Ps2 Roms Berserk

[Maryetta Worm]

The behavior of the robots is really almost 100% identical to the arcade version. The only (but important) difference is that the robots appear and the action starts at the same moment. The arcade version gives you a few milliseconds to see where they are at a new level.

The voice sounds actually BETTER on the Atari, although it has a much more limited vocabulary. That would be something that could easily improved by now, with extended memory etc. I have a full list of all the words that Berzerk uses. (some you hear VERY rarely on the arcade machine).

I can NOT understand that this game was never officially released, it is the best home conversion for sure. Overall I have a feeling that the guy(s) who programmed this had access to the "rules" that the arcade game robots follow. I would love to know who programmed it and here the story behind it, also why it was never released.

That could be the reason. I always assumed that it was because Atari wanted to give the 5200 a few arcade exclusives so Space Dungeon, Battlezone, Mario Bros, and Berzerk were never released for the 8-bit. I'm still not sure if the roms for Berzerk and Mario Bros are official 8-bit protos or just 5200 hacks. I believe there's a box for Mario Bros in one of the CES pictures and it has a known part #, so that one was probably planned as an official release.

2. 5200 hacks are created by changing bytes in the original 5200 ROM and appending additional code. In case of Berzerk, binary comparison with the 5200 ROM reveals differences more substantial than that - if it was a hack, it would have to be created by disassembling the 5200 version first, and that's unlikely.

I would _LOVE_ to see an update to Berzerk. The only thing needed would be adding some words because the A8 version has less text than the arcade. (Would love to hear it say "Coin detected in pocket" in the attract screen.

If I am right, the voice was done by using an odd numbered distortion on one (or all) of the POKEY AUDC registers, and by messing with the volume setting on the corresponding AUDF registers. Done really fast (at 60 cycles per second on NTSC) this allows you to have 4-bit sampled sound. Only downside is, it can't be done in the background (like in a VBI) far as I know.

On the other hand, if it uses some compressed method like Impossible Mission on C64, then working out the method could be a real chore - I've looked online to try and find the method IM on C64 uses but there's next to no information. It would seem the method is sufficiently good that it's still a viable method today and not made public.

Yes, there is not enough cycle time to be able to handle animation and the sound at the same time, as is mentioned above, the sound is made by amplitude modulation (altering the volume registers in real time)...

yes, I know... but if you study the code of each respective player, virtually _EVERY_ single possible cycle of processor has been optimized, with no cycles left...we can't do that here without drastic rewrites to the game (and arguably, throwing away the game...)

The modern way is use Pokey Timer IRQs - that allows foreground processes to still be active and thanks to the precision of the Timers, leaving the screen turned on has minimal effect on the playback quality.

Exactly - Rybags beat me to it. I was going to site Space Harrier as the "new way" of doing things. It is amazing to see (and hear) the little Atari doing full screen animation with full quality sample playback at the same time!

Different version. Later on in the XE's lifespan Atari decided to create a completely different version of Battlezone and release it on the XE. I believe that version is 64K while the original is 16K. They're very different ports.

I discovered with digital sounds IRQ, it is best to write a custom IRQ and NMI routines. That requires disabling the OS ROM and use the RAM under. You have much more CPU time available to be able play digital sounds with a moderate size VBI for your game.

I have been considering doing "FRENZY" on the Atari 8-bit because I have experience working with Digital Sounds, Character Mapped Screens, and Sprite Multiplexers. We could do a very accurate port. PACMANPLUS did this game on the 7800 and feel we can do the same for the 8-bit/5200. Might use Antic-4, but the arcade seems to have more "Rows and Columns" for those pieces of walls you have to shoot. I can do some character set manipulation to get it close to what the arcade is. Since it also has steady a playfield, "Super-IRC" could be used if we need to go over 5 colors.

A way around that can be to use the Serial Output Complete IRQ - it can be used as an "on-demand" IRQ since it will trigger instantly so long as serial data isn't being sent. It can be used to allow the Timer IRQ to finish up, then get control back to your VBlank code.

Eh, they're both kinda crappy in their own way. The XE one has more arcade like graphics (the background is vector like the arcade), but it doesn't play much better than the original 5200 proto. The 5200 proto has some serious flaws, but was impressive for the time. The XE version is the better one to play I suppose, but both could have been better.

Anyway got nearly every emulator working apart from MAME (and Fairchild F but aparently that work through MAME?), a lot of the games work but there are so many many that don't and I can't figure out why. I followed the video tutorial and like I say it does work to an extent but want to make sure its not something im doing wrong. So im using MAME64 (tried both 0.202 and 0.205) standalone as described via the video and not the retroarch core. I also have a MAME romset 0.202.

So what happens is that many games just say something along the lines of "the selected machine is missing one or more required rom or chd files". So for games like the 1940 series,, none of them work they all say the same thing. I found posts regarding QSOUND, but looked in the romset I have and its already in there along with QSOUND HLE. Ive tried different versions of MAME, tried starting it out of LAunchbox and directly from mame and have the same error. MAME has it in its workig category apparently. Could it be that they just don't work or am I actually missing something?.

If you have the 0.202 MAME romset then use 0.202 of the MAME emulator. Also depending on the romset type you have you may be missing the bios files, the non-merged romset contains all the bios files inside each game zip, the other two merged and split may not have those bios files in the romset at all.

Ah I see, thanks so its possibly that I may be missing the BIOs files. So sorry to ask another noob questoin but how can I tell if I have amerged or split romset?, is it literally the roms inside are indiviual or in one big zip file?. Mine are all split in seperate files by the looks of it. Also how can I tell if I have the correct BIOS files if any?, as I have looked online but it seems to relate to older version which im not sure will help me or not.

A split sets and non-merged sets will have the parent and clone game data in separate zip files. i.e. 1941.zip, 1941j.zip, 1941r1.zip, 1941u.zip. In this case "1941.zip" contains 19 files and no folders. Look inside "1942u.zip". If it contains 19 files it part of a non-merged set . If it only contains 4 (or 5?) files, it with a split set.

Hi guys thanks for all you replies and srry for my late one. Im a lot more informed about it now and its a split set I have. It turned it it was a bad romset as I spent the last couple days aquiring another and it works now. Thanks again.

So I have a question on that similar issue for mame. I have the .202 rom set and have the .205 mame64 installed. Is there a simple way to go back to the old mame64 .202 version without overriding anything and having to rescan games?

Thanks for the help. It does seem like of bunch of the flying games weren't working. It seemed like about 1 out 20 random games didn't load up, but mainly the 1940, 1941, etc. that's talked about above. If you alphabetize games and play ascending order it seemed like alot.

Im experiencing similar issues. I currently am running MAME 0.206 with a Merged MAME 0.206 Rom set. I have found that particular roms initialize and boot me back to the Launchbox UI. When I attempt to run them through MAME, I receive the "Selected Machine is Missing one or more required Rom/CHD images" error. Im assuming I need to go through the process of acquiring the bios for these games in order for them to work properly, but would it make more sense for me to scrap the merged romset I have for an older non-merged set so all the required files are already there? Or are finding the bios not that difficult and require something as simple as putting the bios files into the same folder as the one that currently contains my roms?