idavis

Got mine as well. I can't say thanks enough.

Just confirming here. I definitely want a set.

Go ahead and continue discussing plastics, but can we all just agree to not let that Billy Mays guy see this? I can only imagine the late night infomercials "oxycute-ing" all the old classics...

Here's a little food for thought. I have read about halfway down this, and will read it all later, but there was an Apple Clone. I would have to dig out old Compute magazines. I believe it was called the Orange, or some other fruit. My point is that it's just a footnote, and I would be willing to bet only a few people have heard about it, and it was an Apple II clone.. Not too successful. Now put on a shirt with an Atari or Apple logo, and people will recognize it. Atari was successful enough.

I too want to be put down for a set of Analog cd's. Also here's a vote for Compute magazine. I used to love reading it. I know it covered more than just the Atari, but that was part of the beauty. You could keep an eye on everything. Reading through these old magazines really does bring back some memories. Simpler times I guess. We didn't have the internet. Hell, I remember teaching myself to program using magazines and the example programs before I had even received the computer. I was so excited to finally get the 800 I coudn't stand it. I didn't even have a cassette, so all of the programs I wrote on paper, I had to type in and test, and then they were gone when I was done. I was so glad to finally get a storage device.

So I guess I am just concentrating too hard on other things right now, but what can I do with one of these fully populated? I believe I have a 1200xl in the closet, but I still use my original 800 for all my Atari computing needs. I guess I am just confused what this is and what peripherals would require this. If you don't want to clutter up the sales thread, a pm would do, and a summary is fine. I don't need extreme details, just to figure out whether I am missing out on something I might kick myself for later.

Curt, Our thoughts are with you. Take time to heal. We will be here waiting.

Michael, It might be easier just to find a disk image (.atr) of a dos disk and copy it. I would think just for general use Dos 2.5 would be the ideal choice. Don't go with Dos 3. It's a long story, but 2.5 is actually newer and better than 3.0, which was a major flop. I am sure you can find reams of info about it on the web. There are plenty of other Dos versions like SpartaDos, MyDos, etc. But you can work with those after you get more general experience. My rambling point is, just copy the Dos disk, give it a name you want, and then remove all the files you don't need. Dos.sys and Dup.sys would be the ones I would leave.

ThumpNugget, I too went out to the mailbox today, and lo and behold there was my copy. I am sitting here reading as we speak. I wanted to say thanks. It looks awesome, and now I don't have to dig through my closet.. Kudos on an excellent job!

It looks like there are a couple of options for getting a cartridge out there. I am getting closer to being finished. I guess it doesn't seem to hurt the value of the cartridge by releasing the game as an atr right? I am not in this for the money, and do want to make sure this gets freely distributed, but again my dream has always been to release a cartridge. I need to work on a few small things I want to change, and then some basic documentation.

I haven't calculated the latest compile but I am sure it's close. The gameplay is really simple, but the code that I worked really hard on was getting the Atari to generate a working puzzle. That was the task, and isn't as simple as it may sound. In fact the last thing I am working on right now is some kind of display to let you know the atari is generating a puzzle, since it can take a while at times. It's all "random", which I know isn't truly random, but as close as we can get it, and certain things have to fall into place for the atari to generate a puzzle. I am probably more proud of that code than I am of the gameplay. But I am sure most people won't see it that way since it does take a while occasionally to generate a puzzle. We have become accustomed to faster and faster pc's and I think most people forget that it wasn't always billions of calulations per second..

I agree. It would be really simple to dump a cartridge. I guess I am trying to size up the interest in making my game into a cart, and need to know if people are buying them for the "collectible" value, or for gameplay? As for polish, my game works, and I do like the gameplay. I just don't think I am going to be able to get it to the look and feel of examples that people have posted. Now granted they used pc tools to come up with the look. I am not in this to go commercial. I have just always wanted to write a game in assembler, keep it around 8k, and make it into a cart. I just don't want to damage the "collectibility" by releasing it on a disk image before putting out a cartridge. I do have a working version in my thread, but it's got a number of options not available. So I am not worried about that competing with the final version.

