Player repositioning

[Player repositioning]

Does anyone know of a game that actually does this manual sprite copies thing on the A8? I've heard about this a million times but have never seen it done as far as I can tell. It seems like it would be about as much of a pain as getting the dragster to move around in 2600 Dragster.

[Aliens in the Attic : Atari 2600 T shirt spotted]

I could easily spend $500 on that t-shirt site,but I'm poor at the moment.

 

Yeah, some funny sh*t there!

[Atari games that had "special editions"]

What was the idea behind the marketing ploy? That since Superman was a character license (albeit owned by Warners itself) it was supposed to appear as if it was a limited release or something?

[An Atari joystick this Christmas?]

Well, Curt is posting here. Send him a PM.

[What if....Atari 8bit]

The XEGS succeeded in what I felt its goals were, which was not to win the battle but to make the most of the last years of an aging and badly managed platform. Had the Tramiels NOT done the XEGS they probably would have EOLed the 8-bit years earlier.

[What if....Atari 8bit]

( The ZX81 had one - and that was dirt cheap )

 

Not to mention the O^2. I think the tank-like shielding on the 400 had more to do with its cost than anything else.

[New and Old Era Atari?]

15 years of homebrewing. Wow. I first started on Stella Gets a New Brain around then too. That's when I first got onto the internet before I even moved to California. How times have changed.

[What were the hardest arcade coin-op games?]

I am surprised to see Star Castle listed as a toughy. Perhaps others had the bad luck to only play later 'suped' up machines that were indeed tough (sped up quickly and stars followed you as you changed sides of the screen), but in some of the early machines, the floating deadly stars that followed you would not follow you as

 

The drones in the version I had would sometimes cross over. It depended on how close they were when you cross, because they would decelerate once you wrapped around and sometimes made it across before they came to a complete stop.

 

I agree that major havok is hard. I can't navigate the base at all.

 

Gravitar is even harder, IMHO. Slow paced, perhaps, but hard.

[What if....Atari 8bit]

Unfortauntely, as usual, the source of that (mis)information in the Youtube video is RJ again during one of his speeches.

 

Why is it you can have so many Amiga people in one place like that and nobody sees fit to correct him? That is a vintage interview from before Jay passed away so the memories can't be that faded. I don't get it.

[What if....Atari 8bit]

What Atari needed to do is take the 800 as a base specification and IMPROVE the sound and graphics

 

To do that would require Atari to have in-house R&D that actually understood how the chipset worked so they could extend upon it. They didn't have that. Not by a longshot. They shot themselves in the foot by losing Jay Miner's team in the first place. The only thing that passed for R&D since then were various attempts to repackage, cost-reduce, and add peripherals to the existing chipsets. The brain-trust was simply not there. It was there in coinop, but not in consumer.

 

I just got done watching some making-of-Amiga videos on Youtube and the people behind the Amiga claim that Atari nickle and dimed Amiga and that's why they went to Commodore. To make matters worse, they claim that Atari only wanted the machine, but did not want the Amiga workforce. The idea that Atari would pass up an opportunity to bring Jay back in is inexcusable.

 

I don't see how any preferred alternate reality for Atari would propose that Atari lose the Amiga and do something on its own.

 

However I don't agree the ST was a failure, there was such little 8 bit demand from the public compatibility was not a big issue, and if you compare it to the Mac it was a better machine with a better OS. Less cheap keyboard would have helped a lot but as a games machine with no sprites/good sound/hardware scrolling/blitter the ST was living on borrowed time as a games machine, which is a shame because as a business machine it was fantastic and writing friendly GEM programs using FAST Basic was a sinch

 

Once you get into the Tramiel era it's a comedy of errors on so many levels. There was no way Atari would regain its former glory with those guys at the helm.

[Is Polar Rescue fun?]

It's my favorite Vectrex game. It's Star Raiders underwater, basically. It has the best 3D vectors of any Vectrex game I've played including homebrews. I love how stuff fades in from the distance (like a fog effect).

 

It does take a while for the difficulty to ramp up, though.

[stuff youd like to see in games]

Space ship cockpits

somehow they became an endangered species.

 

+1

 

It's about time LucasArts dusts off the X-wing franchise again, for instance, this time without Wing Commander style scripting.

[Atari games you like but no one else does]

Rick Maurer was developing that game before Atari even considered purchasing the rights for it. Perhaps that has something to do with the dissimilar graphics.

 

Space Invaders arcade was the crossover point between bronze-age and golden-age gaming. Remember that it was still black and white. So just presenting the game in glorious color with the magenta UFO going by was a big deal. I can still vaguely recall the slobbering envy I felt when I visited a friend's house who were playing Space Invaders on a big console TV in their den with the sound pumping DUN DUN DUN DUN. At the time all I had was the bloops and bleeps of a Coleco Telstar Ranger. But after experiencing Space Invaders, I had to have an Atari. There was just no negotiations. So you can surely analyze other coinop ports but Space Invaders was really a unique case from a historical angle.

