solidcorp

Yes there is a code snippet box that you can use. It's in the full text editor. ; X DONE FIRST BECAUSE OF THE LARGER X RANGE - MORE LIKELY TO EARLY OUT LDA SPARKX SEC SBC SHIPX CLC ADC #SHIPSPARKRADIUS CMP #SHIPSPARKRADIUS*2 BCS .SPARK_MISS_SHIP LDA SPARKY SEC SBC SHIPY CLC ADC #SHIPSPARKRADIUS CMP #SHIPSPARKRADIUS*2 BCS .SPARK_MISS_SHIP .SPARK_HIT_SHIP ; BOOM .SPARK_MISS_SHIP Just wanted to say I totally understand coding something simply because it's a challenge. I'm wondering what you got left that you want to implement? Jeff I would like to: Improve shot accuracy, they used to be perfect but after I optimized them sometimes shots are too slow and take on angles that don't appear to match the ship direction. This is the biggest gameplay issue. Remove the spark timer and add a high score - but I don't have the RAM/ROM to display the high score so I have to think about it. Sparks are supposed to start in the center and ride on the shields until they pop out into space. I don't have the room in the ROM to code that unfortunately. Add progressive difficulty (spark speed) currently it's one level over and over that starts too hard and never gets any harder Change the ship/spark and ship/fuzzball collision to use the hardware - that should buy back ROM, time, and be pixel accurate as opposed to box accurate. Improve ship explosion frames - I rushed those out and the particles don't flow out right. Play a little more with the drone sound - I think I took some pitch liberties and it should try to mimic the arcade Take the shimmer off the score ships screen and add some color effect to the title screen. That's really tricky, there's only 4 bytes free in that bank of ROM Cycle the title screen between the last score screen or high score and the title. Once again that bank is full and the words high score would take 30 bytes in ROM without even considering the kernel code to display them. And of course the PCB, programmable logic on the board, and the cart case. D. Scott Williamson

That is the one thing I would have to disagree with you on. Wolfenstein was EPIC at the time. AFAIK, it was the first 1st person 3D shooter with stereo sound. It was immersive to me! I was blown away that you could hear gunfire to your right, spin that way, and see the guy shooting at you. But other than that, I agree, most really great titles were works of improvement using previous versions as test beds in a way. I have almost an embarrasing amount of time invested in Oblivion, and never really enjoyed Morrowind. The only 2600 game I invest time into is Escape from the Mindmaster and Dragonstomper. Yea, I have to admit Wolfenstein was epic. Also one of the first/most successful limited try before you buy games - download and floppy. There is Mario who started in Donkey Kong and has grown ever since, but DK was huge too, there are other titles that illustrate my point but they all escape me at the moment. D. Scott Williamson

