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 I ADDED YET ANOTHER console to my (unwieldy) collection: a 7800!
And the totally sweet game Pole Position II.
I've been resisting acquiring this for a few years now, but my resistance finally melted when, out of the blue, someone offered to sell me their CC2. After hemming and hawing for a week or so I decided, in the end, that I couldn't pass up the opportunity to get one. And so, of course, I needed a 7800.
And so here I am today, burdened with another 1980s machine to play w
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...
BEEN CHECKIN' OUT NES tunes a little. The title tracks for 8 Eyes and Adventure Island III are pretty good.
Anyway, over the weekend made some progress - not as much as I'd hoped - on the Four-Play tune: FourPlaySong20060820.bin
Changed: volume of some notes in bass line; also played with the drum track a little. Didn't really do enough to count as "progress" but there it is.
New deadline is end of the month; you can all watch me panic as we get closer...
EDIT: ...And in ca
SO AFTER A LONGISH hiatus from 2600 coding I've begun to dive back in. This coincides with finishing the first new (to me) Zelda game I've played in about 4 years. Complete coincidence.
So, a few days ago I got some of the rust off by writing a buzzer program. I'll probably get back to that and add some sounds a tweak up the controls a little for Murph74, but last night I returned to Go Fish!
And boy has it been a while.
I spent about two hours last night trying to, essentially
SO. I had plans for 2006:
Oh-fer! I rock!
In more detail:
I came up with an idea and did maybe 15-25% of the programming. Got a little bogged down with the SC's/2600's limitations and didn't really have time last summer for much programming. I am thinking about picking this up again, but other projects have a higher priority.
Started a bunch of stuff but didn't really come close to finishing anything. Made a big push to get the Elevators+Maid game done by Christmas but my invol
I think I'll go through my already-started projects one by one and evaluate the pros and cons of each game as well as looking at the problems I encountered in each one.I'll attach the most-recent binary as well as a screenshot of each one.First, the practically ancient...Running Man.Read about its development in its thread in the homebrew forum.Judging from the date on the latest source I have, I last worked on it January 21st of this year.Here's a screenshot:Here's the binary:Status of this pro
NOW YOU CAN blow up the walls! Plus I fixed the maze generator so that it (should?) cycle through the 255 possible different mazes.
I forgot to mention this last time (until a late edit), but press RESET to cycle through the mazes.
TankMaze20120211.bin
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
SO...I have a Wii.
First time I've had a "modern" console since the N64 in 2001. Kind of weird, really - my brother-in-law gave it to me (!) plus ~5 games. Wasn't really sure what to do at first; I'd already decided that I wasn't buying any more hardware for the foreseeable future - I had/have too many systems and not enough games and not enough time for the ones I have.
But anyway, eventually hooked the thing up and I've been having fun with Wii Sports, Super Mario Galaxy. Also real
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
AN OLDIE but a goodie? I was looking back through my super-sprite-multiplexor demos and I realized that I never shared the latest revision of the space shooter demo. So here it is:
spcinvdr.bin
It handles 12 sprites (two are used for the player) plus 2 missiles flickered for 4 bullets. It also detects collisions, both missile-to-sprite and sprite-to-sprite.
gac.v10.zipgac.v12.zipgac.v121.1.zip
EDIT: Attached source: gac.v10.zip
I'm not actively working on this right now (and I h
BACK TO STRIPED elevators, based on feedback. I thought this would give me lots of RAM back - but it wasn't to be.
I really wanted to add stairs on either side of the screen, and I just couldn't fit it into the old kernel. So I've gone back (again) to the RAM-hungry kernel that supercat suggested.
And so now RAM is an issue. Probably can make it work, though.
So new binary: still isn't playable - I was too tired last night to add the code back in that moves you up a floor and incr
ON A COMPLETELY different note, I felt like compiling a list of which computers and consoles use what processors. Classic machines, specifically.
Please correct where I am in error and fill in the blanks in my knowledge.
6502
2600
5200
7800
Atari 400, 800, 800XL, etc.
XEGS
NES
C64, C128, etc.
