Hi there, and thanks for featuring TRSE on your channel! It really made my day - in addition to reminding me that I really ought to start work on a detailed TRSE tutorial video series
i may not be of the age that grew up with this but my dad did grow up with a TI-99 and a c64 as a kid himself so is always great to see yours, the 8 bit Guy's content and others
I like these development things a lot, and TRSE looks pretty interesting. Myself has been working for a couple of years on my own programming language and cross-compiler for 8 bit 6502 systems, called PROG8. It's mainly used by a small number of people to write applications and games for the Commander X16, but it can also create programs for the PET, C64 and experimentally for Atari 8 bit. Vic 20 support is still a wish from me to add some day.
I loved Below the Root and Alice in Wonderland on my C64. Both were extremely fun and held my interest until the very end. Definitely in my top 25 C64 games. Thanks for mentioning them. :)
Probably could have been done on a stock Vic-20, but it would have been a massive multi load nightmare. Like playing Defender of the Crown on a 256k stock Amiga 1000 with only one floppy.
25:24: Another Peter Ferrie (aka "qkumba") sighting. (I frequently find him playing a behind-the-scenes role when looking through 8-bit githubs and releases) 28:28: Yup, I also used Borland's Turbo Pascal for college assignments as well. 30:50: Did any books from back in the day show how to do assembly soft sprites on commodore machines?
I'm not aware of any soft/simulated sprite routines in books but it'd be neat to see. The VIC-20 had such a short shelf life that I'd expect book authors wouldn't have had time to get that advanced with subjects. And of course the C64 had little need for them. The Plus/4 family probably had the best software sprite routines but those machines got relatively few books written about them.
23:58 I used Turbo *Pascal* back in the day… It was great! What language is "Rascal"? 33:45 Looks vaguely Pascal-like. 37:50 If the game logic can keep up with 60-frame NTSC, there'll be no screen-update tearing. Though, without parameter tuning, the NTSC game will run 20% faster. Also, if interrupts aren't disabled or synchronized to the raster, you can still get video tearing. 43:43 But emus can't fly!
I haven't looked at turbo rascal for a while. I was confused by all the systems being added, figuring they couldn't all be perfectly represented. But the environment appears to have matured quite well (besides the puns left and right perhaps). I learned Pascal in school and ran it on an old multi-user system, the name of which I can't remember. Pascal was great for learning structured programming. I remember struggling with pointers! Very useful. Learning C and C++ later was much easier. Anyone who knows Pascal will hit the ground running when learning Delphi (if that's still a thing now). I do wonder if Turbo Rascal is like programming C on the C64 in the sense that programs may take up more memory than strictly necessary.
Yeah, I replaced the main belt but didn't have a good fit for the tape counter so I just left it for now. (I think I'm remembering correctly; I've had a few different tape decks open lately)
Instead of metroidvania games we call them... wonderroot games now? heheh. I need to try some of those games. I like getting suggestions for games to try from youtube videos like yours. I did not have Commodore computers back in the day, so I need all the game recommendations I can get!
Reminds me of my 8b Atari times: tape loading, don't breathe! Mom came and turned on the light: loading ruined. Later got Commodore 128DCR, it was soooooo much better (floppies!). Yes, Atari and Commodore under one roof, even wrote a device driver for almost-SPI-like communication between them: Atari's joystick port was connected to Commodore's USER PORT, Atari had "drive J" for saving its programs to Commodore's RAM 😁
"Metroidvania" is a subset of a larger genre of games known as "Exploration Platformers" which includes the former games, but also a lot of proto-metroid games and other games that follow may follow a slightly different formula (i.e. Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap, Jet Set Willy, Monty Mole, Zelda II - The Adventure of Link, and a ton of others that don't quite follow the Metroidvania formula).
Yeah, this particular deck I have tuned up pretty well, new belts, restored the roller, azimuth is good. And I had already loaded the game from that tape half a dozen times in the previous week. It just messes up if pressed right up against the C64 or VIC-20.
Wait, that screen shake at the end... I didn't realize the VIC-20 could offset the entire screen including the border like that. Does the 64 know that trick too?
The C64 can't shake the border itself, just what's inside the border. The original VIC has a few weird tricks the VIC-II can't do like that, and also it can change the number of rows and columns displayed (within some limits).
@@8_Bit That might be an interesting idea for a video, actually. I don't really know anything about the VIC-20 beyond the basics, and the _Programmer's Reference Guide_ for it is a lot less comprehensive than the 64's.
