Hi everyone!
Now the foundation for Magnavody is in place after the last few updates, we're finally getting to the good stuff!
This version includes a big piece of what makes the Odyssey such an interesting puzzle -- overlays!
Odyssey can only draw four spots on screen -- two player blobs, a wall and a ball-type object. It can't render different sprites or colours like later consoles -- BUT did you know that Odyssey can achieve higher fidelity graphics and colours than any console from the next 20 years?!?
How did they do it? By the simple but genius idea of including plastic overlays with the console that players stuck to their TV screens. With these overlays Odyssey is able to deliver finely grained and colourful graphics at a high resolution. Of course it is extremely limited technically and the frame rate (how quickly you can peel and replace the overlay) is terrible! Arguably though, depending on the printing process used, the resolution is still superior to the latest 8k screens.
Today Magnavody adds support for digital overlays. In the game selection menu a player can now choose an overlay. An overlay comes in three version -- standard, widescreen and crumpled. If you look at real world examples of Odyssey the plastic overlays are usually bent or damaged and so I don't want you to miss out on that authentic experience! If you select a game and press "quick start" it will auto select the appropriate overlay for you.
Now we have the overlay functionally, it becomes practical to see more games on Magnavody! Today we add "Magnavody Tennis" which is a homage to the original 1972 Tennis game. Wait! Didn't we already ship with Tennis? No, we shipped with Table Tennis. An utterly completely different not-at-all-the-same game. Well, not that different. The main difference other than the cool overlay are the rules. Tennis uses a different scoring system (eg LOVE, 15, 30, 40).
These two games really highlight to me one of the really interesting things about Odyssey. Today we often conceptualise games as a self-contained artefact of graphics and rules and inputs in a bundle. And yet with Odyssey we get two completely different games even though they share identical circuitry. This is achieved simply by writing different rules for the players to follow. It's SO STRANGE to me as a game developer but I love it so much.
To get Tennis running this update also enables Card 2 emulation. Card 2 is similar to Card 1 except that it does not activate the wall spot.
There's so much I want to do with this open source "simemulator" and your support makes it happen!
Regards,
Luke
Add
- Add Card 2 support
- Add Tennis game
- Add support for overlays
- Add widescreen overlay support
- Add crumpled overlay support
- Add toggle for crumpled overlays
Change
- Update documentation
- Game quick start now selects an overlay if appropriate
- Quick selecting a game without an overlay clears overlay