NEW Atari 2600 Game Shown

[NEW Atari 2600 Game Shown]

I expended a great deal of effort to make Star Castle and I don't want ANYONE to have it for free.

Disclaimer: I'm not begging for a release and I sincerely hope I don't offend you. It is not my intention to be rude in any way. I'm not attributing any motives to you -- any jabs are not directed at you, but at others in various communities I've seen over the years.

I think I understand now. While I don't agree with the premise, I understand the sentiment. You've put a lot of hard work into it and don't want people to play it without any sacrifice of their own, (meaning spending hard earned cash). This is entirely legitimate. But at the same time, you feel that any money earned from sales couldn't possibly offset the time and labor you've put into the game, (which is the reality -- standard selling price in the homebrew market to a limited number of buyers would never amount to real compensation for you. Meanwhile, you didn't do this with the intent of selling it, so there's no incentive to release it for a pittance. It's the enjoyment of making it and the pride of accomplishing something that others said couldn't be done that matter to you. All understandable points. If I'm wrong, please correct me.

 

The part I don't agree with is that I see games as things to be played and enjoyed.* I don't understand a programmer putting all the time and effort into something that only they will enjoy. I wonder if that is in fact not enough, and the reason why we see those who do something and then show it without releasing it. They get the enjoyment of their work plus they get the compliments of others saying how good it looks and how much they'd like to have it. It seems to me that seeing the most amount of people possible enjoying your work would be more rewarding, but this is where my view conflicts with many programmers. In the current market of 360, Wii, and PS3 production, I understand the disdain and fear of piracy. But in the retro market where no one can possibly expect to make a living, let alone get rich, I say do it for the love of doing it and let as many people as possible play it. edit: But I'm not a professional programmer, so I really don't understand their way of thinking (-remembering the confusion I felt reading Rob Fulop's thread).

 

I spent years, (about six), working on a project before and once I released it, I saw websites from Brazil selling my work. I was offended, but at the same time, what would be the point of fighting it? Should I have not released it? I didn't do the project with the intent of making money, heck I released my work for free because I wanted as many people as possible to get it. I didn't like the idea of others profiting from it, but at least those dirty brasilian sellers were getting it into the hands of people who would probably have never gotten it otherwise.

 

I'm getting the impression you would rather not know something you can't have exists.

While I have mixed feelings about this, I would tend to agree with that statement. I like to know something exists, but I think it's because I have hope that I might someday be able to own or play it, (most prototypes have fallen into this category). In this case, I hope that once it's finished you will one day change your mind and decide to release your work, so at this point I'm glad you let us know about it.

 

On the other hand, if it turns out that down the road there's no hope of it ever being released, then I would prefer to have not known about it. I feel that way with a lot of the so-called "limited run" stuff. If it's done for any reason other than practicality of production numbers, I feel it serves no other purpose than to stroke the releaser's ego and it's a tease. Hey, look what you can't have! (I'm not saying that about you)

 

 

*subnote from 2^nd paragraph: This is why I feel deeply offended with the "collector only" mentality. Some people will buy anything and pay any price for a crap game just to have it in their collection. I couldn't care less if a game is supposed to be "rare." To me, that has NO effect on its value. I won't pay more for a crap game just because it's harder to find, which is why I'll probably never own Chase the Chuckwagon. I'd love to have the game and would actually play it if I did, but it can't possibly justify the price it goes for. But that's the way the world works. I say if one wants to collect something with no intention of using it, they should go collect stamps!

 

You make good points across the board. I think you understand where I'm coming from here.

I neither showed the game nor am withholding the game in any attempt to tease people.

 

D. Scott Williamson

[NEW Atari 2600 Game Shown]

I'm getting the impression you would rather not know something you can't have exists.

...and that's the number one reason I no longer give an extremely pretty woman the satisfaction of knowing I think she's all that by copping a glance. Best turn away or be turned to a pillar of salt!

 

@Cebus... Gorf. ROTFLMAO!