I'm assuming TFW8B is taking advantage of the cassette craze and getting brand new cassettes made for releases like this, but I wonder where they're getting the short, software-grade tape from.
@@8_Bit It was more the grade of magnetic powder I was thinking about; I've been told that data tapes back in the day used a special formulation because the kind used for audio tapes tended to be unreliable for reproducing data.
I was wondering when watching this if the Datasette not loading properly because it is too close to the computer is a thing with the Commodore 64 as well, never really thought about it until I saw it in your video today but perhaps some issues I was having with a Datasette loading unreliably could be the same thing.
Yes, it can be a problem on the C64 as well. With really finicky tapes I've had success by moving the Datasette almost the full length of the cord away, and actually lowered it from the table that the C64 is on, so it's on a different plane. It might just be superstition or luck, but it worked.
I know very little about emus, save from that they defeated the Australian army way back when (See 'The Emu War'). Do they really put their heads down low while sprinting? That'd be so cool!
The J-card gets its name from being folded into the shape of the letter J (when viewed from the side) to fit inside the cassette's case. I've never heard the term j-card until this moment.
He was a big Man United fan and couldn't watch the game due to interfernce, went up to fix his TV antenna and fell off his roof, the old fella met his end that way. RIP Rod Hull - a UK Jim Henson, a clown and a creative childrens entertainer.
Hah -- TRSE is crazy. I used it to write my game, Nybbles: Legend of the Drunken Snake! What a nightmare it is in some places, with the way it deals with parameters and pointers. I have to admit, though, it's wormed its way into my heart, and Leuat is really responsive to bugs. Only thing that drives me nuts is the post-optimizer. It's totally nuts sometimes, and even the `;; keep` "don't optimize this" notation doesn't work sometimes, forcing me to encode some things in machine language. Really helped to firm up my understanding of some of the lesser documented bits of hardware on the 128 in the process, though. Great toolset, all told, but I think my next game is likely to be done in llvm-mos C instead if I'm wanting to do something fast.
“MetroidVania” doesn’t really reference the NES Castlevania. Though Castlevania III Dracula’s Curse was getting close, “MetroidVania” era of Castlevania started with Symphony of the Night on the original PlayStation. That was the first one with Metroid-style progression and an almost-identical map.
I can understand why you'd have old games on tapes, but I'm not sure why you'd have new ones. The largest audience will be using SD2IEC or compatible. That's what I'd focus on.
The 35K expansion requirement means that most people won't be able to play it on real hardware, unless they have a modern RAM expansion solution. Perhaps it should have been released on cartridge, too?
I suspect a bank-switching ROM cartridge that could hold EMH would approach the cost of a RAM expansion, especially as the game might require more than 5K of RAM in which case the cartridge would need RAM expansion as well. And/or the game would likely need extensive rewrites to support running from cartridge.
Is this game available for digital download? I imagine it may not be because it would just end up getting endlessly copied and then nobody would want to buy a cassette of it
Newly-made +32 and +35K expanders have become common, but they definitely weren't common in the '80s. 16K and a couple 3rd-party 24K were the biggest available that I know of.
lol when I took pascal in high school (also first class I was offered), it didn't take long before I'm like......meh C's better, but I'm like......how do you access the BIOS rutines? He's like YOU STAY AWAY FROM THE BIOS!! I'm like.....uggggg Everything uses bios ruitines it's how it works. All I wanted to know was how to change to a resolution that wasn't supported by the compiler. I knew how to do it in C. Hell at one point I knew how to do it in debug. I don't know how to do it in debug anymore. lol
so anyway out of shear bordom while everyone else is learning basic crappy stuff, a few friends and me were competing to make ASCII tetris. I believe I was the only one that finished. Sadly my teacher did not save the code. He did apologize. He was impressed.
![แฉกลโกงงานวัด 2024 [ โกงมั้ยครับ ep.106 ] | DOM](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/taC5dpP3HXA/mqdefault.jpg)
Hi there, and thanks for featuring TRSE on your channel! It really made my day - in addition to reminding me that I really ought to start work on a detailed TRSE tutorial video series
I am beyond impressed As an old VIC20! If this game was out in 1983 I would’ve seriously loved it.
It's amazing that cassettes are still available to distribute this game!
Yes, cassettes are still being manufactured new, unlike floppy disks unfortunately.
Rod Hull and Emu lol A British Kids TV show from the 80s. I always liked the Grotbags bit the best
WAIT ! No 'T Bag' Grotbags the witch need to be pulled in for questioning. Or my memory has gone wrong again.
