jwierer's Blog - Beef Drop Construction Set (BDCS)- 2006

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I actually own a full size Burger Time so I was really excited when Ken Siders started posting Beef Drop(actually Burger Time) roms to the 5200 forum. I had played it for almost a year before I noticed that there were a couple errors in level 3 in the 5200 version. So I started looking at BD using a hex editor to make the changes and also discovered hidden levels available in the AtariAge cartridge release.

 

Ken created mazes that were incredibly easy to view in a text editor, but it was a bit tedious to manipulate by hand because a slight typo might result in a piece of a burger that looked ok, but since it was off by a bit it wouldn’t work. Also there are drop areas that need to be set and if you just change the maze it won’t work. Ken posted the source and also sent me several very crucial personal messages about how the game engine worked that allowed me to create this editor.

 

Although I never publicly shared it until now, I did share it with a couple AA users to test it. Christmas day 2006 I used BDCS to create the levels for my xmas-time hack available here. You can’t use BDCS to hack the graphics though, I used tile molester (terrible name) for that.

 

Once I finished editing the 5200 version I figured I would add support for 7800. I figured Ken used the same mechanism for describing mazes – yes and no. He did use the code encoding scheme, but since he wanted to save space for additional logic (proper arcade regeneration of falling bad guys) he used compression to store the mazes – doh! Luckily he shared his Perl script for compressing the mazes and assembly used to decompress it. All I had to do was recreate that code in visual basic – not easy especially when decoding 6502 assembly –oh which I am not an expert. It took about 2 weeks to create a reliable compression/decompression library (bdzip.dll).

 

This was written entirely in Visual Basic.NET using Visual Studio 2003 if I recall? It was my first Visual Basic.NET 2003 applications at the time. I’ve since upgraded the code to VS2005, VS2008 and will probably move it to 2010 when it comes out. After Visual batariBasic this is probably the most involved application I’ve publicly shared.

 

In the end I did post a corrected 5200 binary here. I wonder if the cartridges in the Atari Age store still have this bug? This was caught in time before the final 7800 binary/cartridge was released. Anyway I finally shared it here. I also wrote thorough documentation available here.

 

 

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?a...;showentry=6138