 

Oh great, now I'm being compared to pretty women by jilted men who have given up on the fairer sex. ROFL.

If you've seen the video, you know I not that good looking

 

(just kidding don't take this one too seriously)

 

D. Scott Williamson.

[NEW Atari 2600 Game Shown]

To be fair, Scott didn't start this post.

 

And to his credit, when people asked him for technical details, he offered them, and when they asked him for a video showing the gameplay, he posted one.

 

I understand why he's wary of piracy... heck, before Duck Attack! was even finished, somebody grabbed the work-in-progress bins from the homebrew thread and uploaded them to their pirate ROM sites.

 

The key thing for me is that he feels the game's not finished. Once it's done to his satisfaction hopefully he'll want to share it with the world. Finishing a game like that is no small feat, so it makes sense to me he'd want to focus on that before considering a release.

 

And if he truly only wants one copy of the game to exist... well, there's certainly nothing stopping other 2600 developers from making our own version(s) of Star Castle that could be released to everyone. I wouldn't at all be surprised if this thread inspired somebody to do just that.

 

--Will

 

 

Thank you so much Will.

 

I'm not offended or upset but I have to admit I've become rather interested in the human nature this thread is exploring.

 

D. Scott Williamson

[NEW Atari 2600 Game Shown]

"I'M GOING TO TAKE MY TOYS TO ANOTHER SANDBOX! AND NONE OF YOU WILL GET TO PLAY WITH THEM! SO THERE!"

 

Gorf? Is that you?

 

So, by your analogy let's say I constructed my own toy, for the sake of argument an intricate model that took years to make. Nobody knew I was working on the model and noone knew it existed until I shared it with a few at a nice party (VGS). Now I'm happy returning to my own sandbox and contented to play only with close friends (where my toy is less likely to be stolen), what's the problem?

 

What's the Gorf reference - sounds like it might be funny - link?

 

D. Scott Williamson

[NEW Atari 2600 Game Shown]

What is the Team Savage game?

 

Link please?

 

D. Scott Williamson

[NEW Atari 2600 Game Shown]

Unfortunately, once I let the genie out of the bottle I can't put it back, and lets be honest with ourselves, once I release it in any form I can expect that it will be more downloaded than purchased which dilutes the effort in my opinion.

I don't understand this statement at all. Why would people playing your game (whether it be by downloading or purchasing in cartridge form) dilute your effort? More people would be enjoying the game. Do you mean, "People would pirate my game and I wouldn't make as much per copy being played"? Considering you stated you weren't in this "for the money", I'm getting mixed signals.

 

I personally take affront to the whole, "I developed this awesome game but I'm not going to let any of you play it!" mentality.

 

..Al

 

I did show and let people play the game at VGS.

 

I expended a great deal of effort to make Star Castle and I don't want ANYONE to have it for free.

The only way I can protect it is not to release it into production, which wasn't my goal in the first place.

I don't need the money and a few thousand dollars is far less than the value of my time and effort poured into this project anyway. If I wanted to make money I'd be making iPhone apps or XBLA games in my spare time rather than classic games. I guess it's more of an exhibition piece, I hadn't given it any thought while doing it, I didn't even know it could be done until about two weeks ago (I ran out of RAM and ROM at the same time there were serious timing issues and there were still more game features to be done). I love the classic game scene and I love squeezing the most out of very constrained hardware systems - the 2600 is the best! I also love a challenge and that's what I found in Howard Scott Warshaws quotes.

 

Some of you just don't get it. I did it to do it, I did it for the love of doing it.

 

I'm getting the impression you would rather not know something you can't have exists.

 

D. Scott Williamson

[NEW Atari 2600 Game Shown]

Over 10 million people have bought games I've worked on over the last 20 years.

 

I wrote Star Castle to prove it could be done and I'm not finished with it. I worked on it intermittently over the last two years, and pretty hardcore over the last four months sacrificing time I could have spent on other projects or with my family.

