Motorodeo

[Motorodeo]

It's rare alright. And the one I donated to the AtariAge auction has got to be the rarest of the rare, because it has the accidental reversed endlabel. I wonder how many are like that?

 

I didn't do that, it's the way it came out of the factory. Sorta like the Pole Positn goofup!

 

Bid now!

 

Signed NTSC Motorodeo

[7800 Dev. Documentation]

The 7800s biggest weakness was in its horizontal resolution. Most games featured 160 horizontal res which was pretty weak by mid 80s standards. It has a 320 horizontal res but I don't think there is enough screenram to allow for the entire screen being that res, or you have only 2 color per scanline in that mode or something. Few games that I know of used the higher resolution mode. The NES therefore had an effectively higher resolution (which I think is 256 horizontal, a weird res to use compared to the C=64 and Atari 8-bits that used 320, but convenient for 8-bit CPUs to store the X coordinate in one byte). I think the NES can do many more colors per scanline, but has a more limited palette overall (52 colors vs. 128 or 256 on the 7800), and can't push sprites as effectively (regardless of how you classify 7800 sprites, games like Robotron definitely demonstrate how many simultaneous moving objects you can have).

[MAD ATARIAN undeway]

There is a book, player missile graphics on the Atari in Basic.

 

There are ways to do fast graphics routines in Basic, but it takes a lot of peeks and pokes, which necessitates a lot of information about the underlying hardware anyway (like assembly).

[guy on bridge adult game]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Secret Quest:

I often wonder why there isn't "Adult" games for PS2 and Nintendo. Somewhere out there has to be some perverts who would like this sort of thing. They could ever have there own special controllers...... ahhhh I'm thinking too much about this.

---

 

 

Dead or Alive is the first "jiggle" videogame, that's for sure.

[Considering Atari's Console Woes...]

I always thought one row of the invaders looked like the McDonalds "Fry Guys".

[new Defender game for PS2!]

While I can certainly imagine how the game will play in a 3D environment, it's going to have a very different feel than the original. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but in this case I doubt it'll be as much fun as the original. But I'd like to reserve judgement until it's released and we have a chance to play it.

<<

 

I can bet for one thing there won't be a REVERSE button. Imagine the shock of the perspective change with that if it stayed behind the ship.

[I got the Activision TV games]

Maybe Ken can comment on what's inside these things? You may be surprised to find out.

[new Defender game for PS2!]

I don't see how it will play like Defender in a 3D perspective. I can see it being a lot harder that way. Spy Hunter ini 3D, yes, but not Defender. We'll see.

[Considering Atari's Console Woes...]

I think mascots are an outdated concept.

 

It didn't matter pre NES, and it didn't matter when the Sony Playstation came on the scene with no Mascot (they tried using Sophia from Toshinden but that was't really serious).

 

Mascots seemed to matter when kids wanted to play 2D platformers like Sonic and Super Mario Brothers more than any other genre. It's like they looked at videogames as interactive cartoons. While 3D platformers are around today, the dominance of that genre is gone. The gaming demographic has also gotten older in the last 15 years.

 

Sonic lost most of its luster, for instance, during the Dreamcast's run. Nobody really cared anymore about that icon.

 

Nintendo still clings to Mario, though, but that just illustrates their difficulty responding to changes in the industry.

 

If you are talking about branding, branding is merely a reputation for a company. It doesn't have to be a mascot per se. Sony developed a representation for good 3D games and variety in titles. Atari had a good reputation with arcade action type games before.

[Considering Atari's Console Woes...]

I think part of what made Atari great is that there WAS NO FRANCHISE. NO MASCOT.

 

That's what the classic game era was all about. Character isn't the issue. Atari didn't need Sonic. It didn't need to pander to a kiddie audience. It just had great classic games. No BS. No sequelitis. Just great games.

[Psychology of Nostalgia post 9-11]

Right around the events of September 11th was the California Extreme show and I decided not to attend.

 

For a while I was thinking that videogames were pretty meaningless compared to what was going on.

 

However, I have read reports that people are retreating for "comfort food" so to speak. The ratings on the Gilligan's Island docudrama, for instance.

 

I read something about the game industry that indicated that people are buying fewer new games and are playing games that they feel have tried and true replayability instead.

