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
WORKED ON THE Four-Play tune again last night: FourPlaySong20060821.bin
Made a little progress with parts of it and...ugh. Feel like I went mostly backwards.
My current music driver allows the use of 4 tones (AUDCx values) for notes (an additional four are assigned to the percussion track). I'm mostly using just three: square, lead, and saw. I am using the bass tone a little bit and I thought I could cut that part out and reclaim that 4th tone for an additional percussion sound.
YOUR POWERS ARE WEAK!
Just thought I'd share some amusing pictures of Darth Vader as a kid:
Adjusting the fit...
Using the Dark Side of the Force to terrorize the house! Oh no!
Unmasked!
This helmet plays various Darth Vader phrases and sound effects. Usually it's used by the older two, but recently Jo has had a fascination with it. Good times, good times.
YOU GOTTA LOVE WORDS WITH CONSECUTIVE 'u's in them, even if they are made up.
Anyway, I gave it the ol' college try, but I couldn't quite get a playable version done last night.
Changes:
-Added legs-up animation when you press the button.
-Enemies can be squished! Er, just by touching them. The timing on this needs work also.
-Constrained player movement. This is now done, except for animating the little bastard and getting his left/right speed correct.
-Added some of the scori
YOU, TOO, CAN MAKE your Atari talk!
Nathan wanted a ROM that he could modify/play around with that would make the AtariVox speak, so I jumped at the chance to get coding again. Here it is:
SpeechTester20070802.bin
SpeechTesterSource.zip
The ROM currently supports up to 4 different speech strings, though only one has anything in it right now: the "go fish" from the game of the same name.
Switch between speech strings with SELECT, start/restart a speech string with the trigger, a
WAS TOO LAZY AND/OR distracted to get much work done on the tune mentioned below, but I did get a little done on another 2600 tune.
This one is not for anything in particular, Tommy just asked me to code it about six months ago for fun and, while he was over Monday night, we coded the first four measures:
It is a 2600-izing of a tune called The Battle of Gilgamesh or something similar, from Final Fantasy V (I think).
THIS IS KINDA TECHNICAL, I suppose.While I don't expect to ever actually complete a VCS Metroid port, for various reasons, I am going forward with it right now. I've targeted it for a 32K cart, and I've been thinking a bit about the best way to switch banks.This is what I've come up with:Call a subroutine in another bank with this code:
brk
.word Subroutine
Have the break vector point to this subroutine (copied in every bank):
plp
tsx
inx
dec $00,X
lda ($00, X
THANKSGIVING MEANS ATARI at our house. Well, kinda. Anyway, thought some of you, especially Chris, might appreciate this:
The bearded one is me, the two small guys are Danny and Mikey (my boys), and my brother, Tommy (aka HeckYesIDid), is the scruffy looking guy sitting closest to the camera.This is at my folks' place on Thanksgiving.Good times.
DID A LITTLE WORK DURING my lunch break today on The Battle of Gilgamesh. Some of the notes are wildly out of tune but either a) they aren't that out of tune or b) it's so fast - in any case, it doesn't sound so bad to me.
I'll attach the music also so you can see what I'm working from here.
EDIT: I suppose a few notes on the music are in order. First, notice that there are 16th-note triplets in there. The version of my music driver I'm using doesn't allow for triplets, so they ar
OVER THE WEEKEND I FINISHED entering all the notes for the Battle With Gilgamesh tune.
All that's left is tweaking a few notes, adding percussion, and adding volume changes.
Here's a MIDI of the original tune, so you can hear how close (or not) we got.
You can hear that the 2600 version is a little too fast. But that's OK, I think, since then you don't have as much time to hear the odd out-of-tune note.
OK, ENOUGH tomfoolery with Gilgamesh.
I did a little more work on the "tune" last night. Well, to be more precise, since I last posted about the tune, I did some more work on paper laying out how the structure of the song and, last night, I started to impose that structure on the tune.
Here are the froots of my labors: tune20060710.bin
I didn't change the melody at all, I just added some drum breaks and some drums underneath the harmony part near the (current) end.
Basically,
NOW I'M GETTING SOMEWHERE! Last night, after a relatively early soccer game, put in some more time on the Four-Play tune - and finished the evening fairly satisfied with what I'd done, unlike last time.
Latest: FourPlaySong20060824.bin
Did:
Reworked the main drum beat slightly; I think I'm pretty satisfied with it now.
Added/refined some of the drum breaks; satisfied with all of them except for the last one.
Also adjusted the volume of the 2nd bass-line, pretty happy with that no
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.
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
THIS IS COMPLETELY unrelated to Atari. Just so you know.
Last night I played in the 8th game (of 10) of the winter season of my soccer league. We play weekly, year round, and I've been playing with this team, Mayhem, for about five years.
Last season we pretty much dominated, going 7-1-2 before the debacle of the championship game (which involved a sh***y ref, a red card, and losing ).
This season, despite having mostly the same players, hasn't been so rosy. Before last night's g
YOU WANT IT? YOU GOT IT.
Several people have expressed a desire for a true arcade pong on the 2600, most recently here: http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=76696
Well...I decided to code it. Sort of. The kernel, anyway.Check it out.
apong.bin
APONG_source.zip
Use paddle 0 and paddle 1 to move the, uh, paddles. I probably won't take this project much further but maybe someone else will.
Anyway, that's why I attached the source.
WHILE I'M HOME SICK FROM WORK I might as well take the chance and try to make some progress on RPS:
Not a lot of changes, but since the previous version was so rough, I thought I'd put this out there.
Cleaned up all scanline counts - now at 270 on all screens and transitions appear to be rock solid. Also got new credits in:
rps.bin
rps_source.zip
WELL, WE'LL see if I'm really done.
But last night I finished the Four-Play song: FourPlaySong20060828.bin
Did:
-tweaked some of the slide-y runs (made them louder and shortened one of them)
-added some crescendos/decrescendos to the melody. Nothing real obvious, maybe too subtle, but I think it gives it a bit of shape.
-drums tweaked. Didn't mess with the 2nd drum beat (I think), but very slightly changed some of the drum breaks and added just the hi-hat back in to the part near
NOW WITH ENEMIES that move!
TankMaze20120222.bin
Not too exciting, really - they just change direction randomly when they hit an intersection. But it's something!
Also, your tank will now turn whichever way you press the joystick, even if a wall prevents you from moving.
Press RESET to start things off and to switch through the different mazes.
STARTED USING Git, and have uploaded the source code to Github.com: https://github.com/vdub-bobby/tankmaze
I'll continue to post updates here, though they might lag what's on Github. For example! The version on github is slightly newer; the enemy tanks have (crappy) AI now!
I'm in the middle of rewriting the routines that move the enemy tanks; right now the routines are too slow and too brittle.
More to come...hopefully.
SUCCESS!
Christmas morning!
Ahh...I know that glazed look of concentration...
The day after Christmas - at it again:
He even let his brother play a little:
Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas!
(PS The 5200 port of Squish 'Em is almost done... )
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
WHAT COULD A 2600 FOOD FIGHT LOOK LIKE?I started thinking about this after reading a little in the 7800 forum.Here's what I came up with:Player1: CharleyPlayer0: Chefs (each freely roaming but not overlapping vertically)Thrown food: MissilesFood on floor, manholes, and ice cream cone: Ball.In a 2-line kernel, I think it would be possible to:-Draw Charley and the chefs with single-line resolution, changing color every line on Charley; chefs would be single-color.-Draw the thrown food (missiles) e
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