Homebrew Emulation Introducing Nintellivision - an Emulator for the DS/DSi

[wavemotion]

Coming in the next day or so... manual/instruction support. Instead of trying to type up small manuals for all the games like I did with the Atari 2600 (time consuming and really dull work), I'm going the custom overlay approach with this. If you have a "name-of-rom".man file in your (configurable) directory it will load that up as a manual/instruction for the game. It's just a plain text file. I can't always remember the 6 different potion types for AD&D Treasure of Tarmin nor the special books... so this will be handy for me

You can have up to 512 lines in the file and can scroll up/down using the D-PAD keys. If that's not enough, I can expand it.

 

[matt!]

Manual feature is cool, I'll use that for Chip Shot club distances.

OK, I am not sure the commonly available overlay for Chip Shot fits/aligns well? At least, for me the 1/2 numbers were way to low.

But I come up with some concepts.

1. redone generic buttons
2. astrosmash
3. lock'n'chase
4. utopia

Photoshop file: https://file.io/uLpOvQdElOhR

Thoughts appreciated.

 

[wavemotion]

Manual feature is cool, I'll use that for Chip Shot club distances.

OK, I am not sure the commonly available overlay for Chip Shot fits/aligns well? At least, for me the 1/2 numbers were way to low.

But I come up with some concepts.

1. redone generic buttons
2. astrosmash
3. lock'n'chase
4. utopia

Photoshop file: https://file.io/uLpOvQdElOhR

Thoughts appreciated.

Your redone buttons look nice - I'd love to have the original source .png file on that if you would be willing

I'm in the process of removing the QUIT and adding MENU to the bottom of the standard display options. Quit is hardly used and I'm adding a bunch more menu stuff that I want to keep off the main screen - things like screen scaling will be in the full menu...

As for the vertical ... yeah, 192 pixels isn't much to work with. I think that's why the official DS Lives in 2010 used modified overlays that spanned the entire screen horizontally. Both MarioKartFan and I have been utilizing the full horizontal range to get all those rare pixels and put them to work

Attached is the original "empty" overlay.

 

[wavemotion]

Version 2.3 is released: https://github.com/wavemotion-dave/NINTV-DS

V2.3 : 10-Oct-2021 by wavemotion-dave
* New Custom Overlay Guide (see extras folder)
* New Manual/Instructions Support (see extras folder)
* Improved speed, reduced memory usage
* Full JLP flash support
* DS-LITE/PHAT sound improvement

I've written a better custom overlay guide (in PDF with pictures!) and provide 2 template examples now.
I've also supplied an example .man instruction manual for Treasure of Tarmin (my favorite game).
These things are now in the 'extras' folder (originally called 'custom-overlays' but it will contain lots of cool stuff going forward)

I bumped up the sound quality on the DS-LITE/PHAT about 10% now that we've got some speed to play with...

Enjoy!

 

[wavemotion]

I just updated the .NDS file in the official 2.3 release.

I figured out what caused that little "screech" when you first load up a game... like a little garbled sound when you first start a game. It's minor but worth not waiting for 2.4. It was really bothering me

So if you grabbed the 2.3 release earlier today, just grab the updated copy. It also fixes the FPS counter for anyone who has that turned on.

Lastly - if anyone makes any .man instruction manuals for games they enjoy, I'd love to have a copy!

 

[matt!]

I was wondering if a circle controller could be implemented on the touch screen?

D-pad only allows 8 directions but intv controller allowed 16 directions.

Discussion about games that used 16 directions: https://atariage.com/forums/topic/244847-intellivision-games-that-use-all-16-directions/

 

[matt!]

Your redone buttons look nice - I'd love to have the original source .png file on that if you would be willing

Sure! Feel free to use it.

I've previously posted the artwork.

Photoshop file can be loaded into free Photopea web app.

And Imgur gallery includes 256 colour PNGs

 

[wavemotion]

For sure it can be emulated on the touch screen. It might work well for some games. The problem is that the touch screen isn’t super responsive nor does it have any kind of tactile feel. It’s why the intellivision games that came out on the iPhone some years back mostly sucked - the controls just felt wrong.

But I’ll play around and see.

 

[matt!]

Here's a man with club distances for Chip Shot: https://gist.github.com/gingerbeardman/b851df3502ed9519b99fc1b12cdb071a

It would be nice if there was a quicker way to summon the manual? (dedicated Manual button?)

Or maybe Menu could remember it's state so that if I dismiss when viewing manual next time I press menu I am still in manual section. (But then how to go up a level to the main menu?)

