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SmileyDude

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Posts posted by SmileyDude

  1. Posted

    AW is a great game -- AW2 looks like it's going to be another must have as well, even though the novelty has worn away a bit. AW is the kind of game that you hope to see more of for the GBA -- the SNES ports are good, but not very much fun if you've already beat them.

     

    BTW -- another good game not on your list is Metroid Fusion -- when I got that game, I couldn't put it down until I beat it. Classic SNES action but with a new story -- excellent game :)

  3. Posted

    I love this game -- I started playing it with the Japanese version. Man, some of those micro games can be really tough if you don't know Japanese :)

     

    The bad part about this game is that it is quickly finished. I was able to beat the game in about 2-3 days. And I unlocked all the mini-games a day or 2 later. Once that's done, you have the challenge of earning the little badge for each of the mini games. Once you do that, everything is pretty much unlocked.

     

    BTW -- Pyoro 2 is much better than Pyoro, IMO -- definetly worth going through the hassle of unlocking and earning the badge for each of the microgames :)

     

    Another good challenge is to max out the score on Sheriff -- you can get a max of 999,999,999 points on that game :D

     

    I just hope that there is a followup to this game -- I would love to see something like this for the GCN as well. Maybe next time, they can include some Atari games as well :)

  4. Posted

    The "happy" kernal

     

    Ok, now write it using a lookup table instead -- i.e:

    HappyBitmap:

.byte %00010000

.byte %00000000


; etc etc etc

     

    Hint: you can do it a couple of ways -- you can have one table, with values for PF1 and PF2 interlaced (i.e, PF1, PF2, PF1, PF2, etc, etc). Or you can have two tables -- one for PF1 and PF2.

     

    "Happy" coding :D

  5. Posted

    Here's a few more -- sometimes, you'll see the Game Boy names abbreviated diferently as well:

     

    DMG - Dot Matrix Game (Original Game Boy)

    CGB - Color Game Boy

    AGB - Advance Game Boy

    SGB - Super Game Boy (adaptor cart for the SNES)

     

    I don't know what the abbreviation is for the Pocket Game Boy (smaller version of the original Game Boy), but I wouldn't be surprised to see it as PGB or GBP -- but, since it really is the same system, it might be just DMG.

  6. Posted

    Okay so thats the mystery of the 1200XL but I still don't see a valid

    reason for renaming the 400 as 600... Nor do I understand the switch

    to 65XE, etc.

     

    The XE line is simple -- well, relatively :)

     

    The 65XE has 64k, the 130XE has 128k. I think the reason why it's 65XE and not 64XE is because of the C-64 -- i.e, this one goes to 11 :) And, the 130XE is twice the 65XE, so hence it's name

     

    The 600XL was actually prototyped with the 1200 -- the line would've been 400/600XL/800/1200XL. When the 800XL came out, they kept the old name for the 600XL.

     

    It's actually not too bad once you look at them -- it sure beats trying to figure out Apple's naming scheme for the Mac in the late 80's/early 90's... :)

  7. Posted

    bah -- if you buy them NIB because they are NIB, then you should probally leave them that way :)

     

    If you are buying them because you want a game to play, rip them open.

     

    Personally, when I buy NIB, I either have an extra copy or play on an emulator (yeah, I know :) ). Hopefully, the Cuttle Cart 2 will erase the need for the emulator :D

  8. Posted

    So I need informations about networking on ST/AMIGA and XL ofcourse and how to make them TCP/IP compatible to be connected to the PC ...

     

    Interesting idea -- but, I'm affraid I can't offer much in the way of help. The only suggestion I have is to use a SIO2PC cable for the XL to one of your PCs. That won't give you TCP/IP connectivity, but it will allow you to transfer files to and from your PC and print from your Atari to your printer. That covers most of what you probably want from a TCP/IP connection on the Atari.

     

    I'm planning on building one of these cables myself and connecting it permanetly up to one of my Linux boxes. Then, I'll have a shared filesystem that I can use from any of my other machines to send files to/from the Atari. It's not as nice as being able to do something like FTP from the Atari, but it's not that bad either :)

  9. Posted

    I've been using RadASM and ASMEdit for about 2 years on other efforts and was trying to get a sense if this would be a viable tool for VCS development.

     

    I just looked at those two links, and as far as I can tell, it looks like neither of those IDEs support dasm (well, at least out of the box).

     

    I guess the question is what are you wanting out of these IDEs? Are you looking for project management or are you looking for an editor, or both? If it's just an editor, then you'd probally be fine with them. But if you want project management, then these probally won't work.

