Ultra Tank

HudsonArcade

Well-known member
Joined
Aug 12, 2009
Messages
14,720
Reaction score
3,621
Location
01749, Massachusetts
I was just fooling around with ultra tank and was annoyed with how clunky the graphics are.
Looking at the tilemap proms, a bunch of redundant tiles are solid blocks (0x20-0x29) even though the code writes different values to the screen ram:
1690986298132.png

Just for shits and giggles I hex edited the proms to make those 10 tiles distinct:
1690986126370.png

....and now the game looks a bit more modern:
1690986231525.png

Also of note, it looks like the game was designed to be in color if used with a Tank 8 / Sprint 8 color converter, so someone might want to play with that.
 
This is cool! Think they were planning on doing this and forgot, or just ran out of time?
They did all the "hard" work writing the code to select different tiles as the shapes are drawn (they start with a horizontal segment in a known screen location and pack 4 segments into a byte of table data using 2 bits to code up/down/left right), but didn't change the tiles in the j10/h10 proms.
 
Wild, like having the directions and knowledge to write words and sentences, but your alphabet only consists of "A"s.

Seems like someone had to have been planning on making those characters something besides just blocks.

I like that you didn't leave them solid, the contrast stripe in the center looks good!
 
Just as a side note, Ultra Tank is pretty much a cutdown of the Sprint 4 design, so there's a fair amount of layout reuse between this and my Sprint 4 redesign (ie. the bottom right 1/4 of the board is almost identical). There was enough logic removed to cut out a column of chips, so a bunch of other stuff got moved around.

This is one of the last games with with fully separate sprite circuits before they added line RAM that got drawn during blanks and read back out with the normal bg hardware. The sprite #s and locations are stored in RAM in this era of hardware though -- it's part of the evolution between x/y/sprite being on dedicated port writes, and the full RAM-based sprite circuirty that came in with Warlords / Centipede.

It'd be interesting to know if the line RAM-based design was copied from Galaxian or developed independently.
 
Back
Top Bottom