Fractalus

[Michael]

I hadn't seen the Atari 7800 version's cockpit before as I've only played the C64 version of RoF, and I am basing the remake on the C64 version. I should get a copy of the Atari version and have a look at the graphics, especially the cockpit as it looks more detailed than the C64 version.

This cockpit version is from DEMO version of RoF that was specifically designed for the ATARI 7800. It was never released though, so you would probably never get a copy of that game.

The ATARI version that was released looks pretty much the same as on the C64 - the version you use as a basis for your game.

[Michael]

You can find more about it here:

http://www.atariprotos.com/7800/software/rof/rof.htm

[Luke]

Aha, that would explain my confusion. I've seen videos of the Atari version and thought it looked the same as the C64 version. I didn't consider that there were multiple Atari versions

I did a bit of hunting and found a copy of the RoF 7800 ROM and an emulator so I'm now able to play around with it and have a closer look at the design for that cockpit.

[Michael]

What emulator did you use?

[Luke]

I used ProSystem (link). There's an orange bar rendered over the main view in RoF (bug in the emulator? not sure), but the cockpit is displayed correctly and the game otherwise runs fine.

[Nick]

Hi there, haven't played this yet, but I will be as soon as I've downloaded it, it looks awesome so far.

As for the flying saucers, they leave you alone at lower altitudes and shutting down the your ships systems when landed is how you break a turrets lock on you.

[Nick]

Hi again

I've now played it and it's pretty cool so far, so here's my thoughts.

1. I don't recall being able to fly upside down (and then land upside down ) in the original, but flying upside down isn't a major issue, just maybe have the craft right itself when landing.

2. After watching the video for 0.5.0 the way the Jaggi turrets fire at you was good effect, it gave sense of awesomeness as you flew through the incoming fire to destroy it, so maybe it might be an idea to keep that for when the turrets are taking random potshots at you and then when it has a lock on it fires the beam laser?

Other things like being able to re-orientate the craft when landed but with the systems still on and the like have already been mentioned.

I hope you are still able to find time to work on this because so far it is great

Cheers

[Luke]

Hi Nick and welcome to the forum!

As for the flying saucers, they leave you alone at lower altitudes and shutting down the your ships systems when landed is how you break a turrets lock on you.

I do remember that the saucers can't go below a certain point in the original. I will copy that behaviour to my version. Didn't know about breaking a turret's lock by powering down, will implement that also

1. I don't recall being able to fly upside down (and then land upside down ) in the original, but flying upside down isn't a major issue, just maybe have the craft right itself when landing.

You're right, in the original you could not fly upside down, which I imagine was more a limitation of the tech at the time. You definitely could not land upside down, the landing process in my remake is something I need to do a lot of work on. I added the ability to fly upside down in the remake to allow full freedom of movement - particularly in the pre-0.5 builds where the flight controls did not automatically yaw.

2. After watching the video for 0.5.0 the way the Jaggi turrets fire at you was good effect, it gave sense of awesomeness as you flew through the incoming fire to destroy it, so maybe it might be an idea to keep that for when the turrets are taking random potshots at you and then when it has a lock on it fires the beam laser?

I admit I miss the bullet or "bolt" type weapons the turrets used in 0.5, even though in the original they never used such a weapon, it was always the beam. I like your suggestion to have them only use the beam once they lock on, I think that's a good compromise that would allow me to again implement the bolt weapon I liked so much

Other things like being able to re-orientate the craft when landed but with the systems still on and the like have already been mentioned.

I think this was implemented in 0.6, though I neglected to mention it in the changelog.

I hope you are still able to find time to work on this because so far it is great

Time is constrained but I am still finding bits of time here and there to work on it. 0.7 is definitely in progress

Thanks for your feedback!

- Luke

[trekkie22]

One other thing is that sometimes when landed and the pilot started to run to ones ship they sometimes could be alien so if you open your airlock and let him in he would kill you and the those you had saved. That is also something I miss in your game. I did let an alien in one time in the old game and he killed all the pilot I had rescue and then he killed me too. So one had to be careful so that one didn't let an alien onboard.

I remember that also. I think they started appearing at about level 5 or so. First they were easy to spot, because they had a green helmet. Enabling the shields killed them easily. Later they learned and got more sneaky with white helmets. Then the only way to sort them out was to let the pilot knock two times on the airlock - a real pilot would knock the second time, an alien knocked only once and then started to attack you.

If you let them in by accident they killed first all pilots and then you, with one exeption - if the mothership was already in range, you could return there and the alien got killed as soon as you left the atmosphere. If you were quick enough even the pilots survived.

I played this game times and times again and always had that scary moment when an alien pilot with a white helmet attacked me...

I love the remake. It needs some polishing, but it's already pretty good. I would love to see the original intro being remade with the rescue ship starting from the mother ship and the "level-change" animation.

I think ground collisions consume way more energy in the original. I remember I once lost because I got somehow stuck in a ground collision and that used up all energy.

[trekkie22]

1. I don't recall being able to fly upside down (and then land upside down ) in the original, but flying upside down isn't a major issue, just maybe have the craft right itself when landing.

You're right, in the original you could not fly upside down, which I imagine was more a limitation of the tech at the time. You definitely could not land upside down, the landing process in my remake is something I need to do a lot of work on. I added the ability to fly upside down in the remake to allow full freedom of movement - particularly in the pre-0.5 builds where the flight controls did not automatically yaw.

Lol, that's something I can clarify by coincidence. After a while being not really active in the retro scene, I was over at AtariAge the last days. Just before I learned about the fractalus remake (BTW really coincidence - I talked with some friends about retro games and searched for a video on Rescue on Fractalus and the first one was the one that compares the original and the remake...), I read the thread about the "real", never officially released, Star Raiders II at AtariAge. And as crazy, as it sounds - in there is the answer to this question in a post from Aric, who wrote Star Raiders II and was at Atari the same time Rescue on Fractalus was written:

I didn't work on Fractalus directly but when I was at Atari I got to know the teams working on Fractals & Ballblazer and I worked on the fractal code for Koronis Rift. There is another story behind this....

Loren Carpenter was doing the fractal code for the Genesis effect used in the movie Wrath of Kahn. David Fox was working on a game design and they were working in the same building. David admired Loren's work and lamented that the 800 didn't have the CPU to do fractal fly-overs. What David didn't realize was that Loren admired video game programmers because while he was using a bank of computers that might need 24 hours to generate a single video frame, we were using a 6502 and creating a new frame every 30th of a second.

While David thought that doing fractals would be impossible, Loren really wanted to try, and a few weeks later they had a demonstration of the code.

Loren and David faced a problem that the terrain rendering code worked by drawing vertical stripes so you couldn't rotate the screen. This is why you can only bank your ship a limited amount and even this was done by simply increasing or decreasing the y-position of the points based on their distance from the center of the screen. The screen is actually sheared, not rotated.

I assume it's not really helpful with the remake, but I think everyone here is interested in stories around Rescue on Fractalus and it is a piece that you can find only by coincidence.

BTW: I can really recommend to read this thread about Star Raiders II, especially Arics posts, and hear the interview with Aric (podcast link is in the first post). Rescue on Fractalus is only a side story, but there are other interesting stories about Atari in this thread and the interview, that are worth the time.