The pink windmill on the thumbnail was a bit of a surprise
Or is it the Real Rod Hull?
th-cam.com/video/F0jtZUcdUMM/w-d-xo.html
there's somebody at the door...there's somebody's at the door...
YOU MAGGOTS!!!
Nobody reviews a game like you do! Fun plus education rolled up into one! Thanks Robin!
Another great installment. Thanks for doing this Vic-20 based episode. I enjoy them just as much as the C-64 ones.
I would love to see you do some tutorials on the Turbo Rascal Syntax error!
Thank you for going through the game loop in TRSE. You explained it well enough that I'm now confident to give the basics a try.
i may not be of the age that grew up with this but my dad did grow up with a TI-99 and a c64 as a kid himself so is always great to see yours, the 8 bit Guy's content and others
I once watched some of Rod's TFW8b videos on TH-cam and got recommended Emu videos for months.
great use of VIC20 colour palette.
I’m guessing the Rod Hull / Emu / Pink Windmill lore is lost on a lot of viewers of this
There's somebody at the door!
@@elbiggusI am him, I am Rod Hull and I loooooove jelly.
@@OtterlyInsaneGREEEEEEN JELLY?
@@OtterlyInsane Yes, I AM HIM.
th-cam.com/video/F0jtZUcdUMM/w-d-xo.html
Very lost! It felt like it might be a reference to something, but I had no idea what. LOL
Emu was such a massive hunt
Import of this game is probably banned in Australia due to it being a hate crime.
@3:00 having to move the tape deck away, would be cool to play with shielding to find out why
I can hear loading sounds from my c64 if the SD card module is too close to the video cable
Load error for the authentic datasette experience!
Fantastic! Mind blowing how advanced this is now!
I like these development things a lot, and TRSE looks pretty interesting. Myself has been working for a couple of years on my own programming language and cross-compiler for 8 bit 6502 systems, called PROG8. It's mainly used by a small number of people to write applications and games for the Commander X16, but it can also create programs for the PET, C64 and experimentally for Atari 8 bit. Vic 20 support is still a wish from me to add some day.
I loved Below the Root and Alice in Wonderland on my C64. Both were extremely fun and held my interest until the very end. Definitely in my top 25 C64 games. Thanks for mentioning them. :)
That looks really fun! I don't have a VIC-20, but I'll have to try it on an emulator. 🙂
ROM Cartridges don't need expansion modules because they can have their own built-in RAM I'd like to see more VIC-20 cartridge games like that.
I like how the music is muted when you are in the water. Lots of great little details in this one. :-)
If only the music would be muted the whole time. It really looks like a fun game, but I can't stand the music. It's really getting on my nerves.
@@EgonOlsen71 press m to toggle music
This game looks so well made. Interesting to see some later game concepts squeezed onto a Vic.
Probably could have been done on a stock Vic-20, but it would have been a massive multi load nightmare. Like playing Defender of the Crown on a 256k stock Amiga 1000 with only one floppy.
(@2:13) “Found EMH”. So, that’s where the holographic Doctor from ST:Voyager has been hanging out lately. 😊
Heh. " Please state the nature of the medical emergency "
TRSE is an amazing development environment. I 've used it to develop Night Knight on C64!
I would genuinely love a series of you making a game in Rascal.
I think its so cool that this sort of retro media is making a comeback.
More of this Awesome stuff
Awesome game! It's almost got a Castlequest for the NES feel to it, especially with the different coloured keys.
Emu would work well for a Joust game.
25:24: Another Peter Ferrie (aka "qkumba") sighting. (I frequently find him playing a behind-the-scenes role when looking through 8-bit githubs and releases)
28:28: Yup, I also used Borland's Turbo Pascal for college assignments as well.
30:50: Did any books from back in the day show how to do assembly soft sprites on commodore machines?
I'm not aware of any soft/simulated sprite routines in books but it'd be neat to see. The VIC-20 had such a short shelf life that I'd expect book authors wouldn't have had time to get that advanced with subjects. And of course the C64 had little need for them. The Plus/4 family probably had the best software sprite routines but those machines got relatively few books written about them.
23:58 I used Turbo *Pascal* back in the day… It was great! What language is "Rascal"?
33:45 Looks vaguely Pascal-like.
37:50 If the game logic can keep up with 60-frame NTSC, there'll be no screen-update tearing. Though, without parameter tuning, the NTSC game will run 20% faster. Also, if interrupts aren't disabled or synchronized to the raster, you can still get video tearing.
43:43 But emus can't fly!
That tune reminds me of long hours mastering a game late at night.
