Gemintronic

I was experimenting with embedding the ball and missiles into the player sprite for collision. My code is too buggy to show. But, maybe with your savvy at least the concept would pan out In this demo it is possible to get trapped when the player gets stuck inside the playfield. Platforms with thin floors will cause the player to fall through if they just jumped. badaegondemo.bin

I think batari BASIC users all go through the phase where we don't understand how bad the keyboard is (as a joystick). Get a cheap USB joystick and test your game with that. I use a spare Xbox One joystick.

One thing to note is that the flickering of virtual sprites can annoy the eyes of your game players. Really depends on the person and the TV/monitor being used. What I try to do is design my game so that virtual sprites never have to be on the same horizontal band as eachother.

Strangely this might be more suitable for the Atari 5200 or 7800. The mock up has multiple sprites that would be keen to seek the player. When more than two sprites are on the same horizontal plane they'll flicker like crazy.

..from RAINBIRD!! Rainbird rainbird Sorry. Unless you say the whole thing it gets stuck in your head for the rest of the day!

The original poster way back in 2014 stated $70 titles being a breaking point. Also, availability. The opposite of expensive, well packaged games is experimental, simpler games with cheaper/loose cart packaging. Is there a demand for such games? It feels like the bar is set pretty high.

Even with slightly better and more expensive (thus harder to sell) hardware the big N was coming. The only alternative history that makes sense is if Atari called Miss Cleo for their free reading and agreed to become a shell company that sells Nuntendo product. The problem with THAT is that purchasers for big stores were sure video games had stopped being a trend. Also, very little trust in Atari to sell like the old days. I doubt Atari management would follow the big Ns "bend over backwards" and "hide the fact it's a video game system" philosophy that won the day either.

it looks like you set the cart type to 32k ROM with SuperChip RAM. That means you have a lot more variables to work with. Just, they have a weird way of accessing them. https://www.randomterrain.com/atari-2600-memories-batari-basic-commands.html#superchipram

The Xbox One joystick is comfortable and has enough buttons for most systems. Although I haven't tried to get it's wireless dongle working. Intellivision core needs a Jaguar to USB adapter so I get a joypad AND that numberpad.

I thought I saw that you posted about having your own score related code in there (5 digit score topic). Does this effect people who use modied score_graphics.asm? I know I needed to modify that to include A-F and something else for RevEngs multi kernel framework.

Not an answer, but, I suspect whatever chips the Inty board has is not easily soldered off and on again. Probably have better luck with hardware assist on the cartridge either in a new standard library, additional CPU or more RAM.. or, all three!

If I were really clever I'd find where bB actually draws the score and tell it to skip the middle two digits. That would leave the center score variable free for use UPDATE: Not clever enough. I did realize one could do a "const noscore = 1" and then use the playerscores mini kernel. Not sure if that would increase the bloat though. https://atariage.com/forums/topic/113146-minikernel-player-scores/

If there's no graphic specified for hex value A wouldn't it point to invalid data on a real cartridge? @KevKelly: did you try adding the extra A-F values as documented in the links and you ran out of space? Not bugging or anything. Just curious about these things

My first PC experience was at my best friends house. There was still something called "middle class" back then and they just barely afforded an XT clone. It had a wondrously grindy hard drive and a proprietary 16 color mode that we never used - although some shareware came up in exotic 16 color CGA. The first PC of my own was a CompuAdd 386sx at 25mhz. Once I bought a copy of Borland C and wiped Win 3.1 off to make room. Poor Windows got slapped around and demeaned on the system. Even upgraded to Windows 95 by installing RAM Doubler so it would report enough memory to pass the installation check.

Working with instead of against score mode I came up with this mock up I compiled and ran in Stella. Not terrible!