catsfolly

I'll have you know that all my demo ROMs are "derriere-complete" !

The Apple II computer had a minimalist audio circuit. A speaker was wired to the address decoder circuit for the "sound" register. Whenever the "sound register" address was accessed, a click was heard in the speaker. That was it. With this simple setup, programmers wrote code that played multi-part music harmony, and even voice synthesis. What impressed me was that some games played music in the background while the game was playing. Since the Apple II had no software programmable interrupts, the programmer had to design the game program to make sure that no matter what path the code took, the execution time would be the same, so that at the proper intervals the code could hit the sound register. This was the audio version of "chasing the beam".

The Sinclair ZX81 computer didn't have a true "graphics generator" circuit - instead the designers tricked the Z80 processor into generating the graphics display data stream. As a result, even though the computer was designed to display only character graphics, programmers have rewritten the display code to generate "hires" displays and games.

You can only tease people for so long - eventually you have to really announce something...

Actually, Disney sued Williams (the makers of the Robotron arcade game) back in the day (TRON 1 era) for copyright and trademark violations. But Disney lost the suit...

From the main menu in Paddle Party, press "7" to access Hockey Robots of Death. (Only 5 choices are displayed on the screen). Do not press 8. Catsfolly

My point was there there was no technical reason that forced me to limit the background robots to 12. It was a decision based on the Hockey Robots gameplay (in that game the player is completely helpless when separated from the hockey puck, so I felt they needed some breathing room...) There is no reason why you couldn't have 20-30 background robots, combined with regular motion objects to make a hectic, robotron like game. The only gotcha is, with the way I am doing the background objects, they can only move vertically or horizontally. So it might not be as exact a Robotron clone as you would like...

It looked more like a Berzerk/Frenzy clone - but since the robots weren't moving yet, it is hard to tell exactly...

Hockey Robots of Death had up to 12 robots running around on the screen at once (as background objects), along with the hockey puck and the player paddle and the hockey puck trail and explosion animations and robot shots.... I limited the number of robots to 12 because the screen felt kind of cluttered at that point. So, I think the Intellivision could handle a Robotron style game... Catsfolly

Good question! Unfortunately, it has been over 30 years since I have looked at the exec, so I can't remember if it has any string support or not. In general, I feel writing in IntyBasic is much less tedious than assembly, because it takes a lot fewer lines of IntyBasic to do the same work as in assembly. Fewer lines means less typing and less code to maintain, and fewer opportunities for typos and other mistakes. On the other hand, on this project I was fighting against the limits of IntyBasic's data structures, while if I had used assembly I could have set up my data exactly the way I wanted it. I did an "easter egg" for the game Intellipongola where, after the game ended, a text box popped up and showed a ridiculously long chat session between two Bill and Ted type characters. The chat session repeats a few times, and then one of the characters gets tired of saying the same things over and over, and so in order to "say something new" he uses the random number generator to make new sentences - but of course they are just random. <-- click to animate, dude! This project was about the same level of complexity as the Trollish Comment Generator, and as far as I can remember, it took about twice as long to write. But maybe that is because it was my first time to try and do this sort of thing.... Catsfolly

Well, I think sooner or later Intybasic will get some kind of support for strings, and then this program will not be a good example (people will look at it and say "Why did this guy write such twisted code when he could have just called the string functions?"). So maybe it is not a good candidate for the samples directory... Here is the current source code if you are interested... tcg.bas Catsfolly

You obviously have no need for my program.

Cool. I am looking forward to shooting some things soon.. Catsfolly

That MUST be it. People aren't just downloading the rom image - they're passing it around. Probably, even as we speak, people in far off lands who have never even HEARD of Atariage are running my program and wondering "What kind of game WOULD Amish Popsicle collectors design, anyway?" That would explain the low download count. Piracy!!! Arghhhh!

With a heavy heart, I am officially announcing that I am cancelling my dream of producing a deluxe, CIB version of my "Trollish Comment Generator" utility. After a few days of availability, less than 10 copies of the "TCG" rom image have been downloaded. I am no financial wizard, but I imagine I would need to print much more than 10 boxes in order to get a reasonable price break on them. So, in short, the numbers are just not there. I can't justify going through with the project. I thought that maybe the world was filled with people who wanted to be irritating, obnoxious trolls, but were just lacking a creative spark to enable them to fullfill their potential. Apparently, I was wrong. Apparently, the world is filled with gentle, kind hearted souls, who respect each other, and whose only wish is to support and encourage others with thoughtful and helpful words… These people have no need of a trollish comment generator… (sigh) So, my dream of creating a financial empire by making and selling troll-enabling tools and utilities - that dream is shattered into dust - crushed beyond repair…. gone, vanquished, kaput - nothing now but a memory…. Oh well, that's life I guess… On to the next project…. Catsfolly

GIF Fans! I added GIF animation to the first post so people could see what the program looks like (without having to download the whole 5.5 k tcg.rom file.) Catsfolly

