catsfolly

On THE FLASH TV show last night, the mysterious girl (who might be Dawn Allen from the future) was wearing an "Oregon Trails" T-shirt. How timely is that?

My favorite is "LunchTime" which was a clone of the Intellivision version of Burgertime for the Radio Shack Color computer... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydwd0lJYdQU

I first met Keith when we went to high school together, at Mira Costa high school in Manhattan Beach. He was well-known in high school for making funny drawings and elaborate films. Our high school had one physics class. I took the class a year after Keith did. For physics, we had to keep a "lab notebook". In the lab notebook, we had to make drawings of our experimental setups. A classmate told me that Keith had spiced up his lab notebook drawings by adding silly things like gorilla hands holding the equipment. I thought that was a funny idea, so the next time I saw Keith, I smiled and said "I heard about your Physics lab notebook!" Keith looked shocked. His reply was "What! How did you hear about that? No one is supposed to known about it. Don't tell anyone about it!" I said "Okay". Apparently there was something else interesting about Keith's Physics lab notebook, something controversial. But I don't feel guilty telling this story though, because I still have no idea what it was all about... Keith made elaborate movies. For one scene, one of Keith's friends jumped off the "Mark Twain" paddle boat into the "river" at Disneyland. Somehow, his friend wasn't injured, and Keith talked his way out of their getting arrested. So, we were all sure Keith would be a movie director or producer someday. Keith did go on the work in special effects, and even worked with George Lucas on Star Wars ("Star Wars, The Holiday Special...") The next time I encountered Keith was at Mattel Electronics. Funny thing was, I didn't recognize him at first. When I knew Keith in high school, he was much shorter than me, and slightly overweight. So I was surprised to meet him 9 years later and discover that he was now much taller than me and thin and lanky. Apparently he waited until college to have his growth spurt. Keith had been at Mattel about a month when I got there, and he was already working on Solar Sailer. Keith and Mark Urbaniec competed with each other to make the coolest game, which let to innovations like custom fonts for their games. After Solar Sailer, Keith moved into management. I ended up working for M Network on Atari 2600 games, so I never worked with Keith directly. But Keith helped to make Mattel a fun place to work - he threw all his energy into everything, whether it was making "Blue Sky Ranger" logos and t-shirts, or company events, or even the company softball teams. After Mattel closed, Terri Valeski bought the Intellivision rights. He subcontracted with Realtime Associates and Quicksilver software (companies founded by ex-blue sky rangers) to make new games for the system. Keith helped with the manuals and box art. In his spare time, he created his own comic strip - Making it. He was also a leader in the effort to keep the city of Manhattan Beach from tearing down the landmark Manhattan Beach pier (last time I checked, the pier was still there...) After 5-6 years, Terri Valeski's company went bankrupt. which left him holding the rights to the Intellivision Intellectual property. Keith and his friends tracked down Valeski and bought the rights from him. From then on, Keith kept the Intellivision brand alive through releases for the popular consoles and the PC and MAC, and plug and play games. and t-shirts and other goods. He could tell stories about the Mattel days for hours, and was always entertaining and enthusiastic, and generous in his praise of the people he had worked with. He was the face and voice of Intellivison Inc. He will be missed.

Yeah, recent versions of IntyBasic give a lot of warnings if a label is defined but not actually referenced in the code. It's a little annoying, but sometimes it helps to find a bug. Generally I just put "rem" in front of my unused labels to get rid of the warnings, and then "unrem" them if I actually need them... Catsfolly

It compiles fine for me. Are you by any chance using a version of Intybasic older than version 1.2.3 (the first version to allow an expression for a mob index)? The "c" variable is the only variable I see in that line... Catsfolly

Here in Japan, most people seem surprised to hear that there were video games before the Famicom (NES). There was a Famicom retro-boom a few years ago (because of the many clone players that came out), but it seems to have died down now. But, I never saw an actually Famicom-mini in a shop anywhere, so they must have all sold out quickly. Occasionally, I see items like "Super Cartridge Vision" Games. Some Retro shops in Akihabara have the old Bandai Inteiilivision, but in most Japanese shops they have just the maintream stuff: Nintendo, Sega, Sony, and NEC. Catsfolly

I read it as: [There is no question in my mind about whether I will buy this or not] I need this. When [will it be available] is the question? The blue parts I filled in with my imagination. Your imagination may vary...

