haroldoop

The 2016 SMS Power! Coding competition is now open for voting! http://www.smspower.org/forums/f9-Competitions There are a few really good Sega Master System homebrews this year.

I imagine it would require a large amount of reverse engineering before one could even begin to implement a two player mode for the game.

Has anyone seem this video? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tkwWD_BWWQ

Where-did-you-learn.. to-fly?

New update: All of Blockly's native boolean logic blocks have been implemented. Repeat while/repeat until has been implemented.

Thanks! BTW, there's yet another update: Numeric comparisons implemented If/elsif/else implemented

New update: now the tool can generate ROMs for either SMS or SG-1000. I've started implementing ColecoVision support, too, but that isn't working, yet.

Well, I'm actually intending to use this as a scripting editor for a game making system that would allow non-programmers to make simple games for classic systems; it would probably include: A 16x16 tile editor for background tiles; A 16x16 tile editor for sprites (yeah, the sprites would have a fixed size, at least for the first versions); A color palette editor (maybe not on the first versions, though); A map editor (without scrolling, at least on the first versions); A library of predefined 'behaviors', that would be used to define how the sprites would move; An editor for custom behaviors, using Blockly; it would mostly be used for high-level stuff: the low level stuff would already be done in assembly; The editor would be able to generate an ASM file which would then be used to make the final ROM. As you can see, the last two steps are, at least partially, done; now, I need to do the rest.

Hello, As a first step on a project of mine, I'm trying to adapt Google's Blockly to generate Z80 assembly code. I already have a working demo; so far, it can generate code for printing strings, do math, use global variables and make fixed-size loops. It can also compile the Z80 asm code into a fully working Sega Master System ROM. The source code is available at GitHub. I'm currently targetting the Sega Master System, but it can be easily ported to any Z80-based platform,

I know this may sound a bit un-retro-ish, but how about adding a microcontroller on the cartridge to do the 3D logic, while letting the Vectrex do the rest? Another option could be to have multiple pre-rotated images stored on the cartridge.

Want a challenge? Make it a first-person game! http://www.retrocollect.com/News/homebrew-animus-xs-in-development-for-sega-master-system.html

I LOL'ed at this one!

Just for the hell of it, I tried to see how such a game would look at a small resolution with limited colors: http://www.haroldo-o...er-sms-0.01.zip This one is for the Sega Master System; It plays a 64x48 2bpp video at 10fps. An Atari 2600 equivalent would probably look just as blocky (or less blocky, but shorter).

I'm not sure how those have been made, but there's some information on a fan translation of NES Mega Man for the PC-Engine: http://www.digitpress.com/forum/showthread.php?136463-Megaman-1-on-your-PC-Engine-TG16

Basically, the only possible justification for doing a Dragon's Lair clone for the Atari 2600 would be as a technical exercise, something you would do just to say "Hey, take a look at what I can do!"; Dragon's Lair itself has zero gameplay value.

Well, you could maybe take a look at the Mouse Programming Language: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_%28programming_language%29

Yes, even though the CPU is similar, the rest of the hardware is hugely different so, without custom hardware, you'd have a very slow emulator; of course, if you don't mind the speed, that would be okay as a programming experiment. As an alternative, how about implementing the emulator as a static recompiler? You could make a program that would disassemble the Atari 2600 ROM, analyze it, and output the corresponding PCE code; the resulting program would then be able to run directly on the PCE's hardware. Yes, that's actually harder than it sounds; the few examples I've seen of such a thing require some manual editing of the converted code.

I guess you'd have a few options if you wanted to do a Dragon's Lair clone for the Atari 2600: Store the animations as low resolution video in the ROM, and reuse parts of the video over and over, in order to make it longer; Find some way of generating the animations (or at least parts of them) procedurally, so you could fit more animations on the cartridge; Cook up some custom hardware that would allow you to stream the video data from an SD card or something like that; Forget about the video format and do the game the standard way, but make the gameplay rely a lot on memorization and timing. Anyway, the end result would be a game that would have all of Dragon's Lair gameplay limitations, and none of its virtues... but, still, that would be OK as a tech demo.

Oh, I made that one. I'm actually feeling embarassed for never writing the documentation that I promised...

I used to code some simple SMS games a few years ago, and knew a few others who were also doing so; on the other hand, I never heard of anyone actually making physical cartriges for non-personal use. Maybe you should ask the people at SMS Power about that.

Maybe you could use an 16-bit random number generator, and the top eight bits of the seed would be fixed for each cart, while the bottom eight bits of the seed could be selectable by the user. That way, you could have up to 256 unique carts (the top part), each with up to 256 unique dungeons (the bottom part).

Wow! Really impressive!

This is a really fantastic Atari 2600 game. Good graphics and quite complex gameplay.

True. Maybe it could become more feasible with some color interlacing?

I like this game. You've managed to keep the "feel" of the original Adventure without making it an outright clone. Way to go, can't wait to see the higher difficulty levels.