Trivia: I used 4 different systems (including the Atari 2600+) in this video, which makes me wonder if I've ever used more than 4 in a single video. I think I also used 4 in each of the two #SepTandy videos I made a few years ago.
That Mini PET is mega-gorgeous, and ideal for learners. The keyboard click sound is beguiling, hypnotic, is it the SID chip? I'm thinking of purchasing an oscilloscope from Bangood to help me learn more about my computers. 😂 🖋
I got into a zone where I don't even know anymore what Robin is saying. I just keep the videos in the background - and the peaceful narration, mechanical keyboard sounds and 8-bit samples take me back to that safe place the 80s were.
The desire to keep your SX-64 with its quirk intact is so relatable :) I always love your in depth videos and it always feels like I am attending my favorite elective class ever.
Chase also works on the C64. Just be sure to use LOAD"CHASE",8 and not LOAD"CHASE",8,1. I actually first saw this game in a book called "More Basic Computer Games," and had typed it into my C64. The book is actually a collection of games published in Creative Computing magazine, but this game is even older than that.
The harness you made for your controllers reminds me of the time when my dad decided to make a custom desk for his computer made out of plywood and he decided that he would screw in blocks of wood to hold the controllers from the TI-994A in place on the desk. I wasn't even 6 at the time. Talk about memories.
What a delightful cruise down memory lane. My friend and I used to train on this game on the Apple IIe with the keyboard. It was an 8 finger affair or rather a six finger two thumb affair. To those who got good it was possible to perform prodigious feats perhaps not possible with joysticks. For example it is possible to cue up the next shot or move in the opposite direction with your fingers which is not possible with the joystick! Love the hex editing! Hopefully I get time to get into this one day!
As always, such a great pleasure to watch - I love your insightfulness into all the ins and outs and a satisfying fix at the end! I totally get that you didn't want a perma fix either, there's no telling how it that may or maynot manifest - might even be extant that actually works around it ... and lord forbid, a power surge and your pulling up to 5 might pull up to "act of god" and fry it totally 😲 Keep up the great work my dude!
Thanks for another video! I had a great time watching it as usual! :) I would really love to see what treasures you have on your "tools collection" cartridge :)
Robotron was the name of the computer factory of East Germany before the wall came down. And a follow up Robotron company is still around, now as a general IT consultant company.
I like you used the word "Firepower" since of course Williams made that Pinball with many of the same sounds as we see in Defender and Robotron! Also I have to say I live up road about 20 minutes from Morristown NJ!!
Robotron 2084 included joystick holders for Atari 5200. Pretty sure I saw some twin stick games doing the same with standard CX-40 Atari joysticks for Atari 8 bit home computers. Edit: Space Dungeon included joystick holders too. There was also something called “Stick Stand” for CX-40 which widened the base and gave you a ball top. Two of those would do the trick.
5200 has the only home port of Space Dungeon, oddly enough. Which is a shame, it is a cool game. It's been in a few modern Taito collections, but those are all emulating the arcade instead of porting the game.
A classic "but it works on my machine" bug, where software actually works correctly on a developer or test machine, but only by chance, even though its code is wrong, and with correct code it will work on any machine.
2:50 the move notation in Chase would end up resurfacing in arcade fighting games to represent the joystick/D-pad/thumbstick motions necessary to execute various moves
Super interesting! I am amazed, but I guess I shouldn't be, that there's a difference between the same computers like that. I guess we should be amazed they even work, eh? Great job again, fixing another program, Robin.
Mine returns a 0 with the peek, although I should also dig out my Robotron cartridge just to confirm it works normally... (edit) Confirmed, my cartridge works fine, and the SX-64 is a GA1 041038 from October 1984 and is one heavy bugger.