Here are some simple experiments, so people have something to criticize: 1. A single dot animated (click to animate) : 2. 2 dots in a line (click to animate): 3. A separate dot moves at a different speed (click to animate): Here is the source code: r.bas Catsfolly

Whilst we wait for those smart people to show up, I'll try some diagonal rain brainstorming... 1. The most straightforward way to do rain would be to use the motion objects. Of course this means that you could only have 8 raindrops at a time. (Unless you multiplex the objects - that would cause them to flicker, which might be okay for raindrops. ) The big problem is that you usually need the motion objects for other things - like player characters and enemies and shots and explosions... 2. If you have blank background characters, you could assign them to a gram character, and draw new rain animation frames every interrupt to the gram character. If you have a genius graphics designer (or just work on it for a ridiculously long time), you could maybe design the animation so that the raindrops exiting the gram character at the end of the animation match up with raindrops entering the character at the start of the animation - that way the animation will "tile" over several backtab characters. You can set the motion object priority so these backtab drops appear on top of the motion objects. 3. If your background is full of custom characters, you can try adding an animation (like in step 2 above) to each gram card. Then the rain will be on top of the graphics (of course it will be the same color as whatever is in the gram card). Since you can only write about 20 gram cards per interrupt, this could only work for simple backgrounds. 4. If you loosen the connections between the Intellivision and your tv, you can sometimes get a "snow" effect. It's not rain, though... (nor is it diagonal)... That's all I can think of at the moment... COME ON SMART PEOPLE! Catsfolly

(x, y :- A u B; x != y) x^2 - y^2 >= 0 The meaning is: x, y :- A u B can you X-plain Y people are so excited? When the Union of Atariage rumors and Believable facts is still unknown? x != y Xcitement isn't the only reason Y x^2 - y^2 >= 0 Hopefully the Squares of our Xcitement and Yearnings will add up to more than zero. What could be simplier? Catsfolly

Thanks for the kind words. This is not really my game, it is just a port of RetroBrad's game. But I do have some ideas on how to improve the Intellivision version - now I just have to find the time to work on it...

No. If I had known that people would still be curious about what went on at Mattel Electronics 35 years later, I would have taken some notes.... Catsfolly

Well, it's a long story and probably doesn't belong in this thread, but since you asked… The hardware dept of Mattel Electronics bought a Colecovision as soon as it came out, and they took it apart to see what made it tick. Until the Colecovision and Atari 5200 came out, Intellivision was the top of the game console world in power and sophistication, so Mattel's engineers wanted to understand what their new competitor was like. Besides studying the hardware, they also disassembled and printed a listing of the Colecovision BIOS and at least one of the games (I think it was Cosmic Avenger). However, none of the hardware engineers were excited about looking through pages of disassembled Z80 code, so they asked me if I would take a look at it. At that time, Mattel had not publically expressed any interest in developing games for the Colecovision. So I thought if i could get something up and running on the system (and show them how "easy" it was to develop for) it might motivate them to make Colecovision games. So I studied the disassembled listings, and I figured out enough of the code to set up the cartridge header and put up some sprites and read the controls. Unfortunately I didn't have a Z80 development system to try things out on. Fortunately, in order to speed up shipping, some of the early Colecovision games shipped with EPROMS in the cartridge instead of ROMS. So I took the cartridge of a game I didn't especially like (I think it was "Looping"), unsoldered one of the EPROMS and put in a socket. This was my development platform. I would write code, burn it into an EPROM, put it in the socket, and then try it and try and guess why it didn't work… After many tries I got it to the point where I had the Intellivision running man on the Colecovision screen, controllable with the Coleco controllers. I showed it to Mike Minkoff, and he seemed surprised. What I didn't know was that Mattel had decided to develop Colecovision games, and that they wanted to use a "clean room" reverse engineering approach. The "clean room" approach would work like this: a team of engineers outside Mattel would study the Colecovision and its code. These engineers would then create a document that described the Colecovision memory map and BIOS routines. Mattel Engineers would then write Colecovision games using only this document, and would never look at any Coleco code. That way, Mattel couldn't be accused of copying any Coleco code. Since I had studied the Coleco code personally, I was "tainted", and therefore not elegible to work on Coleco games. But, there was plenty of Atari 2600 work to do, so I was fine (well, until the whole game industry collapsed and Mattel Electronics shut down a little over a year later…) Catsfolly

