Well it's been a pretty productive week - been busy working on quite a few projects over this period in the end. Things will slow down a bit now as I get back to work but we'll push on. Tower of Rubble Haven't done as much as I thought I would have but a very special thanks to @cimmerian for not only featuring Tower of Rubble on the his ZeroPage Homebrew show but also for helping me debug a frame overrun issue when starting the game on hardware (still waiting for my Harmony cart). The code f
I've posted a first WIP release of my take on Tower of Rubble for the Atari 2600 using batari Basic and DPC+. Been really enjoying programming a game again after not doing so for quite a period of time. Still have a few things to knock off (especially sound which I'm dreading). Probably another few weeks to finish.
So after a few more days of work i've now got a new titlescreen with some scrolling text and flashing colors (bank6 now full!), a more varied and colored tileset (still not sure of the colors yet) and the first beam/lazer?? dropping blocks. I've had to re-arrange stuff and play around to try and get access to certain things across a couple of banks. The main loop is in bank2 and I now have the player code in bank3 and the enemy stuff in bank4. Hoping this will work ok on a real machine but un
As discussed in the previous blog post, i am interested in a reasonably reusable animation engine which allows me to call a SetAnimation function to initialise a new animation then use generic UpdateAnimation and DrawAnimation functions to process it regardless of what i need animating. I need to set the total frames, the speed of the animation (by screen update generally), the frame to display and any positional (x and y) change. When starting this game I followed a few example games across t
So over the past week or so I've started a new game in batariBasic based on Tower of Rubble! Actually not too long after starting I saw that another user had also started their own version - looking forward to seeing what can be done in 4k with someone who appears to know what they are doing! I've been putting this together in DPC+ and its been a learning experience getting to understand some of the modest limitations of programming for the Atari 2600. One of the more interesting issues has
I've created a template for batariBasic containing a basic game structure with the following features:
DPC+ kernal
Utilising multiple banks
Title screen (bank6), play screen (bank 2), game over screen (bank 3)
Pause mode (bank 3) - using B&W switch
This is an adaption of the ex_title_screen_and_game_over.bas generously created by the following people (thank you!): ; Example program by Duane Alan Hahn (Random Terrain) using ; hints, tips, code snippets, and more from At
Well this has come a surprise over the past 6 months. Earlier this year I picked up a C64 and 1541 II off eBay having started watching a number of retro videos in the period proceeding that purchase. All of a sudden I was back into my youth playing some classic games from the past - much to the probable annoyance of my wife and kids (I'd previously planned and built an Arcade cabinet [Nintendo - Donkey Kong] over a 10 year period so just another thing to clog up the house) though my son seemed t
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