There was a version of this by Jeff Minter for the Atari St called " Llamatron " that only used a single fire button. Your character would constantly shoot in the direction of travel but when you held the fire button this "locked" the firing direction until it was released , allowing you to move in a different direction to the direction of fire, Was great for strafing many enemies whilst moving away from them en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llamatron
I seem to remember some two joystick game that actually came with an adapter to hold the two joysticks together. I thought it was Robotron (since there aren't that many that used two simultaneous joysticks!) but I could be wrong. BTW, Eugene Jarvis is a LEGEND right up there with Activision's David Crane and id Software's John Carmack and John Romero.
The video title set totally wrong expectations for me: I read Robotron and thought "wow, Robin got his hands on one of these East German Z80-Clones from the GDR Company Robotron" 🙂
Robotron is also a good game to use to test all the sprites and vicii chip when doing a repair on a c64. On one of my C64's the brown/orange sprite had vertical lines through it so that one has a bad vicii chip but only for one sprite.
I love this time travel to fix bugs that have been there for decades and somehow managed to slip from the programmers. Wondering how many of this things are all around in C64 games ??
I know 3 bugs in original arcade game. The tank round they only fire a certain amount of bullets. The mickey brain way round they all go after mickey and the brain wave right wall. They cannot be killed fireing up and stuck on wall.
I remember we had several joysticks, one of them being the competition pro joystick. However...we had four suction cups under them on each corner. I now realize that might have been something my dad or somebody else ended up adding to it. I had always thought that was original. So the joystick was basically always stuck to the desk.
Yup, in the UK you could get Quickshot 2 Joysticks and later Cheatah 125+ sticks which both came with suckers on the base should you want our sticks held firmly in place.
For a single stick, it should shoot in the direction you are moving AND in the opposite direction (either at the same time, or alternating). That allows you to shoot while running toward or away from the robots.
I can remember the first time I saw and played Robotron 2084. Late summer of 1982 my family went to the movies in Costa Mesa to see "The Thing." We were an arcade game friendly family for sure,and my cousin spotted a new game in lobby called "Robotron." Both of us played the wheels off that machine then drove back a few times just to play again. EPIC classic arcade game, thanks for the review! 👍 👍
19:33 -- RE: SX-64; I don't have any practical idea why there's an SRQ line from the floppy drive controller *but* I do recall that the Commodore was capable of using 50 or 60 Hz power supplies, and that makes me wonder if perhaps that would be more of a factor than solar flares.
I guess you could also think of it as - If they were setting $FE to $DC0D, it probably clears to 0 on the regular c64 and doesn't get bunged up. So no harm/no foul. The SX64 never clears it to 0 , until you manually set it to 0, allowing the game to run.
I didn't study the schematic but it looks like it would be possible to build a DIN plug with a resistor that you can just plug in when you want the "bug" gone.
Chase is like a spiced up version of the old 'robots' unix game? we still did a clone of that back in 2000 for the university programming course(it was ran on a linux shell, the evaluator program for the course just checked out and input.. and there were some dumb quirk not on the assignment or something, I remember someone had written a thing to get the excepted inputs and outputs out of the system)
Indeed in digital logic it is a bad practice to keep floating lines. However... it also depends on the chips sometimes. The C64 is old TTL. In TTL the logic level range is from 0 to 5 volts but anything between 2 and 5 V is high and 0 to 0.8 is low. So anything between 0.8 to 2 volts is ambiguous. According to the datasheet the input voltage threshold of the 6526 is 2.4 volts and it also looks like the FLAG pin is active low and is internally pulled up. This is a common practice for a lot of logic chips; you only require the 'thing' driving it to make sure to pull it 'low' to set the flag.
responded before watching the whole thing. So supposedly suggesting the pull-up was missing I got suspicious. On the schematics I can find, from zimmers, indeed the I/O board seems to have a pull up for FLAG_2 but not FLAG. I noticed that there is two serial bus headers; P11 and P13. Looking at the schematic of the actual floppy drive board seems to suggest there should be pull up resistors there though. I do not have hardware to confirm myself. But if the design was to offload this to the disk drive some people could end up with maybe drives that will be missing the resistor(s) of the FDD board while others might not. And even a drive swap could "fix" the problem.
