ilmarque

Is it possible to use more than 26 bytes of ram with inline asm? Undoubtedly it is possible but how badly will it mess things up?

This is true. Althought it has never caused any problems with any TV we've tested our demos with. I've been thinking of changing it that way, but apparently i've been too lazy to do it. But i promise to fix it before the next release. Haha, no I wrote that ram clear loop a few years ago when i knew very little about 6502 and i haven't even looked at that part of the framework ever since. Thanks for constructive feedback

Probably the best way to make songs to sound less out of tune is to choose notes that are somewhat in tune. The downside of this method is that you'll have a very narrow selection of notes to use. That's probably the reason why most of my 2600 songs sound pretty much the same For Saigon I used Paul Slocum's music kit which i've been modifying a lot over the years. For example I've added a simple decay/sustain for both channels which makes the sound a bit smoother and may also give the illusion of having more than 2 channels. I've also added a simple vibrato, which simply varies the pitch of one channel between 2 values.

These videos are from emulator. Our friend Jimmy will hopefully capture Saigon from a real Atari soon. We've discussed and considered this option but personally i've no interest in working with Batari Basic.

Two new 4k demos for Atari 2600 were released last weekend in Poland at Sillyventure 2k10 demoparty. Saigon by Trilobit Download binary SillyFiller by noice Download binary edit: I forgot to mention that once again these are PAL only

Wow... that's pretty impressive I've done something a bit similar myself but i used playfield instead of sprites. Also i haven't used any extra ram so the resolution is pretty low. I'm looking forward to reading the source code.

What happened with this? Did you ever make an even better YouTube video using S-Video? If you did, please let me know and I'll delete this one: The s-video kit we ordered didn't work as well as we expected so our friend ended up designing and building his own video output mod. However, it seems that the rotating cube effect doesn't work properly on real hardware thanks to badly timed HMOVE. I've been intending to fix it but i've rather spent my time on new projects. Sure. Go ahead. Thanks

I did it by changing the background color instead of sprite colors and masking the area around sprites with playfield. This way you have to place the sprites in the middle of the screen horizontally though.

Just be patient

Ok. Thank you for your quick and in depth answer. Time to get coding

This is neat. Good work Have you tested these on real hardware? When i tried to run testscr2 on MESS and ColEm i got just a black screen but it worked fine on Vcoleco. Also, for example in the bunny game ColEm shows only the upper ~1/3 of the screen. Any idea why?

This is definately the best one. I didn't notice a single glitch. Thanks!

Thanks for your efforts. We really appreciate it Btw. We ordered a s-video kit today, which means that we'll hopefully get authentic video captures in the near future.

In the second version scrolltexts look a bit funny... As if there were pixels missing. The wobbly hires-picture doesn't look normal either. Also the music might be even more out of sync than in the first version. As a whole I think the first one was better.

I tried capturing it with CamStudio 2.5 to see if I could get a clearer picture. If you like this, I can send you the video so you can upload it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuFPK0A0hYg&fmt=18 Thanks! Apparently you used a frame merger for the whole demo. It causes some blurriness in those effects that don't use flickering. Also, music gets a bit out of sync towards the end. Anyhow, plasma and that pixel effect look a lot better in your version. In my opinion we could keep both versions online.

Finally. A YouTube video: HQ:

Too bad it's so difficult to make good use of all the colors. At best there're maybe 30 different colors showing in Doctor. I've been trying to make a decent video capture for youtube but i need some advice. There're couple of scenes that use 25hz flicker. What would be the best way to mix consecutive frames so that the video would look good at ~25fps?

You have some nice ideas. I'm not sure if any of these routines were that usable for making games. Most of them have 0-5 spare cycles per scanline. Of course they could be simpler and be based more on precalculated data instead of real time calculating but i still wouldn't use them as a basis for a game. As for random terrains i think the Boulder Dash 2600 way to do it is the best. I don't find the amout of colors that important. On VCS it'll look just as ugly anyway Also it wouldn't make much sense as we don't have any ntsc machines. Anyway.. i try to make a ntsc version of Doctor as soon as possible.

Thank you for your kind words Yes... we could make a NTSC version but i don't want to see a single line of code right now. I'd have to rewrite some parts of the 3d cube to make it work on NTSC console. Well... the 'real' version should work on real hardware but there's a slight chance that it doesn't. The demo was finished in a serious hurry and i might have mistyped something. If that's the case, then we'll post a new .bin soon. Are there any certain techniques / effects you'd like to see in a game? We've been thinking about making a game but first we've to come up with the best game idea ever

I use photoshop I've made a simple converter which splits bitmaps to 8 pixel wide slices and converts them to binary, adds labels and even memory addresses if i want to use indirect addressing. There isn't any kind of user interface, so i have to compile the converter every time i want to change any values. I might make a more user friendly version some day but i wouldn't count on it.

My tracker would probably use a heavily modified version of Paul's music kit 2. I've removed some useless things from it and added features like sustain, vibrato, glitching and fade in & out. I have some nifty ideas but i don't want to talk about them yet :>

Yes. And someone will probably make one some day. I've been working on a 2600-compatible tracker but it's still far from anything usable. Hmm... your question made me want to continue working on it

Oh, sorry. I thought you meant it the other way around. No they don't

Newsflash: tom/jones was released before that episode of Robot Chicken was aired. ...and besides, they don't even sound alike.

Believe me, you'll see even more amazing things in the future