     

    Personally, I use make and vim under Linux, but that's just me :) The way I have it setup right now, each .asm file generates a .bin, so it's not very flexible for large projects (what exactly constitutes a large project on the 2600?? :D )

  10. Posted

    Didn't know that about the cartridge port. I've never used my 1200XL that much for gaming so I never tried inserting game cart's in it other than maybe Pac-Man or something like that. Thanks for the info!!

     

    I actually have a cart around someplace that we had to hack away the plastic on it to get it to fit in the 1200XL slot. It was the cart for the modem that we had (300 baud... those were the days :) ). If I find it, I'll post a picture of it up.

     

    Luckily, we had other machines as well -- a couple of different 400s, and the 65xe... so, we didn't have to use the hacksaw on all the carts :)

  13. Posted

    You go things wrong.

     

    The 1200 came out before the XL line - 400/800/1200 - The 1200 missed the mark when it came to public opinion for the XL line was rolled out - 600XL/800XL

     

    The 1200XL was the odd machine that came out between the 400/800 (hence the 1200 portion of the name) and the 600/800XL (hence the XL portion of the name). I do recall that it was originally supposed to be just 1200, but AFAIK, it was only released as 1200XL officially.

     

    The 1200XL wasn't a bad machine, but it did have it's problems. Since it was an XL, it had all the problems of the XL (translator disk anyone?) with none of the benefits (like built in BASIC). Also, the cart slot was recessed on the side, and there was a lot of 3rd party carts that didn't work with it. The thing was big and ugly, but IMO, it had the best keyboard of any of the Atari line.

  14. Posted

    One can design any number of bank-switching schemes.  The Tigervision 3F scheme is easily extended to 512K.  Roll your own, basically, and have as much ROM as you want.  Of course there are tradeoffs based on bank-size and speed, etc., etc.

     

    Very true -- and with the nature of video, you most likely just want to move to the next bank -- so if your bank switching scheme had two "commands" (increment bank, reset to bank 0), you could implement a big enough cart for video :)

     

    Now, if you wanted it to be interactive, you would have to go more complex -- but for straight video, that's pretty easy (well, the bank switching part :D)

     

    I keep thinking about implementing a 2600 cart using an Cypress EZ-USB chip. I believe it has enough memory and i/o pins that it could emulate a 2600 cart with no problems. And, you could have the PC keep feeding the cart with more data as needed over the USB port. Now there would be a sight to see -- a PC feeding video data over USB to a 2600 in realtime. :D

  15. Posted

    Now someone who came in at the very end of this thread would go :o "Wow holy cow that's incredible!"

     

    Wow -- I think MegaManFan pre-quoted me... Andrew -- this is great stuff. I think I need to go out and build a cart so I can try this stuff out on the real thing :)

  16. Posted

    if I can do it my first game is gunna be called atari safari, Ive designed the cover already & got the concept - no-one will guess, it's to obscure  :P

     

    lol, you've already got the hardest part of the project done -- choosing a name ;) Now you get to do the easy part -- learn 6502 assembly, learn the 2600 inside and out, and write your game... you have 24 hours to post up your binary :D

  17. Posted

    Actually, the resoulution issue is taken care of by the emulator quickly swapping lines for display every frame... because the screen is a LCD, it slightly blurs together, making the display look a little better, even though it techincally can't show more than 160 lines at one time.

     

    Also, the swapping isn't as complicated as it seems -- the GBA has built in scalling hardware, so they just have to adjust the scalling registers every frame to get this effect working. I've played with this myself for a few of my projects, and it works fine on real hardware. On the emulators, it tends to look bad :)

  18. Posted

    Except you'd have to worry about getting the emulator loaded.  (The e-Reader has an embedded NES emulator built into the hardware, which is why the NES games fit on one or two cards.)

     

    Actually, all of the NES games that have been released have been 5 cards, for a total of 9-10 long strips -- ~40k.

     

    As a means of comparison, z26 (which is written in a mix of x86 assembly and C) is a hair under 130K.  Even if somebody could cut that in half (which would be a pretty impressive feat) for the GBA by writing in 100% assembly and taking advantage of the uniform hardware, you're still talking about 20+ cards just for the emulator.  That's even before worrying about how to get the e-Reader to run arbitrary code (something Nintendo probably planned on making very, very difficult), or even just trying to get the damn cards printed.

     

    If you got it to 60k, you're talking 5 cards, with all 4 strips being used -- not too terribly bad. And, you can also take advantage of the compression routines in the BIOS to compress the code down a little more.