The 1953 quintessentially bad scifi movie Robot Monster must have had some influence on RT2084, such as the last human family aspect. If anyone wants to watch it, it's in the public domain, but there are also riffs on it by MST3K and Rifftrax.
There are a LOT of what looks like high res software sprites in Robotron for the 64, and very little color clash - someone should make a video about how they pulled that off!
It sounds like that bad code was supposed to be for debugging the game during development. The dev was able to stop the enemies and step through the movement code one at a time. I wonder how many other games have old debugging code that can be found be used by players to cheat the game. Might make for a good video.
I first played a Chase derivative on the Amiga, in the form of Daleks; a game played through the Workbench. The first Berzerk derived game I played was Amok, on the VIC-20. I have to say, the sound on the C64 version of Robotron was rather underwhelming!
And unfortunately, you can't play the C64 version in WinVICE using a duel analog controller, due to the fact that VICE auto-configures the joystick(s) based on real devices, rather than letting you map the virtual sticks as most emulators do. :(
Hi Robin. I hope you’re doing good. I remember I love going to the Arcade as a kid in the early 80’s. One time I robbed my piggy bank, skipped school and spent all day at the arcade wasting all my money😂
Thanks for your videos. Just for the fun of it I checked on my SX-64 serial # GA1007262 and the peek result was 0. I also did a loop to print the PEEK 1000 times and the first time I got 999 (0) and 1 (1), the second and third times I got 999 (0) and 1 (129) each time, and the fourth time I got all (0).
Maybe if you played Robotron on your SX-64, it might "stutter"... running normally most of the time but then slowing down/stopping occasionally. That would be neat to see, but annoying if you were really trying to play :)
@@8_Bit I am not much of a game player so I don't plan to try it out. In any case I have only seen bit 0 and bit 7 on and never bit 4 so the problem would probably not occur.
I’d like to see you do a video about the Defender game on the C64. If your ship gets shot and you hit Run Stop/Restore during the explosion the next game your ship doubles in size. Just wondering if that’s a bug or if the programmer intended that.
That bug sounds familiar to me, but I don't see it in my list of things to investigate. I've added it now, will give you a shout-out if I figure it out. Thanks!
Since the video briefly mentions memory byte order (aka endianness), here's a random fact of the day: I always thought it doesn't matter which byte order CPUs use. x86 is big endian (high value byte comes first), most other CPUs are usually little endian (low value byte comes first), or they can even operate in both modes, but usually use little endian by default. Network protocols are usually big endian for no technical reason, big endian CPUs were just more common when the first network protocols were developed, and big endian numbers are easier for most people to read; the network hardware couldn't care less. Also, all modern CPUs have hardware instructions to swap byte order, so the performance impact of doing so is tiny. However, there are good technical reasons why CPU design is easier when the byte order is little endian. Without going into technical details, it makes it easier to address and align data in memory. It also makes many internal CPU operations a bit more efficient. That's why new CPU architectures are always little endian by default. If they're not, they're at least endian neutral, meaning they can support either mode (sometimes the mode has to be set at power-up, sometimes it can even be switched at any time), but they may have a tiny performance penalty when operating in big endian mode, unless they're used in networking hardware and primarily parse network protocol headers, because then they don't have to swap byte order all the time, which may even provide a tiny performance boost.
How did they make the sound on the C64 version worse than the arcade? Come on. 2 joysticks, speed, colours, and SOUNDS are what I remember from the arcade version, and I'm sure the SID could have duplicated it.
Back in the 80s I was involved with a company that built a hard drive for a Commodore 64. They built two and I have one. I don't know what happened to the other one, and the last time ( a long time ago), I checked it, it worked. It's been sitting in a very dry Arizona garage and I want to maybe sell it. Any ideas? I think it's a 10MB.
Sounds interesting. If it's not documented at all online then it would be very interesting to see photos and learn about how it interfaces with the C64 both physically and in the firmware.
@@JazzBuff23 If you go to my main channel page there's a description that will say "More" or "About" and it'll show my email address in there. I'm looking forward to seeing those photos!