I agree, can I lock this thread now, so we can just forget about it? Why lock a thread? why the censorship? Nothing malicious is being said, no feelings are hurt, I've answered questions about the code, the history, and a couple Lynx questions. If people don't want to participate in this conversation it will die. D. Scott Williamson I was going to hold back on a few questions, but you're a surprisingly good sport, and it's rare to pick at the mind of someone who does this for a living. I heard you're involved with The Conduit series? Correct me if I'm wrong. The rest of this post is going to appear amazingly silly. The first game in the series was an attempt to prove the Wii was an underrated piece of hardware. It failed by many accounts, due to a lack of stand out moments and severe repetition. Now the second title is on the way, and looks to make good on the promises of the first. Reading up on it, reveals the quote that nothing makes it in unless it actually excites the team. What generates excitement in creating a world? What's the difference between a good design and a bad? How does one stand out in a sea of me-too titles? I'm not sure an Atari 2600 forum is an appropriate place for me to get into too much detail about a Wii title and there is a limit to what I can say about Conduit2 and my work at High Voltage. I will try to keep my answer brief and if you like you can send me a personal message. I am the head of the Advanced Technology Group at High Voltage Software in Hoffman Estates Il. (Thanks Selgus for hiring me!) It's my job to manage the team that invents, extends, and maintains our technology, and I am an active programmer on the team. We have multiple game engines on multiple platforms. Any given day I can work on any combination of PS2, PSP, Wii, Xbox360, PS3, PC and some I can't talk about. My team was responsible for creating the Wii graphics pipeline and tools for The Conduit. When it shipped I believe we were one of a handful of developers in the world at that time with such a flexible, powerful, and efficient graphics pipeline and toolset. We also did a lot of work optimizing things behind the scenes, at times writing a lot of power PC assembly to squeeze any performance we could out of the not quite next gen Wii. In those technical areas in which my team and I were involved I believe we were successful beyond any expectation. Since then we have further extended our graphics capabilities and optimizations on the Wii and it is to this day some of the work that I am most proud of. The company is acutely aware of what was more or less successful in the first title and has really focused efforts on new features that will address everything you mentioned and more. Believe it or not, I see less of Conduit2 than I did of The Conduit mostly because all the tools and tech work most of the time now and they don't need as much help from ATG, but I can say that some of the levels are breathtaking. The concept artists, production artists, and design have been working really hard and the spaces and themes are stunningly beautiful especially for a Wii. We developed the first title along with the technology and there were a lot of growing pains and rework. Now the tech and tools are mature and the artists are experienced, the resulting quality and productivity are visibly improved. I can't say too much more, snoop around the web for more specific info, the game did show at E3. I'm a technologist, I haven't done game design in a long time and it wasn't my strongest suit, so I am going to stick to talking about what I know about As far as me too titles, it's my opinion that first person shooters are still underrepresented on the Wii as a percentage of titles overall as compared to the PC, PS3, and Xbox360. It's a viable game genre. Most importantly, if you are going to do anything do the best you can all the time. Always do everything you can to be the best, because if you are, then the others are the also rans. One more thing - epic games are rarely epic on the first version, consider Unreal, GTA, Burnout... Quake came from Doom which came from Wolfenstein. I'm not so vein as to tell you that Conduit2 or any other title is guaranteed to be the next big hit, but if you get a good start and keep reinvesting in a title, the chances of creating something great and just maybe hitting commercial critical mass get better. D. Scott Williamson (sorry, I guess I didn't keep it as short as I had liked, I hope this wasn't too preachy)

Enclose your code in tags (omit the spaces), or just select the code and click on this button: Clicking the button with nothing selected will insert the opening and closing tags at the current cursor position. Thanks a million, I knew it had to be there somewhere. D. Scott Williamson

Inspiring. Thank you. I know I sound unreasonably selfish to some people, I can't help but say that's what I want to do with this project for now. The part about the understanding wife should be in a large bold typeface D. Scott Williamson

I think that's a great idea. I'd encourage anyone to try to do something hard naything - it's win win. If you succeed you will have a version that you will be more comfortable sharing and if you do not, you will no doubt learn plenty along the way. D. Scott Williamson

I hadn't noticed the subtitle to this thread until now. I don't know who added that or when but that is pretty mean spirited and not something I would typically expect on Atari Age. D. Scott Williamson

I agree, can I lock this thread now, so we can just forget about it? Why lock a thread? why the censorship? Nothing malicious is being said, no feelings are hurt, I've answered questions about the code, the history, and a couple Lynx questions. If people don't want to participate in this conversation it will die. D. Scott Williamson Jeez, I even posted code from the game this morning.

I agree, can I lock this thread now, so we can just forget about it? Why lock a thread? why the censorship? Nothing malicious is being said, no feelings are hurt, I've answered questions about the code, the history, and a couple Lynx questions. If people don't want to participate in this conversation it will die. D. Scott Williamson

I absolutely would not have tried to do it or at least finish it without the conveniences afforded by the Stella debugger, particularly with respect to timing and using conditional breakpoints to place usable breakpoints in banks. Thank you for a professional grade tool. D. Scott Williamson

