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TxK, Tempest 2000 Remake for PS Vita Demoed
If you happen to be one of the other five people who own an Atari Jaguar, you've probably played the excellent Tempest 2000. As chance would have it, a few months ago Llamasoft announced they were approached by Sony to write TxK, based "...on the essence of the original T2K. ... . We're not going to overload you with ultra psychedelia, but we will make it fluid and colourful and awesome-looking ... We're going to give you a perfect treat for your eyes, ears and thumbs with a modern extrapolation of one of the best shooters ever made on hardware that's just perfectly suited for it, and in a way that retains the purity of the original design."
A couple of weeks ago, a working version of TxK was demoed at Play Expo. Read below to see the video. It really seems to retain the aesthetic of Tempest 2000 enhanced by modern hardware and a full color range, with a touch of Space Giraffe tactics (you can kill enemies at the rim somehow at least).
I bought (and still have!) a Jaguar just for Tempest 2k. Great gameplay of the original with a trippy, addictive soundtrack!
Too bad the union of Jag owners, Tempest fans and Vita owners is likely quite small ^^
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!
REAL Tempest fits entirely memory locations 0x9000-FFFF, its lines are ONE pixel wide (but it's a BIG one!) and it does not have whiny buzzy switching power supply. It has a large throbbing step-down transformer and a whopping thirty-two thousand microfarad capacitor in the power supply. It has a flyback transformer feeding a CRT that bristles with actual electricity terror death.
Real Tempest machines go out with a real BANG.
What is shown is some Fisher Price low voltage plastic computing device, obviously meant for children, whose level completion screen is full of whoopy flashes and dancing bears distracting artifacts and eye candy as in, deer-meets-headlights.
The Real Tempest, when a level is complete it launches you into the middle and flies you through the tunnel, this was the COOLEST damned thing we ever saw when we first sawed it, and gets back down to business. No goofy crap.
THIS IS WHAT A REAL TEMPEST IS. IT CAN HURT YOU..
If the NSA tunes their TEMPEST receiver towards you and the signal resolves into a TEMPEST game, would they chuckle at the irony? If a bear shits in the woods and laughs because shit got on his 'bear' hands would he laugh hysterically and change brands of toiley paper?
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
The Atari Jaguar was awesome and stands as my all time favorite console. One of it's biggest problems was it essentially had the first GPU (in a round about way). Almost no one wanted to program those chips, citing the difficulty. Consequently, programmers wrote most of the games to run off of the 68000 chip which was originally intended only for booting the machine. The next problem was that almost none of the games were finished, but got released anyway - despite being unfinished many were still fun. Also, I won't deny that many of the few games that came out were in fact crap. But the best titles, that were finished, made the console worth having: Cybermorph, Battlemorph, Iron Soldier, Iron Soldier 2, Tempest2k, Alien versus Predator, Best Rayman implimentation and a few other awesome titles I can visualize but not remember. If you are lucky, you are one of the very few that got a copy of Battlesphere.
IMHO Battlemorpth is one of the all time greatest games ever made.
I recall there was a hardware bug that required a workaround, but I don't remember the details.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
The fast co-processors (Tom and Jerry) didn't have instruction caches (as you would think of them today anyhow). They did have a small amount (4K) of directly mapped local memory. They were originally designed to run programs either in this memory or in normal memory. However, due to bugs in the chip, you could only reliably run code from the 4K internal memory. Since this was directly mapped, that meant all your code had to run in 4K. If you wanted to run larger programs, you needed a small amount of resident code that swapped functions or chunks of larger code into memory and did fixups on them and then ran them on the GPU. Most developers didn't have the expertise to do this themselves so indeed, a lot of game code ran on the 68K with certain heavy lifting functions (graphics transforms or blitter programming) happening on TOM and then usually just Audio/DSP (software mixing) on JERRY.
FWIW, the hardware was quite buggy as well. I think I averaged finding around one undocumented hardware bug per week in the various coprocessing chips while working on the system.