So I am working on the game that I want to turn into a cartridge (sudoku). I am getting close to what I want to release. I was wondering though, do the guys writing homebrew cartridges usually post up a working version here to get feedback? I know that there is no money in making homebrews (or at least that's the feeling I get), but am I doing myself a disservice posting up a copy of the game in atr format before I sell a couple cartridges? Would anyone be interested in a Sudoku cart? I realize the game I have made has a '79 look and feel to it, but don't know how much time I will have to devote to "polishing" the look. I am trying to size up the interest before I go and start looking hard into the hardware side of this little dream of mine.

Kaz, I don't see why it couldn't be a 16K cart. My only concern right now is the amount of time I have to work on this. I guess 8K was just a goal I had in mind. I have always been amazed that Star Raiders was done in 8K, and I guess I set that as a goal. I will have to get a little better at programming in assembler to have anything that looks like the screen shots you guys have come up with. What I am using right now is a graphics mode where I can just drop in the numbers to the screen location that I calculate based on where the cursor is. I would just have to work on my graphics skills (a lot). I modified it last night to actually generate a puzzle. One of the issues is that to generate a puzzle can be real quick, or take some time depending on random luck. Believe it or not, it's not that easy to generate a "correct" sudoku puzzle, and since there is an element of randomness, it can just take clock cycles to get the right combination. I have to come up with some kind of screen animation that you can watch when the puzzle is generating. I am working on something, but want to keep this to a minimum, since I want to spend most of the cpu time on getting the puzzle generated and not some display. The good part is that we have a working game right now, you just can't change the difficulty. But that should be fixed soon. It might not be the prettiest at the moment, but it will work. I think right now, for this version, I am going to do this on my own from start to finish. My initial goal and inspiration was to make a game and have it on a cartridge. I have been wanting to do that since I was 12, and am now 40. Once I get it all buttoned up as a cart, then maybe we can work on another version with fancier graphics. Isaac

Hey guys, funny that I would see this post at the top of the list again. I have about a week free from school, I have returned to college, and was relooking at all my code and thinking about working on a quick splash screen with the menu options I need: Difficulty: Beginner, Easy, Medium, Hard, Expert Atari Generated Puzzle or scrambled pre-made puzzle Kaz, I really like your screen, and Pseudografx, I like that look, but for now with my limited assembler experience, and I was trying to make sure this all fit in a 8K cart, I am going to stick with what I have. I mean, the fact that an 800 can generate a sudoku puzzle is a pretty amazing feat in my opinion, and I want to leave that option in the cart. I am going to try working on a few things this week and see what I can come up with. Isaac

I don't know if there's a speed difference, but I switched from a serial to usb after moving my sio2pc pc to vmware. I have a couple of machines "virtualized" and I figured that would be a good candidate. It wasn't really working with the serial connection because my vmware server is linux based. The serial connection from the real machine to the virtual was a little sketchy, and I tried a number of different settings in the Ape software and for the actual serial port under linux as well. I decided I would pull the trigger and buy the USB version to see if it would be usable under my configuration, and it has been working reliably. Linux Server -> XP Machine under VMWare -> Atari 800, nothing but net. Steve has a high quality piece of equipment, and I can't recommend it enough.

You might have to have an Atari computer hooked up and running to supply the power through the cable. I know I thought mine was bad as well, and it turned out I just needed to have the 800 running to supply power. Now Steve's new USB interface gets power from the USB and you don't need the Atari running.

You should take a look at Blue Max as well. Isaac

Since I remove the numbers from a solved puzzle, of course there could be more than one solution, but I have to work with what we have. I am trying to fit this in an 8 or 16K cartridge. If there is more than one solution, and you don't get it right, then look for the other solution. Right now, I remove a fixed number of squares. Eventually, that will be variable based on how hard you want the game. The easier and less squares, the less chance you will have of getting multiple answers. Just look at it this way, there are more than one way to solve other games, same here. At least it is solvable. Part of the game is figuring it out, and doing it in the fastest time. Isaac

