Propane13

Ok, just to close out this thread-- there was an issue with too many cycles, but that wasn't my main issue. The main corruption issue seems to have stemmed from not initializing RAM on the 7800 properly. I'm guessing that emulation sometimes defaults certain memory areas to $00, whereas in a real hardware situation, such RAM locations could have any random value on power-up.

Thanks for the link! Though I still want to see one up close and personal.

Hello! I was thinking of going to NAVA for the first time ever in NJ on Saturday, and I wanted to see a Cuttle Cart 2 in action (since I've never seen one). 2 random questions I have are: - Does anyone in the Philly or NJ area have one? - If yes, what would it take to motivate you to go to NAVA on Saturday? Thanks! -John

Welcome to the forums. Just a random suggestion-- next time, you may want to keep the source code handy. Even if you're not planning to keep the source code, you can always post it here, so if you want to pick it back up, it's someplace. You never know when somebody might say "hey, I like this, and could you make this little tweak?" And, after a bunch of those types of iterations, you may end up with an amazing game. It's happened before. Anyhoo, welcome aboard the world of 2600 programming. -John

Ok, I've waited long enough-- the tension is just too intense. Please put me on the list (NTSC). -John

This will sound like a stupid question but-- I know that Boulderdash can be hard (especially since the amoeba can randomly generate, I think). Is the game verified to be beatable?

This looks awesome. Just wanted to share my support!

This looks really cool. So, what's the next step? Do you need more gameplay testing, or is this game pretty close to a final state?

Oh, and that link in my previous post has links to the maps as well.

One guy on these forums was challenged, and got a perfect score, after a LOT of trial and error. http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/91530-pitfall-ii-2nd-maze-ending-pix/

Looking good, as usual.

So, the challenge question is-- how far have people made it? Has anybody beaten it? Perhaps we need to have a contest-- a "bragging list" online, in order of people that have beaten the game, perhaps. Yes, I am guilty of not playing this enough, but such a challenge may bring this game out a little bit more. -John

Thanks for sharing! The Virtual Boy doesn't have a lot of love, so this is awesome news.

Maybe there's something "similar but different" in the works... -John

Well, homebrewing is an art-- the more time you put into it, the better you get. And, while the "Nintendo generation" is kind of taking off, the Atari generation is really starting to die out. For me personally, I've written/released a handful of tech demos and 2 games for the 2600. I've got a few 7800 projects brewing as well, and hope to release one of them as a game this year. You can check out my history-- I wrote "Pressure Gauge" in college, and 2-3 years ago released "Mean Santa" for the 2600. Pressure Gauge is infantile and blocky. It has good gameplay, but it was my "first experiment", and I am proud of it. With "Mean Santa", I was able to use new tricks I had learned over years of discussion with other programmers to make something better than my first attempts. And, I'm happy with that one too, and realize that I can push myself even more. To get to where I am now (which is nowhere near some of the greats on here) has taken me 12 years. You are right about the dedication level necessary. Yes; I have a life, and am not a teenager. When I got married and moved across the country a few years ago, I took (over) a year off of programming. I've had spurts of motivation, and times where I just can't do it. But sometimes, I get motivated to wake up very early and put in 30 minutes to an hour of work a day into something that could be fun. It means that I get less sleep, but I sometimes crave the satisfaction of putting something new out there. Imagine doing that almost every day for a few months, and you'll see the dedication level required to get something out that's better than a newbie's first attempt. Don't get me wrong on that-- we're all happy here for the new blood we're getting as well. Some have managed to improve over time and become much more skilled in their releases, and that's awesome. It is true that you don't program for a classic system for money. "Mean Santa" took a year on and off, and the money made comes back significantly less than minimum wage. So, the only people who would program for this system would be the curious, and those who love the system. So, in comparing to AVGN-- AVGN provides a lot of entertainment that crosses many platforms of games. Even if you don't have a Fairchild Channel F emulator, you can see what he's talking about and laugh along with his rants. All you need is a web-browser, or a friend with a web-browser. In this community, it's different-- if we take the 2600 itself, it is a specific platform that requires one of 3 (or 4) emulators to use and play. We can queue up a game in JStella and make it playable in a browser too, but at the end of the day, does the entertainment value match? Well-- I think it's apples-to-oranges. Go ahead and download my game Pressure Gauge. http://www.atariage.com/software_page.html?SoftwareLabelID=870 I spent a heck of a lot of time learning very hard assembly instructions, and getting myself a little game. It took a long time. I experienced timing nightmares, graphics glitches, a frustrating assembly environment, and limited emulation support. I had to climb over these to get a release, and the community was grateful when I could get something playable out there. However, if you weren't there during its development, it probably looks like a crappy game of blocks, with a one-button interface that you lose almost instantly. That's not something that the general public would appreciate, but at the time, the small band of Atari folks thought it wasn't a bad first attempt. I'm guessing a random AVGN watcher might think my game is total crap, and even submit it to AVGN to get made fun of. So, I think it has to do with appeal across the board. AVGN can be funny/amusing to many people across the globe. Solving a complicated Atari challenge doesn't frankly mean to much to people outside of this little group, and 6502 programming is not a skill that's portable to Android or IOS devices, so growing your skills for the 2600 doesn't really translate to more money in the long run. I've seen AVGN since the beginning, and he is growing his skills to make a movie, and then maybe someday, can use his skills to make his own independent films as a career choice. And, I think people want to get on board with that to see what he can do. For the 2600 programmer, our path is different. We can start by making a crappy game for the 2600, then make a better game for the 2600, and then um... well, there's nowhere to go. Maybe we can do some low-level chip validation code for Intel as a career-altering move, but this stuff isn't applicable to most software fields anymore. Is that globally cool? Not really. So, I guess that's why it's mostly the people that love this stuff and don't want it to die that are here. -John

