Hornpipe2

http://gamestudies.org/0601/articles/montfort This (somewhat lengthy) article from 2004 takes a more academic approach to analyzing Combat, and makes an effort to correctly place the game in a historical context while providing a solid review. Recommended if you've got the time. As a side note, whenever the AtariAge store comes back online, it might be fun to stock T-shirts with a hex dump of Combat on the front.

And now Wikipedia is corrected with a citation : ) I had wanted the reference link to work but apparently Digitpress is blacklisted? What gives? ETA: never mind, some cracked out drama going on with that, according to the ban log. Too bad as this would be considered a legitimate source.

Thanks once again for putting this all together - the extra ~ marker is a great help in picking out Originals. I'm currently working on One 4k Multicart to Rule Them All and ran across some of these which I think should have a tilde but don't. You may want to tack one on for a hypothetical V6. Air Raid (Men-A-Vision) (PAL).bin Air Raiders (Air Battle) (1982) (M Network, Larry Zwick - INTV) (MT5861).bin Atlantis (Lost City of Atlantis) (1982) (Imagic, Dennis Koble) (720103-1A, 720103-1B, IA3203, IX-010-04).bin Atlantis II (1982) (Imagic, Dennis Koble) (720103-1A, IA3203).bin Pepsi Invaders - Coke Wins (Coca-Cola, Coke & Pepsi) (1983) (Atari, Richard Maurer, Christopher H. Omarzu - Coca Cola).bin

Hey guys I haven't given up on this project! Still tweaking things here and there and trying to figure out what to focus on next. I altered things a bit so that the Jump now propels the character forward, while the Jumpkick does not. This leads to a little more player shuffling and much less jumpkick spamming. Also, * added more sound effects - these are almost all subject to change but at least there's audio feedback now * made a hacky attempt at stopping the screen rolling on player death (still happens... I see the cause but it's actually pointless to fix it now since I already plan on reworking it later) Moves still need further balance (the crouching punch is useless, the stomach kick is very strong) to make them useful in different situations. I'm thinking of adding a "forward dodge" if I can figure out graphics for it - the idea would be that you could get behind an opponent spamming high attacks like the face-kick by rolling under him instead. k_master_test4.bin

Good thinking, if that's just a Plain Ol' Genesis inside, you could mod it (or a spare) like this: http://www.longhornengineer.com/Projects/Neptune But 32x carts are a bit wider and I would not suggest it if it means you'll have to cut wood.

Would be interesting to know what's in it - if it is an actual Genesis, you could swap out with a Genesis multicart and play all kinds of stuff on it. EDIT: I'm an idiot, there's a Genesis cart sticking right out of the control panel! hahaha

For those who don't want to download anything I stuck the video on YouTube:

Badge is somewhat large IMO. I'm fond of the little userbars people put in their signatures on modern gaming sites. It might be fun if we expanded on this idea to include a number of badges corresponding to VIP status, user feedback, is a developer with items in AA store, country of origin, etc.

Thanks for the feedback. I used IK for a good amount of inspiration, but I've always found the control scheme unintuitive - sometimes pushing in a direction does not attack in that direction. I realize I risk alienating old players if I stray too far though : ) However, something I have been missing (and it seems you too) is a way to leap forward without attacking. I'd like more ways to get the players to swap places so they must turn around. Probably what I'll do is make U+R into a forward leap (like the backwards leap) and eliminate the plain ol' jump. I'll take another look at IK and see what else I might port over, because you're right, I could probably stand to lose some of the defensive moves. I think the Block might be an interesting new mechanic once I get it working though - further testing will no doubt prove that out.

Some beta testers you lot turned out to be! Nine people downloaded the binary and no feedback. I figured it's probably because you all have no friends, so I decided the AI was the next area to focus on : ) Try this one on for size. The AI player will now attempt to rough you up (this is super preliminary and I need to enhance it to defend itself better, judge distances better, and mix up attacks so it's not vulnerable to repetitive jumpkicks), your player may now die in four different ways, and I fixed a couple of branch-out-of-range errors. Still got problems with dying players rolling the screen and I think the jumpkick is too good for its own good. The sweep is hard to hit with as well.

Pixel-perfect collision detection should be working now. Since it's now possible to knock opponents around, please try out the attached binary (with friends if you've got 'em) and give feedback on initial move balance. Are some moves overpowered? Is it too hard to hit with others? Three things to note real quick - * the middle kick will be adjusted up or down 1 pixel - right now it's too hard to hit with since the foot goes into the opponent's belt * blocking does nothing yet * knocking players over rolls the screen : ) ETA: controls straight from the top of the source, assuming your player is facing to the right: ;<none> stand ;U jump ;D crouch ;L walk back ;R walk forward ;UL jump back ;DL block ;A+L turn ;UR face punch ;A stomach punch ;DR crouch punch ;A+U jump-kick ;A+UR face kick ;A+R stomach kick ;A+DR shin kick ;A+D crouch kick

Banging out some collision detection. Right now I can tell if the danger point (one pixel X/Y location where hits are checked) is within the 40 x (sprite height) area of an enemy. Next I'll need to write a small 'more precise' function to put on both banks with image data - this will check if the dangerous pixel does or does not collide with real image data. Ignore the ugly colors below, that was part of my WIP color-decode.

