Here is the latest version of my four-in-a-row game. It is a challenge to win, but I'm able to do it from time to time. Usually the wait between moves is less than 20 seconds, and the longest time I measured was about 35.I am curious how people feel about the difficultly level now. I hope Thomas has some time to try it out, since he consistently won against an earlier release.Some other new features include a screen that starts out white and fades to black while the Atari is thinking. This gives
pescoman_v96.zip
My Four-In-A-Row board game has been playable for some time now, so now I'm just polishing things up. Of course, this list is subject to change.
1) Stabilize scanlines per frame during thinking state.
Thanks to Fred and John for their help.
2) Title screen graphics
Big thanks to Nathan for the title artwork. You are looking at an actual screenshot above. I've managed to animate the colors in the text, a first for a 52 pixel image. There is still a little bit of wo
OK, I changed the colours in Four-Play for those of you who live across the Atlantic, (or the Pacific, for you Aussies and Kiwis.)
The colours look good in z26 to me. Anyone care to try on hardware?
veclogo.zip
Here is the demo recently shown at the Midwest Gaming Classic. It includes substantial improvements over the last release:
* Title screen
* Board and marbles made taller
* All winning combinations highlighted when a player wins in more than one direction.
* Entire board blinks when game ends in a draw.
* Barndoor effect and a stable scanline count during the thinking process.
* Game responds to immediate threats and wins instantaneously.
The m
(actual screenshot)
Here's another kernel that I would have not thought possible earlier. It draws up to 17 objects that can independently be any of 5 colors. I'll give you all a chance to guess how this works before explaining it.
Here are some details. Are they useful as hints?
The ball is available as a cursor, and can be a 6th color.
Colors are very limited: the choices are $3X $7X $BX or $FX.
If the number of objects in a row is at most 11, the color choices are unrestricte
Today I built a bike light out of a prototype board, a 9V battery connector, a resistor, and an LED. It won't win any beauty contests, but it works. I have new respect for the people around here would build their own hardware, because I've now dealt with wires slipping out of holes heat them, getting plastic insulation too close to the iron, cutting a wire too short, etc.
One problem I had was that the holes in the prototype board were too small to insert two wires that I wanted to connect.
What a great game. It is the story of a boy who is banished by his village because he happens to grow bull-like horns. They imprison him an in an uninhabited island castle. Well, almost uninhabited. He meets a young girl with strange powers who is also a prisoner. The two work together to escape the castle, which just happens to be filled with well designed and challenging puzzles.The game's style is unusual for a video game, with a minimal use of color and music. It will not be to everyone's ta
Tonight I finished off the last few puzzles. The most difficult by far was #19, where I was stuck for months:
Even when you've solved all 24 puzzles in Marble Jumper it still has replay value, because you are not likely to remember all the solutions. Indeed I doubt I could complete #19 again without spending a long time.
Special thanks to Nathan Strum for the artwork.I'm sure that experienced programmers can imagine how to do a 51 pixel bitmap without flickering. Anyone care to guess how I managed 52? EDIT: Now explained below.
.You guessed it! Congo is a board game. This chess-like game sets you up with a menagerie of African animals. Your pieces are a giraffe, a monkey, two elephants on either side of a lion, a crocodile, a zebra, and a row of 7 pawns. Each piece moves according to its own rules, and the object of the game is to capture the opponent's lion. For more information, check out chessvariants.org.The mockup above is definitely doable. An asymmetrical playfield with 9 color changes already exists in my Go k
If you haven't seen it in the homebrew forum yet, I have posted a demo of a well-known Russian block game. The kernel manages 10 independently colored blocks at 8 pixels wide. (Well, 9 pixels for the far right one.)
Although there are only 4 COLUxx registers in the TIA, VBLANK offers an often overlooked 5th color (always black).
