Really, I do. Because if I'm not 100% wrong about him, one of the world's largest nuclear arsenals will within a few years be in the hands of a third-world nation.
I'll readily admit that McCain was a pretty feeble candidate, but at least he would have let the country tread water until someone better came along in 2012. I believe Obama hates this country and will waste little time running it into the ground.
As I said, I hope I'm wrong.
Well, it looks as though the Senate is going to buy a getway car for the worlds' most expensive bank robbery. Unless Congress can stop it, the U.S. may commit economic suicide in the next couple days. STUPID STUPID STUPID STUPID!
The novel-length Christmas-tree piece-of-Sith legislation the Senate just passed will do nothing to resolve the effects of toxic paper in the credit derivatives marketplace, but will cost us about a trillion dollars. As a result of its passage, the crash will be
Theresa Marie Schindler (Schiavo) was forced to give up the ghost one year ago today, as a result of 13 days' forced dehydration. The media portrayed the issue as a contest between spousal rights and parental rights, and between a person's expressed will to die and other people's will that the person live. The media are liars.
Although a person's spouse should generally be trusted with that person's care, there are exceptions. While Terri was alive, Michael Schiavo sired two children by h
Is there any reason why aspiring Presidents should not be willing to prove their eligibility for office as a matter of course?
If Obama was born in Hawaii, why would it not be in everyone's interest for him to authorize the state of Hawaii to officially say so? Note that they have said they have a birth record on file, but they haven't said what it indicates about where he was born (a newspaper article's headline claimed they said the latter, but in the article itself they only said the for
Introducing 0840 EconoBanking
I've just built a cart using a new low-cost 8K banking scheme. Unlike other 8K designs which either require a programmable logic device or multiple logic chips, this design uses one 16-pin DIP, a 2.2K resistor, and a 100pF cap (and an EPROM of course). The one limitation is that code must be written to use the new banking method--it's not F8-compatible. Writing games to be easily-adaptable to both formats, however, should not be difficult. Any address $0800-
Here's a simple demo of my BTP2 music routine. The routine can produce a full chromatic scale over a five octave range, though the top and bottom octaves don't sound too wonderful (I doubt that the DPC would sound great on the really high or really low notes either).
Each of the four voices can independently play loudly or softly (though in this demo the volumes all tie together). This demo doesn't maintain vsync, though doing so probably wouldn't be too hard. The music player requires 46
I've finally figured out how to get Z26 to compile, and implemented my own set of banking routines for 4A50 support. This version may be used to run the Ruby Runner WIP binaries I've posted in earlier entries. It is based on the Z26v213.tar distribution; the source code for all modified files is included.
At first glance, this kernel may look like any other 24-column text kernel. But there are a few differences. It should probably be suitable for use in a text adventure game (with a nice scrolling output, even on an unexpanded 2600!) though I may have to increase the line spacing slightly for that.
For a variety of reasons, this is not "just another 24-column kernel":
-1- Minimal flicker thanks to a variant of David Crane's "flicker blinds" trick and an anti-flicker font.
-2- Minima
This version has some significant changes. I rearranged some variables so six bytes' worth of temp variables are now overlayed with kernel temp variables. Hopefully I've eliminated all conflicts there.
It's now necessary to click twice to remove blocks. This allows for a limited preview/undo function. If you click somewhere and don't want to remove the blocks that turned brown, click somewhere else instead.
I added some feeble sound effects as well. Let me know how they are.
Als
Here's my start of what Atari's "Space War" should have been. Everything suffers from 30Hz flicker (oh well) but the players can have get 4 shots on screen. Or maybe I'll go with three shots per player and have two floating fuel pods.
In addition to the "combat-style" two-player game, I was planning to also have a single-player game in which a computer-controlled ship lays down red and green dots. The player is required to collect the green dots while avoiding the red dots or the computer
Based on some discussions in "The project after the project..." I decided to test out whether a ball-based kernel would work for a Juno-First style background. My conclusion: it works and is doable with a reasonable cycle load and in a reasonable amount of code on a banked cart, and horizontal motion looks great. Vertical motion is not so great, unfortunately. The pixels seem to be horizontally "jumpy" and I don't see any good remedy for that which would still have the dots move vertically.
I've restarted work on my Matchie game after finding a solution for an annoying TIA quirk. Although the 2600 shows 160 pixels across the screen, SCORE mode can corrupt the color of the last HALF-pixel on the left half of the screen. If the last playfield pixel on the left half of the screen is set, the 77th through 80th pixels should appear in P0 color. Unfortunately, the right half of that playfield pixel will show up in an indeterminate color which may be affected by COLUPF even though the
One thing I was pondering recently while evaluating the feasibility of the Wormy project is the question of whether to shoot for a 4K or a banked cartridge. Certainly during the heyday of the 2600, 8K and even 16K carts were hardly uncommon, and yet there is a certain 'purist' side of me that favors 4K. How should one best decide?To be sure, there's nothing that prevents going to a banked cartridge after starting out planning a 4K one. It only took a couple hours to split Strat-O-Gems from on
In case anyone is curious about the exact specs for the music in Stella's Stocking (BTP2 music driver):
4 independent voices; two are output to each sound channel. The voices are otherwise isomorphic.
