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Atari projects, Mac mini DVR, and other things

Entries in this blog

Rules of the Game

In order to finish writing Draconian, I need to figure out the Rules of the Game. Information gathered from StrategyWiki, Gaming History and by playing in MAME. Sometimes StrategyWiki differs from what I see in MAME, most likely due to how the dip switches are set. If you spot something that's incorrect, can fill in any blank spots, or answer any questions, please do so in the comments below! Anything in green has been implemented in Draconian. Anything in strikeout will not be done
SpiceWare

SpiceWare

54

release candidate 4

like all other fragments, Magna-Mine debris now continues to travel along the path of the destroyed object When the double-section Magna-Mines were shot, if it was coming straight at you the back half would always turn clockwise to come after you. It now randomly selects the direction. shield now takes time to recharge, twice as long as the amount of time you used. If you used the shield for 1 second, it takes 2 seconds to get back to full strength. You can still use shields if they're
SpiceWare

SpiceWare

40

Music Update

Ladytron's coming back to the US, and this year I know ahead of time!! They'll be in Houston on Monday April 20th (other Texas stops are the 21st in Austin and 22nd in Dallas). They're touring with The Faint, who sound pretty good.   Blitz, new album by KMFDM is coming out in 2 weeks. I've preorded the Blitz Bundle (signed CD, T-Shirt, etc) from KMFDM's online store.   New things I've been listening to:   by Shiny Toy Guns  Mamma's Boy by Chromeo (link to high quality video at end o
SpiceWare

SpiceWare

30

release candidate 3

fixed the synchronized rotation issue with large asteroids When I first started coding Space Rocks, I set it up to support an arbitrary number of styles for each size of asteroid as I didn't know how many would end up in the game. So I wrote the original InitWave routine like this to select a random asteroid style, rotation and speed: gSpriteAnimSeqID[i] = LARGE_ASTEROID_SEQ_ID + ((LARGE_VARIATIONS * (Random32() & 0xff)) >> ; gSpriteAnimControl[i] = RandomRotation();   L
SpiceWare

SpiceWare

29
Draconian

Announcing Draconian

A while back, Nathan posted some well thought out mockups detailing how to do Bosconian on the Atari 2600. There was a bit of discussion, including a suggestion by supercat for drawing the stations using players instead of the playfield. But nothing came of it - until today.   Two weeks ago I approached Nathan about possibly using the routines from Space Rocks to implement his ideas. Those routines seemed ideal as they support objects with unique colors as well as the ability to set th
SpiceWare

SpiceWare in Draconian

26

Adam Savage's Tested

Late last night I ran across a post on Facebook by Kurt Mayer about Adam Savage's Tested (he of Mythbusters fame). Had trouble sleeping afterwards, thank's Kurt Tested team members Jeremy Williams and Sean Charlesworth decided to build a new arcade cabinet running Starlords, a game they've built from scratch and introduced at California Extreme last year. As the name suggests, the game is an homage to Warlords. They enlisted the aid of Mike Mika and Kevin Wilson of Other Ocean. In this initi
SpiceWare

SpiceWare

23
Draconian

Slick Kernel

With my prior DPC+ kernels, I used an Event Datastream that would tell the kernel to jump out of its normal loop. After that, the 6507 would spent a lot of CPU time deciding if it was supposed to reposition player 0, reposition player 1, or if it was all done drawing the game display.   I got to thinking and came up with a way were the 6507 no longer has to make any kernel decisions - instead of having an Event Datastream, just have a Jump Datastream. Every entry in the Jump Datastream
SpiceWare

SpiceWare in Draconian

23

spiffy saucer & UFO

New saucer and UFO graphics new medium asteroids using 24 frames of rotation (so it matches the large asteroids) Ships accelerate faster than before Ships have more inertia speed of asteroids increased. The prior sixteen speeds were 3 -> 9 in steps of .4, they're now 5 -> 11 in steps of .4 rebuilt the shot offset tables so shots now start at the ship's nose instead of in the middle of the ship revised the vertical wrap-around logic. Before all objects would wrap using a
SpiceWare

