I'VE BEEN PLAYING with 2600 music lately - I wrote a new music driver, which I'm pretty happy with (maybe more on that later); I've been trying to write something cool with it.Here's an unfinished 2nd effort; the imaginatively titled: Song B
songb.bin
It just loops through the final 8 measures forever, about a minute in. Thoughts?
THANKS TO TOMMY I was at the Sounders FC vs. Real Salt Lake MLS match last Saturday. It was a sellout! Something like 30K people at Qwest field, I was kinda surprised. Very loud crowd, a lot of fun. Though the stupid horns were beyond annoying...
Sounders won 2-0; the 2nd goal was just pretty.
Here are the highlights (1st goal at 0:55, nice save by Sounders keeper Kasey Keller at 1:55, 2nd goal at 3:00):
A lot of fun. See, we 'mericans aren't completely hopeless...
BLOG BLOG A-BLOGGYWell, I had a blog, once. Still have it, I guess, though I've only updated it twice in the past year or so. So I resisted creating yet another blog. Yet here I am, blogging. Why?Well, I've had so much fun and learned a bunch reading others' blogs* here on AA that I thought maybe I would start one as well, mostly documenting the work I do on various 2600 projects, and maybe other people will enjoy it as well.We'll see how it goes. *Specifically, the game-development blogs o
SO YOU WANNA DESIGN VIDEO GAMES, HUH?There is lots of programmer-oriented documentation for the budding 2600-coder, but not a lot for someone who doesn't want to code for the beast but still wants to know, in a somewhat non-technical way, how it works. Plus, lots of people think they have the bomb idea for an Atari game but they have no clue what will and won't work with the 2600 hardware.So, for them, I presentSo you want to be a game designer? How to design an Atari 2600 game.Updated!Note th
WHEN I SHOULD HAVE been working on my Elevators/Maids game during the past week, I was instead working on this:
RType20070329.bin
EDIT: Fixed a bug or two: RType20070329.bin
I was inspired partially by Manuel's post about the NES' lack of R-Type clones and partially by the idea of writing one for the 2K minigame competition.
I started with my Metroid code, since it conveniently had an asymmetrical playfield plus intelliflickered sprites.
I've pared it down from 32K to about 3K
NATHAN has probably given up all hope, but never fear! I am actually working on it, though veeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrryyyyyyyy slowly...
Most of what little I've done so far is simple stuff to help me understand the code better.
I did, however, get one of Nathan's new hand graphic sets in, and I cleaned up the scanline counts and some of the transitions where the screen would jitter or jump. And I changed the copyright date.
Lot's still to do:
; To do:
;
; fix scanlin
SO HOOKED UP MY 130XE a couple of weeks ago and I have been enjoying Donkey Kong, Frogger, and Defender.But the disks! The disks! So many games...And my 1050 sits next to the 130XE, so close but yet so far apart. I don't have an SIO cable! The ones we used to have are lost, somewhere.Can anybody help me out, and tell me where it is possible to pick these up*?*Besides ebay. Ebay is my last resort.
MORE DEBRIEFING of Reindeer Rescue. It was such a whirlwind putting this together over the last month that I feel a bit wrung out right now. I'm hoping to write some of the development stuff down here to try to remember and try to collect my thoughts.
So anyway. Here's a description of the kernel and how it works.
First, a picture:
The kernel has four main parts. The top part is the horizon, where the sky, the sun, the snowman, the snowmobile, and the hills are drawn. The sky is
YOU GOTTA MOVE ON at some point; this is the final recap. And not much of a recap, truthfully, but maybe the one with the most content. Anyhoo, here's the source and the ROMs. Enjoy!ReindeerRescueSourceAndRoms.zip
AND, OF COURSE, it was my own buggy code all along. :roll:I have to run pretty quick, so I'll fill in the details later, but basically I committed the classic boneheaded ASM mistake: I forgot a '#' in front of a constant:
lda GameFlags
ora PLAYERCONTROL_BIT|SCROLLPF_BIT
sta GameFlags
Can't believe it.
Well, mystery solved anyway.Will post fixed binary and source later.
EDIT: Fixed source and binary attached. RR20060301.zip
And a big thanks to Eckhard to sending me
JUST WHEN I THOUGHT I WAS DONE it turns out I'm not.
Anyway, I'll just reproduce what Al wrote to me and ask: anybody have any explanations or a fix?
Message Two:
If anybody has a Kroc cart or a CC and want to test Reindeer Runner for me? Manuel, I'm assuming that you have already, since you ran this on a real TV to test the PAL colors.This has me baffled; it is beyond my "expertise."The only weird thing that the game does is hit HMOVE at an odd time and, as mentioned in Eric B's weblo
NOW WITH shooting! Also a proper (though lame) maze, sort-of finalized kernel (and sort-of finalized tank graphics), and a glowing base to defend.
TankMaze20120130.bin
In answer to what I think was Thomas' question, right now the maze is hard-coded. If I can come up with a good algorithm for generating mazes, I'd really like to do that. If I can't come up with an algorithm that generates high quality mazes, I'll probably just create several by hand. It helps that the game will have walls
PROGRESS CONTINUES...