1. Time Bombs (Intellivision) This was my "do something on the Intellivision to get up to speed" project. Time bombs were bouncing around the screen (why???), and the player had to tag them all to defuse them. Management thought it looked promising, so they encouraged me to keep working on it, but I joined the Atari 2600 team a few weeks later and never worked on it again. (In hindsight, a game where the player's goal is to prevent stuff from blowing up seems like a mistake...) 2.Dual Scrolling - This was like a 2600 technical demo where two game characters were in a maze, and the top half of the screen had the camera centered on one game character, and the bottom half of the screen had the camera centered on the other game character... 3. Party Line 2600 - Keith and Bill Fisher and Andy Sels conceived of simple games that people could play competitively at parties - they called them the party line games (Nintendo would have a lot of success with this kind of game years later...) I worked on the Atari 2600 version of "Blow Out" but didn't make much progress on it. 4. Triple Action Biplanes was very popular among Mattel's programmers. I read the source code of the game to understand how the physics worked, and then wrote a document so others could understand it without having to read the code. Steve Crandall read my document and created a version of biplanes for the 2600. Marketing thought the biplanes game looked too similar to Atari's own 2600 Combat game. But I think this code was the start of what became Rocky and Bullwinkle...

I worked on Atari 2600 games like Star Strike and Bump and Jump, and some other projects that I never finished. And I reverse-engineered the Colecovision, even though I wasn't supposed to....

I joined Mattel Electronics in January 1982. When I started, the company was located in a small area on the first floor of the Mattel Toys office building. When I started, The Mattel Electronics staff had already filled up the area allocated to them, so Mark Urbaniec and I were put in cubicles on the second floor, mixed in with people who designed catalogs, I think (I can't remember what they did actually...). Anyway, while I was trying to get up to speed on how to program the Intellivision, I would chat with Mark about the game he was developing, which at that time was called "Vectrix". The game was inspired by Tempest. Mark said management wanted something fast action and abstract. It was fun to watch it develop. Eventually, Mattel converted an old warehouse into the "Mattel Electronics" building. Mark Urbaniec and Keith Robinson worked in cubicles across the aisle from each other, and they would compete with each other trying to add cool effects into their games (Keith was working on "Solar Sailor" at the time...) I always liked the look and sounds of the game, but had mixed experiences playing it. Occasionally I would have a good run and quickly finish a level and feel good about it, but as the game progressed I felt more and more powerless, lurking in the shadows waiting for an energy boost to keep me alive while annoying bird like things picked apart the structure I had worked so hard to build...

To be precise, the "Analog NT Mini" is marketed as a high end 100 % compatible NES replacement. It has NES cartridge and controller ports, and its ads give no indication that it would run anything else. It retails for $449 dollars. The Analog NT Mini achieves its high degree of NES compatibility because it has an FPGA core, and the programming of that core was developed with the assistance of Kevtris, who has spent countless hours analyzing the original Nintendo chip set. Kevtris is also making some of his other FPGA cores available for the machine, which will enable it to simulate other systems, including the Intellivision. He is also looking into making controller adapters and/or cartridge adapters for various systems that could be added on to the machine.

Sorry it wasn't so funny. I was trying to imagine what Groovybee's interest ing news might be...

