Tatung Computer Forum

Now I have a proposal to the Einstein community, as they've been a lot of chatting lately about gaming for the Einstein machines I can announce that the AGD MSX port is ready to be fully available (most probably it'll be included in the next AGD release by Jonathan Cauldwell). What it means?, that a TC-01 port could be easily created as the hard job is already done, just some good Einstein knowledge is needed and some spare time .

For the first time, look what can you get with this engine (if anyone doesn't knowns about it yet):

https://youtu.be/A2t_6AsGdKw

(btw, how can I post a video?)

I can offer, to anyone interested, full assistance to help him/them to create the Einstein version. I would eventually ended up programming the port by myself; but as I'm interested in keep working in the MSX2 version, would be great to find some volunteers to help with this project. Of course my original desire is to get a TCS256 working version; but being ready the MSX1 version, seems stupid not to get some profit of that. Next will come the TCS256...

I’d love to try making a game with it, if it does get ported

I'll help. I'd like to get a feel for what's involved before I fully commit though

Not really hard, don't worry

An AGD suite has the following parts:

1) The "engine". An assembler source with all the core routines.
2) A "compiler". Programmed in C and responsible of reading the AGD source and traslating every command or sequence of commands in functional blocks, generating inline ASM statements of simply calling core routines. It adds to the result the engine file (obviously) and the parsed data of the graphic resources. The final result is an asm file that only needs to be compiled.

That's the main part and probably the most common points between machines. There's also a "build" script (CMD, Shell, Perl, whatever) used to invoke all the toolchain and generate the desired final distribution for the machine, maybe even to build a media and launch an emulator.

What do you have now?. Being finished the MSX port you only need to know what are you going to do with your memory map (Einstein seems to have a great amount of easy managed RAM, from 0100 to E0FF, right?) and of course how to map every piece of hardware from MSX to Einstein, VDP and PSG seems only a matter of change some EQU constants an map different ports and the "biggest" problem, the keyboard reading, completely different between machines. Sincerely I can't think of any more great differences.

The compiler will be easy to port as the amount of new code generated is small (some keyboard related routines) and there's no reason to change funtion names, so most of the glue code will remain unchanged.

I think that getting a compiled COM from an AGD would be a relatively easy task

You can ask whatever you want, of course...

What are the different kinds of games you can make with this? Top down maze, single screen platformer etc?

It's really good for create all kind of platform games or as you say, top down "atic atac" mazes; but I know of examples of every genre. Maybe the text adventures are not possible and everything with scrolling scenarios; but you can create mostly everything you want.

Check this examples:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7z8nrDM2Bgc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wg4G07-7-iM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsGLh26XO8Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foB_eStFS6E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzlo4nOEmSk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_9B5JNps7Q

I'm trying to think of what kind of game I will make. I want to have like a 1920/30s detective setting.

Something like Contact Sam Cruise?

That kind of style, and also like Movie

Btw, I've uploaded the first public release of the AGD MSX version to my GitHub account; so if anyone feels brave and wants to take a peek to the engine code and think about porting it to Einstein, please do it!

https://github.com/jltursan/AGD-MSX-Suite