Comcast took over from Time Warner in the Houston cable TV market. One of the things they've recently done was to bump up our internet download speed from 5Mbps to 6Mbps. I do a lot of video conferencing in iChat, and was hoping the upload speed would increase from 384 Kbps, but it didn't.
I then found out I could upgrade my service to 8Mbps down, 768Kbps up, so I changed my service over the weekend. The upload speed increased, but the download speed didn't change. I ended up having to s
animation in place
2 "styles" for each asteroid size.
2 distinct styles for larger asteroids, but only 2 frames1 of animation for each
small & medium styles are just mirror images, but have 4 frames of animation each
[*]each asteroid has an independent rotation direction and speed.
[*]Animated saucer
[*]new UFO after 7000 points. At the moment it's just a smaller target that shoots more frequently. There's no targeting AI yet for either enemy.
[*]Fixed the ship invisible bug2
Test of X values from 0-159. Use the RIGHT Joystick to move 2 of the robots. If you push upward the left/right movement is slowed down to facilitate testing. (2nd joystick keys for Stella are: Y = UP, G = LEFT and J = RIGHT).
The Room # is now the first 4 positions of the score. The robot's X value is the last 2 positions of the score. In the topmost strip of the room I've turned on all 8 pixels for the sprites. These are positioned using the traditional position object routine so th
I became aware of Walk of the Earth after this video showed up on my 3DS in the 3D Video app.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHvl6z56zGc
Soon after I found their clever cover of Goyte's Somebody That I Used to Know where all 5 members of the group play on the same guitar at the same time. I subscribed to them on YouTube after seeing it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9NF2edxy-M
Today they just posted this cover of Madonna's Material Girl.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpnHhii
In order for the Robots to move or shoot, they need to know where the Humanoid is in relation to themselves. If we're only looking at 4 directions it fairly straightforward - horizontal vs vertical is determined by seeing if the difference between Robot X and Humanoid X bigger or smaller than the difference between Robot Y and Humanoid Y. Once horizontal/vertical is decided then if the difference is negative the direction is left or up, while if it's positive it's right or down.
For
there's fire *
I took these while driving home to Houston after visiting friends in San Antonio for the weekend. The photos where taken on I10 between Luling and Shulenburg, about 30 miles south of the fires in Bastrop.
Finally past it
* screen grab of Weather Underground at time of post, zoomed in so you can see where Luling & Shulenburg are.
Last week I wasn't feeling up to snuff, so each day after work I just kicked back on the couch and watched TV.
On Sunday afternoon my left arm went numb and was accompanied with some chest pain, so I hightailed it over to the ER. They did preliminary tests and while most looked OK, they saw something odd in the EKG so I was admitted to the hospital. The rest of Sunday (and all thru the night) consisted of blood tests every 3 hours. Between that and the 2 am admission for the other bed in
I've added a few new Atari pages to my site, plus updated the "play online" page for Medieval Mayhem. Many thanks to Nathan Strum for his contribution!
Been to a lot of concerts late, 4 in less than 3 weeks: OMD on March 16th, Lords of Acid on 19th, Devo on the 25th and Scissor Sisters on April 4th!
Didn't get to meet the band like I did for Devo, but we were able to get fairly close to the stage. They put on an awesome show.
http://spiceware.org/albums/scissorsisters2011/IMG_0250.sized.jpg
http://spiceware.org/albums/scissorsisters2011/IMG_0269.sized.jpg
http://spiceware.org/albums/scissorsisters20
Didn't get as far as I'd like due to being laid up with a sinus infection; but, I'm down to 2 RAM variables to decipher and have 125 labels renamed with 197 to go.
Warlords_Source.zip
I'm down to 8 RAM variables to decipher and have 108 labels renamed1 with 214 to go. A couple interesting finds:
each player's paddle is only read every 4th frame. There's a couple subroutines, that I named SmoothXmotion and SmoothYmotion, that are used to smooth out the motion over the 4 frames between paddle readings. As a test I changed subroutine to NOP the smoothing and the motion was very jerky.
Paddle usage had me confused for a little bit:
Paddle 2(INPT1)
In this topic about the exciting new RGB mod for the 2600, collinp reported that the XRGB-mini had problems syncing with Warlords.
I took a quick look and noticed that VSYNC was set before the WSYNC, instead of after, which resulted in the sync signal starting late in the scanline.
I did a quick hack via Stella to swap the order. The hack resulted in the kings getting shifted to the right, but was enough for collinp to confirm that moving the VSYNC after the WSYNC did indeed fix the probl
The robots now try to avoid the walls.
Shots now take out other shots. Sometimes a robot will shoot too quickly, causing both shots to disappear. This will be fixed later when I add a "gun cool down" routine.
This change took a bit longer than I expected - a shift in the compiled code triggered the MAM1 bug in the ARM chip and it took me a few hours of reordering the functions until it cleared up. Not fun.
ROM
frantic_harmony_20110827.bin
Sour
Robot animation frames are in place. They have thrown off the wall avoidance routines though, so no need to let me know that the robots are walking into walls more frequently than they should!
Also no need to let me know the Frenzy variation doesn't look right! That's because the Tank robots aren't in place yet.
Speaking of Tanks, which do you prefer?
Traditional Tank
Scorpion Tank
Both Tanks look cool. The main tradeof
We've had a couple discussions before in Nathan's Blog that brought up the late 60's cartoon Wacky Races. I ran across this today and thought a reply to those posts might get lost, so here it is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAsyF4J_klk
Did the robotic 7-8 treatment on the voices that work at 4000. They all have the distortion that I don't care for.
Based on the experiments done so far, I'm hoping I'll be able to use Alex4000_simple4 from the prior blog entry, but until the game code has been written I won't know how much space I'll have to use for audio samples. I will decrease the quality (or even eliminate the samples) if needed, though there's also the change that there will be extra space allowing me to add an
thrust exhaust now visible
asteroid speed slowed down a little bit. It was originally 3->9 (in steps of .4) and was changed to 5->11. After watching keilbaca play, I decided to split the difference and it's now 4->10.
sound effects are now quieter in demo mode
UFO now targets asteroids when it's not targeting a player
respawn no longer occurs when UFO is onscreen
asteroids now start at edges of the screen
Thrust exhaust
ROMs for Harmony or Stella 3.7.1 or la
I've made a variation of my sprite converter tool that will convert a sprite AND create a vector version at the same time. This will make it much easier for me to process all the forthcoming images.
http://www.spiceware...ari/vector8.php
To use it, enter a GIF image that's available online via URL
Tell it which color is the background color, color numbers are in the top-right, and an image using those numbers is at the bottom. (Tip: click CHANGE COLORS if screen color conflicts w
To try out HEX, a new Vectrex homebrew, I discovered I had to use one of my work systems to run the MenuMaker.
I don't like to do that, so I contact Richard H. to see if there was a Mac version and if not if I could port it. There's not, so he sent me his Delphi code so I could see what needed to be done.
I'm not familiar with Delphi so started doing some research and discovered it's Pascal. I found Lazarus, installed it, and after a bit of work was able to update the Vec
I recalled reading about hitting HMOVE at weird times and had an idea on how to extend the left/right edge of the SpiceWare logo using it. It worked surprisingly well! I took the ball, make it 8 pixels wide, then positioned it to extend the right of the logo by 8 pixels. I then unrolled the graphic 48 loop and turned the ball on for the first line, off for the next. I then used a late HMOVE and shifted the ball over 56 pixels over course of 4 scanlines(yep, shifted by 14 pixels per line). I then
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