Hornpipe2

The VCS plays a pretty predictable game, but it doesn't develop a good long-term strategy and we can use this to win most games. It places a high priority on gaining corners and edges. What you need to do to win is to make sure you get pieces on as many edges as possible, with a gap between yours and Black's, and then wait out your time until the VCS makes a dumb mistake and you capitalize on it. Here's a sample game. At the beginning, note that the VCS is afraid to play outside of the center 4 blocks. It knows that if it does, you're likely to gain an edge first, and so it will wait to avoid that. Your objective at the beginning should be to have a wide dispersion of pieces throughout the center block. This gives you a lot of opportunity later to make some good plays. Now the key to getting your pieces on the edge is to make sacrifices: allow the VCS to take a spot too, with the knowledge that you'll get it later. How I do this is to play a piece in a way that it completes a horizontal or vertical line and also forms a diagonal: The VCS will then flip your piece with a diagonal move: ...but since you ensured diagonal backup, you may ALSO make a diagonal move and flip it back - gaining yourself a foothold on the edge. It's important to note the safe places to play. Again, your goals are to secure a foothold on as many edges as possible, wait and force the VCS to make a bad move, and then capitalize. Let's look at that screenshot above with a little annotation: The areas marked with a purple X are bad squares - as they border the corner, you are quite likely to be giving away a corner to the VCS. The yellow X goes on any edge square which is bordered by a black-edge and a white-edge. These are bad because if you drop a piece here, you've just surrendered that edge to the VCS. On the other hand, if you manage to wait out the rest of the game without an error, your opponent can be forced to play in a yellow square and this is the moment at which you take his edge, capture the corners, force him to pass, and make your high scores. There are some exceptions to the "purple X is off-limits" rule, but I'll leave you with just one. Imagine this situation: Here, the yellow X may be a safe play. That's because you already own this edge and the play would join the square to your existing owned pieces. Use this to your advantage when you need more "wait time" for the VCS to do something else stupid!

Yes, this. Another site that may help you: http://www.arcadecontrols.com Be warned though. The next step after building your own arcade controller is building your own arcade CABINET.

Perhaps an alternate challenge then: the "Warlords Challenge" - end a game where you occupy all 4 corners? This seems pretty tough given that the computer values corners so much, and it's not readily repeatable either. EDIT: Dang. Were you playing against a level 3 opponent? Anyway, for posting pictures - use the Attachments box right below where you enter your post. Browse to the picture on your computer and hit Upload, then make your post.

Perhaps someone could construct a "fixed" rom that repairs the PRNG in the markers version...? That would be the best option of all. Then you could play either the Fixed or the No-Markers.

The XIII soundtrack is Most Excellent, give it a listen if you haven't already.

There are two versions of this ROM floating around. One is pictured above, with black "pips" at the corners of the 3rd and 7th intersections. The other does not have these markers. I don't know if there are any other differences between the versions... but I'll be playing the one shown here as I believe it is a later version. EDIT: I think it's funny that the manual says going first is an advantage - that is not really the case! In fact going second is better as your last play cannot be challenged. EDIT2: Dear lord I hope we go with the text-label because 55 points! (And yes I double-checked the settings) EDIT3: Shutout.

IIRC didn't Stella have a change recently to cause the RAM to start up in a random state? Could you extend that to start up in a random bank as well, for >4k games? It would be a handy wake-up call for developers who don't properly code their start-up routines.

Noooo, you beat me! Anyway. My fastest time to the first down-ladder leaves 19:05 on the clock or so, if that helps.

This is fantastic - what a cool collection!

Progress has been very slow lately. I set in to work on some AI so I'd have an opponent to test against, but in the meantime the HSC has taught me a valuable lesson, and I am now going to have to re-do the title screen a bit (which I am dreading). That lesson is: All 2600 games should have a high score counter. Modern games, it's said, have long since moved past the need to keep track of points. We can have full-on FMV endings, elaborate stories - beating the game can be an end in itself. But this is the VCS, and IT never moved on... and that's the entire appeal right there! I think of the Atari as the ultimate casual gaming machine - nearly every (good) title can be played in five minutes or less, and the best games are those that keep you hitting the RESET button "one more time". So instead of selecting between Human or Computer Level X, I'm going to change it to Human or Atari. Playing "Atari" will pit you against enemies of ever-increasing difficulty until they kick your face in without mercy. Points scored for hits, bonus points for awesome hits, extra points for defeating an enemy, and mega-bonus-points for flawless victory. The display on the bottom will be a Record for vs. human matches, but will show a six-digit High Score for vs. Atari matches. Now to rip out my old code and stick in the new. Ugh...