I haven't looked at turbo rascal for a while. I was confused by all the systems being added, figuring they couldn't all be perfectly represented. But the environment appears to have matured quite well (besides the puns left and right perhaps).
I learned Pascal in school and ran it on an old multi-user system, the name of which I can't remember. Pascal was great for learning structured programming. I remember struggling with pointers! Very useful. Learning C and C++ later was much easier. Anyone who knows Pascal will hit the ground running when learning Delphi (if that's still a thing now).
I do wonder if Turbo Rascal is like programming C on the C64 in the sense that programs may take up more memory than strictly necessary.
The graphics remind me of a Spectrum game.
Yes, they both have the same sort of "colour clash" with the simulated sprites. The Commodore Plus/4 and 16 are pretty much the same too.
Nice video, btw seem rubbers are failing on your tape deck, as the counter seems to be jumping a bit.
Yeah, I replaced the main belt but didn't have a good fit for the tape counter so I just left it for now. (I think I'm remembering correctly; I've had a few different tape decks open lately)
Based on the Looooooong running Rod Hull and Emu.
Pascal is available on Linux Mint but everything gets converted into AT&T Assembler which gets assembled into a Binary.
Instead of metroidvania games we call them... wonderroot games now? heheh. I need to try some of those games. I like getting suggestions for games to try from youtube videos like yours. I did not have Commodore computers back in the day, so I need all the game recommendations I can get!
Reminds me of my 8b Atari times: tape loading, don't breathe! Mom came and turned on the light: loading ruined. Later got Commodore 128DCR, it was soooooo much better (floppies!). Yes, Atari and Commodore under one roof, even wrote a device driver for almost-SPI-like communication between them: Atari's joystick port was connected to Commodore's USER PORT, Atari had "drive J" for saving its programs to Commodore's RAM 😁
"Metroidvania" is a subset of a larger genre of games known as "Exploration Platformers" which includes the former games, but also a lot of proto-metroid games and other games that follow may follow a slightly different formula (i.e. Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap, Jet Set Willy, Monty Mole, Zelda II - The Adventure of Link, and a ton of others that don't quite follow the Metroidvania formula).
Load Error LOL - at least you didn't need to try and adjust the azimuth
Yeah, this particular deck I have tuned up pretty well, new belts, restored the roller, azimuth is good. And I had already loaded the game from that tape half a dozen times in the previous week. It just messes up if pressed right up against the C64 or VIC-20.
Wait, that screen shake at the end... I didn't realize the VIC-20 could offset the entire screen including the border like that. Does the 64 know that trick too?
The C64 can't shake the border itself, just what's inside the border. The original VIC has a few weird tricks the VIC-II can't do like that, and also it can change the number of rows and columns displayed (within some limits).
@@8_Bit That might be an interesting idea for a video, actually. I don't really know anything about the VIC-20 beyond the basics, and the _Programmer's Reference Guide_ for it is a lot less comprehensive than the 64's.
I'm assuming TFW8B is taking advantage of the cassette craze and getting brand new cassettes made for releases like this, but I wonder where they're getting the short, software-grade tape from.
I don't actually know, but I know some cassette manufacturers will do custom or at least short (5 or 10 minutes per side) lengths.
@@8_Bit It was more the grade of magnetic powder I was thinking about; I've been told that data tapes back in the day used a special formulation because the kind used for audio tapes tended to be unreliable for reproducing data.
I also thought of Bubble Bobble before you even mentioned it
I was wondering when watching this if the Datasette not loading properly because it is too close to the computer is a thing with the Commodore 64 as well, never really thought about it until I saw it in your video today but perhaps some issues I was having with a Datasette loading unreliably could be the same thing.
Yes, it can be a problem on the C64 as well. With really finicky tapes I've had success by moving the Datasette almost the full length of the cord away, and actually lowered it from the table that the C64 is on, so it's on a different plane. It might just be superstition or luck, but it worked.
@@8_Bit I wonder, have you tried tying the ground cable to an actual ground pin to see if that helps? Without grounding it's basically an antenna.
Typo in the game lol @ 04:17 - should read at the bottom PRESS ANY KEY
I'm sure that's a deliberate joke.
I didn't know that the doctor was only 35K !
Sit Emu Sit. Good Dog!
Rowf!
I know very little about emus, save from that they defeated the Australian army way back when (See 'The Emu War'). Do they really put their heads down low while sprinting? That'd be so cool!
I've had issues getting TRSE running under Linux in the past, might you do a video using it on a Linux Host.
