Question: What do you get when you combine interleaved flicker for mixing colors with horizontal scrolling? See attachment! (scrolling left every 2nd, right every 3rd frame)
ParaTest3.bin
I had almost forgotten how good this music is. If you like this, make sure to check out your their new album!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJFShE1VfEc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqU_0xpILIU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wn9FevDdcLU&
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjoQiqY9MN4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8sFupDAwvo
The PC I bought ~10.5 years ago is still up and running.
I only doubled the RAM and bought a new 4 TB HDD (which I plan to continue to use) when the 2 TB Seagate HDD died early. But the small SSD does still well:
63 TB total writes bytes means ~500 writes per byte. The wear level count is at 55, so it could last more than twice as long. I wonder if my next Samsung will do as well too.
Anyway, even though the SSD is still healthy and the CPU is also fine for most ta
Ok, it was "only" a big rack.
Yesterday morning, just a few minutes before I had to get up, I woke up by a loud crack noise followed by a big rumble right beside me.
When I switched on the light, I saw this. Sometimes collecting computer magazines can be dangerous...
EDIT: New picture I made when I cleaned the room. Lock at the crack of the desk standing right besides my head!
Something I wrote this weekend inspired by the arcade game'Tunnel Hunt'. You can control the speed with the joystick (up/down).
Maybe I'll make a game out of this. Or maybe not.
EDIT: Here is how a turn may look like. Now fixed (v0.03)!
Tunnel__v0.01_.bin
Tunnel_001.zip
Tunnel__v0.03_.bin
I just had the "pleasure" to listen to the terrible remake of a better unnamed trash musician. So I dug out the gorgeous original from Matia Bazar. Enjoy!
Getting first aware of the new hype around 2048 by this link, I started playing the game and immediately found myself wasting my time.
Since it is obvious that the 2600 could pretty easily support this game, I soon started wonder how it could be presented on the Atari. There are little bells and whistles to the game. Besides some nice animation effects when moving and merging the numbers, there are only colors. For me these colors, combined with the very reduced and clean graphics and fonts
When reading some stuff about one of my old C64 favorites "The Sentinel", I wondered if something similar would be possible for the 2600. Since 3D was sure impossible it had to be in 2D. Attached is a very preliminary result.You now watch the game top-down, your own position is at the bottom of the screen. Your sight is limited but you will be(!) able to rotate in 90° (maybe 45°) degree steps. For the heights, various colors are used, starting with dark magenta, then blue, cyan, green, yellow, o
After a longer break, I finally took the time and decided for a kernel. Many thanks to John for providing the basic idea of it.
SudokuKernel.bin
SudokuGridKernel.bin
Pixelboy's Sudoku game got me thinking. Now I am wondering about a Sudoku game and especially a generator for the 2600.
Some initial brainstorming:
Display: Has been discussed multiple times already. Should be able to display the digits (doable), annotations (tricky, 2^9 combinations!) and a cursor. Later...
RAM: 10 different values per cell (~3.4 bits), should be easily direct accessible, so no fancy compression algorithms. So 2 cells/byte, 40.5 bytes in total. After ge
Since Chris is busy with his RL, I will continue his blog entry about Star Castle Developments here.
Source code can be found here.
Note: There are still some occasional glitches which I have to sort out. And maybe even a crash. So if you find one, please let me know. Especially if you can reproduce it.
Attached is the final build from October 2015 and here the (never ending) DONE and TODO list:
; Explanation:
; - = open
; o = partially
; + = done
; ? = debatable
; x = cancell
With the recent thread about the never to be released, new Star Castle homebrew, I first tried to understand from the available videos and screen shots, how it is done.
The rings and gun are drawn using the 48 pixel routine, using large, precalculated ROM blocks. I described that a bit more detailed that in the very thread. All other objects are probably drawn with the ball (though I am not 100% sure here).
The result looks pretty impressive, but there is one pretty obvious difference f
I was a bit bored this weekend, so I had a closer look to some games. A lot of games, especially from Taiwan, contain garbage data, which is unsed by the game itself. Often this garbage contains traces from the game development, sometimes even snippets of source code. In this entry I will post some source code findings.
After "some" time, I recently decided to have another look at Robot City. Since the Minigame Compo deadline for 1K is coming soon, I decided to try again to squeeze the gameplay into 1K. Last time I failed, but now I have some more experiences in compact coding. Still I had to strip down the game massively, but finally I managed to keep the important gameplay elements intact.Attached you find the current version. It is almost complete, except for missing sound and some polishing (especially betw
After participating in 2015 myself and therefore starting to watch it for the first time, the Revision demoparty has become a fixed date in my schedule. So I did spend Eastern watching the Revision 2018 via Twitch live stream (and YouTube for the too late events). And it was a blast again! Not all compos, but most of them. Besides the Oldschool compos, I mostly liked the ones where size is limited. If you want to watch any compo relive, go here. Please note that the entries are ordered by t
I had a few hours to test the console and I must say, I am overall disappointed.
Positives first:
Very good HDMI output (it even remembers the last 16:9 or 4:3 setting, which is a surprise)
Convenient form factor and nice design (though I wonder why the woodgrain is orange?)
Convenient to use IF it works
Very little lag
The CPU seems powerful enough for newer Stella versions
PAL ROMs work well too (though the picture is somewhat small for PAL50)
After some time, I started to wonder about Paradroid again. The droid transfer game looks like a nice challenge. The kernel looks pretty busy, the level creation and evaluation seem complicated too.
I started with the kernel and soon found out, that a simple score mode kernel (color #0 left, color #1 right) won't work here due to the so called "blockers" with the opponent's color. Those are displayed on the "wrong" side. After some experimenting with variable mid-scanline color chang
Ok, that's the name of the game I am trying to develop now. :)It still a very long way to go. Attached you find a first (still slightly buggy) demo, which shows the kernel and the horizontal scrolling over one deck ("Repairs").Next planned steps are debugging and improving the kernel (especially getting rid of the annoying stripes in space) and allow vertical scrolling too (this one is going to become pretty tricky). Since I am pretty busy with my daily job again, progress might become very slow
During my work with Space Castle I have to manage quite a lot of graphic data. Especially the castle explosion is very big (currently 16 frames, each 5 blocks of 40 bytes = 3200 bytes) but there also is a lot of other graphic data needed for the various messages and the scores.
All data is compressed by overlapping the data blocks. For the explosion this was done by Chris before I took over from him. When Nathan asked me, if there is enough space for frames to improve the explosion,
Last Wednesday morning I smelled some burned rubber in the kitchen. But I was unable to detect the origin. A few minutes later, my whole flat lost power. Since all my fuses where on, I thought about a power loss in the building. But the light outside my building was OK. So I informed my landlord who send an electrician pretty immediately. Meanwhile my power had come back (and the smell too). The electrician checked my fuse box and electric meter and found... nothing! But he identified the orig
I realized that there is no place where people can download my ROMs. So I decided I should use my blog to provide them.
There will be ROMs of all my homebrews. And maybe I will add some demo or unfinished stuff later too.
Yesterday my good old 29" Sony Trinitron KV-X2901D CRT has died.
It has faithfully served me for about 20 years, for watching TV and developing all my Atari 2600 games.
R.I.P.
I will miss you.
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