bobcurtiss

Yes I know Stuart and have stayed in touch with him over the years. Also Dick Balaska (Tunnel Runner), and 3 or 4 other people from CBS Electronics.

I shared an office with Alex Leavens at Bally/Midway. I started working there in late 1981. Alex worked on Kickman during that time. Roklan had an agreement with Bally/Midway in which they did the programming for 2600 Wizard of Wor and shared their technical knowledge of the 2600 system. Alex worked closely with people at Roklan during that period, which was just prior to when I started working at Bally/Midway.

Fortunately the code I want to examine is a game (Super Cobra) that I originally co-programmed, so that should (theoretically) make it a bit less difficult. Assuming, of course, that I will recognize assembly code that I wrote 36 years ago. Should be no problem, right? LMAO 8^D

I'm not familiar with the tools being used these days to extract code from 2600 carts. I suppose it's possible to get an assembly code listing generated from a ROM dump? If something like that is available I'd love to have a look at it. ~Bob

Would you happen to have contact info for that other programmer? Are you referring to Paul Crowley?

Generally true, but not for the 2600. Code that generates the playfield, especially in a side scroller like Super Cobra, should reveal a few clues about whether it was done from scratch or partially copied.

Hey, no worries. For 7800 ports of 2600 games it was only necessary to write new graphics code, all of the game logic could be copied and pasted with very minor edits. Of course, one needed to UNDERSTAND the logic code, and when another programmer had written it that wasn't always easy, LOL. But I did essentially the same thing for both Pete Rose Baseball and Kung Fu Master.

Has the ROM been released? I made that prototype.

I took a look at the screenshots of Super Cobra, linked from your post. I can tell you some details about the development of that game if you're interested. I was one of the programmers.

Not so much 'lazy' as "budget constrained".

I coded Kung Fu Master for the 7800 and was a very straightforward port of the 2600 version. Due to similarities between the 2600 and 7800, it was relatively easy to use the same game logic code from the 2600 version and rewrite only the display portion. It took 10 weeks from start to finish. I used the same approach for Pete Rose Baseball -- direct port using the 2600 version game logic, also a 10 week project. This was the way that Absolute Entertainment wanted it done, to minimize development costs.

I stumbled across this forum thread today and I'm very sad to learn that Alex is gone. He was only 43 when he passed. I knew Alex personally. We shared an office at Bally Midway in 1982, working on 2600 games together. After about a year we both did work for a company called Roklan. Alex was a very intense person, always high energy. We used to team up on one of the arcade games that had a two player cooperative mode and rack up some high scores. I remember testing Crazy Climber while he was working on it, and he tested a game I was working on, Solar Fox. Probably nobody knows that he and I worked together on designing the preliminary screen display for Ms. PacMan during the very early stage of that game's development. Alex was always full of energy, and he could really crank out code. I've been out of touch with him since the mid-90's when he worked at Activision. If anyone has more details about his passing, I would appreciate learning more. Bob Curtiss