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DU: OG Halley's Comet
#377775 - 07/25/18 02:38 AM
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Joe Magiera dumped a prototype of Halley's Comet. He also dumped an alt revision of Ikari Warriors but I don't have a pcb pic of it.
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Re: DU: OG Halley's Comet
[Re: Smitdogg]
#377776 - 07/25/18 03:41 AM
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> Joe Magiera dumped a prototype of Halley's Comet. He also dumped an alt revision of
> Ikari Warriors but I don't have a pcb pic of it.
Halley's Comet is by far one of the weirdest designs Taito came up with
Actually I wonder if it really came from Taito, it sticks out like a sore thumb compared to every other piece of hardware they made.
I still wonder how Acho managed to figure half of that out, complex multi-layer blitter, hardware collisions, palette / transparency effects... in 1986. Emulation definitely isn't perfect, but it's a beast, I wonder if any of the video chips are actually CPUs themselves.
The driver is of course, also full of gross hacks, the way collisions are handled is especially scary.
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Re: DU: OG Halley's Comet
[Re: Haze]
#377777 - 07/25/18 03:46 AM
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I think this proto might be dated 1985. That's why it's OG.
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Re: DU: OG Halley's Comet
[Re: Haze]
#377778 - 07/25/18 05:12 AM
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> I still wonder how Acho managed to figure half of that out, complex multi-layer
> blitter, hardware collisions, palette / transparency effects... in 1986. Emulation
> definitely isn't perfect, but it's a beast, I wonder if any of the video chips are
> actually CPUs themselves.
If you mean the big, square pin grid array devices, they're Fujitsu mask-programmed gate array chips.
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Re: DU: OG Halley's Comet
[Re: Smitdogg]
#377779 - 07/25/18 05:51 AM
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What, this thing has THREE General Instrument AY-3-8910 sound chips?
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Re: DU: OG Halley's Comet
[Re: jonwil]
#377792 - 07/25/18 07:21 PM
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> What, this thing has THREE General Instrument AY-3-8910 sound chips?
That's nothing special.
A single AY-3-8910 is probably one of the least interesting sound chips ever made at least in terms of what types of sounds you can get out of with it without using the latest demoscene tricks. I've seen it affectionately nicknamed "the doorbell" 
It gets a little less bland when you have three (Bomb Jack) or even five (Gyruss) of them.
S
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Re: DU: OG Halley's Comet
[Re: Sune]
#377794 - 07/25/18 08:57 PM
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> > What, this thing has THREE General Instrument AY-3-8910 sound chips?
>
> That's nothing special.
>
> A single AY-3-8910 is probably one of the least interesting sound chips ever made at
> least in terms of what types of sounds you can get out of with it without using the
> latest demoscene tricks. I've seen it affectionately nicknamed "the doorbell"
>
> It gets a little less bland when you have three (Bomb Jack) or even five (Gyruss) of
> them.
>
> S
I think the majority of the 128kb ZX Spectrum library would like to have a word with you. There are some absolutely iconic pieces of music done with it.
It can produce some stunning music in the right hands, without 'demoscene tricks' (which have been used recently to do sample playback on it, yes, but such tricks aren't really practical for game music and aren't what the majority of them are using since many of them are played during gameplay, when you wouldn't have the cycles for that)
Just because outside of the European home market nobody seemed to have a clue what to do with it doesn't make it a poor chip. For arcades, sure, it's criminally underused considering how many boards have one, but that's just how it went.
Personally I like it a lot more than the C64 SID stuff.
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Re: DU: OG Halley's Comet
[Re: jonwil]
#377803 - 07/26/18 06:15 AM
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> What, this thing has THREE General Instrument AY-3-8910 sound chips?
Four actually 
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Re: DU: OG Halley's Comet
[Re: Haze]
#377805 - 07/26/18 07:17 AM
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> It can produce some stunning music in the right hands, without 'demoscene tricks'
> (which have been used recently to do sample playback on it, yes, but such tricks
> aren't really practical for game music and aren't what the majority of them are using
> since many of them are played during gameplay, when you wouldn't have the cycles for
> that)
Demoscene tricks maybe, recently no, not practical are you joking? It's the sound chip of the Atari ST...
Arcade-wise the tricks usually aren't needed because a non-dma DAC costs nothing, the crudest version being some ttl for address decode, a latch, some resistors for digital-analog conversion and a lowpass filter (e.g. one resistor and one capacitor) to clean up the worst crap. Not sure why the computers didn't have some as a matter of course. It was so easy that the ST had *two* cartridges (ST replay, MV16) that did just that.
OG.
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> > It can produce some stunning music in the right hands, without 'demoscene tricks'
> > (which have been used recently to do sample playback on it, yes, but such tricks
> > aren't really practical for game music and aren't what the majority of them are
> using
> > since many of them are played during gameplay, when you wouldn't have the cycles
> for
> > that)
>
> Demoscene tricks maybe, recently no, not practical are you joking? It's the sound
> chip of the Atari ST...
>
> Arcade-wise the tricks usually aren't needed because a non-dma DAC costs nothing, the
> crudest version being some ttl for address decode, a latch, some resistors for
> digital-analog conversion and a lowpass filter (e.g. one resistor and one capacitor)
> to clean up the worst crap. Not sure why the computers didn't have some as a matter
> of course. It was so easy that the ST had *two* cartridges (ST replay, MV16) that did
> just that.
>
> OG.
Well I was mostly meaning you're not going to get a ZX Spectrum doing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BbBwwdueM0
during gameplay, presumably that's all your actual CPU cycles and most of the memory eaten up just on the music.
You did get various little speech clips tho, yeah.
I don't think any of the actual ingame music is anything you'd class as demoscene tho
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8CMScjD82o
is still one of my favourites for actual game music (It's a Rob Hubbard track)
Then you've got the Spectrum LED Storm, a Tim Folin one, which I much prefer over the arcade soundtrack
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9b9XjxK2RJc
and a huge number of Codemasters games too (most of the Dizzy series for example)
I'm less familiar with it's use on the Atari ST tho
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Re: DU: OG Halley's Comet
[Re: Haze]
#377816 - 07/27/18 02:36 AM
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Re: DU: OG Halley's Comet
[Re: Smitdogg]
#377951 - 08/02/18 01:40 PM
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> Joe Magiera dumped a prototype of Halley's Comet. He also dumped an alt revision of
> Ikari Warriors but I don't have a pcb pic of it.
there are definitely some differences in this Halley's Comet
I've only tested with the cheats dipswitches on (hold start 1 on boot for them to function) but in the proto verison you can't seem to die from 'damage 100%' like in all the other versions, also the dip after the data logger one causes the game to hang when you start it.
this makes the invulnerability dipswitch more useful as you can play the game forever with it turned on.
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