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
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
I finally decided to wean myself off z26 logs and learn to use to the Stella debugger. It will obviously make homebrewing easier once I get used to it.
I am trying to set a break when PF1 is set to $aa. I tried the instruction below, and the program is clearly not breaking when the condition is met. Does anyone see what is wrong?
breakif { *PF1 == $aa}
We all continue to speculate whether we will have hoverboards by 2015, but if you go back to the first movie, Doc Brown was originally planning to go 25 years into the future before the Libyans showed up. He always dreamed of seeing the future looking beyond his years, seeing the progress of mankind.
Of course 1985 + 25 = 2010.
So suppose it were two years ago, and Doc asks you to show him around and explain how things have changed since 1985. What do you tell him? For example:
Pretty
.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 don't know if this has been done before, but this diagram is the secret to my time-sensitive kernels. It shows every clock and every cycle of the scanline. No more adding up cycles. If you know what your kernel needs to do at a particular point, the code almost writes itself!I've attached a blank diagram, and an example filled out for the main part of Marble Jumper. I'll take suggestions for improvement, and if it seems useful to enough people, it could go in the MiniDig.stak.zip stak.zip
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
It has been over a year since I've posted anything to my blog. Unfortunately I do not have much time for homebrewing these days, but I still hope someday to get back to some of my unfinished projects.
A while ago, I took on the challenge of making a chess kernel without flickering or Venetian blinds. After many aggravating attempts, I finally got it with some convoluted code. I know a chess homebrew is low priority compared to the other projects I've started, but I've been thinking about how
This is something I've wanted to do for years, and I finally got around to it.
We all know a million is a large number, but exactly how large? Watch my new video and see for yourself:
http://youtu.be/h_wNu-T-K80
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
Here is an unfinished project of mine to hack a classic title into a two-player cooperative game. I've had the idea for a couple of years now, and wanted to keep it under wraps until I had a finished game to show off. Unfortunately it was easier said than done.The idea was to bankswitch between two nearly identical copies of a game and to flicker two independent player sprites. The attached demo shows the basic idea. In this demo, player 1 can move freely, and player 2 is limited to horizontal m
If you've been browsing the homebrew forum, you have probably seen the Marble Solitaire game I've been putting together for the 2005 Minigame Competition. http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=75152Since the original annoucement, I have been able to include some basic sound effects, and more than doubled the number of puzzles. Currently, I am looking for more puzzles to include in the final version. They are not hard to find, indeed the problem is actually narrowing them down. I've
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.
veclogo.zip
When you are finished trying out Conquest of Mars and the other MCG releases, check out the latest version of Four-Play with four difficulty levels.
Note some changes to the controls:
RESET now takes you to the title screen
FIRE does not switch sides anymore, but at the end of a game, resets the game at the current level.
To switch sides during a game, flip the LEFT DIFFICULTY switch. It's not effective during the thinking process. Again, you can use this feature to w
Welcome to my Blog!What is it about the Atari 2600 that motivates so many to want to create their own games? Like a large number of AtariAge members, I have more projects in mind than actual time do to them. I have been programming for the Atari VCS since 2003, and am the creator of Combat Redux, the 2004 Stan Awards, and the chess hack Knightmate. Continuing projects include Tank AI, a 9x9 Go game, and Combat with an asymmetrical maze.It does not make sense to start a new thread every time I g
.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
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
I use Windows, Mac OS, and Linux, and don't usually get involved in brand rivalries, but this iTunes search for the PCWorld podcast was pretty funny. Check it out.
This search was made on October 1, 2011. I was originally planning to post the screenshot the following weekend, but then we lost Steve Jobs.
If anyone needs to reach me, please be advised that due to moving, my internet access will be less frequent than usual. Four-Play is still on schedule, and is planned for release in a few months. I'll try to synchronize the release with any events that AtariAge may attend in the summer.
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?
Just wanted to let you know that I'm still working on my homebrew. I've got a version that takes at most half a minute to play and is a challenge to beat, a vast improvement over the 3.5 minutes the last version took.I spent some time during the holidays working on alpha-beta pruning and got it working. This pruning allows the computer to recognize moves that will not be of any benefit and saves searching time. Also I've been able to put in a more intelligent heuristic. There is still work to d
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
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