Commander X16

Read about it here.

 

For someone looking to port Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, or Marathon (Duke Nukem 3D or Quake may still be bridges too fat) or create an original first-person 3D concept for the Commander X-16, this might be worth looking into, considering that it appears to have been made to run on the Apple II, Atari 800, BBC Micro, and Commodore 64. Considering that the X-16 runs at four to eight times the clock speed.  Then again, I haven't taken the time to calculate the average percentage CPU overhead involved in bankswitching the High RAM for this sort of thing.

I also don't know whether or not it makes use of the undocumented/illegal opcodes...

Wolfenstein 3D uses raycasting; this engine looks like it would be more useful for something like Elite. Once it releases, this might be useful, as TRSE has some support for the X16.

Okay - once this comes out, someone needs to make a demo doing the Death Star trench run briefing animation, and streaming the audio from disk to accompany the animation.

It would be really cool if somebody ported Elite to the X16. ? Even cooler if it were an officially sanctioned port. ?

One can dream..

3 hours ago, Elektron72 said:

 this engine looks like it would be more useful for something like Elite.

 

@Falken you can play the space traveling and trader sub game in text only mode if you really starved for elite content. However I confess it will get boring rather quickly without the 3d space flight, docking and fighting part...

22 hours ago, ZeroByte said:

Okay - once this comes out, someone needs to make a demo doing the Death Star trench run briefing animation, and streaming the audio from disk to accompany the animation.

Video is surprisingly easy to do on this machine.  Here's something I put together back in September of 2019, on version 28 of the emulator, but there's no sound; VERA has only gotten better since then.  I think I'm going to put together an instructional video showing how to make a much better version of this with sound.

 

20 hours ago, Falken said:

It would be really cool if somebody ported Elite to the X16. ? Even cooler if it were an officially sanctioned port. ?



One can dream..



 

Elite would probably have to be 160 x 120 x 256 resolution to get the frame rate anything like. You have two basic problems 16 bit maths vs 8 bit maths and the way you access the screen. Michael Steil and I both have written Bresenham type algorithms independently for 320x200x256 mode and they do about 2 a frame, or 120 a second. Don't know if this is using 8 bit arithmetic or 16 bit to calculate its rotations but it makes a heck of a difference.

3 hours ago, Ed Minchau said:

Video is surprisingly easy to do on this machine.  Here's something I put together back in September of 2019, on version 28 of the emulator, but there's no sound; VERA has only gotten better since then.  I think I'm going to put together an instructional video showing how to make a much better version of this with sound.

Are you sure this would work on real HW? Whenever I run my Wolf3d audio demo using SD images, it takes orders of magnitude longer to load the one image into VRAM than it does when the emulator hyper-loads it (using the host FS). I'm sure the emulator is slower with SD cards than the real HW is going to be, but given that the emu is just teleporting the data into VRAM (essentially) and the real HW is still going to have to chew through it at several cycles per byte - I'm curious to see if it will be able to keep up.

56 minutes ago, ZeroByte said:

Are you sure this would work on real HW? Whenever I run my Wolf3d audio demo using SD images, it takes orders of magnitude longer to load the one image into VRAM than it does when the emulator hyper-loads it (using the host FS). I'm sure the emulator is slower with SD cards than the real HW is going to be, but given that the emu is just teleporting the data into VRAM (essentially) and the real HW is still going to have to chew through it at several cycles per byte - I'm curious to see if it will be able to keep up.

When I did my LOTR video I found I had to put in a delay loop to match the speed of the actual hardware. The emulator loads from file into VERA approximately 50 times faster than the actual hardware.