 

I am fiercely proud of the nearly finished product and I can't convey how surprised, flattered, and appreciative I am that people want to help me sell it and others legitimately want to buy it. Unfortunately, once I let the genie out of the bottle I can't put it back, and lets be honest with ourselves, once I release it in any form I can expect that it will be more downloaded than purchased which dilutes the effort in my opinion.

 

For the time being, I'm going to focus on fabricating just this one special cartridge for myself.

 

Thanks,

 

D. Scott Williamson

[NEW Atari 2600 Game Shown]

Thank you lucifershalo.

[NEW Atari 2600 Game Shown]

you work for high voltage soft. ,right?

 

 

how is conduit 2 coming along?

 

 

I can't say too much about it but it's really awesome. A big jump up from the first one. Check it out here on IGN http://wii.ign.com/objects/067/067276.html

[NEW Atari 2600 Game Shown]

I'm in Portland Oregon.

 

My work is high end CAD / CAM software sales, support, training, and application solution engineering. (figuring out for the guys that paid for it, how stuff can or should get done) We've a product design focus, mostly mechanical, some electrical, and the 3D printer is a show 'n tell toy for us. The software is Siemens Unigraphics NX. Powerful, expensive stuff. One seat would about pay for the printer, if somebody wants any of the good functions.

 

My interest in retro comes from this being a hobby, since the 8 bit days. I spend most of my time, either banging on a VCS with Harmony, or doing stuff on a Parallax Propeller. I'm flirting with the CoCo 3, because it's got a 6809, but I haven't gotten serious just yet. I kind of never let go of the Atari machines, and have enjoyed the productions over the years. My fave is doing lower level graphics stuff. My weakness is making it all run together! Batari Basic helps with that big, because one can get a lot of the speed in the VCS, without having all the ASM management issues. Ordinary people can actually do stuff, and I think that's just cool as hell.

 

I'll send a PM, and deffo say, "hi" next time we meet. (Batari is his handle here, BTW)

 

Yeah, I think it's cheap too! Amazingly cheap actually, which is why I linked it. Seeing as how you like that kind of thing, I figured you would appreciate it. Can run in a living room, if somebody wants to do that. That machine can do a cart, or most any of the plastic I've seen on the Atari machines. Been trying to get some time to model and build some stuff. Kind of slammed with other people's parts at the moment though.

 

A home made CNC machine is an excellent to have. I think these things will see another round of cost reduction, eventually landing in the 5K range, and then parts of this hobby are gonna rock, IMHO. People can just send files and print stuff. Golden

 

[getting way OT] Wow, very cool, I thought so. My other big project is a 5x10' CNC table with a 4.5' x 8.5' x .5' work area, a 3.25 hp porter cable router, vacuum table, vacuum system, and a fourth axis I'll install one of these days. I designed and built it from scratch with a mountain of advice and guidance that from a machinist friend of mine whom I've known and worked with for 10 years - we met at a local robotics club. He died in his sleep last November and I miss him terribly - I'm on my own now and the learning curve got a lot steeper. Photos here

 

Some of my latest test cuttings here

 

I was going to make a mold of an Atari cart in silicone and cast my cart in acrylic, but I'm planning on machining the cartridge pieces on my machine now. It all takes a different kind of time and space

 

D. Scott Williamson

[NEW Atari 2600 Game Shown]

Now that's classic VCS! Looks way better on the over cranked TV!

 

I like to call it NTSC AntiAliasing.

[NEW Atari 2600 Game Shown]

Thumbs up to the LEDs. Rock on with that! Be sure and get some beer, and a few buddies to play with, or you will miss out on some of that! I've often thought blinking lights in the cart would be sweet. Back in the day, tossing a few LED's in a clear cart would have been pure gold, literally because we didn't have blue ones. (now we do, and I think at least one needs to be in there, just because)

 

Gonna go with colors, or what?