At first blush, it looks as though the game is making assumptions about interrupts; and failing to sense an interrupt that moves the other characters on screen. Going to stick my neck out and say they replaced some ICs from the breadbin 64 with a custom IC, and one of the side-effects is more precise address decoding; Robotron is trying to access some hardware at an address that on the breadbin would effectively be a mirror of an official hardware address, but on the SX64 leads nowhere. Now back to watching, and let's see if I was right ..... **EDIT** Ah, OK. Nearly right. Hardware difference, to do with interrupts and getting the wrong response to "who rang?", and even based around how an unconnected input _usually_ reads high; just this one is missing a pull-up resistor and instead relying on whatever is on the other end of the port to drive its ones high, but here it's going low. I'm sure you won't begrudge me half a mark, eh?
I was looking for one of those last year when I first heard about it! I've got a few other strange joystick accessories and it would fit in well. A dual stick version would be great for Robotron :)
![BOWKYLION - วิงวอน (ex-change) [Official MV]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/cLdnZWDaO-w/mqdefault.jpg)
Every day Robin releases a new video is a good day.
It sure is! I know he's a real humble guy but his calibre is definitely in the top 1% of his class of content!
Atari Joysticks suck.
The CH Flight Stick was way better.
Trivia: I used 4 different systems (including the Atari 2600+) in this video, which makes me wonder if I've ever used more than 4 in a single video. I think I also used 4 in each of the two #SepTandy videos I made a few years ago.
12:35 I really like the Father son project you did with Lego
That Mini PET is mega-gorgeous, and ideal for learners. The keyboard click sound is beguiling, hypnotic, is it the SID chip? I'm thinking of purchasing an oscilloscope from Bangood to help me learn more about my computers. 😂 🖋
11:29 You really want to have a heavy dual arcade-like joystick for that. EDIT: Loved the Lego solution!
I got into a zone where I don't even know anymore what Robin is saying. I just keep the videos in the background - and the peaceful narration, mechanical keyboard sounds and 8-bit samples take me back to that safe place the 80s were.
I do like the refresh in-place. That was a nice update.
The desire to keep your SX-64 with its quirk intact is so relatable :) I always love your in depth videos and it always feels like I am attending my favorite elective class ever.
Great video. I love Robotron and the C64 version looks very decent, it’s great that they added in the 2 joysticks option for proper play.
Chase also works on the C64. Just be sure to use LOAD"CHASE",8 and not LOAD"CHASE",8,1. I actually first saw this game in a book called "More Basic Computer Games," and had typed it into my C64. The book is actually a collection of games published in Creative Computing magazine, but this game is even older than that.
Jeff Minter's "Llamatron" is a crazy classic
Yeah! So much fun! Its available on the Llamasoft Collection on switch and steam too amongst tons of other great classics
It had the two joystick mode too!
Fantastic video Robin!
The harness you made for your controllers reminds me of the time when my dad decided to make a custom desk for his computer made out of plywood and he decided that he would screw in blocks of wood to hold the controllers from the TI-994A in place on the desk. I wasn't even 6 at the time. Talk about memories.
I'm sure it was nice using the lego stand I built for you
Oh my goodness! One of the alleged eight Harbron children appears! Your dad is a legend, but I think you already know that :)
@@AureliusR Yes I do know that
LEGO solution for the win! Great idea and I think you could improve on it and make it even better!
13:00 Couple of quickshots and a glass table cover, that was my setup back in the day
What a delightful cruise down memory lane. My friend and I used to train on this game on the Apple IIe with the keyboard. It was an 8 finger affair or rather a six finger two thumb affair.
To those who got good it was possible to perform prodigious feats perhaps not possible with joysticks. For example it is possible to cue up the next shot or move in the opposite direction with your fingers which is not possible with the joystick!
Love the hex editing! Hopefully I get time to get into this one day!
As always, such a great pleasure to watch - I love your insightfulness into all the ins and outs and a satisfying fix at the end!
