Jonathan Thomas @atariste.bsky.social

FASTER for Atari STE is finally here! A brand new, 100% oldskool, super-fast-and-smooth racer. 1st place in SillyVenture 2024 WE ST game compo! Please RT and spread the word by all means possible! Download FREE from retroracing.itch.io/faster-atari-s…. Plays on real hardware and emulators.

FASTER for #Amiga OCS/ECS: copper sky gradient is now in, enabling reduced bitplane count in parts of screen for better performance. Still frame drops when screen busy but hoping to sort with optimisation. Next up: status display and speedo, using a mix of HW sprites and bobs.

I'm back from Sommarhack... had to finish the demo on the party place so it's kind of glitchy and not quite what I had in mind originally, but heck, at least i made the deadline! And yes, some people will hate it, I'm used to that 😅 youtube.com/watch?v=ePhfz3…

Big thanks to @zeropagehomebre for this exquisite award certificate and trophy for FASTER on the Atari STE! (Amiga OCS/ECS version of FASTER is still in the works - please bear with me...😃)

DOOM for Atari ST has come a long way. Thanks to m68k assembly, countless hours of optimization and a lot of help by some of the most superbly skilled people I've ever met, the framerate has steadily increased and more than doubled since the baseline version of two weeks ago!

DOOM on Atari ST! To be fair, an emulated one with a 32MHz Motorola 68060. The memory limit is now down to 4MB so this could actually run on real hardware. Let's start optimization from here.

DOOM on Atari ST. Got better dithering results now with much less distracting noise. I'll just post a couple of screenshots for you to enjoy. Disclaimer: still running on emulated Atari STE with 8MB of RAM accelerated to ludicrous speed(TM). Don't expect a playable game yet :-)

Has DOOM ever been ported to the Atari ST? #retrogaming

Here's a very informal comparison between the existing #AtariSTE version of FASTER and the (WIP) #Amiga OCS/ECS version, because I know you guys love this kind of thing. 😄 Atari left, Amiga right.

FASTER for #Amiga OCS/ECS: switched over to single pass (rather than 4 pass) rendering for car and scenery bobs, giving a noticeable increase in performance. Further evidence for any existing doubters out there that this is definitely not a lazy port from the ST! 😄

FASTER for #Amiga OCS/ECS: currently adding in some features that had to be left out of the STE version because they were too CPU intensive. This depth-cueing effect on the ground/road surface is a good example. I don't love everything about the Amiga, but I love the Copper! 😁

FASTER for #Amiga OCS/ECS: currently adding in bobs for top status display. Time digits will be hardware sprites. As with the STE version that came before it, each new feature requires a load of optimisation work in other areas to hold onto that all-important 50fps framerate!

FASTER for #Amiga OCS/ECS: Following much head scratching, the speedo in the bottom right has been switched from BoBs to hardware sprites, giving a nice performance boost and other cool benefits that I'll come to later. I did say this would be no lazy STE->Amiga conversion. 😄

The rotating minimap is actually a test for the chunky-to-planar code I'm experimenting with. At 64x32 pixels, it takes exactly 10ms per frame to render on an 8MHz Atari ST. The dithering is integrated in the c2p routine and I like how it makes the 2x pixel scaling less obvious.

atarilegend.com/interviews/81 Here is the #interview I conducted a year ago with T.R.Buz. It may seem a bit chaotic, as the exchanges between Théo and me spanned several weeks, but I didn’t want any details to be lost to time. Read all about the creation of The Ultimate Arena here.

FASTER for #Amiga OCS/ECS: still getting the right foundations in place to build upon. Switched to interleaved bitplanes to allow single-pass bob drawing. Considering best use of Copper and HW sprites to maximise framerate. Be assured: this is no lazy STE->Amiga conversion!😄

Another question for #Amiga coders. I can draw these 9 scanlines of status captions either as 2 bitplanes, or 1 bitplane overlaid with all 8 hardware sprites. Timing-wise, Grok suggests that both options would be very similar, so I'm inclined to go with 2 bitplanes. Thoughts?

A question for #Amiga coders. I've updated my copper list such that the top 60 lines use 2 bitplanes and the remainder use 4 bitplanes, by changing the BPU bits of BPLCON0. Will this free up DMA time in a similar way to completely disabling bitplane DMA on those lines?

youtu.be/Ff3aqpPKLNE?si… Finally, the last part in #TheUltimateArena documentary has been released. In this final part we dissect the creation of the #AtariFalcon version, and follow Théo on his journey all the way up to the release of the game at the beginning of 1996.

At 18 years old, around about 1990/91 and just a few years into learning 3D graphics I worked with a friend, the late Jose Commins to create our first 3D world on the Atari ST. It might seem primitive and crude, but this was a foundational step for me from there to #NoMansSky

FASTER for #Amiga OCS/ECS: I never imagined saying this in a million years, but I seem to be struggling to get the performance I need out of the blitter, and I don't even have all the stuff on screen yet! Anybody know a faster way of rendering bobs than the cookie cutter method?