 

I was wondering whether you think this will result in more interest in classic games as it evokes an earlier more innocent era?

 

To me, it has strengthened my resolve to finish my 2600 game, as the programming is a calming exercise for me. Not that Death Race is in any way a wholesome type of game, but it is going to be highly kathartic. One could certainly picture the pedestrians as anybody you wanted, including al-Qaeda terrorists.

[Nolan Bushnell... still smokin']

>>Antidrug ethics already existed in the culture of that time. That's why the drug scene was said to be part of the counterculture.<<

 

Depends on the agegroup. The 60s youth counterculture became the mainstream in the 70s. The 70s were the ME decade, the excess decade, as you recall. As we live in a democracy, baby boomers defined what the norms were by virtue of their numbers in relation to the rest of society.

 

Certainly to most anyone a generation older looks at the younger generation as a counterculture. As a GenXer I look at GenY rap-rock, tattoos and tongue studs as counterculture

 

And people change as they shift from age bracket to age bracket.

 

If you look at the game offerings at Nolan's current startup, uWink, you'd probably come to the conclusion that he's gotten way conservative in his old age.

 

There aren't even any action games there.

[3600]

A bit of postgame analysis on this...

 

The reason Atari had trouble following up the VCS had to do with the fact that the original VCS engineers left the company after they finished the 400/800 design due to the mismanagement of Ray Kassar. The 400/800 was originally supposed to be the followup to the VCS but as it was shaping up it probably would have been tough to reach a VCS-like pricepoint in 1979, so it was positioned as a home computer.

 

What they should have done is yes, released it as a home computer, but then waited a little bit and then released a keyboardless and expandable 400 as the 5200, maybe in 80 or 81. Basically to be an early XEGS. If they could add in 2600 backwards compatibility, all the better.

 

But instead they did the 5200 with all its flaws, and then they had to scramble for a real VCS successor.

 

But like I said, their braintrust was gone, and the Sylvia design was a perfect example of that. They didn't have engineers who knew how to make a game system anymore, at least not in consumer. They probably should have brought in their coinop engineers who were doing great work straight up until the crash. I don't know who actually designed the 10-bit Sylvia system. It sounds all too familiar to the quirky Intellivision in conception. It wasn't until they outsourced to GCC to do the 7800 that they found some decent engineers to R&D a new console, but it was pretty much too late.

[Adventure II Main Character Poll]

I guess I'm a luddite but I think the more emphasis that gets placed on making graphics decisions in this game the more likely it's going to look great and play like crap.

 

I think being hung up on the look is really the opposite approach that should be taken to designing this game, and it PERFECTLY illustrates why the 2600 was such a great console, because it virtually eliminated the ability to create good looking but poorly playing games.

 

A sequel should offer much more than better graphics. And it certainly shouldn't sacrifice anything that made the original great either.

 

Take Star Raiders II for instance. I know it wasn't conceived as such, but when compared against the original there was too much lost and not enough gained to consider it a real advance vs. the 8K original. It was mostly a cosmetic improvement.

 

Then take a 2600 sequel like Frogger II. That game introduced the jumping aspect of the gameplay and is a true improvement in offering a new gameplay element.

 

So I would stick with bland graphics and focus on the underlying gameplay first, then skin the game's graphics.

[Nolan Bushnell... still smokin']

Who in the early 70s wasn't into drugs?

 

This sort of moral relativism where we try to apply today's ethics to past eras is just silly.

 

Despite the drugs, the leftovers of late 60s idealism is what brought us the microcomputer revolution in the 70s. It's what led to all the best innovative thinking that evolved into what we take for granted now in the modern era.

 

And if you think decadence is limited to the 70s, think of how it returned bigtime for the DOT COM boom a few years ago in a yuppified flavor. At least at Atari they accomplished something, hottubs or no hottubs. They had big dreams and they made quite a few a reality. The Dot commers did almost nothing but waste venture capital, but look stylish and sophisticated while doing so.

[7800 sound]

They were going to make a high score passthrough cart. They should have added the POKEY in there so that it would have been a one-time purchase.

[Games based on movies]

I think a Planet of the Apes game would have been cool. There is mockup art for one. Apes was owned by 20th Century Fox. They could have done it.