I totally get that you didn't want a perma fix either, there's no telling how it that may or maynot manifest - might even be extant
that actually works around it ... and lord forbid, a power surge and your pulling up to 5 might pull up to "act of god" and fry it totally 😲
Keep up the great work my dude!
The game goes way back. I first played the text version on a teletype connected to an HP2000 mainframe in 1977 and it was old then.
Put me in mind of Berzerk on Atari and Robots on the TRS-80 Model 1 :) Happy days. And then you started playing Berzerk :)
Thanks for another video! I had a great time watching it as usual! :) I would really love to see what treasures you have on your "tools collection" cartridge :)
Wow, as a Robotron (and Smash TV, and not least Llamatron) fan, this was great to see! Thanks Robin, you’re a star! ❤
Robotron was the name of the computer factory of East Germany before the wall came down.
And a follow up Robotron company is still around, now as a general IT consultant company.
I like you used the word "Firepower" since of course Williams made that Pinball with many of the same sounds as we see in Defender and Robotron! Also I have to say I live up road about 20 minutes from Morristown NJ!!
Robotron 2084 included joystick holders for Atari 5200. Pretty sure I saw some twin stick games doing the same with standard CX-40 Atari joysticks for Atari 8 bit home computers. Edit: Space Dungeon included joystick holders too.
There was also something called “Stick Stand” for CX-40 which widened the base and gave you a ball top. Two of those would do the trick.
5200 has the only home port of Space Dungeon, oddly enough. Which is a shame, it is a cool game.
It's been in a few modern Taito collections, but those are all emulating the arcade instead of porting the game.
Chase was actually available for the Altair 8800 - so it goes back quite a ways!
They invented the Dual Shock controller before the PlayStation was even a thing.
Always nice to see a Mini PET.
Wonderful video! What a neat keyboard! 🎉
8:00 this game is pretty impressive when you take the VCS hardware limitations into account
Yes, it doesn't at all look like a system with 2 sprites!
so THAT'S why my C64 joystick had suction cups on the base :)
A classic "but it works on my machine" bug, where software actually works correctly on a developer or test machine, but only by chance, even though its code is wrong, and with correct code it will work on any machine.
I'm jelly if your SX-64. I absolutely lusted after that computer in the '80s.
2:50 the move notation in Chase would end up resurfacing in arcade fighting games to represent the joystick/D-pad/thumbstick motions necessary to execute various moves
Debugging the 80's, one game at a time! Great vide as always! 👍
Super interesting! I am amazed, but I guess I shouldn't be, that there's a difference between the same computers like that. I guess we should be amazed they even work, eh? Great job again, fixing another program, Robin.
I just had a look, my SX-64 is a GA4 and returns 16 when typing in that peek
Mine returns a 0 with the peek, although I should also dig out my Robotron cartridge just to confirm it works normally...
(edit) Confirmed, my cartridge works fine, and the SX-64 is a GA1 041038 from October 1984 and is one heavy bugger.
There was a version of this by Jeff Minter for the Atari St called " Llamatron " that only used a single fire button.
Your character would constantly shoot in the direction of travel but when you held the fire button this "locked" the firing direction until it was released , allowing you to move in a different direction to the direction of fire, Was great for strafing many enemies whilst moving away from them
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llamatron
I seem to remember some two joystick game that actually came with an adapter to hold the two joysticks together. I thought it was Robotron (since there aren't that many that used two simultaneous joysticks!) but I could be wrong. BTW, Eugene Jarvis is a LEGEND right up there with Activision's David Crane and id Software's John Carmack and John Romero.
The video title set totally wrong expectations for me: I read Robotron and thought "wow, Robin got his hands on one of these East German Z80-Clones from the GDR Company Robotron" 🙂
It is my dream to play Robotron 2084 on a VEB Robotron computer.
I thing the same 😢
Same for me 😂
@@TheLohoped Did anyone port Robotron 2084 to a Robotron computer?? :)
same here.
would be great to see an episode about this former socialist East German computer, even though I grew up in West Germany.
I have an original Robotron arcade game board stored away. Forgot all about it until I saw this video. I should do something with it.
