New Atari 2600 game - Blackjack Theta VIII - (beta, 4K)

[azure]

Blackjack Theta VIII

 

You're an astronaut stranded on the planet Theta VIII living out the rest of your days in a hotel casino. There is no exit and Blackjack is your only entertainment.

 

This game uses the joystick:

 

Betting Screen

• Up or Down to increase or decrease the bet
• Left or Right to select bet amount
• Fire starts a new game

Game Screen

• Up to stand
• Down to hit
• Fire starts a new game

This game is still a work in progress, so this version is a beta. The core functionality is working, but I have plans for many more features including double down, surrender, insurance, splitting hands, difficulty modes, more graphics touches, and sound. My goals were accurate casino play and better graphics compared to Atari's Blackjack game.

 

The current features are:

• true 4 deck card game
• dealt cards are tracked to prevent dealing duplicates
• 6 on-screen cards
• unlimited off-screen cards, which are tracked as a point total

 

I'm running out of ROM space, so I'll have to increase the ROM size to 8K in the next version. I don't have enough space for the title screen, so I placed it into a separate demo.

 

Let me know if you find any bugs or have any game play suggestions.

BlackJackThetaVIII-beta-0-3.bin

Title-beta-0-3.bin

[TrekMD]

This looks great!

[Arenafoot]

Plays like a dream! Can't wait for the other options to be added!

[azure]

Thanks guys.

[iesposta]

Looks excellent!

 

Thank you for asking for suggestions!

 

- Selecting 1- 4- 6- or 8-deck?

In Vegas I've seen single deck, and I think the regular uses 6.

Atlantic City used 8 decks.

Keeping track of 6 or 8 decks may be too many cards to track.

Single deck should be easy.

 

- Suggestion to add red / black suits.

If the green/green is the playfield, you could use horizontal background red lines and offset the cards the height of the suit, and clear the playfield under the card suit and place the diamond and the heart over the red, and the spade and club over the black.

(To me as a beginning programmer that sounds easier than mid-line background color updates, but maybe that technique is easier and it will keep the cards horizontal? Also there may be no cycles left to do any of this. That's okay too.)

 

As always, it is best to "keep it simple" and add what's "planned", game play first functions (splitting, doubling down, etc.)

Put suggestions on a wish list and forget about them so you don't end up lost, frustrated, or never finishing.

 

Thanks for sharing.

[MissCommand]

Yay! I am so glad somebody did this... I was thinking about this as a possible future project for myself (just to make better looking cards) and now I am glad it is already out there.

 

My only suggestion (as you mentioned above) would be the solid black and red suites for the cards. Would really like to see that.

[azure]

- Selecting 1- 4- 6- or 8-deck?

In Vegas I've seen single deck, and I think the regular uses 6.

Atlantic City used 8 decks.

Keeping track of 6 or 8 decks may be too many cards to track.

Single deck should be easy.

I wanted to go with 8 decks, but I won't have enough RAM once I implement the remaining features. I would have to cut game play, which I really don't want to do. I track the dealt cards in a 26 byte data structure. One bit represents one unique card. Going to 6 or 8 decks would require another 26 bytes of RAM. I have 28 bytes free, so while it is technically possible now, I would still need to re-think (or combine) some of the other variables to reclaim more RAM. I've already been through a few rounds of optimizing for space, so I've done the easy optimizations.

 

I'll revisit the 6 & 8 decks after I've implemented more features, but right now I consider it less important, because it doesn't affect the player's experience.

 

I also have a plan to add an option to select the number of decks, so single deck play will be in the game.

 

 

- Suggestion to add red / black suits.

If the green/green is the playfield, you could use horizontal background red lines and offset the cards the height of the suit, and clear the playfield under the card suit and place the diamond and the heart over the red, and the spade and club over the black.

(To me as a beginning programmer that sounds easier than mid-line background color updates, but maybe that technique is easier and it will keep the cards horizontal? Also there may be no cycles left to do any of this. That's okay too.)

 

I can see this working technically, but I really like the horizontal layout. If I went with a staggered or vertical layout, it wouldn't resemble a blackjack table very much. Suits and colors don't matter in blackjack, so I figure it's not worth making compromises on the layout.

 

I can't think of any way it's possible with the horizontal layout without introducing flicker or reduced vertical resolution. There aren't enough cycles, and I really don't want to introduce flicker. Flicker is a lot more annoying for fixed position sprites.

Edited September 8, 2018 by azure

[azure]

My only suggestion (as you mentioned above) would be the solid black and red suites for the cards. Would really like to see that.

 

I don't think it's possible without going to a 2 line kernel or skipping frames, because there aren't enough cycles to alternate colors that fast. I think it's more important to stay with a higher resolution and avoid flicker, so I don't plan to implement suit colors.

[azure]

Plays like a dream! Can't wait for the other options to be added!

 

You got up to 6500 chips? Wow.

 

I think my RNG algorithm is probably biased. I just slapped it together. I intend to spend some time on it; however, the thing about that is I might implement difficulty levels, so an algorithm that can be tuned to bias the results would be nice.

[Arenafoot]

 

You got up to 6500 chips? Wow.

 

I think my RNG algorithm is probably biased. I just slapped it together. I intend to spend some time on it; however, the thing about that is I might implement difficulty levels, so an algorithm that can be tuned to bias the results would be nice.

I'm a heavy better! So for a few hands I pushed all in and built it to 6500 chips.

[azure]

I worked on some artwork for the game using Inkscape. It could use some more details, but the gist is there I think. It's a strange concept, but I think all Atari 2600 games should be space games.

Edited September 11, 2018 by azure