In July 2020 I and sat down at my home-brewing desk and started to play around with tweaking my 2002 Atari 5200 homebrew, Koffi: Yellow Kopter. I have had notes about doing a 2nd Koffi game since 2002 when I finished the first one, but it seems ever more unlikely I'll devote time to do a whole new sequel with all the ideas I'd planned. So, I decided to play around with the original, add a few game play tweaks, some new visual details, fix a few bugs, and add a new 2-Player co-op mode. Som
Updated 10/12/20 with the results, see bottom.
I'm running out of ROM memory with the new code I'm adding for the 2-player mode of the game. Koffi: Yellow Kopter was programmed in 32k back in 2002. It seemed like a huge amount of ROM at the time, so I didn't try much to keep things small. There ended up being huge graphics tables and repetitive code routines, just because that was easiest to do. Also, before I finished Koffi, I used up as much remaining memory as I could.
I figured out why using the TASM .TEXT command was producing junk at times. It was because the 'pretty font' I used with Adventure II XE, font1.s, had the characters switched around and some were actually replaced with custom chars. Standard ASCII and ATASCII has lower case letters from $61 to $7A, and upper case letters from $41 to $5A. But this font1.s had upper case in the range $21-$3A. I had a temporary programming fix which got the upper case letters to work, but I kept noticing oth
The very last programming change I made to Adventure II XE brought me great happiness, because it was a bug fix that, although infrequent and minor, had eluded me. Giving up on it over the past years of this project, I concluded that it must be a weird timing issue with the Atari Hardware and VBI timing. Something was perhaps changing registers behind the scenes? Because my code was surely 100% rock solid and correct.
This was a bug which plagued me for years of this project. I'
Sega's 3rd party released Panzer Dragoon Remake for Switch, which I don't own and don't really intend to buy right now. I've always been a bigger Sega fan than an Atari fan. I almost picked up a Switch when the newer Virtua Racing came out last year, but didn't.
So I dug out my Saturn from the closet o'doom and hooked it up. I have to use composite with my Panasonic 42" Plasma since it doesn't support S-video. I see there are Saturn Component and HDMI cables and I'm looking into
2022 was a busy year for me. I didn't have free time or mental energy to do much homebrewing on Atari XE or 5200, which I had wanted to. On the personal real-life front, 2022 took everything I had. Full-time job. Family obligations, of course. After a year of searching and looking at houses, I successfully found and bought what we wanted (many other properties I was outbid on, or the property sold before I had a chance to make an offer. The real estate market was crazy in 2021-2022
Star Wars: The Mandalorian series. Episodes 1-7.
Initially I wasn't going to subscribe early to Disney+. But then they showed the trailer for The Mandolorian. There was absolutely no thought process after that. I waited a week to let 2 episodes queue up, then subscribed and watched the first 2 eps back-to-back. I've now watched all 7 of the aired episodes, so what do I think? I'll list my top 5 surprises and bottom 5 'cons' so far. I was going to post this earlier bu
It always amazes me the GUNK that sticks to our cement and brick walkway slabs in 1 year. Every year I spend a full day pressure-washing all these front & back, and also my pool deck which has composite decking but still accumulates dirt that needs to be washed off. This year I had a little drawing fun before cleaning them all off. This isn't chalk on cement; the dark parts are slime, the bright parts what it looks like after the pressure wash water cleans it off.
For a while, I have had an idea for Atari 5200 and A8 called Detective Powers. My old blog entry from 2015 has my original ideas. Here is the original blurb for the game:
Assume the role of the world’s most famous consulting detective, using investigation and deduction to navigate Baker Street, countryside manors, and interior room locations in a retro 80’s arcade-adventure style of game play. Find helpful items and clues, keep your Detective Powers fully charged and solve each ca
I got my first clean compile in DASM for Detective Powers 5200. I had started it a while back using the 6502 assembler called TASM, which is what I used for 5200 / XE Adventure II. But I wanted to start using the most recent DASM 6502 compiler. Many of the code formatting changes were straight forward to see the problem and easily change, but I spent some time trying to figure out why I kept getting unresolved symbols on "A" and "a". I'm not sure if DASM can be configured to show me the li
[EDITED again - added a Before and After pic below]
Back in 2020, I started to tinker with my old 2002 game, the 32K Atari 5200 homebrew Koffi: Yellow Kopter. I'm calling it Koffi Redux so far. I fixed bugs, tweaked gameplay rules, rewrote various graphics routines to make more efficient, added some colors and graphics, and added 2-player mode. One nasty bug was in the original on stage Windy Vines - it took AA member @RB5200 to find it and report some clues to me. The bug
RE: this thread - https://forums.atariage.com/blogs/entry/16804-cleaning-out-the-homebrew-folders/
I dug out my 20+ year old gridlines notebook to draw some stuff and realized I had never pitched these designs for 2002's Koffi: Yellow Kopter. Posting them in a blog.
I'm over 50, thus I have 1 deceased parent (from year 2000), 1 elderly mom and her elderly husband (of 21 years) , my stepfather. This year I spent a lot of days in support of my 2 elderly parents. My stepfather's health deteriorated a lot in particular, and thus there were many trips to hospitals, caregiving, then in-home hospice, then his death in December at age 84. Now my mom is a widow again. The first time she was widowed in 2000, she was only a few years older than I am now.
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