MIDI play for Oric.

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Chema
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Re: MIDI play for Oric.

Post by Chema »

Prince of Persia has always been in my mind, to be honest. I once even took a look at the blog of the guy who made the C64 version. It should be doable in the Oric, but the trickiest part would be to have a good and fast animation of such a big sprite, as the Oric lacks hardware sprites. And that the usual issues with colors.

But it shouldn't be impossible. There is a lot of information around even in 6502 code, so nothing like starting it from scratch!
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Re: MIDI play for Oric.

Post by Godzil »

Look at the DBug's Metro Station, they are big sprites ;)
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peacer
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Re: MIDI play for Oric.

Post by peacer »

laurentd75 wrote:Hi there,
You'r very welcome, this was sincere, you really have a talent for graphics, that's for sure!!

I do understand though what you mean about porting this game, I am very well aware this would be a monstruous task, and I for one would also be unable of such a feat... I I were more skilled in 6502 development and if I had enough free time I would gladly offer you a hand, but unfortunately, I'm nowhere as talented as all you people out here...

Mind you, I think we all knew at least one guy that could have done it all by himself... Our deeply missed Jonathan, aka Twilighte... I was so impressed by his work, and particularly by his port of 'Stormlord'... I used to love playing this game on the Atari ST, and once I discovered and tried his Oric port, I just got transported back in time and magic, he managed to recreate the atmosphere of the game so well, this really was an awesome piece of work... I really wish I could have had the opportunity to meet this guy, and I will always rank him very high in my personal 'hall of fame' !

Anyway, I don't want to try and entice or force anyone into doing it, but there are other people around here who are blessed with all the talent they need to do it quite easily.... The likes of Dbug and Chema for instance... So guys, if you ever get bored and don't know what game to develop next for the Oric, here's a challenge for you :-)


Cheers,
Laurent

I've said "Its impossible for a one-man duty" . This is a definition for normal men. Jonathan was a hero, superior to all of us. He was the one who can be a source of inspiration. He was more than just an enthusiast. All the things you said about him is true. He will always be in top of "hall of fame" in any meaning about Oric.

Surely, there are people like him with superior talent and capability like Dbug & Chema. Your works also have shown us that, limits of Oric is way more beyond than I thought in 80's. It's even still being progressed everyday with some new ideas and techniques. In 80's, drawing some colorful circles was miracilous for me. Today, I see such extended works and still have newer advanced games and programs that surprise me.

I am sure, there will be many advanced projects, new games, and ports of old games like Prince of persia on Oric. Its proven by previous works done by the names we spoken and others in the past.

I can contribute to any such project if there's something that I am capable of helping in it.. Maybe I don't have enough programming skills, but I have enthusiasm :)
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Re: MIDI play for Oric.

Post by Dbug »

peacer wrote:I can contribute to any such project if there's something that I am capable of helping in it.. Maybe I don't have enough programming skills, but I have enthusiasm :)
On this type of project, generally the difficulty is to device graphics representations that are possible to handle in code, and also does not look bad, which means creating reusable elements, which have to be aligned on multiple of 6, take care of attribute placement and inversion flags if you want color, how to perform masking, etc...

All this can be done without any code, just making graphic data and tilemaps :)
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Re: MIDI play for Oric.

Post by ibisum »

All this can be done without any code, just making graphic data and tilemaps :)
If someone who has done this would write up a tutorial and get the basics of starting out and coming up with a semi-decent result, written down, then I'm sure I'd be quite happy to spend hours every week creating Oric artwork .. its just that I don't fully understand the AIC mode and how its limitations can be exploited to do cool things. Yet.
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Steve M
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Re: MIDI play for Oric.

Post by Steve M »

I think the problem is not having working hardware. Telestrat MIDI ports don't work. No-one came up with MIDI ports for Atmos.

Sonix software is MIDI compatible.
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Re: MIDI play for Oric.

Post by retroric »

Chema, Dbug: thanks for your answers !! And sorry Chema I missed your first answer, it was funny afterwards when I discovered you had actually replied before I mentioned your name and that you had considered porting the game !!

Back to the auestion of 'it is doable on the Oric'...Well, you both said it was probably doable, keeping in mind Oric graphics limitations (especially with colour attributes), and I would add, regarding the use of 'big sprites', that games like Stormlord by Twilighte demonstrated if need be that 'big software sprites' (albeit not animated in as detailed a manner as the PoP character) are possible...

Now, I stumbled across a VERY interesting piece of news while wandering the net for Prince of Persia, I'm not sure if any of you is aware that the Prince of persia original Appel II source code was released back in 2012 ???!!!

Here are the links to the announcement and source code on GitHub:

http://www.jordanmechner.com/archive/#2012-04-source
https://github.com/jmechner/Prince-of-Persia-Apple-II

Also, I found a series of article containing a somewhat useful analysis of the original source code:
http://fabiensanglard.net/prince_of_persia/

AMong interesting details, it says a bunch of very advanced techniques at the time where used in the code, from "self-modifying code, in-house bootloader, clever floppy disc format to skewing lookup tables"...

Obviously, not much of this would be of any real use to porting the game to the Oric, given the hardware differences, but to me, it might constitute a proof if need be that it is indeed doable on the Oric. The reason being, as far as I know, the Apple II had NO hardware sprites, (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II_graphics) hence all animation and graphics processing had to be done in software, like on the Oric! So, if it was doable on the Apple, it must be doable on the Oric, albeit with the known color/attribute clash limitations ! :-)
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retroric
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Re: MIDI play for Oric.

Post by retroric »

Hello,

Looking back at my past messages on this thread I'd like to apologize for two things:
- first, for kind of hijacking this thread that was originally meant to discuss MIDI play for Oric! Sorry, that was really bad forum etiquette, but I didn't do it on purpose or knowingly, I swear!! :-)
- and second, for posting info about Prince of Persia source code release that was actually already mentioned on another thread (I just stumbled on it !): http://forum.defence-force.org/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=740
(so I suppose any Prince of Persia -related digression should be resumed on this thread instead!)

Sorry peacer if I have annoyed you (or anyone else) with my rants, and feel free to get back to the original subject of course !! :-)

Cheers
Laurent
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Re: MIDI play for Oric.

Post by waskol »

Thank you to everybody in this thread. With your guidance, I achieved my first midi conversion, see on my github :
https://github.com/DJChloe/got

got.tap
Tap file for atmos
(14.45 KiB) Downloaded 461 times
Last edited by waskol on Fri Oct 12, 2018 2:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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waskol
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Re: MIDI play for Oric.

Post by waskol »

Different technique, I used mymplayer (I changed a few address, because this sublime music wass rather huge) :
https://github.com/DJChloe/Very-cool-music

This was composed with Arkos Tracker (http://www.julien-nevo.com/arkostracker/) then exported to YM format, then converted to Mym format.

coolmusic.dsk
Disk file for Atmos
(131.5 KiB) Downloaded 449 times
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ibisum
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Re: MIDI play for Oric.

Post by ibisum »

Really nice work! Listening in the background, I forgot it was an Oric. Always nice when music brings such changes..
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Re: MIDI play for Oric.

Post by Dbug »

Ultrasyd has quite many nice tunes, I did not actually know that one :)
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