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
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
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
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
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!
Homebrews
Synthcart
Lady Bug
Thrust+ Platinum
Medieval Mayhem
Star Fire
Seawolf
2005 Minigame Multicart
Skeleton+
Conquest of Mars
Fall Down
Climber 5
Marble Craze
Go Fish!
Strat-O-Gems Deluxe
Gunfight
Crazy Balloon
Dark Mage
Oystron
SWOOPS!
Testcart
Colony 7
Space Instigators
Hunchy II
A-VCS-tec Challenge
Space Treat Del
After reading Manuel's blog and trying out Uridium after a long time again, I wondered if that typical Braybrook look could somehow be transformed to the 2600. For the dreadnought, we'd have to use playfield grahics. Obviously we would need more than just two colors (foreground and backgroud) there. From Andrew's experiments we know, that flicker can help here.By mixing the constant background with two different foreground colors (changing every line) and switching the order of the foreground co
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,
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)
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.
Looks like my new games take about as long as it takes to make me buy new hardware.
So I spend the last days to browse the Internet and magazines to select the components for my new PC. Didn't think this would be any fun anymore, but it turned out to be quite interesting. Today I finally ordered it, and it really felt good (hope this feeling stay when I build it together ).
For those who are interested in details:
BitFenix Shinobi SB 3.0 Midi-Tower USB 3.0 black
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 Logitech announced to stop further development of the Squeezebox series (the server is promised to continue, and you can update the firmware to their new UE system), the devices have become much cheaper lately. So I decided to buy myself a Squeezebox Radio (limited red edition incl. accupack) for 111€.
Yesterday it arrived and I have immediately started playing with it.
The device seems really powerful, but the software is lacking quite a lot. E.g
Inspired by this blog entry, I spend spend some time with the line drawing part of Elite.
Since there is no double-buffer (like Elite), I experimented with 3 ways of line drawing:
1. Clearing the whole screen and then drawing all lines.
2. Plotting pixels with XOR, erasing the old and immediately redrawing the new line
one by one.
3. Plotting pixels with XOR, erasing all lines first and then redrawing all new lines.
The constant clearing time in variat
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.
This is my first blog ever and probably will be the only one for quite a while. There is only one reason why I created it and I will show you... soon. Stay tuned!
A while ago I had some discussion with SvOlli about improving a part of his winning Bang! demo called "Snake Sprite". Initially he wanted to add more colors, but I thought more about removing the repositioning gaps. This seemed like something never done before inside a 48 pixel kernel, so I took the challenge. After making it possible, SvOlli suggested to integrate my little demo into a bigger mega demo. So I spiced up the demo a bit, scripted it into 4 parts and added some pompous demo text s
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
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
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
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
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
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!
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