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almightytodd

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Posts posted by almightytodd

  1. Posted

    Hey, don't trouble yourself with regrets about things you did when you were 10. YOU WERE TEN! You're not supposed to be ready to make sound judgments and correctly assess priorities. That's why the law protects you by not allowing you to enter into legal contracts and vote, and have a job and drive a car and consume adult beverages when you're ten. Just be glad we live in an age where it is possible to start over and recapture portions of your childhood.

     

    When I was ten, I had a whole set of the original red-line-wheeled Hot Wheels cars that I played with. Did I hold any of them back, and keep them in their original packaging with the understanding that they would one day become valuable collector's items? Of course not. Mattel even went out of their way to TELL me that these were COLLECTIBLE items, but of course, I opened up every one I ever got, and ran them around the orange plastic tracks, and crashed them together, and let the paint get chipped and the wire axles get bent.

     

    So ten years ago, I started buying a Hot Wheels car here and there, and this time I kept them in the original packaging. I have maybe a couple hundred of them. Then, I found out that an old friend from high school did something similar, and has a collection of like, 5,000 cars! I don't think I'd ever want to really get that "into" collecting. Just finding room to store all of that stuff would become a major hassle. On the other hand, I know there are people in this community that have entire rooms dedicated to the storage of their Atari related materials, and some have encountered conflicts with their wives over the amount of time and money they put into all things Atari.

     

    Just keep things in perspective. And if you're not happy with some of your past memories, start making some new ones now. It's never too late to decide to embark on a new direction in doing things you wish you'd done in years past. The past is in the past! There's nothing you can do about it! The rest of your life starts right now!

     

    As wise old Doc Brown said, "You're future hasn't been written yet. It is whatever you decide to make it, so make it a good one"!

  2. Posted

    I was a little disappointed when I discovered that the game-play had nothing to do with the Journey coin-op arcade game (http://www.journey-tribute.com/journey/resources/arcade/). But for some reason, this was one of the few games my wife liked to play, so it was a way for us to enjoy Atari together. It really fits the definition of what they're now calling a "casual" game - one that you won't spend more than five or ten minutes at a time playing before you go on to something else. I think there was a feeling in the early 80's that video-games were "supposed" to be like that, since the whole concept was based on the arcade machines that were designed to be as efficient as possible in separating you from your pocket full of quarters.

  3. Posted

    I think this is a game that really needs two players for it to be interesting at all. I've played it with my 17 year old daughter a few times, and it is one of the few classic 2600 games that she'll play with me. I think it's an achievement that a game like this is possible at all on the 2600 hardware.

  4. Posted

    Hey R.T. - thanks for keeping the love going for E.T. I don't think it will ever be my favorite game, but thanks to your web site, I can enjoy playing it and appreciate it as a decent game. It's a shame that after all of these years, the myth that E.T. is the worst video game ever made still has any life in it at all. As your site points out, if you bother to read the manual and learn what the object of the game is, and how everything works, it's a highly playable, challenging game. Knowing the history of how quickly it was programmed and made ready for production, it is a remarkable accomplishment. I've been a professional programmer since 1993 and I can tell you that today, NOTHING in software goes from concept to ready for production in five weeks - even with a team of architects, programmers, artists, and technical writers working on it.

  5. Posted

    Secret Quest is a god amongst video games.

     

    Heres my complete maps page for it.

     

    And anybody stuck on the last level who doesnt want to spoil the challenge should not download this file!...

    That is WAY cool, Fretwobbler. You just saved me a TON of work redoing something that you've already done. I will modify my web page and put a link to your page right at the top with acknowledgement of how hard it must have been for you to create that.

     

    Thanks,

  6. Posted

    I like Sorcerer and Space Jockey which are two games that alot of people hate. :)

     

    I'll second the love for Space Jockey. I think the people who hate that one must be playing on the default game variation, which is admittedly terrible. They just need to try the variation with the fast shots, enemies that move up and down, etc.

     

    As for Sorcerer, you're on your own on that one. :P

    I'll add a third for Space Jockey. I may be biased because I found a cart in a thrift store a couple weeks ago and bought it, but I also think it has some potential to turn it into a hack based on the movie "Independence Day".

     

    I also agree with BassGuitari about Star Ship; for the reasons he cites, as well as my nostalgia for when I first played the game as a teen. Of course other versions of "pilot a star ship through space and destroy targets" games followed that were much better implementations, but Star Ship was the first.

     

    I like Street Racer as a head-to-head two player game; especially the diverse game variations such as Slalom, Number Cruncher, and Scoop Ball.