I just realized that I could have used hardware for the spark/ship collision. That will save a lot of time, some ROM, and be bit accurate! That makes me very happy. The sparks and shots used to be drawn on opposite frames because I thought the colors would match better and I switched them at one point because the sparks should be bigger than the shots. The colors ended up looking better anyway. BTW, someone asked me what code I found clever - I like this bit of unsigned comparison code. ; X DONE FIRST BECAUSE OF THE LARGER X RANGE - MORE LIKELY TO EARLY OUT LDA SPARKX SEC SBC SHIPX CLC ADC #SHIPSPARKRADIUS CMP #SHIPSPARKRADIUS*2 BCS .SPARK_MISS_SHIP LDA SPARKY SEC SBC SHIPY CLC ADC #SHIPSPARKRADIUS CMP #SHIPSPARKRADIUS*2 BCS .SPARK_MISS_SHIP .SPARK_HIT_SHIP ; BOOM .SPARK_MISS_SHIP It a 2D axis aligned bounding box (AABB) collision with unsigned range, early out, two compares and two taken branches max. SHIPSPARKRADIUS is easily tunable too. This may be obvious but it beats doing signed comparisons for +dx, -dx, +dy, -dy. Of course the hardware detection will be much faster D. Scott Williamson P.S. Is there a way to make the tabs stay in the posts? It keeps collapsing my code left.

Thanks, you make compelling points and I appreciate the sentiment, but I respectfully disagree. I think this point of view is out of line with the reality of rampant piracy of all titles on all platforms on the internet. If the robot game wasn't pirated it could only be because no one wanted it. IMHO D. Scott Williamson

I did it because it was supposed to be impossible. If I said "I don't want to sell it because pirates will cut into my profit", well that would just be ridiculous; I'd be cutting off my nose to spite my face. Last time I checked zero profit was way less than some profit. Besides, pirates don't pay for anything, so good copy protection doesn't necessarily equate to better sales, they just won't have the title in their collections (for a while). I know there are plenty of honest customers in the home brew market, but still, I think I just want to keep the cart to myself. D. Scott Williamson

I'm curious, is there any real reason to have any sort of paranoia about releasing a game? This is really starting to sound like Gorf for the Jaguar all over again, which ended real badly. Plenty of people on here have released homebrew games for the 2600 & a couple other consoles for anyone to play, and it is good. I'm curious why you are taking the exact opposite stance. Are you expecting the original IP holders to bring a cease & desist? I know there's no obligation for you to release this to the community, whether it's a freely-downloadable ROM or in a purchaseable cartridge form, but there is the carrot dangling factor here. I'm not terribly worried about the license holders, whoever they are and that would only potentially become an issue if I released the game and they would only care if there were money to be made. How did the Jaguar Gorf issue end? D. Scott Williamson

While I agree with everything you've said here, I can guarantee that no such code to circumvent a ROM not meant to be emulated would be placed in the main Stella codebase. I can guarantee this for the official releases, since I personally control that. Of course, since Stella is GPL, there would be nothing to stop someone else from creating such code and doing unofficial releases ... To be absolutely clear on my commnet - the documentation on "hacking" Atari 2600 cartridges uses the example of finding out how to increase the number of lives or something like that - NOT how to break copy protection. I didn't mean to imply that it is a tool intended to steal copyrighted material. But - if I did decide to sell cartridges that, for example, implemented a new bank switching scheme can I safely assume that no one would rip and publish the ROMs? and more to the point that Stella (and the other Atari 2600 emulators) wouldn't emulate the new bank switching scheme just like all the others or like the custom hardware in Activision carts. Stella is a brilliant tool that walks a fine line in this area. I do not mean to malign the tool or the intent of its creators and maintainers, I'm just making a point that backs up my paranoia surrounding releasing the game. D. Scott Williamson

That is absolutely true. Except of course what we're talking about here is a VCS title, so the interest level of the small community in putting in that effort to pirate it and screw over one of their kind is debatable. But of course you gotta do what you want, as is your right Awesome work by the way. I love it. I politely disagree. There are brilliant people like Fred Quimby (Melody cart, Harmony cart, and Batari), or the makers and maintainers of Stella who invest their time and energy in providing tools and support that benefit the homebrew community. There are others whom I can't say are more or less brilliant, but always seem more plentiful, that look at the challenge of breaking copy protection much as I looked at the challenge of developing Star Castle. It only takes one and then it's freely downloadable, emulatable, and burnable for everyone. Heck, the Stella debugger manual has sections on hacking cartridges. Thanks for the compliment on the work. D. Scott Williamson

