Cybergoth

*waiting...* Greetings, Manuel

Hi Greg! Marble Craze is 32K, too Greetings, Manuel

Hi there! Good - Better - Atari Greetings, Manuel

Hi all! Good choice, 't was one of my favs, too! I sure hope that all the others, especially Efren (how you achieve such brilliance with MS-Paint(!!) all the time, is beyond me ), don't give up their efforts in upcoming contests. So much talent! Greetings, Manuel

Recommended!!!!!!!!! Greetings, Manuel

Hi there! I've some questions about this. - Maybe I'm not finding the right location as to where the this info is hidden, but does it make a difference, wether you're playing the PAL or the NTSC version of a 2600 game? - And are scores played on emulators valid? Someone mentioned AVI recording on the PCAE emulator, is this a valid proof of a record? - And what would a record in the category 'Outlaw - Factory Settings' look like? - Killing the non-moving second player 10:0? Do you accept my word on this record or do I need to send a prooving video? Greetings, Manuel

That depends solely on how it is programmed. Gunfight isn't using the hardware collission detection between player & missile at all for example. Any collision is calculated based on the cowboy / bullet position. Determining wether a cowboy is hit or not is rock-hard doing it that way, no matter wether the bullet is visible or not at the very moment. When relying on the hardware collision detection only, failures may in fact happen due to the flicker of the sprites. To know for certain, one'd need to reverse-engineer the suspicious part of the ROM. Greeetings, Manuel

Well, of course. Just take a Hexeditor, slice everything into chunks of 4K and Distella each part separately. No magic secret, that's how we all do it Greetings, Manuel

I still got some ~30€ for mine, so you don't really lose much on evaluating it. Oh, that's one I've yet to try. This week I bought four GBA games on eBay: Fire Pro Wrestling, Boxing Fever, Chu Chu Rocket & Lucky Luke. Boxing Fever already arrived today, so maybe tonight I can report on it's quality I always have 4 *floating* games. I buy them from eBay, play them 1-2 weeks and then sell them again. Only games I considered worth keeping in my collection so far are: Advance Wars, Castlevania, Golden Sun & X-Men. Greetings, Manuel

Hi Thomas! Oh. I think the sources *worth* to be converted will be there & ready rather quick. And we'd possibly get rid of tons of useless crap for free I even think just porting all available reverse-engineerings would be good enough for a start. Every homebrew author spending another hour converting his own source, and we'd be done for the most. Well, you know that there's this strange license of DASM and the copyright owner of it is long gone. But here is XASM, a living assembler in the hands of the guy who originally wrote it, who can just legally release a bugfix or update any time. He is *here* and talking with us and, most of all - he's using the assembler himself, so he'll probably understand certain needs and suggestions more than most other people. Greetings, Manuel

I think that's be quite some work to do for fox. XASM is an excellent assembler, offering all DASM does and probably way more. It's just: Some things are handled a little different. For example, DASM does STA.w and XASM does STA a: If fox'd change that, all other 8-Bit Atari stuff wouldn't work anymore. Only maybe, if he could just 'add' what we are used too, i.e. offering both ways. On the other hand, it took me less than an hour with Textpads 'Search & Replace' to make Gunfight compile into a BIN that matches 1:1 the DASM one. And Fox already added a 'Raw BIN' switch, so that we can work with ORGs as usual. -> See the beginning of this thread. The cool thing about using XASM would be, that from then on all Atari 8-Bit programmers could use the same assembler, no matter if they're targetting the 2600, 5200, 7800 or the 8-Bitters. The other cool thing is of course that XASM is *living* wheras DASM is *dead* since '93... Greetings, Manuel

Uhm... ok. You asked for it Here's two for example: This is a sprite of a 2600 game, the number '7': .byte $18 ; ...xx... .byte $18 ; ...xx... .byte $18 ; ...xx... .byte $0C ; ....xx.. .byte $06 ; .....xx. .byte $42 ; .x....x. .byte $7E ; .xxxxxx. As you can see, it is turned upside down. That is, because it is displayed with a decrementing loop to save cycles. Now I thought it'd be cool to have some assembler directive like that: .VERTSWAP .byte $7E ; .xxxxxx. .byte $42 ; .x....x. .byte $06 ; .....xx. .byte $0C ; ....xx.. .byte $18 ; ...xx... .byte $18 ; ...xx... .byte $18 ; ...xx... .VERTSWAPEND So one could *paint* the graphics as one sees them and the compiler would turn it upside down. When I now for any reason switch to an incrementing loop, all I'd have to do was deleting the directives. The second thing is similar: The Atari 2600 VCS has registers that are read in reversed order. (Only god knows why... ) To get the '7' to display there, you'd have to make your data look like this: .byte $7E ; .xxxxxx. .byte $42 ; .x....x. .byte $06 ; .xx..... .byte $0C ; ..xx.... .byte $18 ; ...xx... .byte $18 ; ...xx... .byte $18 ; ...xx... It'd of course be cool to have some directive like this: .HORSWAP .byte $7E ; .xxxxxx. .byte $42 ; .x....x. .byte $06 ; .....xx. .byte $0C ; ....xx.. .byte $18 ; ...xx... .byte $18 ; ...xx... .byte $18 ; ...xx... .HORSWAPEND Which would make the assembler horizontally reverse every byte. Best would be of course if you could even combine .VERTSWAP and .HORSWAP Well, my wishlist for the perfect assembler is longer of course, but it should do for a start Other strange things I'm wondering, include amongst others why all pure accumulator targeting opcodes like 'LSR' for example would need an '@' as operator, when using XASM as compiler. Most other compilers I know recognise themselves that a plain 'LSR' is targeting the accumulator and don't force one to type that useless byte all the time Greetings, Manuel