     

    Perhaps GodzillaJoe was on to something when he started this thread; it really is difficult to find one game that is universally disliked...

  7. Posted

    Hey, don't thank me. I'm here to help.

    I am DYING laughing. I especially like line 170: "BLOW UP INVADER"

     

    Just goes to show, to be a really good programmer, you have to really know those function libraries...

  10. Posted

    Huge, long, useless post...

     

    Wow. Do you write for Retrogaming Times Monthly? You should. A very well done analysis. I agree with everything you've said, except I believe the link between PDP-11 computer-based Space War and Coin-op Pong was provided by Bushnell's Computer Space, so I think that makes it important. Call it a "proof of concept". Video games would have arrived eventually, once microprocessors became available, but by wiring up the first coin-op games using TTL, the masses became exposed to videogame concept well before the first wave of 8 bit home computers showed up. This, I believe, created a symbiotic relationship, where interest in videogaming spurred microcomputer development, and the advances of microcomputer development pushed videogaming forward.

     

    Also, the Half-Life framework provided the basis of so many hacks and commercial games, including network games such as Counter-Strike, that it may deserve a mention. I certainly agree that including both Half-Life and Counter-Strike is redundant.

  11. Posted

    The only reason i guess why space invaders wasnt included is because the originators (Taito) admitted that the game is basically a reverse engineered version of atari's 'breakout'

     

    Yeah, you really have to look twice to notice a difference.

    I am truly LOL. :D All of the comments in this thread are really good reading. Doesn't it make a lot more sense that the number one "Most Important" game would be one that launched the industry? Or at least saved it when it seemed like it was about to come to an abrupt end like so many other fads of the time? (Roller-disco, Pet Rocks anyone?) I think an argument could even be made in favor of Computer Space, because despite the fact that it was a big flop commercially, it proved to Bushnell that the technology was at least feasible, and provided him with a few hundred dollars to launch Atari.

  12. Posted

    Is there a ROM file anywhere for this? (...and what are the ethical implications of using a pirated ROM file that is of a pirated hack of another game?)

  13. Posted

    Supercat - your knowledge of both hardware and software is extraordinary. You truly are a "super cat". If I'm understanding correctly, each of the two controller ports would read one joystick in the "normal" manner, and then a second joystick would be added into each port using a multiplexer circuit. So from a programming perspective, controller port one would read joysticks one and three, and port two would read joysticks two and four. Is that right? Would you use Pin 7 (paddle +5V) to indicate which joystick is being read?

     

    This does lead to the chicken-and-egg dilemma, however: With no four-player hardware currently available, there is no reason to develop programming to support it, but with no four-player software there is no reason to create the hardware. Both would have to be developed simultaneously, probably using Stelladapters since there are no emulators that would have keyboard mappings for four joysticks.

     

    Maybe this is an issue that there isn't very much interest in. I just have fond memories of four-player coin-op games in the early arcade years, including a four-player tank, four-player surround, and of course there were multiple four-player driving games. Super Football would be really fun with two teams of a quarterback and receiver and a rusher and defensive end. Identifying who is who graphically would be a challenge, but if it could be done, it would really be something. Activision's tennis playing doubles would really be something too. I'm probably just dreaming and going way beyond what the hardware can do - particularly with the 2600. It seems to me that the 7800 should be able to do it though. It's a shame Atari didn't have that in mind when they designed the 7800. It would have been a feature that would make it a real competitor to the NES. I noticed that most of the NES two-player games were really one-player games taking turns anyway.

     

    I've always liked multiplayer games that involved "coopetition", as is found in the coin-op Gauntlet. That was one of the things I found really fun when Doom came out. I was working at a company developing software and during our lunch break or after hours, we would play network Doom and run around the levels working together to kill off the bad guys, find the secrets, and advance through the levels. That was such a blast.

  15. Posted

    One of the strengths in the original VCS that seems to have been forgotten, until the recent appearance of the Nintendo Wii, is that you could have up to four players playing simultaneously on some games. The one limitation to this, was that this type of play was restricted to paddle-controller based games. The reason had to do with the method of communicating controller information to the I/O chip: two joysticks equal four buttons each, plus one fire button each for a total of 10 signals. Each paddle control communicated on fire button, and a voltage between zero and five. Multiply times four controllers and you get a total of 8 signals.