Thank you, I'm not worried about the name, I doubt the people who have ended up with the rights to it know they own them. The fastest place to be in S.T.U.N. Runner, both in the coin op and on the Lynx is where the summed gravity and centrifugal force vectors are pointing - so down for flats and straights, higher on the outer wall the tighter the turn, and even up over the ceiling for downward curved tracks. The farther you are from the "sweet spot" the slower you will go. The Lynx exactly duplicates the layout and sequence of the coin op tracks including boost pads, stars, shockwaves, and enemies all of which were carefully designed with game flow in mind. I don't think that it matters where you are when boosting but if you are in the wrong place when boost runs out you will slow down fast. I always wished I could think of a better shooting interface for that game, it was hard to switch between shooting aerial enemies and those on the track - in the coin op, the yoke tilted instantly. D. Scott Williamson

Not necessarily true... there has been at least one homebrew game released whose binary was "copy protected" so as to be non-functional on emulators. I believe it doesn't even work on the Harmony cart. There have also been several homebrew games released on cartridge which are not readily available online -- all of the Ebivision games, and one recent arcade port called Stacker, just off the top of my head. There are several more, I have a list somewhere. There's this too. Combine it with the copy protection I mentioned above, and you can be pretty well assured that nobody will be playing your game without buying it. If there is one thing I well never underestimate, it's the tenacity and cleverness of hackers. No copy protection is foolproof. If the Atari 2600 can read it, someone can figure out how and if I came up with my own bank switching scheme, no matter how complex, I bet it would take no more than 48 hours for it to be implemented in a new version of Stella. It's a compliment, hackers are smart, they have to be. D. Scott Williamson Just take your time and do it your way. I think you did an amazing job converting Star Castle to the VCS. Did Howard already respond to your creation? Thanks, I will. By the way, I don't think this is the best venue to discuss any sort of copy protection. If someone were to hit on a brilliant and effective deterrent, it would be documented here in the forums and someone could potentially find an exploit. As I said, if the Atari 2600 can read a cart, so can some other device. I have not made any attempt to contact Howard Scott Warshaw and I haven't heard from him (unless he's been posting on this thread ). I don't know what I'd say to him, this wasn't necessarily a personal thing and I have nothing but respect for his work. I'd love to have the opportunity to buy him a beer and talk to him about the old days and the couple of mutual people we may know... and of course to thank him for his games, his documentary Once Upon Atari, and this opportunity. Anyway, in my opinion the game's not finished so that would be premature. D. Scott Williamson

The binary would have to be signed then. So if ever a binary shows up, we could find the leak. A simple checksum is definitely not enough. The signature had to become part of the game, so that it doesn't work anymore if the signature is removed or changed. And it shouldn't be possible to reverse engineer the code. Not sure if this would work with the 2600 and its limitations, but it is an interesting topic. There's no room left in the cart to do validation! D. Scott Williamson

Not necessarily true... there has been at least one homebrew game released whose binary was "copy protected" so as to be non-functional on emulators. I believe it doesn't even work on the Harmony cart. There have also been several homebrew games released on cartridge which are not readily available online -- all of the Ebivision games, and one recent arcade port called Stacker, just off the top of my head. There are several more, I have a list somewhere. There's this too. Combine it with the copy protection I mentioned above, and you can be pretty well assured that nobody will be playing your game without buying it. If there is one thing I well never underestimate, it's the tenacity and cleverness of hackers. No copy protection is foolproof. If the Atari 2600 can read it, someone can figure out how and if I came up with my own bank switching scheme, no matter how complex, I bet it would take no more than 48 hours for it to be implemented in a new version of Stella. It's a compliment, hackers are smart, they have to be. D. Scott Williamson