 

Yeah, Harmony is amazing, considering there just aren't the proper signals on that cart. The same guy, who lives near me, also produced the Batari Basic. It's absolutely fun, and it works very well. Something I think a lot of people thought was impossible. Many great, and goofy little games have shown up because of that. Reminds me of sharing stuff we wrote in 8 bit days.

 

Did you end up with a particularly clever bit of 6502 code? You know something like one of those "who uses that kind of instruction" like (zp,x), that ended up just fitting in there nicely?

 

Oh, and check this out:

 

http://www.dimensionprinting.com/

 

Heh... We've got one in the building, and I'm still hoping to print up some Atari stuff on it. They are as cheap as $15K. Seems Star Trek to me!

 

Colors were originally going to be blue and white, but so was the palette in the game. I had a few colors in there and yellow and white were the most eye catching. We'll see.

 

I just found out about batari basic from Dan, the organizer of the Video Game Summit show. He uses it and has written a game on it. I'm very impressed that it can compile such usable and capable for such a quirky platform. Say hi to the genius next time you see him at the supermarket

 

(zp,x) takes too much time! I like dec $7f to kill 5 cycles in 2 bytes. I really like all the cleverness you can get by moving the stack pointer around and using php to set bit1 from the carry bit - like enabling missiles, or setting vdelp1 for the 6 digit display kernel. Or using the stack pointer to fill memory. I got a surprising amount of memory back with this function:

 

; INITMEM WILL LOAD RAM WITH PREDEFINED VALUES FROM TABLES

INITMEM

.INITLOOP

LDY INITTAB,X

BEQ .DONE

LDA INITTAB+1,X

STA 0,Y

INX

INX

BNE .INITLOOP

.DONE

RTS

 

INITTAB

INITGAMEDATA

DC SHIPS,3

; CLEAR VBLS AND SCORE

DC SCORE,0

DC SCORE+1,0

DC SCORE+2,0

DC 0

INITGAMEDATABOOM

DC SHIPX,0

DC SHIPX+1,160*3/4

DC 0

 

Called with these 5 bytes:

LDX #INITGAMEDATABOOM-INITGAMEDATA

JSR INITMEM

 

It replaces each 4 byte lda #, sta zp with 2 bytes and they all can be unique. The table is good for 128 values in any number of 0 terminated lists. The routine could be optimized to use two lists for example which would double the address range and eliminate the need for one dex, but the lists wouldn't be as easy to manage.

 

Also, like I said earlier, I underestimated the value of reducing indexed page boundary crossings.

 

I really don't want to bring the topic of money up again, but $15k is cheap for a fab machine but not exactly in john q. public's home brew budget. What "building" do you have one in and what kind of work do you do?

 

D. Scott Williamson

[NEW Atari 2600 Game Shown]

While I am somewhat sad that Scott doesn't want to release the game, I do respect his decision.

 

I do have one request that may seem reasonable to the developer. Would you consider posting a YouTube video of the gameplay captured through an emulator? This will give fans the ability to see the graphics more clearly, hear the audio without distortion and to the truly appreciate the amazing effort that has been put into this game.

 

Just a thought...

 

I will soon, but I have a question. The game runs 30fps in two 60 Hz fields. One field draws the cannon, shields, and the shots, the other the ship, fuzzball, and three sparks. Using over bright colors on black makes the flicker on a phosphor television unnoticable, but stella flickers a lot. Do you have a suggestion for the best way to capture a video?

 

D. Scott Williamson

 

Stella emulates the phosphor effect To enable it, press tab and click on game properties. From there, go to the display tab, turn phosphor on, and set it to 100.

 

Doh! That would have been insanely helpful at times. Thanks!

 

Stella fraps capture here http://www.youtube.com/user/spot1984#p/a/u/0/UygsjtFtf2k

[NEW Atari 2600 Game Shown]

Mr. D. Scott Williamson is responsible for some of the most prolific and arcade-perfect conversions on the Lynx - Roadblasters and Toki.

Definitely two of the best games on that system (Toki especially).

