Post subject: Lynx Joust
Moderator, Senior Ambassador, Experienced player (907)
Joined: 9/14/2008
Posts: 1014
Greetings, I've uploaded a WIP of Atari Lynx Joust and I'd love some feedback. This WIP completes the first wave of the Atari Lynx port of the classic arcade game Joust. The flight mechanics of Joust have always been a bit difficult to master, but with the aid of TAS tools the flight mechanics become eas... who am I fooling, the lure of perfect flight arcs makes them even more challenging to master with any adeptness, albeit a lot more fun. It's possible to flap two frames and pause two frames to get significant lift, but the only way to go fast down is to hit your head hard going up and the mechanics of doing that can be incredibly difficult to get right. In the end, the result is something that is impossible in real life and in my opinion makes the behavior in a TAS significantly stand out from normal play. After setting the difficulty to skill 9 (whatever that means - I did not see any apparent change in my testing), I start by demonstrating how fast the mount can get from the bottom of the screen to the top, subsequently demonstrating that both mount and rider must be helmed as they crash into the top of the playfield with enough speed to ricochet to the bottom of the playfield in time for the first enemy to appear. Getting the timing right to be above the enemy on the first frame it could be killed was incredibly challenging as the enemy spawn code seems to have been written to avoid placing them in your flight path. I spent literally hours on this before finding a decent solution. Winning in combat is a matter of being higher vertically than your opponent at the moment of impact at which point an egg is dropped, the enemy rider disappears, and their mount flies off. The egg must be collected to continue on to the next wave which means 6 things must be hit in the first wave (3 riders, 3 eggs). For this WIP I collect both rider and egg in the same pass. The first rider's egg takes an unfavorable bounce but is collected quickly. The second enemy at the top of the screen was hit twice with a ricochet to retain maximum speed and the third rider was hit at just the right angle to simultaneously pick up the egg (this is not always possible; I couldn't get it to happen with the first or second rider). I ended up continuing on and killing the first rider in the second wave by smashing him at very high velocity after being at a virtual standstill a second before, just for the fun of it. The number of rerecords in this WIP doesn't include the couple thousand attempts I made in other files to get to this point. I had a significant challenge with Mednafen as the order that must be used to get the emulator to not destroy your movie file is a bit specific. This WIP should be in good shape to play back on either Mednafen on Windows version 1.1 available as a binary or on Linux revision r144 (which has to be compiled). Thanks for any thoughts you have, A.C. ******
I was laid off in May 2023 and became too ill to work this year and could use support via Patreon or onetime donations as work on TASBot Re: and TASBot HD is stalled. I'm dwangoAC, TASVideos Senior Ambassador and BDFL of the TASBot community; when healthy, I post TAS content on YouTube.com/dwangoAC based on livestreams from Twitch.tv/dwangoAC.
Post subject: Choice of bird, game manual, other updates
Moderator, Senior Ambassador, Experienced player (907)
Joined: 9/14/2008
Posts: 1014
Greetings, I've spent some more time pecking away at this (pun intended) and I found a copy of the original game manual in PDF format (also available in HTML). The manual explains how to set the skill level but gives no indication of the actual impact of changing it. It also has this tidbit: "Use the A or B button to start the game. Pressing the B button will select the ostrich as the bird you will control. Pressing the A button will select the stork as the bird you will control." I had selected B (inner button) which gave me a blue ostrich which is what's used in the WIP. I tried hexing in an A (which was decidedly non-trivial - the .mcm movie file format is not hex-friendly) to compare birds and it successfully swapped the bird to be the red and white winged stork but it also caused the run to rapidly desync in very unusual ways which indicates the two birds have different flight mechanics which I'll need to explore further. I spent over an hour trying to execute the platform belly flop bug (described on this very thorough clasicgaming.cc walkthrough as well as the Wikipedia article on Joust) but I could not get it to work; I believe this bug is not possible on the Lynx version but I'd love to be proven wrong. In brief, the bug allows the player to shoot through the lower-right mismatched platforms when performing a flap at the right angle and would be handy if it worked. I'm still not sure why I picked the Lynx version of Joust when there are so many other ports (in particular, the Atari 7800 port is regarded as being a very faithful port) but I appreciate the odd nature of the Lynx version so I think I'll keep going. I haven't made significant enough progress to post anything, in part because today's input was yet again corrupted by a hard crash of Mednafen (although it did extend the duration of the movie significantly with input I do not recognize at all). I'll try to get through another wave soon though. Enjoy, A.C. ******
I was laid off in May 2023 and became too ill to work this year and could use support via Patreon or onetime donations as work on TASBot Re: and TASBot HD is stalled. I'm dwangoAC, TASVideos Senior Ambassador and BDFL of the TASBot community; when healthy, I post TAS content on YouTube.com/dwangoAC based on livestreams from Twitch.tv/dwangoAC.