I'm pretty happy with the title screen now, everything's working except there's no Savekey-specific stuff. That's okay, I left 1360+ bytes free on this bank, so there should be lots of room for that later. The Handicap is a fun setting, you adjust the bar left/right to give one or the other player more starting points and help balance the fight. Note that I've done away with 2 player 'match scoring' at the bottom. I was keeping a record of wins, but I decided it wasn't worthwhile. Now you always see your top single player high score instead. Next I'm supposed to re-write a section of the color decoding for players, but I am getting a little bored with pointless optimization, so I'll probably start working on collision detection and see if I can't make a playable game out of this.

Good thinking, I knew there were games out there with a joystick icon on them, just couldn't think of any. This one looks nice - and at just 8 pixels across I'm impressed. Good inspiration. I may have to make my icons taller. I'll keep poking at it.

Updated title screen (new font for digits, highlight-able record and handicap), but not much other progress. The color decode loop is still giving me a headache, plus I seem to have crashed the actual game startup. If anyone has suggestions on how to make those joystick icons look better I'm all ears. They are 15x13 right now.

Still poking around with this and making pointless optimizations. I finally went to start in on the title screen and make some changes so I can accomodate the new single-player mode, and ended up wanting to cram more options in too. So I've got: * a Handicap bar, which initially starts at 0 blips, but can be adjusted left-right to give one or the other player more starting points (2 player only). * altered Players option now shows just one or two joysticks depending on your setting. * The 'Record' option at the bottom will soon be highlightable if a Savekey is present. Clicking it takes you to the Savekey Screen where you can view the top 8 high scores (no initials - it'll be scores using whatever color the player had) and change the color scheme from NTSC to PAL60 (read off key). * Non-Savekeyers will be able to set the initial color state by B/W or COLOR switch at power-on only. WIP screenshot attached. Hope you like the new font, I found it easier to read despite being shorter. I'll probably change the numbers too.

Sold my (untested) Sega CD to Nathan Allan - he's a great buyer, very communicative and honest, and even though I shipped stuff before receiving payment he got me payment in full. Would sell to again.

THIS THREAD MAKES ME WANT TO QUIT ATARIAGE FOREVER

This only burns 27C801 EPROMs, and no 2600 boards support these. Oh right. Well that's for my multicart anyway : ) The page links to the EPROMR2 which burns 2764 up to... well it's not listed but the software shows at leats 27512. Mostly the same design, different hookups. Evidently the software needs a slow PC. http://www.zws.com/products/epromr2/

I am sure someone could come up with a modification to the bankswitch hardware that would instead trigger the custom sound chip whenever a certain RAM address is hit...

You can build your own EPROM programmer (driven by PC parallel port) for way cheap: http://outflux.net/software/pkgs/EPROM/mirror

I thought STA $FFF8 / STA $FFF9 was the standard way that many F8 carts did bankswitching, and many of those do play on FB2? I'm confused...

Well never mind then. LOL.

I made the change as suggested. From what I can tell, one scanline is dropped from the title screen. (Actually this game is weird because it doesn't keep a constant number of scanlines anyway - at boot it is normally 257, then it switches to 256 after about a second or two, and during gameplay it is 260. With the hack it becomes 256/255 -> 260.) I wonder if this game rolls on real hardware as a result of the lack of consistency, and if that is what the reported FB2 problem is (as opposed to an unsupported illegal opcode). I always want for testers : ) Airlock__1982___No_SAX_Hack_.bin

What I mean by 'fixed' is: some of the ROMs for these games have been hacked for other reasons and those hacks may end up working on the FB2. If you have an EEPROM programmer and a soldering iron on hand, you could build working versions out of those ROMs. Specifically I mean Activision Decathlon (converted to F6 Bankswitching) and Activision Robot Tank (converted to F8). Check the compatibility list as I have added downloads for the two ROMs. Someone with free time might be able to hack other broken ROMs and fix them to work, as well. Again you'd need to burn the new fixed ROM to play it. Right now I'm looking at fixing Airlock here: http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=139505 - by recoding the game to remove the SAX opcode, it may fix the screen rolling problem. As far as the 5v thing: I've seen a few reports on it, notably from jsoper here: http://www94.pair.com/jsoper/flashback2.html From what I remember, putting more voltage on the cart doesn't actually help anything. I suppose the 4.24v is within the acceptable range for the ROM chips. Hope that helps. I was a little bummed to find out about the compatibility issues myself, mostly because of the SuperChip games, but since I don't actually own any games or a real 2600 this does help to limit the potential size of my collection : )