     

    Plus, I'm sure Nintendo made this tough to do -- I was hoping that this could be an official licensed product. I would certainly pay a buck or 2 for a pack of cards that had a mixture of 2600 games for the GBA on them.

     

    The GBA's certainly up to the task of emulating the 2600, but the e-Reader ain't the way to do it.  Probably nothing short of the ol'-fashioned flash cart kit will do the trick.

     

    It definetly is up to the task -- just when is the question :) But, if someone would pick this up and run with it (Infogrames?), the e-reader might be a good way to get this to the masses...

  20. Posted

    I do think that the $40 price is a bit much when you look that there are only 5 games on it now.

     

    Well, for $40 your not just getting the 5 games -- you're getting the ability to play other e-reader games as well.

     

    I'm gonna buy an e-reader myself soon -- I've already bought of a couple of the games, because if anything is gonna be limited, it will be the games. The cards are very nice -- not as convenient as having a cart with a game on it, but since it's 1/6th of the regular price of a GBA game, you can't really complain about it.

     

    As far as data storage goes, the long side of the card stores 2.2k, and the short side 1.1k -- that means you can get 6.6k on a single card. Since the majority of 2600 games are 2k and 4k, you could easily put together a collection of 2600 games for this.

     

    Infact, you could have a starter set with the emulator cards, and a set of 5 2600 games. The emulator could handle scanning in the 2600 games, and then you could just keep the emulator in the e-reader memory all the time. Then, you could have packs of cards that you buy, sorta like baseball cards, where you don't know what game you will get. I would love to see something like this :)

     

    I wonder if they would purposely print more Combat and ET cards if they did this... :P

  22. Posted

    Hmmm -- it's got to be more than just what the kids been exposed to before that determines what they like. For example, take my kid -- he's 5 years old, his first gaming system he played on was the Nintendo 64. He followed that up with the SNES, GBC, and now GameCube. I took the 2600 out a few weeks back, and he loved it. He loves Space Invaders on any system, and he quickly picked up the 2600 version.

     

    Now, compared to the version for the N64, 2600 space invaders doesn't have anywhere near the detail that the N64 version has. The sound effects are much simpler, and the game play is pretty much always the same (the N64 version has a little variety in -- different ships, bonus waves, boss waves, etc, etc). But, he still loved it.

     

    I think that some people truely like video games (like myself and, it appears, my son) -- others just use video games as a diversion, and really don't care which game they are playing. This isn't unique to video games -- it also applies to movies, TV shows, music, books -- some people just love the medium so much, that they want to absorb it all in. Others just want to relax for a little and then move on.

  23. Posted

    I'm sad now -- while the console appears to be working fine, both joysticks do not. Well, at least I think it's the joysticks... I couldn't get either of them to even allow me to start the game -- none of the buttons work at all.

     

    Is there anything that I can do to narrow this down to either the joysticks or the console itself? I have an XEGS keyboard, which uses the same connector -- will banging on some keys similate the "start" button being pressed, or something similar so I can tell if the joystick port isn't fried? Is there anything I can do with the joysticks themselves to test with?

     

    I ask because I don't have another 5200 to test with -- that would make this a whole lot easier :)

     

    It was so disappointing -- I saw the rainbow Atari logo, and then the intro screen for each of the games I tried. But nothing seemed to work :_(

  24. Posted

    Anyway I hope HDTV is more forgiving than some newer TVs.

     

    I'd imagine that it's the convertor that would have to be more forgiving :)

     

    My personal plan is just build a small PC for running emulators through the TV -- sure, it's not exactly the same, but it's so close, that it might not matter. I plan on having the original controllers around with adaptors, so the gameplay should be very close.

     

    Also, for me, I'm not planning on emulating all of the consoles -- just the ones that I happen to own (2600, 5200, SNES, 400/800XL/1200XL/65XE/XEGS) or owned earlier but don't anymore (7800, NES). Except for possibly the 7800, I believe that emulation wise, those are pretty complete. And, when played through the TV, it will take someone who is very nitpicky to find the differences (hopefully :) )

     

    BTW, for those thinking about doing something similar, I personally think the mini-itx (http://www.mini-itx.com/) mobos are perfect to build around. Since I already have a home network setup and some Linux servers as well, I plan on making mine a diskless boot -- that way, I can actually build a couple of these and run everything off the network. The price is pretty good -- about $125 for a 800mhz board (that's the mobo, cpu, 10/100 nic, NTSC/PAL video out, sound, 1 PCI, 2 SDRAM slots, USB, and your other standard PC ports).

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