Dug up old PMs from Nathan and saw that he had made a title screen graphic for it already, so I added that in:
This required expanding the ROM to 8K, so that's the other thing I did - which was a giant pain, as it always is. In the process I screwed up all the scanline counts, but I think all the graphics are stable.
rps.bin
rps_source.zip
NOW THAT KOTAKU.COM has ruined redesigned their website, I'm looking for a different video game news/reviews/opinion site. Something reasonably intelligent, platform agnostic, and comprehensive. Where do you all go for video game news?
SO, SO CLOSE. So close to being done with the Four-Play tune. Here's what I've got now: FourPlaySong20060827.bin
Timed it for the first time just now and it clocks in at 2:20 - which is just about where I wanted it.
Working off of the to-do list I posted last time:
Did:
-finished the drum breaks
-wrote new beat to go with 2nd bassline
-figured out ending, wrote it, coded it
Still to do:
-tweak some of the slide-y runs
-add some crescendos/decrescendos to the melody
-drum twe
MANUEL got me thinking about a Wild Western port.
At first I thought it was too simple of a game to need the Supercharger, but I'm reconsidering.
Using strips of RAM to display sprites/particles would allow this kind of kernel:
lda RAM,Y
sta GRP0
lda RAM,Y
sta GRP1
lda RAM,Y
sta COLUP0
asl
sta ENAM0
lda RAM,Y
sta COLUP1
asl
sta ENAM1
lda RAM,Y
sta ENABL ;+45
Assuming that Y ranges from 0 to 160, that would require about 800 bytes
SLIGHT DIGRESSION HEREHad an idea for a SC game so I thought I'd put it up here to document it.I've thought before about making some kind of cool 4-player game, but the controllers available for 4-player games (paddles) are somewhat limiting.But then yesterday, while perusing klov.com, I saw a game (that I can no longer locate ) that inspired me.Here's a mockup:So, it's a side-scrolling space shooter. Old hat. Except! You can have four players all playing simultaneously, cooperatively! Well,
LATEST 'N' NOT-SO-GREATEST version of the Elevator Repairman knockoff:
ElevRep20061025.bin
The sprites is all screwed up because I rewrote part of the kernel and didn't have time to fix the variable setup routines. The kernel works fine; the variables just aren't being setup properly. But that's no big deal.
Oh yeah, I also took out a bunch of stuff (score, 48-char display, etc.) that was using RAM - I needed the RAM and I didn't want to waste time optimizing when the kernel is s
HAD A LOT OF FUN at the show this past weekend. Well, this past Saturday, anyway; I wasn't able to make it on Sunday.David Galloway (djmips) and I had a table (graciously donated by NWCGE) and, between the two of us, we had two 2600s, a Vectrex (first time I'd ever seen one; that thing is really cool!), my AtariVox, my MemCard, a bunch of homebrews (all of ours plus Hunchy II, Thrust+, Jammed, and...that might be it), and a Cuttle Cart that we used to load up a bunch of my demos and David's Foo
WELLLLL...
Another Montgomery makes a safe landing.
James William Montgomery, September 15 2009
For those keeping score at home, that makes five in total:
Danny (with new brother):
Mikey:
Mercy (with new brother):
And Josiah:
SO, VCSTROID development continues, somewhat slowly.Now the 1K master map is implemented, and you can scroll (to the right, only).Since I will be at NWCGE and plan on demoing this, er, demo (along with some other stuff), I thought I'd polish it up a bit, so I also added the Metroid tunes I was working on a month ago.
Now a 32K binary, using the bankswitching scheme I outlined a post ago.
Metroid20060224.bin
Change tunes with SELECT.I've been thinking a bit more about this Metroid port and
BEEN PRETTY BUSY WITH RL over the last week, but found a few hours here and there to work out the code to generate mazes programmatically:
TankMaze20120205.bin
To my surprise, I was able to get something working that actually doesn't look too bad. The algorithm is roughly based on the so-called "sidewinder" algorithm, though with some tweaks. To geek out about this for a minute, it is a pet peeve of mine that every maze-generation algorithm i've ever seen always works on the assumption
SPEAKING OF HOMEBREWS...
For some reason the 7800 has caught my fancy lately. Here's the result:
S1K20080408.zip
Could someone with a CC2 or similar please run this on an actual 7800 and verify that it looks like the picture? The documentation on the 320 modes is unclear.
And, if Schmutzpuppe is reading this - can you explain the graphics in Frogger? I was looking closely at them in an emulator and, as far as I understand the 320 modes, you shouldn't be able to do what it looks
JUST A QUICK post about my tentative programming plans for the year. Partly to document, partly just to get this down somewhere while I'm thinking about it, partly to motivate myself.
Tentative plans:
1. Write something for the SC contest. I was ambivalent about this when I first heard about it, but I'm starting to get a little more enthused. I just need to come up with an idea...
2. Write standard (i.e., cartridge) game for 2600. There are 3 ideas I'm kicking around for this right no
FINALLY got my post-Christmas order from AA. Thanks, Al!
Received:
Crazy Balloon
Lady Bug
Toyshop Trouble
Atari Arcade Classics (for my PC)
I was hoping to receive BLiP Football; I wasn't sure whether or not Al was going to comp me a free one. But David, you definitely promised me one (waaaaaaaay back when) so cough it up!
Anyway, had a little fun playing those, though not a lot of time. Manuel, what's the status on the Helium Heroes patches? Have they all been claimed? D
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