Robotron is also a good game to use to test all the sprites and vicii chip when doing a repair on a c64. On one of my C64's the brown/orange sprite had vertical lines through it so that one has a bad vicii chip but only for one sprite.
LOL we just used to tape down the joysticks to the table in the old days
I love when in 2600 Berserk the shot goes thru the player's neck. No collision detection.
It's like that perfect country song. Adding Legos to a video for the win
Nice detective work :) very interesting
We had the 7800 version, was pretty good
Legos to the rescue! Awesome design and implementation!
I love this time travel to fix bugs that have been there for decades and somehow managed to slip from the programmers. Wondering how many of this things are all around in C64 games ??
I know 3 bugs in original arcade game. The tank round they only fire a certain amount of bullets. The mickey brain way round they all go after mickey and the brain wave right wall. They cannot be killed fireing up and stuck on wall.
I remember we had several joysticks, one of them being the competition pro joystick. However...we had four suction cups under them on each corner. I now realize that might have been something my dad or somebody else ended up adding to it. I had always thought that was original. So the joystick was basically always stuck to the desk.
Yup, in the UK you could get Quickshot 2 Joysticks and later Cheatah 125+ sticks which both came with suckers on the base should you want our sticks held firmly in place.
For a single stick, it should shoot in the direction you are moving AND in the opposite direction (either at the same time, or alternating). That allows you to shoot while running toward or away from the robots.
I can remember the first time I saw and played Robotron 2084. Late summer of 1982 my family went to the movies in Costa Mesa to see "The Thing." We were an arcade game friendly family for sure,and my cousin spotted a new game in lobby called "Robotron." Both of us played the wheels off that machine then drove back a few times just to play again. EPIC classic arcade game, thanks for the review! 👍 👍
Just a quick question: where do we submit city suggestions for the next _8-Bit Show And Tell Band Tour?_
So on a regular c64 you could connect a datasette, play a random data tape, and have a quasi slow-mo mode?
Robin is like the Mr Dressup of the C64. 😄
Robotron was my absolute favorite bac kin the early 80s.
A 1 bit fix!
Hah, maybe that's the title (or thumbnail) I've been looking for!
@@8_Bit Go for it! I should have written "1-bit fix", hyphenated, since "1-bit" is working as an adjective.
Fixed a bit.
19:33 -- RE: SX-64; I don't have any practical idea why there's an SRQ line from the floppy drive controller *but* I do recall that the Commodore was capable of using 50 or 60 Hz power supplies, and that makes me wonder if perhaps that would be more of a factor than solar flares.
^^ Set-Reset I mean, I do have some idea about that and why it's a good thing for a floppy drive controller to have. The Q line though... no idea.
I would d be interesting to see the "Chase" game using PETSCII characters.
"Robotron" is also the name of a "company" in the former GDR that produced 8-bit computers.
What's the pretty music that's playing at the end during the Patron scroll?
I guess you could also think of it as - If they were setting $FE to $DC0D, it probably clears to 0 on the regular c64 and doesn't get bunged up. So no harm/no foul. The SX64 never clears it to 0 , until you manually set it to 0, allowing the game to run.
I didn't study the schematic but it looks like it would be possible to build a DIN plug with a resistor that you can just plug in when you want the "bug" gone.
Chase is like a spiced up version of the old 'robots' unix game? we still did a clone of that back in 2000 for the university programming course(it was ran on a linux shell, the evaluator program for the course just checked out and input.. and there were some dumb quirk not on the assignment or something, I remember someone had written a thing to get the excepted inputs and outputs out of the system)
21:41 This is the weird kind of witchcraft that we had to do to get 20th century technology to work.