Also, I noticed that the list of overlays are not alphabetically sorted. Would be nice if they were.

How is the horizontal stretch/position feature coming along?

 

[wavemotion]

How dumb! Anything on the menu is a meta key... and I simply forgot to allow it to be mapped to a DS key.

I've corrected that - just checked in 2.3a - you can now map "MANUAL" to any of the DS physical keys (A,B,X,Y,Start,Select,L/R).
You can also map the MANUAL to any hotspot on a custom overlay - the example overlays have this already.

I'll work on horizontal stretch/position next... but I suspect it won't be a magic bullet for the mismatched resolutions.

 

[wavemotion]

Okay... just checked in 2.3b with preliminary screen stretch and offset support (in the main menu).

I'm not sure how well it's gonna work... but it's at least available for us to play around with.

For the preliminary version it will not save those screen settings out to the SD card but I can add that should these prove useful.

 

[wavemotion]

Just checked in 2.3d ... been chasing down a horizontal offset bug for Christmas Carol that is now fixed.

If you haven't played Christmas Carol - you owe it to yourself to check it out. Widely considered one of the very top echelon of Homebrew games on the Intellivision - the author has released the game for free:

https://www.carolvsghost.com/game/pg_game.html

With 2.3d this will now play!

 

[matt!]

Just download 2.3d (you've been busy!) and I have Christmas Carol waiting to be played.

screen stretch is interesting. worth exploring I think.

any chance displaying the numerical value of current scaled width? and a way to instantly set it to 320/"unscaled" width? currently i can zoom right past the unscaled width. my goal is to have pixel perfection.

me being cheeky: how about being able to save more than one screen setting? that way i could save a setting for unscaled width viewing the left edge of screen, unscaled width viewing right edge of screen, and map them to L and R.

 

[wavemotion]

Yeah, I can show the scale factor and will definitely add that. I need to slow down the X offset position (it's a bit too fast right now)...

At a scale of 1:1 the screen would look very squished and out of proportion as it would only use 160 pixels horizontally. Here is roughly unscaled rendering of the screen (I need to put the scale factor up to get it exact):

This completely loses the original 4:3 ratio of the screen (both an old-school TV and the DS have the same 4:3 ratio... 256x192).

But hey... at least the club is "straight" (diagonal).

The next time the pixels would line up perfectly is at 2:1 (320x192) which would look "fat". While you can render the pixels 1:1, because the aspect ratio of a pixel is different than the aspect ratio of a dot of phosphor on a TV -they will never look the exact same.

Some interpolation of pixels is necessary with the limited scaling opportunities here. At least we only have problems in one direction - some of my other emulators struggle in both due to the original resolution vs what the DS can supply.

 

[wavemotion]

Version 2.3e is checked in with Matt's new shiny-gold generic keypad which is much closer to the original model Intellivision.

 

[matt!]

I meant x2 horizontal rather than 1:1 pixel perfect, I should have been more clear.

Checking 2.3e now!

 

[wavemotion]

In finally found my white-labled INTV (late era) carts! They were hiding next to my shelf of Atari 2600 games... I forgot that this bookshelf had a gap on one side that wasn't quite wide enough for another row of Atari carts but the less-wide Intellivision carts fit there nicely. These are my non-boxed games.

@matt! version 2.3f is checked in with on-screen scale/offset and now limits to 1:1 (squished screen) to 2:1 (stretched screen). There is never a reason to go below 1:1 nor above 2:1 (which is really too wide to be usable for almost any game).

 

[spacehunter]

@matt! version 2.3f is checked in with on-screen scale/offset and now limits to 1:1 (squished screen) to 2:1 (stretched screen). There is never a reason to go below 1:1 nor above 2:1 (which is really too wide to be usable for almost any game).

wavemotion, you're a freakin machine!

Thanks for all the support you are giving for this emulator, much appreciated!

 

[wavemotion]

wavemotion, you're a freakin machine!

You should see me do the ROBOT. I'm a big hit at the old-folks home

 

[wavemotion]

Version 2.4 is released: https://github.com/wavemotion-dave/NINTV-DS

V2.4 : 12-Oct-2021 by wavemotion-dave
* Fixed horizontal and vertical offset/scrolling. Christmas Carol should now work.
* Improved memory handling so we can load larger games.
* Allow Manual/Instructions to be mapped to keys.
* Improved generic overlay graphic.
* Beta version of screen stretch/offset.