Apple II, IIe, IIc
Z80
SMS
Colecovision
ZX Spectrum
MSX
Aquarius
CP1610
Intellivision
8048
Odyssey2
68A09
Vectrex
68000
Genesis
Atari ST
Amiga
Neo-Geo
Maci
I KEEP TINKERING and tinkering with this two-sprite flicker engine.
I'm not real enamored with it, but I'm having fun playing with it. I haven't drastically changed the kernel; despite my bold words, I haven't been able to make it work.
But I was able to figure out a quick sorting method that does work with the flicker engine. It isn't perfect, but objects don't disappear and it is slightly better than a 1-sprite flicker engine. The sort returns results like this:
For 3 objects:
A NEW YEAR! TIME TO MAKE plans! What...February already? Oh well, better late than never.
Anyway, my plans for the year have come into focus only recently, so I thought I'd share.
Major Projects:
1. Finish the Maids+Elevators game.
2. Port Squish 'Em to the 2600.
Minor Projects:
1. Modify Go Fish! to allow higher scores (or allow the score to "roll") for a few folks that can actually max it out.
2. Mystery project that I'm working on with Nathan Strum.
Details:
Squis
TWO MORE TUNES today.
Also thought I'd show a little progression in the development of a tune.
Here's the 2600-ization of the title screen song from Wizards & Warriors:
2puck.zip
Tommy whipped that up for me a few weeks ago on a whim, I guess.
Here's the first draft of that: That's just the notes.
Here's the 2nd draft: 2puck.zip For this one, I made the lower notes (in the first measure, the 2nd, 4th, etc.) a little softer, I made the countermelody articulated, and I twe
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
I HAD AN UTTERLY RANDOM thought this morning, an idea for a game:
What if you took Missile Command, flipped it upside down and put it under water?
I.e., rather than protecting a city from missiles, you would be protecting a ship from torpedos/etc. You would drop depth charges (and...?).
Has this ever been done?
SQUISHING CONTINUES! Oh, I slay me.
Anyway. Did some more work last couple of nights.
Changes:
-Rewrote part of kernel to use actual enemy graphics (without 13 trailing zeroes)
-Animating enemy graphics. This, as I mentioned before, is amazingly easy. Even easier than I thought it would be: I just take the frame counter variable and write it to REFP0. That's it.
-Added six-digit score
-Got girder color-changes into the kernel, looks much nicer now.
-Moving the brick. I'm
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
WORKED ON THE Four-Play tune some more last night. The result:
FourPlaySong20060712.bin
Composed a few more measures here which I like pretty well, though I'll probably tweak them a bunch before I'm done.
Also did some volume tweaking: I was planning to leave this for final polishing, but very high (and very low) notes are much quieter, with the same AUDVx value, than middle-range notes and it sounded bad enough that I couldn't put it off any longer. Notably, in the harmony section the h
SO...
I was thinking the other day: Say you want two completely independent, non-flickering sprites on the screen. What's the widest they can be (in pixels)?
Using a variant of Zach's fancy 52-pixel technique, I figure you can get as wide as 10 pixels for each.
Anyone think of a way to get wider?
SOME 2600 TUNES for your listening pleasure:
Metroid tunes: mm.bin
Cycle through them with the fire button:
1. Title (64 bpm)
2. Item Discovery
3. Spawn
4. Secret Corridor
5. Brinstar
6. Mother Brain
7. Title (56 bpm)
8. Title (75 bpm)
The title is the most polished.
EDIT: Here's the latest version; took out the percussion and added a bunch more songs:
1. Title (64 bpm)
2. Item Discovery
3. Spawn
4. Secret Corridor (polished a bit)
5. Brinstar
6. Mother Brain
7. Norf
...AND IN THIS CORNERSo...what to do, what to do? What should be my next project for the 2600?So far, I've completed Go Fish! and Go Fish! 1K. M-4 is essentially completed; mostly I am waiting for an inspired idea to fill up the almost-1K of ROM I have left.I've begun too many projects. They are, in sort of chronological order:Running Man: a horizontally-scrolling platformer. This was my first (probably too-ambitious) 2600 project - I stopped work on it for two reasons: I didn't know how to
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