Steril707

Thanks Supercat... I hope i can reveal the thing i am working on soon, so you can see what the fuzz i about, and why i ask about all that stuff...

Nice!!! Welcome to Vectrex World..!!!

Hey Thomas, me again with one more question: I have managed to get the Sprites into the right position, having one Skipdraw being executed in "Kernal 1" and another one in Kernal2 each with their own P_Y s. That works quite fine, as soon as the Sprite from Kernal2 jumps up into Kernal1, it disappears from Kernal2 and appears in Kernal1 so it looks like its the same Sprite, BUT: At the line that splits both kernals apart, the Sprite starts looking like a big square, instead of a small guy. What do i have to do with the Sprite pointer? I have to admit i dont quite understand the spritepointer part of Skipdraw yet, so any advice would be helpful. Sorry, that I cannot post the appropriate code at the moment (i am not at my place). thanks, Michael

Check out german ebay, they go for 50 Euros quite often, and the money you saved on the Vectrex can be spent for transportation. Ask for a photo of the big spaceship at the beginning of minestorm (the one that spreads the mines across the screen). If this one looks decent (i.e. Vectors look well aligned), the unit is okay...The big spaceship uses a quite large Vectorlist, so you can see if the unit can still display it or not. I bought a bad unit on ebay a year ago, and the spaceship was completely unaligned, so all of the other games didnt look well too. Fortunately the next unit i bought was near perfect (and still is). Hope i could help (and btw, check out my site www.borrmann.in for demos of my homebrews ! )

Danke!!! Glaub ich habs kapiert.

Lets say i have my screen built up with split up kernals, like, a sky, a mid area with some mountains and then the ground, and i want my sprite(s) to be able to get displayed within all of these, and being able to wander from one to the other without hassle. It seems a couple of games are doing this, Pitfall for instance, where the kernal is splitted up into several stripes. Yet Pitfall Harry can fall from the "ground strip" into the cellar without problems it seems, and go up again. I tried to check out the disassembly provided by Thomas, but to be honest, i couldn't make heads or tails out of it on this topic, so i would be extremely happy about any pointers into the right direction.

- Vectrex - ATARI 2600 - Laser VZ 200 (my first homecomputer, very obscure) - C 64 - Commodore Amiga - SNES - Wii not even ten.

I understand how the rest of you feels about the old pacman, and i like this pacman4k as much as the rest of you, and it gets a lot of play along Ladybug, but whenever i play the old version, with its weird color scheme and harsh sounds, i start to smile. It's somehow what the Atari was about and what makes it still special in hindsight: These ports all looked somehow different yet, iconic somehow... I mean, i don't know any VCS game that looks remotely like its counterpart from the arcades, yet i remember its own distinct look as much (and sometimes even more) than the arcade version. It's the "Atari thing". Hope my "artistic" rant made some sense...

hmmmm, i think i get it... Thanks a lot for the fast answer... Why wait for the next scan line before rewriting a sprite? The popular 'six digit score trick' sets both players for three copies close and positions Player 1 eight pixels to the right of Player 0. Vertical delay is enabled for both sprites. Before the beam reaches the first copy of Player 0, the program hits GRP0 with the first shape, GRP1 with the second shape (copying GRP0 into the player 0 shifter), and GRP0 with the third shape (copying GRP1 into the player 1 shifter). The registers X, Y, and accumulator hold the other three shapes. Just after the beam finishes scanning Player 0, the code should store the fourth shape into GRP1 (copying GRP0 into shifter 0), the fifth shape into GRP0 (copying GRP1 into shifter 1), the sixth shape into GRP1 (copying GRP0 into shifter 0) and anything into GRP0 (copying GRP1 into shifter 1). Since the beam moves nine pixels during each store, the beam will move 27 pixels between the first and last of those four stores. There are 32 pixels between the end of the first Player 0 copy and the start of the last Player 1 copy, so things work with one cycle to spare.

Ich bin jetzt ein paar Jahre zu spät für ne zeitige Antwort, aber ja, ich kenne den Laden. Die hatten auch eine Dependance in der Thalkirchnerstrasse, das war dann das ganz große Ding bei uns in der Gegend, wo sich alle Kinder getroffen haben. Der Laden hiess bei uns nur der "Atari". Wenn man also einen Kumpel zuhause besucht hatte, und er war nicht da, dann sagte die Mutter sowas wie "Der ist grad im Atari"... Man bekam dort für 50 Pfennig einen Chip (so ein rundes Plastikding mit nem Loch in der Mitte), für den man 5 Minuten spielen konnte. Tolle Sache. Aber nach etwa einem dreiviertel Jahr wars dort dann auch wieder ziemlich leer, die Leute sind dann wieder draussen in der Natur spielen gegangen. (haha. nein, schmarrn).... Den Laden in der Sonnenstrasse habe ich erst später gesehen, und dann habe ich noch mitbekommen, dass die Video Magic Läden auf einmal erst ab 18 Jahren zugänglich sein sollten, weils ja irgendwie auch Spielhallen waren (Ja, ist schon schlimm und charakterverderbend für einen 10 Jährigen, Space Invaders unter Aufsicht spielen zu können), und da wars dann ganz aus mit der "zahle Chip und spiele dafür" Sache, und der Video Magic bei uns im Viertel hat dann zugemacht. Schöne zeit gewesen....

On the Supercharger: i have read up somewhere that you cannot run all Atari games on the SC...Are there any restrictions on coding with this? and, 6kb are not the world these days with average homebrew sizes of 16k.. Seems the way to go for me at the moment though, paying 250 euros for a cuttle cart to develop on a system that costs me 10 euro is a little bit weird. hmm... Hope i can upload some nice little bin with my last steps through the curious world of VCS Assembly here in a few days...

