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About this blog

My Atari projects and games

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New adventures

Well this has come a surprise over the past 6 months. Earlier this year I picked up a C64 and 1541 II off eBay having started watching a number of retro videos in the period proceeding that purchase. All of a sudden I was back into my youth playing some classic games from the past - much to the probable annoyance of my wife and kids (I'd previously planned and built an Arcade cabinet [Nintendo - Donkey Kong] over a 10 year period so just another thing to clog up the house) though my son seemed t

mksmith

mksmith

batariBasic DPC+ starting template

I've created a template for batariBasic containing a basic game structure with the following features: DPC+ kernal Utilising multiple banks Title screen (bank6), play screen (bank 2), game over screen (bank 3) Pause mode (bank 3) - using B&W switch This is an adaption of the ex_title_screen_and_game_over.bas generously created by the following people (thank you!): ; Example program by Duane Alan Hahn (Random Terrain) using ; hints, tips, code snippets, and more from At

mksmith

mksmith

Started a game

So over the past week or so I've started a new game in batariBasic based on Tower of Rubble! Actually not too long after starting I saw that another user had also started their own version - looking forward to seeing what can be done in 4k with someone who appears to know what they are doing! I've been putting this together in DPC+ and its been a learning experience getting to understand some of the modest limitations of programming for the Atari 2600. One of the more interesting issues has

mksmith

mksmith

Animation engine

As discussed in the previous blog post, i am interested in a reasonably reusable animation engine which allows me to call a SetAnimation function to initialise a new animation then use generic UpdateAnimation and DrawAnimation functions to process it regardless of what i need animating. I need to set the total frames, the speed of the animation (by screen update generally), the frame to display and any positional (x and y) change. When starting this game I followed a few example games across t

mksmith

mksmith

Bit of progress

So after a few more days of work i've now got a new titlescreen with some scrolling text and flashing colors (bank6 now full!), a more varied and colored tileset (still not sure of the colors yet) and the first beam/lazer?? dropping blocks. I've had to re-arrange stuff and play around to try and get access to certain things across a couple of banks. The main loop is in bank2 and I now have the player code in bank3 and the enemy stuff in bank4. Hoping this will work ok on a real machine but un

mksmith

mksmith

WIP release

I've posted a first WIP release of my take on Tower of Rubble for the Atari 2600 using batari Basic and DPC+. Been really enjoying programming a game again after not doing so for quite a period of time. Still have a few things to knock off (especially sound which I'm dreading). Probably another few weeks to finish.

mksmith

mksmith

Lots of things...

Well it's been a pretty productive week - been busy working on quite a few projects over this period in the end. Things will slow down a bit now as I get back to work but we'll push on. Tower of Rubble Haven't done as much as I thought I would have but a very special thanks to @cimmerian for not only featuring Tower of Rubble on the his ZeroPage Homebrew show but also for helping me debug a frame overrun issue when starting the game on hardware (still waiting for my Harmony cart). The code f

mksmith

mksmith

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