What is this? Some people were apparently born to be trolls - they can come up with rude, annoying, and inane comments all day long, with seemingly no effort. At the other extreme, some people are so bound by arcane concepts like "good manners", "respect for others", "common courtesy", etc that they couldn't possible be trolls, even if their lives depended on it. But what about people in the middle? Maybe you WANT to be obnoxious, and irritating, and drive other people crazy, but you just can't come up with enough annoying things to say? Does this describe you? If you are in this middle group, and you have an Intellivision (or a compatible emulator), then you are in luck! Intellivision to the Rescue! This revolutionary program takes ancient mad-lib technology, combines it with the new multi-random capabilities of IntyBasic 1.1, and couples it with the power and fury of the Intellivision 16 bit processor to generate more trollish comments than you could possibly want or use... Best of all, it's absolutely free (for a limited time…) Give it a try… tcg.rom (disclaimer - no actual intend to insult or offend anyone is intended or implied. If the program offends you, please delete it…) Edit: Here's a gif. Click to animate...

From Intellipongola - here's the gram character for the ball: ; number # 2 ; name: ball _gfx_eo SET 0 _gfx_w SET 0 gfx_row "##......" gfx_row "##......" gfx_row "##......" gfx_row "##......" gfx_row "........" gfx_row "........" gfx_row "........" gfx_row "........" And here is the gram character for the ball shifted down one scan line: ; obj 29 ball half position _gfx_eo SET 0 _gfx_w SET 0 gfx_row "........" gfx_row "##......" gfx_row "##......" gfx_row "##......" gfx_row "##......" gfx_row "........" gfx_row "........" gfx_row "........" ; object 30 light Notice the extra blank line at the top of the image. If the fractional part of the object's y position is one half or greater, I use the second image, so the ball appears to move down one scan line. Since the object's vertical resolution is twice that of backtab, it appears to move down half a scan line (in backtab terms). Does this help?

If a game can spare the gram space, it can "fake" moving mobs at half vertical resolution. This is done by having two gram images for the object, one of which is shifted down one scan line from the other. Nomally, the unshifted gram image is displayed. But when the object needs to move down half a pixel, the code displays the shifted down image instead.

This is a good idea in general. If you post several versions of your game that look about the same, someone will invariably get or run some old version of the game and confuse you with bug reports and comments about things that you changed a long time ago. A version number or date on the title screen helps reduce these kinds of problems...

It's getting better. The game has a better feel to it now. The Alligator is very big and scary looking. Here are a couple of suggestions. Remember, it's YOUR game, so feel free to ignore them all. 1. I get dizzy watching the monkey spin all the time. Maybe the monkey could NOT spin when jumping straight up and down, and then spin clockwise when going to the right, and counterclockwise when going to the left? If nothing else, it would provide more variety to the animation... 2. The turtles should definitely sink into the water a bit when the monkey bounces off them. Something like this: So far, so good... Catsfolly

What about the SNAKE game? It came out in 2015! At the moment, it has had more than 41 downloads! That's more games than BLIX sold in 2014! It's definitely the best reptile themed game of the year so far!!!!

This looks like it's from my "one_sprite.bas" sample program, that displays a robot running across the screen. In this example, the robot has 4 frames of animation: gramchars: REM 0 BITMAP "...####." BITMAP "...###.." BITMAP "...####." BITMAP "....#..." BITMAP "..######" BITMAP "..#.#..." BITMAP "....#..." BITMAP ".....#.." REM 1 BITMAP "...####." BITMAP "...###.." BITMAP "...####." BITMAP "....#..." BITMAP "..######" BITMAP "..#.#..." BITMAP "....##.." BITMAP "....#..." REM 2 BITMAP "...####." BITMAP "...###.." BITMAP "...####." BITMAP "....#..." BITMAP "..######" BITMAP "..#.#..." BITMAP "....#.#." BITMAP "...#...." REM 3 BITMAP "...####." BITMAP "...###.." BITMAP "...####." BITMAP "....#..." BITMAP "..######" BITMAP "..#.#..." BITMAP "...##..." BITMAP "......#." These frames are loaded into GRAM cards 0-3. So the sprite command takes the x coordinate of the sprite and "ANDS" it with 3 to choose one of the 4 animation frames to display.

Indeed, so many other ideas! -dZ. On the other hand... My jazz-piano playing friend told me that all the "greats" of jazz piano were classically trained, and then made the jump from classical to jazz. He seemed to think that being grounded in the classics must be a good foundation for making good jazz. So maybe programming a version of a classic game might give someone a good foundation for making new original games. For instance, as a random example, if someone made a detailed study of and created their own version of say, "Pacman", it might help them to make a nice original maze game in the future. Catsfolly

It was an entirely original game based on pancakes and a government project even Snowden doesn't know about. There are no pirates in the game now, but there COULD be... That Atari2600land Guy stole my idea! Mind reader! Does he think he owns all of breakfast now? Oh well, back to the drawing board... Catsfolly ]