Think about it, once a sprite has been used, it can be rewritten. :-) -Thom Well, i know...But wouldn't that mean i have to flicker them, if they are on the same scanline? The Ladybug title is definitely wider than 16 pixels (=2 spites). And the only other way to display more sprites in the same scanline area without flicker that i have heard about so far is the RESP0 strobing trick. But this seems to display only copies of the same sprite. So, again, thats out of the question... Gimme a clue !!!

In the last days i checked out a lot of homebrew programs if found here, like ladybug, Pcman4k or Man goes down, and a couple of others, for seeing how these particular effects in these games were done, and thinking about how i would do them myself. Most of the stuff i was able to get analyzed, like when do sprites flicker in these games, and when not. How are the dots in ladybug and pacman4k displayed, although they have different colors from the rest of the playfield(simply alternating lines), and a couple of other stuff i have witnessed.. I really wonder how the title screens of ladybug and Man goes down are made. Especially the Ladybug title graphic seems to be made by a couple of sprites next to each other, otherwise i cannot explain the "hi-res-ness", and is certainly more than 16 pixels broad. Any pointers to this from the experienced people here?

I copied the whole tutorial into one big .doc file, and yesterday i printed it out. So i am able to read the whole thing on my way to and from work. Really helpful stuff. This and Kirk Israels into the breach tutorial really showed me the way. Thanks a lot, this must have been a big load of work... Michael

Yep, definitely check out the VecFlash before you buy a multicart. It's worth every penny, and you can have homebrewn stuff running on your Vectrex. But even if you are just buying a Vectrex for Minestorm alone, it's worth it... Check out the quality of the unit before you buy something on Ebay though... Old Vectrex units suffer from vector drift (caused by old capacitors and disalignment)...

I have to admit i dont like any controller design after the SNES/Genesis Era. I like the old flat NES/SNES Gamepads, and i like the Wiimote/Nunchuck combi now, but i have never been friends with these modern gamecontrollers from the N64/PS1 upwards. Too many buttons, pads, sticks in one device. And the GC one is especially bad in this fields. To each his own, tastes are different.

damn, that was the right code coupled with the wrong bin... (small edit: if you assemble the "redline.asm" you will notice what i mean, anyway, tomorrow i will post the bin file that i mean, sorry for the inconvenience..) By compiling redline.asm, I presume you meant to say that the player refused to move down. Certainly the code looks correct, but the most baffling errors (As I've found out while I toil away on Action RPG) is the simplest oversight. SkipMoveDown lda 100000 bit SWCHA bne SkipMoveUp dec YPosFromBot You forgot the # in front of the 100000. As such instead of loading an immediate value into the accumulator you're loading the contents of memory location 100000 into the accumulator - which could be anything. When you then do a bit test on SWCHA on those contents it's interpreting it as down never being pressed. -- Mord Editted because my eglish sux. *nod self* Sorry for the late reply, BUT: THANKS ALOT !!! You were right...

The same idea, but for all of the other Wii Sports disciplines as well. A more detailed Tennis would be a dream for me. Or Golf.

I heard it's america only at the moment...Hope this comes to Europe also...

It isn't really a design flaw at all. The Classic controller works through the Wii remote which is sending blue tooth signals to the Wii on which button or controller your using at the given time. When you fire up a Cube game, the blue tooth and basically the Wii itself shuts down and reboots as a gamecube. Since the blue tooth only works while the Wii is in Wii mode and doesn't work or isn't able to work in Cube mode, you can't really state that the classic controller not working for Cube games is a design flaw. If you want to look at a design flaw, Then ask why Nintendo didn't just include blue tooth support as a whole for the Cube mode? That is also easy to answer, I'm sure it has to do with issues on the other controllers. In other words the Cube games aren't programmed to interpret the blue tooth signals from a wireless controller. So the games themselves would have had to be redone of some sort of patches perhaps provided to make them work. Another possible thing Nintendo might have been able to do, is to add some sort of logic to the blue tooth where it might have had the ability to translate the blue tooth signals and pass them onto the cube so that it could recognize the controllers. For whatever reason this wasn't done. Perhaps there was was unacceptable lag or it could have likely been a cost cutting measure. Eitherway, without the blue tooth being active in Cube mode, the only wireless controllers for the Wii in Cube mode is the wavebirds. I remember we had this dicussion some months before. I think i can call this a design flaw, even if there are apparent reasons for this. Having 2 different controllers for the sake of playing old games feels weird to me. The classic controller seems to be perfectly blending into the design concept, so it would be nice to be able to use it for GC games also. I guess i dont particularly get along with the GC controller, and this keeps me from having fun playing any GC games. Call me ignorant, or whatever, but it's just my feeling on this issue. I think Nintendo decided to keep development costs and time down on this one, so we have to live with this, but it's far from a perfect solution.

USB Keyboard support is awesome...And i really hope this will work in Opera in the future.

I still think this was Nintendos big design flaw, to have the classic controller not covering the Gamecube games as well. I dont like the GC Controller in the least.

Microsoft is asking for only 99 Dollars for the same thing, as far as i know. But, well, i hope some decent games come out of this.

Hope Alex is fine too, so he can do some Vectrex stuff again... Protector is teh awesome...

So, there is no easily accessible USB-Flash etc solution available it seems.. Oh how spoilt us Vectrexians are with the VecFlash, that Richard H. gave us.