Arcade — Tardis.dk Remakes

SQIJ for arcade hardware updated to v1.5.

November 2, 2018 By Sokurah

Another day, another update.

Nah, I’m making fun, of course – there are usually months between updates. But there is an update today and that’s the important thing.

Back in June I released my version of SQIJ for Taito’s arcade hardware and that’s the game there is an update to now.

If you only intend to play this game on the MAME emulator you won’t see a difference, but if you are among the very little handful of people who might want to burn this game onto EEPROMS and run it on the real hardware, then there is a big difference. See, the MAME emulator is not the most accurate emulator – it only emulates the hardware “well enough” so that the games work, but don’t actually emulate the hardware 100%, which means that it’s very easy to code something that works perfectly in MAME, but fails once it’s deployed to the real hardware as the hardware has some weird idiosyncrasies in its design.

And SQIJ did have a number of problems on the real hardware. None that were actually game-breaking (mostly visual stuff) but after A LOT of debugging and tweaking the game finally runs completely identical on emulation AND the real hardware.

This would not have been possible without the huge assistance from my good friend Adrian, who – to be fair – did most of the work making this update possible. So a BIG thank you to Ade.

Enjoy 🙂

Filed Under: Updates Tagged With: Arcade, Assembler, Sqij, Taito, Z80

Homemade RIP OFF cocktail table arcade machine.

September 10, 2018 By Sokurah

Sometimes people surprise you – and this happened to me recently. Earlier this year, Stephan D from Germany, wrote to me to tell me that he loved my remake of Rip Off and asked if he could build a Rip Off cocktail arcade cabinet and use my game and logo for it? Naturally I said yes.

I have always loved vector games and back in 2007 I decided to remake Rip Off (which was one of my favorites) for the PC. It was enormously fun to make and I’m especially proud of the state-machine behind the enemies that decide their behaviour. And nothing beats my sigh of relief when I had to optimise my code at the end of the project – because it slowed to a crawl when there were many enemies on screen at the same time … and it worked. But I digress.

Back to Stephan now.

Two months passed and he sent me a new mail; “the cabinet was done” and attached 5 pictures. The one at the top with a “Tardis Remakes” logo instead of the Cinematronics logo (the rest are below). And not only that – the cabinet is also made to allow two players playing at the same time. Awesome! It’s only one of two games I’ve made that has a two-player mode, but this was never intended to be placed in a cabinet – especially not a cocktail one, so there is no option for flipping or rorating the screen … but I guess that if Stephan is okay with that, so should I be 🙂

It’s pretty great to know that my game is running in an arcade machine out there. Someone even remade it, LOL, but the best moment was without doubt back in 2009 when I received a nice mail from Tim Skelly (the coder of the original arcade game) calling it a “good job” and taking time out to write a bit more to me than I could have hoped for

Here’s the rest of the pictures of Stephans cocktail cabinet. If you click them, a window with open a bigger version of the pictures.

Cool, right? 🙂

Filed Under: Misc, Remakes Tagged With: Arcade, Homemade, Rip Off

New arcade game: Sqij 2018 (for arcade hardware)

May 4, 2018 By Sokurah

Another day, another release. This time it’s SQIJ again. The previous game I released was a Spectrum version of this C64 game, but here I’ve taken the Spectrum game and coded an arcade version of it – and because the Taito arcade hardware is much more capable than the humble ZX Spectrum – this game is now looking as good as it’s ever going to.