Indeed in digital logic it is a bad practice to keep floating lines. However... it also depends on the chips sometimes. The C64 is old TTL. In TTL the logic level range is from 0 to 5 volts but anything between 2 and 5 V is high and 0 to 0.8 is low. So anything between 0.8 to 2 volts is ambiguous. According to the datasheet the input voltage threshold of the 6526 is 2.4 volts and it also looks like the FLAG pin is active low and is internally pulled up. This is a common practice for a lot of logic chips; you only require the 'thing' driving it to make sure to pull it 'low' to set the flag.
responded before watching the whole thing. So supposedly suggesting the pull-up was missing I got suspicious. On the schematics I can find, from zimmers, indeed the I/O board seems to have a pull up for FLAG_2 but not FLAG. I noticed that there is two serial bus headers; P11 and P13. Looking at the schematic of the actual floppy drive board seems to suggest there should be pull up resistors there though. I do not have hardware to confirm myself. But if the design was to offload this to the disk drive some people could end up with maybe drives that will be missing the resistor(s) of the FDD board while others might not. And even a drive swap could "fix" the problem.
The 1953 quintessentially bad scifi movie Robot Monster must have had some influence on RT2084, such as the last human family aspect.
If anyone wants to watch it, it's in the public domain, but there are also riffs on it by MST3K and Rifftrax.
The best version of Robotron by far is Jeff Minter's take on it, Llamatron 2112.
There are a LOT of what looks like high res software sprites in Robotron for the 64, and very little color clash - someone should make a video about how they pulled that off!
Nice one.
It sounds like that bad code was supposed to be for debugging the game during development. The dev was able to stop the enemies and step through the movement code one at a time. I wonder how many other games have old debugging code that can be found be used by players to cheat the game. Might make for a good video.
I first played a Chase derivative on the Amiga, in the form of Daleks; a game played through the Workbench. The first Berzerk derived game I played was Amok, on the VIC-20. I have to say, the sound on the C64 version of Robotron was rather underwhelming!
Can't tell if they multiplexed sprites, used character or bitmap graphics to get all those moving objects.
When i click play I thought that you gonna repair some DDR (east German) computer 😢
Neat fix!
Oh that's really interesting, I didn't know that. I wonder how much other software bugs on it.
I've heard certain fastloaders bug on it but no specifics.
@@8_Bit It must be because there is no tape port.
Hmm 28:39 is there anywhere in the game that modifies the Timer A ? Make it count down from different number to slow or speed up the game ?
And unfortunately, you can't play the C64 version in WinVICE using a duel analog controller, due to the fact that VICE auto-configures the joystick(s) based on real devices, rather than letting you map the virtual sticks as most emulators do. :(
Hi Robin. I hope you’re doing good. I remember I love going to the Arcade as a kid in the early 80’s. One time I robbed my piggy bank, skipped school and spent all day at the arcade wasting all my money😂
Thanks for your videos. Just for the fun of it I checked on my SX-64 serial # GA1007262 and the peek result was 0. I also did a loop to print the PEEK 1000 times and the first time I got 999 (0) and 1 (1), the second and third times I got 999 (0) and 1 (129) each time, and the fourth time I got all (0).
Maybe if you played Robotron on your SX-64, it might "stutter"... running normally most of the time but then slowing down/stopping occasionally. That would be neat to see, but annoying if you were really trying to play :)
@@8_Bit I am not much of a game player so I don't plan to try it out. In any case I have only seen bit 0 and bit 7 on and never bit 4 so the problem would probably not occur.
I’d like to see you do a video about the Defender game on the C64. If your ship gets shot and you hit Run Stop/Restore during the explosion the next game your ship doubles in size. Just wondering if that’s a bug or if the programmer intended that.
That bug sounds familiar to me, but I don't see it in my list of things to investigate. I've added it now, will give you a shout-out if I figure it out. Thanks!
I own one of those emulators that have a pile of Williams games in it. Like Robotron Stargate Defender Joust and Sinestar
Interesting.
There is a joystick that is easier to use (less stiff) and it has suction cups. That might solve this problem.