I can relate to jumping when hit by an invisible snake in Raiders and entering a new room in Haunted House right into a spider. For me, the first one that I recall jumping at was Star Raiders; of course, I was pretty young at the time. I remember watching the count of the last 10 enemies to go. No problem-- I can take them all on! 8 to go. 6 to go. 5. Lost shields. 4. 3. 2. BOOM! That explosion sequence is still implanted in my brain; I thought it was pretty loud/creepy.

Hi Bob! Looks amazing, as usual. Plus, I am impressed by the speed of getting this one out. I haven't tried it yet, but I imagine that if you have collision detection done, that would have been very difficult to implement. For your questions, re: joystick button, would it be possible to have an option for both? I've played versions of Xevious where bomb/shoot are tied together, and ones where they're not-- I think sometimes you can set it on the main menu or difficulty switch. I think if it's an on-screen option, it'll give people the ability to play the way they're most comfortable. My hat is off to you, again. :-D -John

This is looking better and better. I don't have a VB emulator or flashcart (I'm guessing a lot of folks here don't), so attaching pix/vids in my opinion is the best way to show off what you've done. There's a lot of promise here-- keep it up! -John

Is the guy a forum regular?

Hi Bob, I hit this sort of snag once on "another project" Remember this? http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/153178-some-of-the-demos-i-was-developing-6-years-ago/ I had hit a few issues when writing up the original scroll code for that guy as well. There may be a few things you can do here. First question-- are you updating a character map constantly, or are you using a full set of DL's? In my scrolling demo, I had originally done a full character map, but I decided that it was more economical to just build out a set of DL's per zone, since updating a character map is very time-consuming. Instead, I set it up such that each zone has a set of 16 DL's that each contain 8 double-pixels worth of data. That meant that every 8 double-pixels, I had to scroll. Now that I think about it, since I think mine is 160 mode, and yours is 320, that may mean you have to do double the work. But, actually, the principle could still be the same-- just have more data put into the DL's. This means that if your DL has 8 double-pixels of data, then every frame where you scroll, you just have to go through the RAM and update the HPOS. When you get to a wrap-around, that's when things suck, but if you minimize the number of DL's, you can catch up. It all depends on how much stuff you want to pack into a DL (maybe using character maps to make them have more data). Another approach that I would try is to do some optimizations where you set a flag for zones that have the same data across themselves horizontally. By this, what I mean is, there are many, many frames where you have a long string of dirt that spas the whole screen, or a long string of empty space that spans the screen. In these instances, there is no need to do the full "barrel roll" of data. You can leave things as is. This means, only update zones that need to be updated. Just some ideas off the top of my head-- I hope I'm not speaking gibberish. -John

http://www.atarimax.com/jindroush.atari.org/aopc.html shows 6502 addressing modes.

I wonder how many you could piggyback before the power supply couldn't handle it...

http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/191490-breakanoid-arcade-action-fun-for-the-atari-2600-preorder-thread/

Interesting. So, what I'm wondering is... if your DLI doesn't complete before your subroutines, what happens? Does MARIA come back and interrupt the interrupt, or do you potentially have a screen drawn with too many lines (waiting for the DLI to finish)?