Well, I spent a long time developing the algorithm for generating the puzzle. There will always be a solution, and there are no holes. Please post an example if you think there are, but I can assure you, each puzzle is solvable. The plan on the splash screen is to make the difficulty level adjustable, and it will remove the number of squares based on the difficulty you pick. I guess to prove that each puzzle is solvable, I need to put in some code to "give up" and display the answer. Here is a writeup I did and posted on here (in the homebrew forum) on how to generate a puzzle. Right now, I mix up a couple of puzzles that were generated on the Atari, but that's just for speed. Once I get the splash screen in, I will give you the opportunity to generate a new puzzle, of course, it could take a minute or so. Here is the writeup I did for the generation of a sudoku puzzle. You should see the 6502 assembler code to do the same. Maybe I will publish that as well. Isaac BuildingASudokuPuzzlebyIsaacDavis.txt

I guess I should have posted up some instructions. It's all joystick based. You move the cursor around, and hold the button down when you want to change the number. If you hit the start button, you will use up a hint. Basically that checks all of your entries and removes the ones that are incorrect. You only have a few hints, and the price for using a hint is 1000 points. I had kept it to just joystick entry, but I could do keyboard. I will look into adding that. Background music is something I am looking at as well. I have a neighbor who is a musician and I have been at him for some time now to get me something original and catchy.

So I have been working on this for some time now, I initially posted this in the Homebrew group. I got some interest, but not much. My goal here is turn this into a cartridge. I still have to work on a splash screen, and also work on the timing code. Right now, it's a simple loop, that I am sure would work much better if I actually used the built in counters. I have some time now, and want to get this completed. So here's my Sudoku game for the 800. sudoku.zip

Thanks. I am still working on the splash screen, and maybe some selectable options. Being on call puts a lot of things on hold though..

It's still too dark for my tastes, though, because you're using a luminance value of 0 (i.e., the color value is $40-- hue 4, lum 0). However, I think part of my problem is that I'm running the game on an emulator, and the palette it was using is (in my opinion) kind of crappy. Anyway, I managed to hack the binary image to change the color to something brighter, and it looks like color $36 might be close to what I was trying to suggest-- although again, the exact appearance depends heavily on which of the different palette files I choose in the emulator. Here's a screenshot from the version I hacked: Michael PS -- Ideally, the cursor color would be a different hue for the non-given digits, like red for the givens (which can't be changed), and green for the non-givens (since they can be changed). But that's just my opinion. Gotcha. I will try $36. There is quite a difference in some of the colors between the emulators and the real thing on a T.V. I will also have to consider seperating out the colors from a given and non-given for the cursor. My initial thought was too many different colors and it's going to distract. That's why I made the given and non-given numbers so close, yet still distinctive. I am also thinking about a "options" page where you can change things like colors. Although that wouldn't work too well with a cart that can't save the options. I am going to head out on vacation tomorrow afternoon, so most likely I will not have any updates until after Thanksgiving.

Hint will go through the puzzle, and check your entries. If they are wrong, it will blank it back out, and deduct 20 points. You also lose 500 points for using the hint. It's a disincentive, since my daughter thought on a earlier version she was being clever just putting in a number and then checking it until she had finished the puzzle. She wasn't too happy to have the score go down, and be limited to 4 attempts. I am game for calling it something other than "Hint". It was just what was in my mind at the time. I have another of the same version with a more Red cursor. Right now, I have a rudimentary loop structure in to pause the cursor a little. I will look more into something using the timers for a more exact pause between movement. My take on the location of the posting of the game is this. I definitely want to make a cartridge out of this. I am not out to get rich as I am keenly aware of my being about 20+ years too late on that front. I wouldn't mind if there were a number of them sold. I have the hardware and equipment to crank out a minimum of one, which has at a minimum been my goal the whole time. I can see the arguments both ways about where the post is made. I want to leave the final decision to the board Admins. Symantic question. Would it be a good idea if I post yet another copy with a different cursor color, or should I save up a bunch of changes, and then post up a file. Also how about removing some of the older versions? Would that be a bad idea as it might make the posts look incongruous? Isaac For now, here's a different cursor color. It's just more red. sudoku.zip