Atarius Maximus

I just thought I'd throw in my "Holy !@#$!" too. Amazing work!

It could be useful to add a software section to your list as well. A great place to find pretty much any flavor of DOS you'd like to run is here: WinWorld Operating System Library And of course the MS-DOS software library on Archive.org: MS-DOS Internet Archive I use PCem often: GitHub - PCem WinImage is a nice piece of software to read and create IMG floppy disk images. Great if you've got a Gotek drive. WinImage

Nice, Karl! I've got so many DOS PC's! I'll have to take the time to take some pictures and set a few more up that haven't been used for a while. It'll be fun to document all that and share pictures here once I take the time to do that. The Book 8088's are really cool. I've got two of them, one with CGA (version 1) and one with VGA (Version 2 with serial and parallel), and I added an 8087 to the CGA model. Both have an 8088 rather than the NEC processor. I've done some searching online and there are people who have modded them to use an external keyboard, something I may try to do in the future. There's also a resistor that can be swapped out to increase the brightness of the display. Definitely a cool hobbyist platform.

Here's my current setup for DOS gaming when I'm not using DOSBOX. I've got an IBM PS/1 486 DX2/66, a Compaq Deskpro Pentium II-400Mhz, and a Commodore Colt 8088.

I've found myself wishing in the past that AtariAge had a dedicated forum under Classic Computing for DOS related games and game development. I think it would be a good fit for the user base here as it's from the same era, and I know I would be a contributor to a forum like that. Would you consider that, Al?

RevEng just shared a RMT playback fix that allows for the music that H3xaFli6ht created to be played at the proper PAL speed, this version includes that fix. I also changed the menu system for Drone Bomber once the paddle is activated. After activating the paddle, only the "start" and "exit" options are available, and exiting the game to the Drone Patrol main menu will automatically re-enable the joystick. Spin the paddle to select start or exit. The instructions option is only available when the joystick is active, and of course once you activate the paddle the option to activate it is also removed from the menu. I played Drone Bomber with the paddle for a while again today and it works great. I should have put paddle support in there from the very beginning! drone_patrol_v84_RC5.a78 drone_patrol_v84_RC5.bin

I really appreciate the feedback, thanks for sharing your opinion. At this stage of development it would be very difficult to add that in due to RAM and ROM constraints, as well as how I've balanced the difficulty in the boss battles. At this point the gameplay is set. I'm not going to be making any more changes, I'm just focused on bugfixes now. I mentioned in a previous post that I had relocated the plotsprite4 assembly code and that did in fact cause an issue that I just caught. It only affected the easter egg/hidden game, and it's been fixed. drone_patrol_v82_RC4.a78 drone_patrol_v82_RC4.bin

See the previous post for details on this release. This fixes the issue with trying to switch back and forth between the paddle and joystick within the drone bomber game. In this version, once you select the paddle it's set for that session of drone bomber - deactivating it will reset to the Drone Patrol main menu and automatically revert back to joystick control. drone_patrol_v81_RC3.a78 drone_patrol_v81_RC3.bin

This version makes another difficulty change. On the easy and standard difficulty levels, the second stealth plane that moved from left to right was removed from Boss 8. I also added paddle support to the Drone Bomber game. Playing with a paddle makes the game SO much more fun! On the Drone Bomber menu, you'll see a new option available that displays "activate paddle". Press the fire button on that option and it will change to "paddle active". After the screen displays "paddle active", it will display a message that you must exit the game in order to re-activate the joystick. If you press the paddle button while you're on the "paddle active" menu option, the game will reset to the Drone Patrol main menu and re-enable the joystick (the same as choosing the "exit" option). Once the menu says "paddle active" unplug the joystick and plug in the paddles. The menu will now be navigable by spinning the paddle to get to the different options (start, exit, instructions, and controller selection). Spin it until you see "start game" to start. This unfortunately ruins the game's couch compliance, but it's worth getting up for! Note that the instructions screen itself once loaded is not navigable with the paddle, you'll only be able to view and exit from the first page. Also, the menu option that's visible on-screen is based on the hardware location of the paddle wheel. It might immediately move to a different menu option when you plug in the paddle, and when the game ends the first menu option you see will be based on wherever your paddle is located in its rotation. You might see any of the four options first. When you exit Drone Bomber to the main menu of the game, the joystick is automatically re-enabled. Because of the addition of paddle control the game as it was previously was much too easy. I ramped up the difficulty to accommodate the paddle controls by increasing the speed progression, changing the movement pattern of the enemy mega-drone that drops the bombs, adding two additional levels, and reducing the size of the drones. This makes the game a lot more fun with the paddle, but as a consequence makes it much more difficult with the joystick. Now that it's in-place, I highly recommend playing Drone Bomber with the paddle controller, although you can use either. Drone Bomber been tested on real hardware and works as expected, although it was only about 10 minutes of testing. On the technical side, in order to accommodate paddle control I had to relocate the plotsprite4 code as I was out of space in the 7800basic reserved area. That immediately broke the Music Player, which I've fixed. I'm hoping it didn't mess anything else up, but it shouldn't have. I will need to do some more testing of the main game just to make sure. Edit: The next post has the latest update that fixed I bug I found in this release.

Watching Home Run Baseball on ZPH, it was obvious pretty quick that I had the joystick controls reversed for defense on the 2 Player game. This fixes that. I'd never played on real hardware, and playing with A7800 in emulation it didn't occur to me that it was reversed. home_run_baseball_v0.2.a78 home_run_baseball_v0.2.bin

Thank you! That was my favorite variation too. I didn't create any variations in this version of the game. I just chose the options I liked best, including the pitch that you can control.

Thanks James, but keep in mind that Baseball Dice really isn’t a game yet… you press the fire button, watch the dice roll results, and then see the incorrect results on the screen. That’s about it.

I love baseball. Last summer I started writing another game based on baseball dice. I made some good progress, but the game logic is broken. This game does not work as intended. I thought I'd share it anyway as maybe sharing it will inspire me to continue to work on it. This game is really rather pointless in that you just press the button to roll the dice and see what happens. The screen is intended to simply display what you would otherwise have just written down on paper if you were playing an actual game of baseball dice. It was a fun project that I just never completed. Baseball Dice Rules: baseball_dice_v0.1.a78 baseball_dice_v0.1.bin gfx_bbdice.zip baseball_dice_v0.1.bas

Thanks Guys. This game could be improved and expanded in many different directions, I'm going to have to think about what I might want to do with it. Maybe nothing, I'll just have to wait for some inspiration. I'm going to go ahead and share the source code and graphics for this game as the goal with this one was just to have fun and share the results. gfx_homerun.zip home_run_baseball_v0.1.bas

This game was designed to be similar to Home Run for the 2600. It's not exactly the same but it's pretty close. Why clone a game that was mostly unloved? I played the two player version of this game so much with my Dad as a kid and we loved it. So much fun, so many memories. It makes me smile just seeing it on the screen. I haven't played it enough to make sure everything is perfect, and I know the sound effects need work, but the game is perfectly playable as it is now. You can play against the computer or start a 2 player game. This was a fun side project I started a few weeks ago as I was also finishing up with Drone Patrol. I may work on this some more as time goes on but I thought it would be fun to share it in its current state. v0.2 Fixes the reversed joystick controls in the 2 player game. home_run_baseball_v0.2.a78home_run_baseball_v0.2.bin home_run_baseball_v0.1.a78 home_run_baseball_v0.1.bin