There are four colors available for the first 4 cells: background, playfield, player 0, and player 1. There are also three registers that can be pre-loaded with
I think I've found my next homebrew project after Four-Play. It's an original concept, and the attachment is a rough prototype that doesn't do much...In the remote mountains of Kashmir, maverick treasure hunter Jack Rascly has found the final resting place of the last survivors of Mu, the ancient empire which sank into the sea 12,000 years ago.The people of Mu clearly had an advanced civilization. The rooms were built from a titanium alloy and were well lit. The walls were strewn with bright cry
This was a fun and simple project. It was pretty easy to build the cylinder and attach the frames. The most challenging part was how to spin it. That was solved by mounting it on an old disassembled hard disk. (It's spun by hand.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBWqsJzgqho
The frames are old photos taken by Eadweard Muybridge, who is well known in the history of animation.
This could be a fun project for kids. My suggestion is to draw or print frames with brighter colors. The grays i
If the design is really as simple as shown below, and if it could actually work, this could be a good electronics project for a beginner like myself. It seems to be just a matter of attaching wires.
If the dumper is safe, I can think of a certain undumped Charlie Brown prototype that resides here in Northern California. It was batari who first suggested the idea of using a switch to make his dumping program work safely, although what he described is a little different.
I already ha
EDIT 09/29/05: The ideas and mockup in this post have been made obsolete by recent developments. Supercat has produced a new demo, and I have designed an alternate board. See this thread for details.Many people have thought about how to port Archon to the VCS, but they worked with the classic design of three colors for squares and two colors for sprites. That is too many colors for the VCS unless you settle for flickering or Venetian blinds.With a little flexibility though, a good board is possi
In my last attempt at a chess kernel with playfield graphics, I came up with a technique that would only work with about 27K of code. Since then I've made some advances that make a 4K kernel possible. One trick I developed was a new 32 pixel asymmetrical playfield configuration that takes four loads and six stores. (I believe it's new at least.)
The playfield remains transposed rather than reflected, but unlike before I load the same byte for the right PF0 and PF2 data. The high nybble goes
Sometimes designing kernels is more fun than actual game programming. Anyway, the idea of doing a better chess kernel has been on my mind for a while. I've been skeptical of the notion that chess could only be done with Venetian blinds or flickering, and this weekend I came up with a design that needs neither. Like my other board game kernels it relies heavily on PF graphics and multiple color changes.Unfortunately I could not figure out a way to use self-modifying code. The PF must be updated e
krokodile_commander.zip(52 and 48 pixel Pac-Man logos by DEBRO)I have attached a tool that converts a 52-pixel wide BMP file to assembly code that can be plugged into a kernel. The BMP file should be set to 256 colors, but the program only reads it as monochrome. To set the colors for each line, you have to manually change the data in the C code. If you don't have a compiler, you can edit the assembly code too.You will see from the code that it uses a lot of ROM. The routine takes 56 bytes per l
.I have been working on a board game in which players drop pieces into an upright 7x6 board. The first to get four of a kind horizontally, vertically, or diagonally is the winner. Milton Bradley markets a similar game under the name Connect Four.The first picture is an actual screenshot of a single row, and the next part is a mockup of what the final kernel should look like. Making one row was the most difficult part, and repeating it will of course be simple. With any luck, I will be able to ma
I worked out the AI for Vertical Four-In-A-Row and put together a DOS program with a text interface that plays a pretty good game. The next step will be to implement the AI in 6502 assembly. Then it's on to finishing the kernel (see previous entry) and making an interface.You take turns with the computer dropping pieces into an upright board, and object of the game is to be the first to get four of your pieces in a row horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. As far as I know, this might become
As a treat for those of you who read my blog, here is a sneak preview of my 1K puzzle game. I've tripled the number of puzzles from the first version posted, and added a musical reward for winning. (thanks to Paul and Wolfgang ) It wasn't easy keeping the scanline count stable when resetting and selecting, while still keeping under 1K.A reminder of the rules: You play by jumping marbles over each other, like in checkers, except the jumps are only horizontal or vertical. You win when the last pie
Three years ago I would not have thought this kernel was possible.
There is no game logic at this point. The program just allows three players to place their stones on the board, all using the left joystick.
Note that the cursor does not move into the top row yet. There is certainly room for improvement, but this is good enough to show how a Go-Moku kernel would work. The next steps will be to implement the top row, make the cursor more responsive to the joystick, and to put in dia
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