Since the video briefly mentions memory byte order (aka endianness), here's a random fact of the day:
I always thought it doesn't matter which byte order CPUs use. x86 is big endian (high value byte comes first), most other CPUs are usually little endian (low value byte comes first), or they can even operate in both modes, but usually use little endian by default. Network protocols are usually big endian for no technical reason, big endian CPUs were just more common when the first network protocols were developed, and big endian numbers are easier for most people to read; the network hardware couldn't care less. Also, all modern CPUs have hardware instructions to swap byte order, so the performance impact of doing so is tiny.
However, there are good technical reasons why CPU design is easier when the byte order is little endian. Without going into technical details, it makes it easier to address and align data in memory. It also makes many internal CPU operations a bit more efficient. That's why new CPU architectures are always little endian by default. If they're not, they're at least endian neutral, meaning they can support either mode (sometimes the mode has to be set at power-up, sometimes it can even be switched at any time), but they may have a tiny performance penalty when operating in big endian mode, unless they're used in networking hardware and primarily parse network protocol headers, because then they don't have to swap byte order all the time, which may even provide a tiny performance boost.
How did they make the sound on the C64 version worse than the arcade? Come on. 2 joysticks, speed, colours, and SOUNDS are what I remember from the arcade version, and I'm sure the SID could have duplicated it.
A software bug found because of a hardware bug :)
BTW, did you say 4000 hex was 4K?
Robin, you need to get your son a 3D printer to make stuff! I was a Defender guy at the arcade until decent driving games started to appear.
Robintron 2024
Hi, Just having trouble with the download link for chase and chase 2, is there a problem or is it me?
Hi, I added the "s" to https in the link just now, see if that helps. Sometimes TH-cam and/or browsers are weird about that.
That's fix it, thanks.
Modern notebook computers don’t have a place to store your floppy disks.
I prefer that first game in this video - turn based! 😁 Any idea to get the source code PLS? I want to create it for PC. 🙂 (I have PC only.)
What about C64 SeaFox. Can you make it faster?
Back in the 80s I was involved with a company that built a hard drive for a Commodore 64. They built two and I have one. I don't know what happened to the other one, and the last time ( a long time ago), I checked it, it worked. It's been sitting in a very dry Arizona garage and I want to maybe sell it. Any ideas? I think it's a 10MB.
Sounds interesting. If it's not documented at all online then it would be very interesting to see photos and learn about how it interfaces with the C64 both physically and in the firmware.
@@8_Bit It's very large and I'm not sure if it has any documentation, it may. I'll look and take some photo's. Let me know where to send them.
@@8_Bit OK, I have the photo's and the instruction sheet. Where do I send them?
@@JazzBuff23 If you go to my main channel page there's a description that will say "More" or "About" and it'll show my email address in there. I'm looking forward to seeing those photos!
If Robotron 2084 winds up being prescient I'm going to laugh, granted I'll be 102 years old, so ya I'll probably laugh.
Chase? First turn-based strategy game?
At first blush, it looks as though the game is making assumptions about interrupts; and failing to sense an interrupt that moves the other characters on screen. Going to stick my neck out and say they replaced some ICs from the breadbin 64 with a custom IC, and one of the side-effects is more precise address decoding; Robotron is trying to access some hardware at an address that on the breadbin would effectively be a mirror of an official hardware address, but on the SX64 leads nowhere.
Now back to watching, and let's see if I was right .....
**EDIT** Ah, OK. Nearly right. Hardware difference, to do with interrupts and getting the wrong response to "who rang?", and even based around how an unconnected input _usually_ reads high; just this one is missing a pull-up resistor and instead relying on whatever is on the other end of the port to drive its ones high, but here it's going low.
I'm sure you won't begrudge me half a mark, eh?
Can someone remind Eugene Jarvis that he once promised to dump a rom of an easier version of Sinistar. 😄
dr. who/daleks was similar to chase
12:28 th-cam.com/video/7LUr22CcxRo/w-d-xo.html
I was looking for one of those last year when I first heard about it! I've got a few other strange joystick accessories and it would fit in well. A dual stick version would be great for Robotron :)
Kind of disappointing the sound effects on that one. Ironically the Apple 2 version had better ones
If there are more than 8 directions, I don’t want to hear it!