[Anyone think Ballblazer is possible on the 2600?]

I think for a game like Suicide Mission or Stellar Track that couldn't have been pulled off any other way, the flicker is acceptable. But for this game I think you're introducing a distracting effect where you could otherwise avoid it with the fixed interleaving. Flicker is much better employed on sprites rather than the playfield. Not only do you get a comb effect with horizontal movement but certain speeds of forward and reverse animate themselves in sync with the interlace, hence the gaps become visible across multiple fields. This is just the nature of interlace, and it's the reason why interlaced displays were not really used on videogames until systems like the Dreamcast where the displays were more organic with very few right angles.

[Anyone think Ballblazer is possible on the 2600?]

Like intentionaly display the board with a comb like effect that would be out of sync with the interlacing effect.

 

The easiest way to cancel out the comb effect is to only update the playfield 30 times a second rather than 60. But what will have been gained here? Adding flicker and dropping the framerate is not worth it just to give the illusion that the checkerboard is solid. The mind is perfectly capable of seeing the board as "shaded" by the fixed lines. That's how dithering works.

[Are you going to buy a Harmony cart for the Atari 2600?]

I dunno. It looks like this one fits fine, and regular sized SD cards are cheaper and less difficult to lose.

 

If I had a choice, in this application I'd pick regular SD.

 

In Chimera we had limited board real estate, even with a 4-layer board, since so much was packed together, especially with the peripheral ports on either side. By using MicroSD we could squeeze it on one side and not interfere with the endlabel. MicroSD really isn't that much of a premium anymore, especially for the small capacity sizes you'd need for 2600 games. The bad thing about microSD is that it is fragile. The sleeve hardware is so teeny and thin compared to SD. The metal is about the same thickness as a disposable razorblade. This would have worked with it well fitted in the case, but on the proto boards there was so much wiggle room that I wound up wrecking one slot mechanism with all the flexing.

[Anyone think Ballblazer is possible on the 2600?]

The problem with interlace is it creates a comb-like effect with horizontal scrolling. It may not be worth the tradeoff. I mean, the fixed interleave w/antialias is fine as it is. Look at games like Thrust (or my incomplete Death Derby). The fixed interlace is not that uncommon for 2600 playfields. It's not criminal.

[Are you going to buy a Harmony cart for the Atari 2600?]

Teaser pic:

As you can see by the yellow wires, the daughterboard needs another prototype run... But it's working nonetheless.

 

I'm hoping the next round of prototypes will be the last, and this can start production and be available for the holidays. Stay tuned!

 

That's an SD isn't it? You don't want to go with microSD? It fits so much better in a cart form-factor.

[Anyone think Ballblazer is possible on the 2600?]

Very good. I see the horizon gradient is back. Been waiting for that.

[microprocessor on a 2600 cartridge?]

I see too many color changes per scanline on the playfield to pull that off, but considering what's going on with Ballblazer, who knows?

[technically, was et really that bad?]

Has anyone mentioned the title screen....no, i don't think i'll go there (and get mercelously slagged of by you people)

 

Atari was getting really good at title screens. In the case of Swordquest, the title screens were just about the only thing good about them.

 

[technically, was et really that bad?]

if you make a game that chains you to a manual, you're doing it wrong.

 

Sorry, ET is not THAT complicated.

[Bad experience at a Gamestop make's me think about the modern gamer..]

Are we as the people that came up in the golden age of videogames the last generation to look at these machines with awe and collect for retro systems (at least for the most part)?

 

Yes. We live in a disposable culture. There is TOO MUCH CHOICE in entertainment. As a result, people never stay attached to anything for any length of time. It's out with the old, in with the new. The good stuff just gets sequelized or remade anyway, so why ever revisit an old game?

[Possible to detect emulator from the code?]

If you want copy protection you need to prevent the BIN from being released in the first place. Once you have a BIN all you need to do is find the copy protection routine and hack it out.

 

In theory you could create a new banking scheme that emulators don't support, which would work as long as Stella isn't updated to support it.

 

Chimera native games were going to be hard to emulate just because Stella would have had to add an ARM emulator side by side with the VCS. So just the amount of work that would require would probably prevent it from happening anytime soon.

[technically, was et really that bad?]

Yeah, but just immagine if it had been close to the quality of Ms. Pac Man on the 2600...

 

There were plenty of other good 2600 games in 1982 to maintain the console's reputation as a competent platform. It destroyed some of the trust that Atari had won with consumers (Space Invaders onward) that official Atari titles were the mark of quality, but I'm not sure how much it actually drove people away from the platform.