Hi Fox! Thanks for that... ... and thanks for that!!! I'll start toying around with it soon! Hm... since you seem to be somewhat supportive towards us poor 2600 developers, maybe I should start thinking about more features, to make live easier for us... No, really - if you ever get bored with other stuff, tell me and I'll post you parts of my wishlist for the perfect 6502 assembler with 2600 support! Greetings, Manuel

Hi there! Uih... I'd love to have one of these! Finally some usefull *hardware* Hey, guys from the homebrew hardware dept. what's up? How long until I can order one? Greetings, Manuel

Yippieh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Cool! Danke Matty! Die ersten beiden habe ich gleich sofort-gekauft, bei den anderen beiden warte ich lieber noch. Evtl. gibt mir der Verkäufer ja die anderen beiden *so* noch mit, nur ein wenig billiger Danke auch an Dich Günther, aber bei einem SK Preis von nur 5€ hat man ja praktisch keine andere Wahl Hehe, normal ist mir SK kauf ja zu langweilig, aber diesmal... Grüße, Manuel

Hi Günther! Cool! danke für den Tip, den werde ich also ab jetzt beobachten Danke auch an Matty für seine Einschätzung der Lage. Fein, jetzt habe ich endlich wieder was zum Suchen Zum Coleco: Nein, ich habe leider immer noch keins. Bei eBay sind sie mir zu teuer, also hoffe ich weiter auf einen Flomarkt Fund oder die nächste FfM Börse. (Wir sind doch wieder dabei, oder? ) Grüße, Manuel

Huhu! *bump* Nachtrag: Wie sieht es eigentlich aus mit dem ganzen Muppet Kram? Bisher habe ich nur "Pigs In Space". Viele andere scheinen widerum nur Prototypen zu sein, aber was ist mit denen: OSCAR'S TRASH RACE COOKIE MONSTER MUNCH ALPHA BEAM WITH ERNIE BIG BIRD'S EGG CATCH Gibt's die im PAL Format und wenn ja, kann man sie bezahlen? Grüße, Manuel

Huhu Thomas! Hier sind noch zwei andere Spielefirmen, die ich beobachte: Spellbound (Desperados): http://www.spellbound.de/web/de/main.htm Egosoft (X): http://www.egosoft.de/ Die suchen sogar beide gerade C++ Programmierer. Ich würde mich da sofort bewerben, ich kann nur nicht aus Augsburg weg, solange meine Freundin noch studiert... Grüße, Manuel

Huhu Thomas! Hattest Du also doch recht mit Deiner düsteren Prognose in Frankfurt. Versuch auf jeden Fall mal Related Designs anzuschreiben, dass sind die Macher von Data Beckers "America" Spiel und ganz aktuell machen sie "No Man's Land" für CDV. Jedenfalls würde ich mich da bewerben, wenn ich in Mainz wohnen würde Adresse http://www.related-designs.de/rd/d/main.htm Steht zwar nix bei Jobs, würde mich aber dennoch da mal bewerben. die Updaten die Webseite eh nie. (Ich beobachte die Seite schon seit zwei Jahren) Einer der Chefs dort ist laut seinem Profil mal VCS Freak gewesen, mit dem sollte man doch ins Gespräch kommen können. Schick ihm Notfalls ein Thrust Modul als Köder Ansonsten, wenn Du in Augsburg arbeiten wollen würdest, kann ich Dein Ansinnen mal meinem Chef forwarden. Ich weiss zwar nicht, ob wir gerade jemanden einstellen würden, aber ich würde ein gutes Wort einlegen Ansonsten viel Glück bei der Suche. Ich hoffe Du nutzt die freie Zeit und schreibst ein neues VCS Spiel! Grüße, Manuel

I'm more and more thinking of it being a "portable PSI". I can't yet see the limits of the GBA and the newer games make any SNES and Genesis game look lame... For example GBA Mario Kart is better than it's SNES counterpart - But we all know that the SNES version was cheating by using an extra 3D chip on the cartridge! Only drawback of the GBA compared to a PSI is the possible size of the games. A CD can obviously carry way more data than a GBA cartridge... Greetings, Manuel

Not quite. It is no emulation. There's a lot of differences. For example the sceen on the GBA is wider, so you can see more to both sides. That alone would make the game easier, I assume. AFAIR those large (quadrupled?) enemies are not available in the original NES version, as well as the big Yoshi-coins are missing there. Those are some obvious visible changes and, as I said, I sold it again, because it hadn't the original *feel* to me. That might be due to either me being 10+ years older now or there's more hidden changes, like for example control flaws you just can't recognize for certain or similar... Greetings, Manuel

Mine would be: Golden Sun 2 on the GBA Freelancer on the PC Marble Craze on the VCS 2600 Greetings, Manuel

Hm... from the arcades... Ok, I'll try to do that. Stay tuned... Greetings, Manuel

If you'd like to have a recorded game scene of one of these games, such as mine, let me know. But the jumping Bub (Bob?) is pretty cool too. Greetings, Manuel

Hi there! If you think it's all for kids, try Rayman. I really wished that one was a little easier. I had to give up playing and sold it after I managed to complete only 10% of the game... I sold both Mario games too. Can't say why, but they really weren't providing that fun anmore as they did back then... Only GBA J'n'R I can recommend so far is Castlevania. Can't wait for the sequel! Greetings, Manuel