 

Aw Gee Wiz, thanks. I wrote S.T.U.N Runner on the Lynx too. I absolutely love that system to this day, it was way ahead of its time. I was the head of external Lynx development at Atari. I developed new technologies and supported external developers. It was one of the most exciting times of my life. I still work with John Sanderson who wrote Steel Talons and Hard Drivin' (and more? idk) at High Voltage Software.

 

Not to get too much off track, but I just wanted to add another thumbs up for Toki. I had played the Lynx version for years, and only recently found the arcade machine at an amusement park. I played it, and was amazed at how close the Lynx version was.

 

Star Castle looks great, btw!!!

 

Thanks. We got no source code from TAD, it was the first game I reverse engineered - legally of course it was licensed - but I did install a pause switch on the coin op. It would halt the CPU, and if you were really lucky, you could unpause it too

 

I STRONGLY recommend checking out the "Freakout" easter egg. http://www.vgcheats.co.uk/cheats/lynx/Toki.html

There is an opening scene where the princess is held by a floating magic fist and carried away, well the first time I got the sprites in there they were upside down. That was so funny it became an inside joke and we started throwing all kinds of crazy stuff in there.

 

And thanks re. Star Castle.

[NEW Atari 2600 Game Shown]

I'm chuckling at code to save data being bigger than just the data.

 

You got my next few questions answered, all involving how you managed the data for the shield segments. I maybe have another question or two, once I digest what you've written. Thanks for that. It's the best part of this hobby for me. So many interesting things have been crammed into the tiny VCS. Thanks for showing it off. It must have been great fun seeing everybody jam on the finished (just in time like for real) program.

 

And what do you think of the Harmony? Personally, I love the thing. I get to bang around on the real deal, and it's great fun.

 

Yea, the other thing that happened was that I had a sincos table (a full sin table, with a quarter repeated to read cosine by starting 1/4 cycle into the table) but I was shifting the results to match all the fixed point math for the different entities that it was cheaper to add more tables and remove the sign extended shifts. The ship velocity is a byte but stored in such a way as to affect the 16 bit fixed point ship position with a decent balance of precision. The shots need to inherit the ship velocity but they use a different decimal (binamal?) location in their single byte fixed point precision.

 

It was great seeing people enjoy it and talking to some really great people who've seen a lot more retro gaming stuff than I have. For example I met a guy who had an absolutely fantastic collection of Lynx's and Lynx games. When I watch people play the game I see all the things I still want to fix though (the shots need more directional precision, the game starts too hard, there's no progressive difficulty, I want a better attract mode, I'd like to keep a high score...) And most of all I really want to finish fabricating my clear acrylic cart with LEDs flashing to the game play in it.

 

And the Harmony, man I just love that thing, that and Stella are just genius. I'm soooo glad I found it here on Atari Age. I was just going to use Stella and a home made cart with a romulator on it. Hats off to the guy(s) who made the Harmony. I do some hardware development (PIC/FPGA) and I know first hand a lot of work goes into something like that, and to top it off, it has a really good PC interface and a top notch on cartridge menu. A really well conceived piece of hardware all around - with the casual consumer and developer in mind.

 

D. Scott Williamson

[NEW Atari 2600 Game Shown]

Thought you might like this, there was a 70's band called Ten Years After with Alvin Lee, and they had an album called: A SPACE IN TIME! The big hit of that album was "I'd Love To Change The World"

 

ROFL - I'm jamming out to it now on youtube here.

 

I was only 4 when that song came out but I remember it vividly - awesome!

 

D. Scott Williamson

[NEW Atari 2600 Game Shown]

While I am somewhat sad that Scott doesn't want to release the game, I do respect his decision.

 

I do have one request that may seem reasonable to the developer. Would you consider posting a YouTube video of the gameplay captured through an emulator? This will give fans the ability to see the graphics more clearly, hear the audio without distortion and to the truly appreciate the amazing effort that has been put into this game.

 

Just a thought...