It won't...it isn't being released. I think he asks about the one special cartridge that will be made I prefer to show people what I've done than tell them about work in progress or plans, but here goes. Even though Atari cartridges are plentiful and are still going into landfills, I have a somewhat irrational personal issue with destroying a piece of video game history, in this case a working game, to advance my hobby. I was originally going to make a modified silicone cast of an Atari cartridge so that I may cast the new cartridge in acrylic, but have changed my mind and now I plan to CNC mill layers of Plexiglas and bond or bolt them together. I can spend more time in CAD and rework/recut carts until I am satisfied. Making a sandwich style cart also allows me to make more complicated internal cartridge structures, like the pins to open the Atari 2600 cartridge port protection mechanism and internal bezels to redirect the LED light. I have to get my cartridge to work again first and I have a lot of work to CAD and fabricate the cart. It will likely have the coin op cabinet logo engraved on the back and have standard Atari font style stickers on the front and top of the cart. All of this is speculation, a plan. I will keep you all posted. I usually photoblog my fabrication projects in picasa. http://picasaweb.google.com/spot1984 Pictures of the development of the Atari 2600 SOLIDCart including early Star Castle screen shots and my cluttered lab: http://picasaweb.google.com/spot1984/Atari2600StarCastle# D. Scott Williamson

Thank you so much, it means a lot from someone as proficient as you, it's good to see you here. I showed our mutual friend B.F. your icon when I surreptitiously found you and we had a chuckle at how small the world can be sometimes. He says hi! D. Scott Williamson

One more thing, you guys should check out Howard Scott Warshaw's DVD Once Upon Atari. It's one thing to read about that era, but to see and hear it from the people who were there is something else. Nolan Bushnell is a genius - In the video he says something very close to: "Give creative talented people clear goals and almost no structure and they will do great things" D. Scott Williamson

I should also say that later I found the history of the coin op to be fascinating as well, full of different accounts of the events leading to the release of the game. It sounds like there was some drama there, and those guys worked under some really difficult circumstances - believe it or not, much harder than 2600 development. There isn't even a dedicated CPU in the coin op, the "CPU" is a bunch of logic circuits and ROMS - it's custom and programming was done in notebooks and hand converted to hex. Hardcore to the core. I'll try to dig up some links and post them. Fascinating stuff indeed. D. Scott Williamson

I was an Atari zealot as a kid and I like the history of the video game business. It was a time of innovation and explosive growth, and it was the 70's man, it was like crazy. I read an excellent book called Racing the Beam, that details the history of the 2600s creation and how its quirky design molded the video games made on it and ultimately the early industry as a bunch of game case studies. On page 95 begins a chapter called "A Yar is born" containing the story of how Yars Revenge was conceived and developed. Howard Scott Warshaw is quoted as follows “I soon realized that a decent version couldn’t be done, so I took what I thought were the top logical and geometric components of Star Castle and reorganized them in a way that would better suit the machine.”. When I worked at Atari I wrote some code on the 2600 so I knew how it worked and its limitations but I thought it could be done. Later I read some more of his interviews where he reiterated that it couldn't be done or that it would "suck" (I included links to those articles in my original post) and I became more convinced that it could be done and should be done. I was a big fan of Star Castle in the arcade but I wasn't any good at it. There was one kid at the bowling alley I played it at who seemed to be able to play forever. In 2008 I decided to tinker around with an idea for the shields. It didn't pan out, 76 cycles is a lot shorter than I anticipated but 5 rewrites later I got them to work and later yet I got them to rotate in either direction and do collision detection. There was nothing else really special about Star Castle or the 2600 other than I knew it was really hard and the author of one of the best selling Atari games, Yars Revenge, made it because he couldn't make Star Castle. I did it just to prove a couple points - that it could be done and that I was one of a few people capable of doing it, which is why I insisted on staying withing 8k in a standard F8 cartridge, to be sure the game could have been made at that time. To be fair, Howard didn't have modern PCs or the debugging abilities of the Stella emulator, but my point was the game could be made, and that I could make it. I invite anyone to try to best my effort, who knows everyone may get a better and free version of the game - it's not impossible. I had worked on it irregularly, and recently really crunched on it for the VGS. I fell short, I didn't get my hardware cartridge or case done and there are things I am improving in the software now - still within 8K. IDK how long it will take or when I might consider it done. It depends on how cooperative the Atari is, and how much more I can squeeze the ROM, there is a very hard limit there as I'm sure you are all aware. I will keep you all posted on the progress as long as you guys don't get too mad at me. D. Scott Williamson