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
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
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?
.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 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've applied the classic minimax search to Four-Play, and I'm pleased with the results. The program will anticipate any traps within 7 moves and act accordingly. I was concerned that it might take a long time to search 7 moves ahead, but it turned out not to be too bad.The AI is not terribly difficult to beat at this point because the heuristics are simple. The search just checks whether there is a winning position or not. The next step will be to apply some more sophisticated heuristics, and t
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.
About 2 1/2 years ago, AA member Atari Rescure Group asked in the forums whether Pente was possible for the 2600. At the same time I had been starting to think about how to port Go. The board I proposed back then was a monochrome 80 pixel wide sprite using flickering.I've learned a lot about VCS programming since then, but a board without flickering had still eluded me until this weekend. I knew I could set up 19 pieces with the PF, but there was no way to change the colors every 8 pixels (it ta
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
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
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
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.
The good news is I have made Four-Play smarter. If you can defeat it now, you know something about the strategy that I don't. The bad news is it takes about 3 1/2 minutes to plan a move. You can reduce the time by setting the frame rate to maximum in z26, for example "z26 -r1000 fourplay_dec11.bin". My pentium 4 unit can plan moves in about 30 sec.The next step will be to try alpha-beta pruning to see if I can cut the time to a reasonable amount. If not, I'll have to choose a different heuristic
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
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
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
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
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
I recently pulled out my Dark City DVD, which I haven't watched in years. I had forgotten how good it was. Truly brilliant and definitely underappreciated.I've also been watching Mad Max 2 (The Road Warrior) a lot lately. I noticed for the first time that the dune buggy Papagallo drives at the end was inherited from Humungus' gang. One of them drives it into the compound during the skirmish where Max delivers the rig. OK, not exactly an epiphany, but it's always fun to notice something new about
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
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
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