The J-card gets its name from being folded into the shape of the letter J (when viewed from the side) to fit inside the cassette's case. I've never heard the term j-card until this moment.
for non UK viewers this is where he took Emu, the pink windmill and Grotbag from
th-cam.com/video/n9jmNVPHirQ/w-d-xo.htmlsi=wrQn6DyHWDHH8-W5
or is it? ;)
th-cam.com/video/F0jtZUcdUMM/w-d-xo.html
He was a big Man United fan and couldn't watch the game due to interfernce, went up to fix his TV antenna and fell off his roof, the old fella met his end that way. RIP Rod Hull - a UK Jim Henson, a clown and a creative childrens entertainer.
Charming!
Hah -- TRSE is crazy. I used it to write my game, Nybbles: Legend of the Drunken Snake! What a nightmare it is in some places, with the way it deals with parameters and pointers. I have to admit, though, it's wormed its way into my heart, and Leuat is really responsive to bugs. Only thing that drives me nuts is the post-optimizer. It's totally nuts sometimes, and even the `;; keep` "don't optimize this" notation doesn't work sometimes, forcing me to encode some things in machine language. Really helped to firm up my understanding of some of the lesser documented bits of hardware on the 128 in the process, though.
Great toolset, all told, but I think my next game is likely to be done in llvm-mos C instead if I'm wanting to do something fast.
PWB-UNEXPected 😂
“MetroidVania” doesn’t really reference the NES Castlevania. Though Castlevania III Dracula’s Curse was getting close, “MetroidVania” era of Castlevania started with Symphony of the Night on the original PlayStation. That was the first one with Metroid-style progression and an almost-identical map.
On my Amiga A500 i use AMOS. On my Windows PC i use Multimedia Fusion. I am still using Multimedia Fusion to make an Android game.
The emu looks like the ostrich from Joust!
I'd say this is more of a Dizzy-like. :p Although it looks actually fun.
I can understand why you'd have old games on tapes, but I'm not sure why you'd have new ones. The largest audience will be using SD2IEC or compatible. That's what I'd focus on.
Replace the Datassette film caps. 0.1uF 50V or 100V 10% tolerance. 2X.
I don't see any, any key... I think I will order a tab...
"loading from tape is often fraught with peril"
exactly why I wouldn't bother with it.
i always like me a good while(true)
The 35K expansion requirement means that most people won't be able to play it on real hardware, unless they have a modern RAM expansion solution. Perhaps it should have been released on cartridge, too?
I suspect a bank-switching ROM cartridge that could hold EMH would approach the cost of a RAM expansion, especially as the game might require more than 5K of RAM in which case the cartridge would need RAM expansion as well. And/or the game would likely need extensive rewrites to support running from cartridge.
there is an error in this... emus cannot fly...
I didn't see any flying emus in this game...
@@8_Bit in the easter egg 43:40
@@fumthings oh, true! This emu is very special, I think.
Is this game available for digital download? I imagine it may not be because it would just end up getting endlessly copied and then nobody would want to buy a cassette of it
Yes, it is available now, check the video description for a link to itch dot io
Another game that doesn't fit on my commodore 16k ram expander. That make or 2 or 3 games now? I don't think 32k expanders are really that common
Newly-made +32 and +35K expanders have become common, but they definitely weren't common in the '80s. 16K and a couple 3rd-party 24K were the biggest available that I know of.
Lol massive hunt
I'm not sure that the Americans or the Canadians are getting it 😂
lol when I took pascal in high school (also first class I was offered), it didn't take long before I'm like......meh C's better, but I'm like......how do you access the BIOS rutines? He's like YOU STAY AWAY FROM THE BIOS!! I'm like.....uggggg Everything uses bios ruitines it's how it works. All I wanted to know was how to change to a resolution that wasn't supported by the compiler. I knew how to do it in C. Hell at one point I knew how to do it in debug. I don't know how to do it in debug anymore. lol
so anyway out of shear bordom while everyone else is learning basic crappy stuff, a few friends and me were competing to make ASCII tetris. I believe I was the only one that finished. Sadly my teacher did not save the code. He did apologize. He was impressed.
:)
Wow, it dont even resemble a tipical Vic 20 game, it seems more a C=Plus4 well made modern game
Bro aint 8_bit😡
what?
@@8_Bit serach 8-bit at youtube
@@Yunakskd Why?
@@8_Bit thats why i said bro aint 8-bit
@@Yunakskd I have no idea what you're talking about. How is the VIC-20 not 8-bit? All my videos are about 8-bit computers and software.
omg so kool!!!!