 

I will soon, but I have a question. The game runs 30fps in two 60 Hz fields. One field draws the cannon, shields, and the shots, the other the ship, fuzzball, and three sparks. Using over bright colors on black makes the flicker on a phosphor television unnoticable, but stella flickers a lot. Do you have a suggestion for the best way to capture a video?

 

D. Scott Williamson

 

Stella emulates the phosphor effect To enable it, press tab and click on game properties. From there, go to the display tab, turn phosphor on, and set it to 100.

 

Doh! That would have been insanely helpful at times. Thanks!

[NEW Atari 2600 Game Shown]

Well, I for one would enjoy some tech discussion on the rings. In the video shown, they appear solid. One player used up for the center baddie, another player used up for the player ship, then there are the three little sparkles, and that leaves what left over for the rings??

 

Is there flicker on the screen, not shown in the video, or...

 

Do tell

 

(Scott rest assured, that's a perfectly fine effort, easily putting you in with all the others that get top marks! )

 

As I said in a previous post the game runs in two frames. I deliberately chose overbright colors on black because they appear to the eye (not the camera) to flicker the least and they best matched the coin op appearance. I tested my video timing with a white background and boy oh boy that was an epileptic flicker fest.

 

One screen is a classic Atari 2600 kernel, it shows an 8x8 pixel ship, an 8x8 pixel fuzzball, and the three sparks or mines that follow the ship around. It is a double line kernel so looks more blockey. All image data is displayed directly from ROM.

 

The other screen shows the cannon, shields, and the 3 player shots. Internally, logically, each shield is 12 bits in two bytes that rotate coarsely. There is another byte that has the fine angular position of each shield. Those bits are used to build the shield data into RAM during two vblanks and one overscan. The shield logic is EXTREMELY complex. It basically converts each set of shield bits into a bit-mapped line that it wraps into a circle and packs with other shield bits into about 60 bytes of RAM for display. Each shield ring has different sized shield segments. A later step or's the appropriate 16x14 pixel cannon frame into the center area. The shield screen has a top and bottom portion that simply display the shots where needed, but the 46ish double scan lines in the center center of the display is pretty intense. It's a double line kernel that does not loop, a 3k monolithic function that uses a number of hand optimized macros to construct the lines. It, like the title screen, uses what we used to call a modified Dave Stauguss 6 character score kernel, you probably know the same code as a 48 pixel sprite kernel. Using player 0 and player 1 in tripled mode interleaved with each other on the screen, you load graphics into the GRP0 and GRP1 in such a way as to spit out 48 pixels of graphics by rewriting or latching registers right ahead of the electron beam as its being displayed. It's very sensitive to timing. I use no wsyncs in that code, I sync at the top and it's 76 cycles per line. Each line starts by grabbing bytes out of RAM and masking (and-ing) them with immediate values specified per line in the macros. Those values are drawn into the shield/cannon area, then the graphics registers are cleared and the next scan line turns each shot on and off as needed. That is why the shots are smaller than the sparks (as in the coin op) and the shields appear to be louvered.

 

It was very challenging to get them to work properly in the small amount of RAM and time allotted. There were at least 5 major revisions of the shield code, each previous revision was thrown away for the next. I applied way too many clever programming tricks and modern day game programming techniques, most got thrown out. On the 2600 straight tables are usually smaller and faster than any other cleverness. One classic example was the cannon frames. I only stored 90 degrees of cannon frames in ROM at one point, but the code used to vertically flip the frames was slower and larger than the frame data in the first place. I laughed my butt off when I figured that out.

 

Timing was also a real problem. I wrote the shields first and like I said, they took 2 vblanks and an overscan (37+37+30=104) scan lines to prepare which only left one overscan or 30 scan lines to do all the game logic, including 3 shots that can each collide with the cannon, 3 spinning shields, and 3 sparks. I finally was able to shoehorn all the processing in at about 1am before the Video Game Summit. Placing all the tables (graphics, arc-tangent, sin, cos, etc) in carefully aligned areas of ROM that don't cross page boundaries bought back a lot of time. Sensitive display kernels also had to be sure not to cross page boundaries.