SpiceWare

22
Frantic

Alex tests

Just for grins, did some builds using the Alex voice at 3 different rates: 2000, 3000 and 4000 Hz. Sample space used for the 12 words:   2000 Hz = 7575 bytes 3000 Hz = 11365 bytes 4000 Hz = 15153 bytes   Edit: added Berzerk samples at 2000 and 3000 Hz 2000 Hz = 8743 bytes 3000 Hz = 13117 bytes   Edit 2: added Victoria samples at 2000, 3000 and 4000 Hz. 2000 Hz = 7537 bytes 3000 Hz = 11304 bytes 4000 Hz = 15072 bytes  
SpiceWare

SpiceWare in Frantic

22

smoother

Nathan's sent in a test of one of the large asteroids with line-by-line shifting. It's purdy! Beginnings of a 2-player competitive mode. It's functional, but there's still more work to be done. Revised init wave routines so asteroids shouldn't start on top of the player's ships Revised respawn routine, there's now 5 different locations a player can respawn at - this was added because of the new 2 player mode. New temporary immunity when ships respawn. The ships will cycle their lu
SpiceWare

SpiceWare

21

Disappointed

I spent most of yesterday working on a program that parsed out iesposta's audio data written for my usual audio driver to see if I could optimize the data further to free up space. The data usage shrunk from 706 bytes to 606 bytes, which sounds great, however the drivers to deal with the more complex data arrangement will use more space. So I decided not to pursue that any further at this time. I'll take another look once iesposta sends me the final sound effects to see if that makes a differ
SpiceWare

SpiceWare

21
Space Rocks

Name suggestions?

While playing Asteroids last night for the 7800 HSC, I got to thinking that Frantic's sprite routines could be used to make a much better version of Asteroids. Since there's no playfield to update, I think I can even get each sprite's reposition routine down to a single scanline (in Frantic Player 0 takes 2 scanlines while Player 1 takes 3).   Anybody got a name suggestion?
SpiceWare

SpiceWare in Space Rocks

20

Adding Blu-ray content

I'm planning on getting a new computer later this year, and planned to get a Blu-ray drive for it. Last week Macworld posted an article on How to rip a Blu-ray, so I checked out OWC for Mac compatible drives and decided to buy one now rather than later. It connects via FireWire 800 (my current MacBook Pro) and USB 3 (new computer). It also comes with Roxio Toast 11 for creating Blu-ray discs that I could hand out to family and friends.   I was surprised to see that the burner can create 128GB
SpiceWare

SpiceWare

20

reboot delayed

Last time around cd-w made a comment that led me to doing a test rewrite of one of the ball reposition kernels: DS_GRP0 = DS1DATA DS_GRP1 = DS2DATA DS_HMP0_ENAM0 = DS3DATA DS_HMP1_ENAM1 = DS4DATA DS_HMMB_ENABL = DS5DATA ; HMxx for missile/ball, ENABL DS_COLOR = DS6DATA ; COLUP0, COLUP1, COLUPF - only used during reposition DS_SIZE = DS7DATA ; NUSIZ0, NUSIZ1, CTRLPF - only used during reposition DS_JUMP = DS8DATA RealResblStrobe73:
SpiceWare

SpiceWare

20
Medieval Mayhem

4 International Kings

There's now 4 kings, plus PAL support! Set TV Type to Color for NTSC and Black & White for PAL. I tried to keep the colors as close as possible for the 2 TV systems.   Here's the bin. For those with Superchargers, Cuttle or Krok Carts I'd appreciate any feedback on how this fits on your TVs as I'm attempting to use 200 scan lines for the displayed area. mm_2006_03_11.bin   Version with Green brightened up mm_green_changed.bin   Updated sour
Guest

Guest in Medieval Mayhem

19

do you hear what I hear?

