choice may still change) to demake a game into a semi-fantasy console based largely on the TI-83 calculator with some more odd restrictions and more processing power.

I was thinking that, alongside the original calculator's restrictions (monochrome, 96x64 res) I'd have these:

- No transparency.
- One button and a d-pad for input (no diagonals).
- 8x8 sprite size.
- No way to control sprite depth (sprites are all drawn from left-top to right-bottom, and those closer to 0,0 coordinates always show up below the rest).
- A sprite layer on top of a tile layer.
- Memory can hold a maximum of 16 different sprites at any one time and a single 8x8 tileset.
- Maximum 8 sprites per scanline and 24 on screen.
- If all the above is respected the game can usually run at 15 frames-per-second.

Feedback?