Just off the top of my head: The Commando releases have a different logo (Data East vs Capcom) The Lost Luggage games correspond to the Green Label or Blue Label The Othello differences have special dots on the board to help measure (later release?) The Space Shuttle ROMs are two different bankswitch types (F8 vs FE) and the Video Life ROMs produce different sounds. EDIT: Wait that's not what you're asking for, is it? You are wanting some kind of document that rolls up all the differences?

Freecycle is awesome - I got a (nonworking) Mac LC and an Atari 1040 STe with no cables (and missing an 'x' key).

This is way skewed thanks to the HSC! I put three hours on Pitfall! last week, and before that I played an hour of Star Fire.

glSelect matrix should generally be reserved (I think) for very special circumstances like mouse-picking - it saves the developer some headache when you have an arbitrary scene and need to know "what was in that tiny box the user just clicked on?" and you only call it once per mouse click. For something like this, where you are checking every shot on every frame for a collision... I would suggest instead looping through each shot and doing a point-in-box test within your code. It should be much much faster and I would think easier to write too.

You must accept that ALL sources have some degree of inaccuracy. The fundamental difference between a "real" encyclopedia and Wikipedia is how each chooses to get those inaccuracies corrected. Now that Wikipedia has adopted some sound editorial guidelines and a "cite everything" policy, users are free to correct those inaccuracies and back them up with hard evidence - as opposed to a published encyclopedia, where editorial process shuts out everyday users from fixing it, or needlessly delays the process. A simple example is this article right here: There is an inaccurate date assigned. If this were Encyclopedia Britannica we were talking about, would anybody be able to get that year corrected? For that matter, would any of the (limited) staff of the encyclopedia even bother doing the kind of research that has just occurred to close the case? Really, I think Wikipedia's problems are rampantly over-stated.

I modified the 8k template from Minidig for 16k a while back. I use this in Karate Master with a little modification (each bank actually contains two subroutines and selects which one to use based on the carry bit.) There may be better ways to do this but this will get you started. http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=119684

2000 points! EDIT: 113,827! It won't win any perfection awards but I'll be damned if I will play through this game any more.

He's an AA member : ) http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showuser=160

Some forums will give you a "tooltip" showing the first sentence or two of a topic's first post when you hover your mouse over the thread in forum view. Can we get this feature added to the AA board?

I just want to point out that (like Asteroids) it is possible to rack up a vastly huge score just by destroying all but one enemy in a wave and then shooting down every bullet the ship fires at you. I spent a couple minutes doing just that on Wave 1 - the only real danger besides boredom is missing too many shots and overheating. If you set it to Difficulty B you would have no problem playing infinitely.

Here was my post from a few pages back re: Commando.

Hey guys - some ROMs may actually be prototypes at various stages of development but lacking a proper label. I usually check www.atariprotos.com to see if the differences in a version match a known prototype - then one can put a proper label on it : )

I was just going through the 4k games trying to pick out one of each (original releases) - these alternates tripped me up, just wondered if anyone knew about any bugged versions or anything. Some are already labeled as Fixed.

Here's the post I made to a DSP users group a few months ago. http://www.dsprelated.com/showmessage/93148/1.php EDIT: So maybe it could work if you never had a sequence of ~30 1s or 0s in a row...?

We already discussed this - starting around here: http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?s...t&p=1481552 One big problem with this is that if you try to run the bitrate that low, the internal filter on your CD player is likely to strip out the waveforms (plus do other crap to your signal). So you can't just directly translate the 1s and 0s to +0/+5. There are a few solutions: one is to record Atari tapes to CD, use one of those CD-to-Tape adapters, and put the tape adapter in a 410. Or strip out the FSK decoder of the 410 and put it inside a project case or the CD player itself. Or, come up with a different kind of encoding scheme and build a new decoder for the CD. Since the cassette loader is way slower than the SIO ports, maybe it would be a better solution to make a new audio->SIO decoder and have the CD drive appear as a read-only 810?