     

    It occurs to me, that a paddle controller is a potentiometer, like this:

    gallery_12574_177_7104.png

     

    In a schematic, this is represented as a "tap" moving along a resistor:

     

    gallery_12574_177_5569.png

     

    So I took a look at this page to learn more about voltage-divider circuits, and it got me to thinking - if you could define each of the eight joystick controller positions as a division of five volts (...or falling into eight ranges of voltages), wouldn't it be possible to create four-player games that used joystick controllers?

     

    I envision taking the basic concept of a voltage-divider shown here:

     

    gallery_12574_177_962.png

     

    ...and expanding it to apply to the eight positions of an Atari VCS joystick:

     

    med_gallery_12574_177_6349.png

     

    I'm imagining two joystick-to-paddle adapters that would each be connected as shown here:

     

    gallery_12574_177_5015.png

     

    Does this look at all feasible to any of you? Would there be additional challenges in the programming that would prevent the creation of four-player games such as "Tank Battle" (with Combat-style graphics) or a four-player version of "Surround"? If it simply couldn't be done on a 2600, could a 7800 handle it? (So far as I know, there were no paddle-controller games for the 7800)

  18. Posted

    Speaking of guitar-playing...

     

    I was in a grocery store today and saw a toy electric guitar for 8 bucks. I looked at it, and in my head I put four plastic, colored buttons on the fret board. Then, I imagined a spring-loaded momentary toggle switch in the middle of the body. I imagined this running to the "fire" button pin of an Atari joystick. Then, I mapped the four buttons on the fretboard to the four joystick buttons... ...you see where I'm going with this, don't you? ATARI VCS GUITAR HERO!!! Just add some 2600 rock music and some kind of a descending colored blocks graphics (...maybe hack Zach's Non-Infringing Russian Block game...) and there you go! A 21st century game concept meets 1970's technology!

  19. Posted

    There's this one game on a Coleco plug-n-play that I have (...hey, it was five bucks - I spend more on the AA batteries it takes to power the thing...) where the object is to grab a fly with chopsticks. The thing is, all you have to do is press the fire button as quickly as you can the moment the fly first appears on the screen. If you play one-player mode, all it does it tell you your reaction time. In the two-player game though, it tells which player has the fastest reaction (I think it does best two-out-of-three, but it's been awhile since I've played it). It's pretty stupid, but add some alcohol, a party atmosphere, maybe some techno music, it could have potential. If anything, it might suggest that the overall loser should have someone else drive him/her home...

  20. Posted

    Changes: tweaked colors, added elevator change-of-direction sound effect when music isn't playing, changed scoring.

    Any comments on the new colors:

     

    Hey vdub,

     

    First, let me say that I'm really enjoying following the development of this game in the forum. Thanks so much for sharing this with us and involving us in some of your design decisions. Personally, I liked the brighter colors of some of the earlier versions, but I can see where there isn't much realism in terms of colors that might be used as hotel hallway decor. Ultimately, you're the author, so you get to decide what looks "right" to you. I suppose it probably depends on who you think your target audience is for this game: If you are primarily concerned with aging classic gamers such as myself, the subdued, conservative color tones are probably more appropriate (...my preference for brighter colors not withstanding). If you are thinking of this as a "kid's game" - somewhere between Big Bird's Egg Catch and Air-Sea Battle, then the brighter colors might work better.

     

    Thanks again for asking, and congratulations on a terrific new game!

  21. Posted

    Nice looking demo, Gorf. I've been kicking around some thoughts about "vertical" arcade games ported to horizontal home TV systems. I've discussed it in this 7800 thread, and also this one in the 2600 Forum. It's nice to see someone experimenting with writing the actual code. It may turn out that the 90 degree rotation of these games is just too disorienting to retain the "feel" of the original game. But I think the only way to find out is to try it.

  22. Posted

    I opened one of mine up today, and saw that there is a rectangular plastic device underneath the control wheel with the electrical leads connected to it. It appears to be glued together. Is the entire unit available as a part? Can it be taken apart and repaired?

     

    Thanks,

  25. Posted

    I've updated my Secret Quest web site with an explanation of the Sonic Door found on Station 2, a link to a web page that lets you download a stand-alone Secret Quest remake game, and a more accurate explanation of hexadecimal notation. I also added some meta data to the header section of the html file, so some of the web search engines might start finding it.

     

    Let me know if you're playing this game and find my site helpful. If you're playing the game, and are farther along in it than I am, I would greatly appreciate it if you could share access codes for higher levels. You could convert the code symbols to hex digits using the chart on my web site, and reply to this post, or PM me.

     

    Thanks,

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