Hi Folks,I though I would start this blog to chronicle the development of my various Atari 2600 programming projects, and to avoid cluttering up the main site threads. So far, I have developed the following four games, all of which are now fully playable, but none of them are entirely complete yet:
Hunchy
Jetman
Nightrider
Hunchy2
I also intend to punctuate this with some of my own insights into the differences between British and American culture, which I have observed while travelling.
When I tell people that I write games for the Atari 2600 in my spare time, the first question they ask is usually an incredulous "Why?". Unfortunately I don't have a good answer for this, and my arguments about it being fun and challenging usually fall on deaf ears. At the end of the conversation, I am often left wishing that I hadn't brought it up. Not that I am ashamed of it you understand, just that it is difficult to convey to the uninitiated what an interesting and rewarding activity
In my opinion, one of the hallmarks of a successful game design is that the player should feel fully immersed in the experience. That is, rather than the player simply feeling that they are controlling the game character remotely, they should feel as if they ARE the character itself. All of the great games that I have played have given me this feeling. For example, when playing Super Mario Bros, I soon start to feel the out-of-body effect and I become Mario himself. I stop noticing the c
Another quick PoP update:Following on from last time I have now managed to connect the switches and doors together. The attached demo shows the results with three switches and two doors. The upper switch opens the left door on a timer (it closes again after a delay), the lower right switch opens the right door, and the lower left switch closes the right door. There were an unbelievable number of special cases to consider, e.g. closing a door that is half open, but I think I have got them al
I finally understand how supercats 26-character text kernel works (I think)! As a result, I have written my own version which displays 28 characters on a line. Unfortunately I could only do this by flickering at 20Hz and using a 6-pixel high font, so it doesn't look all that good. However, I think this is the first ever 28-character kernel on the 2600? It only displays one line of text at the moment, but it should be possible to display 12 or 13 lines using the same techniques as my prev
I've been doing a bit more work on the Harmony project recently (together with batari and Thomas Jentzsch).
It was a bit of a struggle, but it actually seems to be working now - teaser shots below:
Chris
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