Nope. You might be confusing me with DZ-Jay, who has done some beta-testing on Groovybee's games and sometimes deflects the criticism thereof (does that qualify him as a "sidekick"?) I am just a person who paid for some games 4 years ago and am semi-patiently waiting for the games to come out, or at least to hear some news about their progress... I have no involvement in the development of these games whatsoever... Catsfolly

bump. Since there is no real news yet, how about some "Fake News"? --------- Fake News* --------- Fake News* --------- Fake News* --------- Fake News* ------------------------------------------------------ "Aliens Stole My Hard Drive" says GroovyZee Retro Game programmer GroovyZee was awakened last night when he heard strange noises and saw an eerie light coming from his computer laboratory. He ran to the laboratory and opened the door just in time to see an alien jump out the window, race to its spaceship, and zoom away into the night. When he looked around the lab, GroovyZee noticed a big gaping hole in his computer where the hard drive used to be. "Oh no!" He exclaimed! That hard drive contained the only copy of the source code of the game "Rocketeer" that GroovyZee had been developing for the Intellivision. The game had been in development for almost 4 years and was about 99.9 % done. "I was just waiting to finish the testing on my 2BZME cartridge hardware, then it would have been ready to go", he lamented. However, GroovyZee has not given up hope. "I think that by reverse-engineering the Jaguar version of Rocketeer (released in 2013), I can recreate the game and still release it in a timely fashion, as long as work and real life don't get in the way…" Please stand by for further developments. On second thought, maybe you had better take a seat. This might take a while…. * "Fake News" is a trademark of Trumpster Incorporated. However, the above news is like "Totally Fake" and is not endorsed or approved by by the Trumpster. However, if you leaked this "Fake News", then you are in big trouble buddy! We are going to find you…. Aliens! We are just kidding. We know you wouldn't steal anything. We are still a primitive planet with a lot to learn. Give us a break, okay?

Is a torchfork the "spork" for angry mobs? <<< torchfork <<< spork (I've been out of the country for a while, so I don't know about these things). We do have sporks in Japan, though... Catsfolly

Hey, What's up with our "informative update with interesting news"? It's Wednesday already! I have invested a lot of time in following this topic, and so far I have not found much that is either informative or interesting. It all seems like mostly a re-hash of past discussions... Maybe you shouldn't pre-announce interesting news before the news is written and tested and ready to announce? Can I get a refund of the time I spent reading this topic? (I guess I just hate waiting for things...) Catsfolly

The inputs just tell you the state of the keys - whether they are pressed or not. To detect that a key has been (newly) pressed, you first have to determine that the key has been "released" by waiting for it the key state to indicate "no key pressed" for several frames in a row. Once you know the key has been released, then the next time a key state changes, you can detect that "a key has been pressed" and use this information to trigger some action. Here is an entirely untested code outline of how this might be implemented: key_released = 0 release_frame_count = 0 const release_frameLimit = 5 new_key = 0 check_for_key: procedure if key_released = 1 then if cont1.key <> 12 then new_key = cont1.key : key_released = 0 : release_frame_count = 0 return end if rem waiting for a number of frames in a row with no keys pressed if cont1.key = 12 then release_frame_count = release_frame_count +1 else release_frame_count = 0 if release_frame_count > release_frame_limit then key_released = 1 end if end rem in the launch routine if new_key <> 0 then gosub launch_disc : new_key = 0 rem in the call back routine if disc_launched AND (new_key <> 0) then gosub callback_disc : new_key = 0 Catsfolly

You have a good point, but sometimes I think it is better to get an example program done quickly (to answer someone's question), rather than wait until the example code is "perfect". In this case, I didn't know if an IntyBasic routine could scroll half the screen fast enough to beat the STIC chip's display update. I thought maybe an assembly language routine would be necessary. So after I did a quick test and found that it could work. I wanted to get that information out. So as a result, I now find myself answering questions about non-obvious parts of my code... For myself, it is faster to type (BACKTAB_ADDR + 20 * 3 + 5) than to lookup the screenadrs macro and check whether the row or column comes first. I think that at some point, IntyBasic programmers have to "GROK" that the screen is a 20 column wide by 12 rows high block of continuous memory, and that writing past the end of the screen can crash the system. Otherwise, they are not going to have much success printing on the Intellivision... Catsfolly

Some players play Deadly Disks by using the Disc on one controller, and the keypad on the other.