Sound effects by Bob DeCrescenzo! Added a hyperspace cool-down timer to eliminate infinite-hyperspace. Before you could hold down and continually warp out/warp in w/out risk of collision and only let go of the joystick once you warped into a safe spot. Cool-down time is currently 5 seconds. A couple of the small killer satellites could explode in the wrong color in monochrome games. This has been fixed. Fixed a couple minor issues in the menu - the kids down option wasn't always forc
SpiceWare

SpiceWare

18

Stay Frosty 2 Teaser Screenshots

Auto-detection of joystick or gamepad. The flicker-free two-color 48 pixel kernel, which I think was first publicly seen in a May 2011 build of Frantic, was originally developed in 2010 for the Stay Frosty 2 logo at the top of this screen.   Broom = Double Jump, Present = Bonus Points. Levels use full width of screen. In contrast, Stay Frosty didn't use PF0 so the upper platforms never appeared on the left or right edges of the screen. Platform color is also updated on all 3 scan line
SpiceWare

SpiceWare

18

Step 5 - automate Vertical Delay

For this update, we're going to double the Y range of the player objects. To use the new Y value for the 2LK we just need to divide it in half using the LSR command. The remainder of the divide, which ends up in the Carry flag, will conveniently tell us if we need to turn on Vertical Delay.   This routine preps the 2LK data for player0 and turns on VDELP0 if required (if you're wondering, VDELP0 is turned off in VerticalSync): ; prep Humanoid's Y position for 2LK ldx #1
SpiceWare

SpiceWare

18
Medieval Mayhem

Vanity, take two

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
SpiceWare

SpiceWare in Medieval Mayhem

17

Step 4 - 2 Line Kernel

Let's review the TIA Timing diagram from last time:   We used that to determine when we could safely update the playfield data in order to draw the score and timer. For moveable objects(player0, player1, missile0, missile1 and ball) if you update their graphics during the Visible Screen (cycles 23-76) you run the risk of shearing. For something that's moving fast, like the snowball in Stay Frosty 2, shearing may be an acceptable design compromise:   That snowball
SpiceWare

SpiceWare

17

Disperse Revision

Revised how the enemy formation will scatter if the leader is destroyed minor update to Bonus Points for better alignment with the explosion it replaces. Formation ships are now destroyed if they collide with asteroids or mines Sound effect volume is lowered when speech is active SECTOR # is now displayed while the player's ship ramps up to full speed removed unused font graphics (saved 200+ bytes) various program optimizations to free up memory Due to removing most of the fon
SpiceWare

SpiceWare

17

Later Facebook

Don't know why, but Facebook had taken to censoring my comments.   Comment about Liftoff and some awesome bookmarks to go with it       In reply to a "wind turbines aren't green" showing buried blades I posted a comment on how fiberglass recycling has only recently been possible:     Comment about covid delaying the ATSC 3.0 (next gen TV broadcasts, up to 4K) rollout in Houston. I've also noticed mentioning COVID in any way tends to get a
SpiceWare

SpiceWare

16
Vectrex

MenuMaker 0.3

NOTE: use MenuMaker 0.4. It fixes a bug found in version 0.3, and adds support for the 2019+ VecMulti.   MenuMaker has been updated for 64-bit macOS. This will create the menu for @Richard H.'s VecMulti SD cartridge for the Vectrex.       Program with source: MenuMaker20211211.zip   Port was done using Lazarus, which is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows.   Use MenuMaker 0.2 if you're still on a 32-bit version of macOS.
SpiceWare

SpiceWare in Vectrex

16
Medieval Mayhem

Main Menu

Oh well, I thought the Main Menu was pretty much done; but, in reviewing my blog entry I noticed I left out an e in medieval I'm going to post this anyway as a friend's going to be in Houston this week so there won't be any updates for a while. Update: Got home earlier than expected so I fixed the missing e. I also added just the BIN down below Update2: graphic revisions   Use your paddle to highlight the option. Either tap or hold down your fire button to
SpiceWare

SpiceWare in Medieval Mayhem

16
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