 

I also think a lot of anime could make it. Battle of the Planets, for instance.

 

I also would have liked to see a Superman II game.

[2600 Galaxian Hack]

Galaxian features seven sprites in a line. That is a very complicated VCS trick.

 

I don't think there was enough time left to do stars ala Cosmic Ark.

[Donkey Kong 2 mock-up and need your advice...]

Rivets could be done with missiles. There are only two per scanline. You could have the missiles extend above the visible rivet, but be black. When Mario jumps it triggers the collision with the rivet in mid air which makes the rivet disappear.

 

Totally doable.

 

Pie factory would be pretty difficult, though.

 

Also remember that the foxfires behave differently vs. the fireballs in wave 1. There is an AI component to add there.

 

The game probably could have had all the levels in 8K. I don't know how much RAM is left, though. That might be an issue too.

[pause for 2600?]

>>

How is this done in software? (some games have a pause feature)

<<

 

There is nothing about the 2600 that prevents pause from being written into games. It just can't be done very well in hardware, at least not without blanking the screen or something (like the way the pause on the Vec multicart works).

 

A 2600 game manually updates the game state during vertical blank/overscan.

 

To implement pause programmatically, all it has to do is detect the pause trigger (probably color/bw ala the 7800) and immediately loop back to the main kernel without updating the gamestate unless the pause is off.

 

It's not pausing the program at all, just the game state. The game then goes into an infinite loop generating the exact same screen. You'd probably also have to have it turn off the sound.

 

It's not that hard, I don't think, but few 2600 games if any support that. The early games used color/BW for what it was meant to be. Mid era games wouldn't have wasted the resources on it, I don't think. Maybe some of the latter era games do it.

 

I also think pause is a more modern concept that the classic games didn't even consider. The early games were designed mostly with the early arcade games in mind which don't have pause (or continues for that matter).

[Atari Force]

Liberator was made by GCC (the same company that did the 7800) as part of their "pennance" for cloning Atari's arcade games.

[Rescue on Fractalus; Atari 8-bit vs. 5200]

>>Where did you hear/read that Rescue' was integrated into the 'Star Wars' universe?<<

 

More to the point, how many sci-fi related computer games has Lucasfilm/LucasArts released that _aren't_ a part of the SW universe?

 

What makes me think it's part of the SW universe is that the guys wear an orange flight suit like a Rebel pilot.

 

It looks like the game is supposed to involve rescuing downed rebel pilots.

[Atari 7800 lack of red]

There is plenty of red in Robotron.

[New Micro-Gamming SB and Miniature Golf ROMs online]

I'm surprised how monochromatic these games are. They almost look like TRS-80 games. No wonder they were never released.

[New Atari 5200 homebrew -- Adventure II !!]

>>

The castle screen and the software to diplay it currently eats up about .75K at a guess. No compression of any form has been tried yet however and won't be for a while. A lot can be re-used/moved around but still space is at a premium. Then again when coding isn't it always?

<<

 

The 8-bits have a screen mode which is very close to the 2600's playfield, only it's a true bitmap.

 

As cool as the new background graphics look, I'd almost prefer the traditional look. You at least have to keep it angular in order to provide all those cool nooks and cranny's for the square to get into. The more rounded and uneven it gets the less you are going to have these serendipitous nooks for things.

 

But if you make sure your level design is symmetrical, then you cut your screen storage size in half right there. You could have some screens be asymmetrical, though, which would allow for more physics-correct mazes (the ones in Adventure don't tile properly).

 

If you store your levels as primitives and then reference them with different colorsets (i.e. tiling them) then you save even more. What I mean is, if you have a castle, store it once, and then change the color registers and it becomes all the other castles. Stuff like that.

 

Since both the 2600 and the 5200 use 8-bit wide sprites, the 5200 version objects aren't going to look that much better. You could try changing the color registers of the sprites in mid screen but I'm not sure which objects would benefit from that, although gradients always look nice. Overlaying sprites for more colors really wastes them on the 5200 amd guarantees more flicker.

 

I would really focus on the level design and the new gameplay elements rather than making the graphics that much better other than eliminating the flicker.

 

For instance, what about a 2-player split-screen mode? That would rock.