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Mr.Do! and Burgertime 2600-time for an improved remake?


gooner73

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I wonder if anyone out there has considered making improvements to these two 2600 games?

 

they are both classics but i always feel that they could have been better,even on the 2600, when you look at the improvements made to mario bros, would it be easy to give these two a new lease of life!

 

comments please :-D :grin:

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I dunno man... Mr. Do!'s a pretty good port for the 2600, given it's capabilities and the timeframe it was released in IMHO. Perhaps a little sprite work is all it really needs...

 

Now Burgertime... I know it could seriously use an overhaul. Starting from the ground up would almost be necessary to fix it's problems and drawbacks.

 

Regardless, unless you want to dive off into the world of Batari Basic coding, getting one of the over-worked, overloaded but very talented 2600 coders here to work on either of these would be a crapshoot at best I'm afraid.

 

Maaaayyybe Nukey Shay could hack these things into something better... Hard to say though since I have no clue about coding and I don't know what kind of schedule he currently has or whether he'd be interested in these two games enough to try to tackle them. Maybe you could PM him and ask or hope he chimes in here to give his thoughts on the matter?

 

Anyway, I wish you the best of luck in your noble efforts sir! :cool: :thumbsup:

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Mr. Do is not a bad port for the 2600 but there are some improvements that could be made. I, for one, would prefer to have more "ground" to dig instead of that solid green bar at the bottom of the screen. Burgetime is another story altogether...I'm with Bentley!

 

Now, I would love to see Mr. Do! ported to the 7800!

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I'm another fan or 2600 Burgertime.

And a fan of Beef Drop for the 5200, 8-bits, and 7800.

And a fan of Burgerspace for Linux.

 

I like them all how they are.

 

But if you were to get someone to do a 2600 remake, I'd either ask for Ken Siders (Beef Drop programmer)

or one of the 2600 homebrew masters (they're all here on Atari Age).

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  • 3 years later...

I have thought a LOT about how to make a better 2600 Burgertime. It has a huge amount of extra RAM for a game of its time.

 

To remake it any better would require assembly programming.

batari Basic with any of its kernels including the DPC+ Kernel would overall be worse for many reasons, we can't use the 40 Playfield pixels (only 32), multisprite intelligent flicker would be bad because the goal is to get all the enemies horizontally on a burger piece for maximum points, anything more than 3 or 4 horizontally flickers very badly, etc.

That's why all 5 displayable objects are used for enemies, the 2 player sprites, 2 missiles and ball, the last three only able to be a line or square. Then you need pepper graphic and bonus item graphic so those cause flicker.

 

2 hack improvements I can think of would be: to not flicker the bonus item if the player object it reuses isn't on the same horizontal, and the missiles and ball can be shifted left/right and resized as they are drawn down the screen, so say the hot dog's missile could be shifted from a square to a more hot dog shape, and the white square could be more egg shaped. I don't know what you could do with the yellow ball object (that is currently a breadstick or french fry?)

Both those suggestions would need more computing time than just changing a size register like the white and brown square do now. And to intelligent flicker the bonus item also would require time to process.

 

The game is slow, I believe, because it is performing a lot of things that make the gameplay elements like the arcade game. You can get all enemies on a burger piece and drop them.

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  • 1 month later...

Burgertime is actually one of the 2600 projects I've been playing around with... (the other is my own original game). So far I've only changed the look of the finished burgers on the plate and sped up the chef's movements. Even with the chef moving faster, I'm still not that great at playing the game, but at least I can make it a few levels in now. :)

 

I've thought quite a bit about doing more work on it, especially after reading all of @iesposta ideas posted here, and in another post somewhere else in the forums on AtariAge.

 

it would take quite a bit of work to do anything beyond a few changes... especially to fix up the graphics. The big debate I'm having right now with the Burgertime project is whether to keep hacking away at the original or just start from scratch.

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"...I've thought quite a bit about doing more work on it..."

WooHoo!

 

"...whether to keep hacking away at the original or just start from scratch..."

Knowing next to nothing about programming, I can't begin to give any advice. But based on other games that have been re-written from scratch (i.e. Donkey Kong, Pacman(s), Midevil Mayhem, etc), maybe the chances for the best results is for you to start with a clean slate. Bottom-line, either way, I'm glad you're giving it a try.

 

Thanks,

StephenJ

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  • 1 month later...

i think Mr.Do is really good, you look at the sprite detail and the levels in general, they have all the features and even music, i dont think this could of been much better within the confines . Burger time is a little slow but not terrible

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My biggest problem with Mr. Do is the dirt moving left to right - there's no barrier. If you clear a row of cherries then move up or down to the next row, there's no line of dirt in between, you just clear a huge swath of the screen and basically make a blank space. It's kinda hard to explain but you aren't creating a maze to hide from the enemies, just creating a big blank open space. I love Mr. Do but I don't like the 2600 port at all, it needs to be updated.

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