 

 

To be a good 2600 programmer you have to be a master of both time and space.

(and maybe a little bit of a masochist)

 

D. Scott Williamson

[NEW Atari 2600 Game Shown]

Mr. D. Scott Williamson is responsible for some of the most prolific and arcade-perfect conversions on the Lynx - Roadblasters and Toki.

Definitely two of the best games on that system (Toki especially).

 

Aw Gee Wiz, thanks. I wrote S.T.U.N Runner on the Lynx too. I absolutely love that system to this day, it was way ahead of its time. I was the head of external Lynx development at Atari. I developed new technologies and supported external developers. It was one of the most exciting times of my life. I still work with John Sanderson who wrote Steel Talons and Hard Drivin' (and more? idk) at High Voltage Software.

[NEW Atari 2600 Game Shown]

While I am somewhat sad that Scott doesn't want to release the game, I do respect his decision.

 

I do have one request that may seem reasonable to the developer. Would you consider posting a YouTube video of the gameplay captured through an emulator? This will give fans the ability to see the graphics more clearly, hear the audio without distortion and to the truly appreciate the amazing effort that has been put into this game.

 

Just a thought...

 

I will soon, but I have a question. The game runs 30fps in two 60 Hz fields. One field draws the cannon, shields, and the shots, the other the ship, fuzzball, and three sparks. Using over bright colors on black makes the flicker on a phosphor television unnoticable, but stella flickers a lot. Do you have a suggestion for the best way to capture a video?

 

D. Scott Williamson

[NEW Atari 2600 Game Shown]

here's a hint - they said this game could NEVER been ported to an Atari 2600.

Looks very nice, but I know of at least one or two people who thought it could be done...

 

I knew I couldn't have been the first, my hat is off to those who have tried before me.

 

D. Scott Williamson

[NEW Atari 2600 Game Shown]

Maybe he is being careful out of concern for possible royalty claims by the original developer of Star Castle. They might want a cut of the pie...

 

FWIW I tried very hard to acquire the license.

 

Without getting into the very interesting and sordid origins of the Star Castle coin op, it was released by Cinematronics, a company which was purchased by Tradewest and renamed Lehland Corporation, all of which was purchased by Midway, which as recently purchased by Warner Brothers Interactive. I know quite a few people at Midway/WMS and I was able to work with the interactive media liaison at WBI who is in possession of the formidable list of properties to which Warner Brothers possesses the rights. Curiously, Star Castle is not on that list.

 

D. Scott Williamson

[NEW Atari 2600 Game Shown]

I would be intersted in purchasing Star Castle but only if you agree to allow me to release and sell copies of it. I am sure that others would be interested in a similar arrangement as well. I suspect that this would have more interest than the majority of the homebrew releases since it is already a known game.

 

 

 

I don't like where this is headed.......

 

I don't like where this has gone, it was never about money. I regret making that stupid joke that has taken the attention away from the work.

 

I wrote the game because I am a fan and to prove I'm at least as good as one of the best Atari 2600 programmers there ever was.

 

D. Scott Williamson

[NEW Atari 2600 Game Shown]

"One Million Dollars!" (read like Dr. Evil from Austin Powers)

 

Just kidding.

 

I'm sorry guys, I'm really really genuinely flattered and I don't want to come off as a jerk (although it may be too late ) but I really just want to finish the one game cartridge and show it off right now.

 

I'd be happy to talk about the technical aspects of making of the game though if anyone has any questions.

 

D. Scott Williamson

[NEW Atari 2600 Game Shown]

Thanks for the callout CPUWIZ. That was an oversight on my part, though I did remove the email addresses FWIW.

 

I hope he doesn't mind, everything he said was very nice and I hope he doesn't find any harm in my post.

 

BTW, you can call me Scott if you like - or SOLIDCorp or whatever.

 

D. Scott Williamson