davidbrit2

Okay, so DPC+ does allow for executing arbitrary ARM code on the cartridge, but there aren't any bB games taking advantage of this at the moment. That makes sense.

Right, I knew the ARM in the Harmony was handling all the DPC/DPC+ simulation. I could have sworn I had heard that Space Rocks (for example) was offloading some arbitrary snippets of ARM code to the cartridge to handle some of the calculations. I may have read it wrong, though.

Ah, I thought the ARM coprocessor on the Harmony was part of the DPC+ spec. That's entirely independent, then?

I kind of suspected it was part of the standard kernel or some other init routine. I'm not quite as concerned about the ones with more complex kernels, as those are far less likely to require sectioning off in my "unfinished" directory. Thanks, some of those look rather interesting. On a related note, what bB DPC+ games are out there already? I'd love to see what can be done with a blatant disregard for the 2600's hardware limitations. Princess Rescue doesn't use DPC+, does it? Just 32K bank-switching?

Nice! Jumpman looks promising from the screenshot. I'll have to give that one a try. And Because It's There is pretty cool, sort of like a mix of Ice Climber and Spelunker.

Found one definite false negative: Aborigines' Revenge. That one's dated 2005 in my set, so maybe bB wasn't doing 7800 detection at that point, thus those bytes don't show up in the resulting ROM. Of the bB games it was able to identify, I was able to test and move over half of them to a sort of "unfinished" directory. (No, I'm not going to name any. Any programmer has to start somewhere; it's more the sloppily curated ROM set that was the problem.) Some of the more interesting ones I stumbled across in the process: Arctic Landtran Ature Cold War Evil Magician Returns Go Fish Lander Money Man Shield Shifter Tron EDIT: May have found another usable bB fingerprint, though I couldn't tell you what it is. A9 00 85 0E 85 0F 8A

I completely agree. Thanks, I'll check those out. None of those names rings a bell. I did a search using the fingerprint RevEng suggested (78 D8 A0 00 A5 D0) and I'm getting 123 matches out of the 409 files in my homebrew directory. All but a couple of them are dated 2007 or later, so that's a good sign I'm not getting too many false positives. Not sure if it's missing any, but this ought to give me a good start at organizing things at least.

Well, part of the problem is that I've already got them pretty much all downloaded (I think there was a homebrew ROM set somewhere on AA that I grabbed shortly after getting the Harmony). Rather than trash and redownload everything individually, I can speed up the process by moving the bB ROMs to a dedicated bB or WIP subdirectory, then moving the good stuff back as appropriate, and outright deleting the stuff that's nothing more than a blocky title screen, and a crudely-drawn player sprite you can move the with the joystick (with the occasional grating sound effect if it collides with the playfield or some other bouncing object). Another good one I forgot: Gingerbread Man. Gets hard as hell pretty quickly, though. Lowering the barrier to entry is quite a double-edged sword. Think of all the awful VB6 and MS Access "applications" out there. But if you know what you're doing, you can use them to produce decent solutions in a lot less time than lower-level alternatives. Kind of the same "issue" with bB.

You're reading way too much into this. Take a chill pill. There's some really impressive stuff like Princess Rescue, DK Arcade 2600, and Zippy the Porcupine. But the vast majority of bB ROMs in my collection are on the level of junk like Drunken Pooper. If I move all the bB ROMs to a separate bB and/or WIP directory, it'll make it a lot easier to sift through the assembly homebrews, and rummage through some of the bB stuff when the mood hits me, or I hear a game name worth checking out. So rather than stomping your foot and slinging ad-hominems, how about pointing me to a list of the best bB games so I can give them a try?

"The [gentleman] doth protest too much, methinks." I just made something like grep that operates on binary files/patterns. I'm going to try feeding it that fingerprint that Rev Eng posted earlier and see how it fares.

I don't hate bB. Don't try to put words in my mouth. There's quite a few cool bB games out there. The problem is that the shitty ones seem to outnumber them by at least an order of magnitude. Those are the ones I want to get rid of.

My observation is that if you separate 2600 games into three categories - commercial releases, assembly homebrews, and bB homebrews - you will find a MUCH higher percentage of unredeemable garbage among bB ROM releases. As was said, it's like anybody who spent a couple hours with a bB tutorial thinks they've made something worthy of release. If I can move the bB ROMs to their own subdirectory, it'll make it a lot easier for me to find what's actually good among them and the assembly homebrews. Anyway, I knocked together a simple search tool in C# this morning. I'll have to give it a test run later and see if it can identify them.

Doesn't bother me one bit. I just want to cull the crappy and unfinished ones.

I'm comfortable with knocking together something in C# if there's a consistent way to fingerprint the binaries. Maybe I'll just have to open a couple in a hex editor and see if I can spot anything.

Well yeah, if the Harmony Cart menu had a way to directly delete files, I'd just do that. Not that there aren't some good bB games out there, but man, the unplayable rubbish has to outnumber it at least 10-to-1.

My ROM set has a homebrew subdirectory which currently contains a ton of unfinished junk made in batari Basic. Is there any easy way I can identify ROMs made with bB so I can move them all to a separate batari Basic and/or WIP subdirectory? Any sort of consistent fingerprint within the ROMs that I could look for?

Well, their interests involve killing monsters and reaching the next level, so much like Gauntlet, you can definitely help each other to those ends. And I can't think of anything with turn-based cooperative play either. You'd probably only see that in something like a strategy game or board game, and I don't think the 2600 has a lot of those. Does Bridge let you play with a partner?

Looks like a cool game, but I'm not seeing the cooperative elements at first glance, i.e. one player being able to prolong the survival of the other by defeating some common threat.

Just wondering what other cooperative games there are for the 2600, and if I've overlooked anything good. I can only think of a few off the top of my head, and while many of them feature players competing against a common enemy rather than directly against one another, there's usually still an element of competing against each other for the higher score. I suppose the cooperative play style just wasn't as mature at that point. Dark Chambers Worm War I Joust (Unless you want to play adversarially) Mario Bros (Ditto) G.I. Joe (Features both cooperative and competitive play modes) Space Invaders

Honestly, it seems like somebody in marketing got ahold of an unfinished build, and said, "Good enough, let's ship it." (And this is coming from somebody that likes the 2600 version of Donkey Kong Jr.) Personally, I think the C64 had the best version of the game, though the Colecovision version is excellent too.

I've had a weird intermittent issue (maybe 10-25% of the time) where I power on the CV FB, and the display will be shifted drastically down and to the right, to the point where some of the menu will be wrapping around to the left side of the screen. Usually messing with the power and reset buttons a bit sorts it out. Is that the problem you're seeing? I've also noticed that in some games (Module Man in particular), sprites will disappear suddenly if they are moved over to the extreme right side of the screen. I'm not sure if this is a quirk of the original games, or an emulation issue.

No way. Have you played (or rather, attempted to play) Mr. Do's Castle? Sky Skipper is a little drab, and Amidar really needs some speed adjustments, but Mr. Do's Castle is just outright broken.

None can out-suck the 2600 version of Mr. Do's Castle. It's almost totally unplayable. Parker Bros. didn't exactly set the bar for 2600 development, but most of their stuff was pretty solid and playable. Except for that one.

That one's not bad, but it's a port rather than emulation, as far as I can tell.

The 3DS version seems to be pretty accurate, except it appears to run at 30 FPS rather than the true 60. The GBA version on Namco 50th is also really good, and you have a few screen modes to choose from: horizontal with scrolling, horizontal squished to fit, or rotated. The rotated view works great with a GBA micro held vertically. You could probably build a tiny little Pac-Man arcade cabinet using one of those.