Two wave tables, which are used for "loud" and "soft". Normally most voices are shaped to start soft and get loud, or start loud and get soft, or something. In the "Echo Carol" (last tune at fireplace) there's a spot where loud and soft can be heard for a solid stretch.
Five octave
Well, I just started playing with 7800 programming and it seems somewhat interesting. Haven't really figured out what to do, though. I've been thinking it might be interesting to see if I can manage a missile defense or area-filling game using only the 4K of internal RAM. The location of the zero-page and stack shadows is nuisancesome, but I have a kernel that seems like it should work for 128x96x4 colors with some cycles left over for a few overlay objects. The bitmap is stored linearly at
So far I've got the kernel going along with the ability to move the player and animate a few things. Here's an actual screen capture (running a 4A50-equipped Z26).That is not a mockup. The game is really displaying all that. Well, it is using flicker blinds, but because they are only used for vertical smoothing and color enhancement, the flicker really isn't objectionable. Here's what a single (non-phosphorescent) frame looks like:It doesn't look nearly as nice, but unlike most flickering 26
Here's a rough kernel test for the 'rings'. This should be quite workable in a real game if everything is flickered at 30Hz (player ship, one shot, enemy fireball, and two chaser mines). Hold player 1 fire to slow down the animation; hold player 2 fire to disable the shift-in data. Color/BW toggles 30Hz flicker. The funny 8x8 block in the middle would be the enemy space ship, which could be drawn at 1lk or 2lk resolution. The plan is probably for rings to have 32 or 48 segments which would
She was a good sweetie. I don't know why I first mentioned early in our relationship (1998) that I still enjoyed playing the 2600, but Dawn quickly fell in love with Millipede. She'd had a 2600 as a youth (four-switch version) but never got any cartridge newer than Burgertime.
Seven years.
I decided to try out some kernel experimentation to see how well Toyshop Trouble could work on the 7800. Things seem like it could work decently, though the lack of cycle-accurate emulation support would probably make it too difficult to get working. Things could be a bit better if the write mode 2 transparency logic used the upper data bits, but even without that ability it should be pretty nicely workable.
The game would run in 320B mode. Four toys per line, each with two independent co
Here it is: an animated GIF showing how the game looks. Totally unlike anything on the 2600. There's a little flicker on a real machine but not bad at all. Monsters aren't deadly yet, but you can see how they move, and how the rocks and rubies fall.
Although I may still make a couple more tweaks, I would say that anyone with a Cuttle Cart 2 can now safely start development on 4A50-based projects. Use the banking file in the previous blog entry.I don't yet have EEPROM support in the CPLD, but expect that I will soon. I have in-circuit programming working for DOS-based PC's with printer ports. On a Compaq Presario 2100 (booting DOS off floppy and running off a RAMdisk) it takes 38 seconds to program and verify the Archon demo in the previo
IntroductionOne of the first steps in creating a game is often designing a screen layout. On some systems this is fairly straightforward. On something like the Channel F, the screen has a certain resolution (e.g. 128x64) and a certain number of colors; any screen layout with the proper resolution and number of colors is feasible.The 2600, however, is another story. Although it's possible to look at some proposed screen layouts and say "Yeah, that would be easy" or to look at others and say "N
Imagine that a restaurant were to announce to 100 diners--all strangers--that they would be splitting the tab. If a diner wanted to buy a $50 glass of wine, it would only cost him $0.50; on the other hand, it would also cost the other 99 diners $0.50. If the diner decided instead to have a $2 soda or a $5 glass of wine, he (and everyone else) would pay $0.02 or $0.05, respectively. What would people under such circumstances end up ordering, and what would they pay for it?
Many people woul
Magic Zeepy banking is a proposed banking method to allow up to 32 zero-page pointers used within certain parts of the code to access up to 24K of ROM directly. It does put some restrictions on the code to be run, but for some applications the ability to access so much memory directly may be more than worth it. The scheme is designed around using a 22V10 as a controller; this entailed some slight compromises, but the scheme should nonetheless be very powerful. The board layout would have to b
I haven't gone into much detail elsewhere about the 4A50 cart and some of the techniques it uses, but since people may find it interesting I'll discuss it here.The heart of the cartridge is a Xilinx CPLD. This device has 36 macrocells connected to 32 I/O pins. While it's a step up from the 22V10 used in Al's bankswitch carts, it's still very cheap as such devices go.Another key to the cartridge is a 14.31818Mhz oscillator. Although many RAM-plus carts get by with some simple RC circuitry for
Like us on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
AtariAge on Instagram
Watch us on YouTube
Chat on Discord