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kisrael

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Everything posted by kisrael

  1. Huh! Thanks for the feedback. So poking around - even with an upgraded firefox it works for me. And i can't see a float. Current theory: somehow you got some funky data saved in "local storage" (probably the fault of my program but still) and now it chokes when it tries to load that data. Quick experiment: could you see if it works in Firefox's equivalent of incognito mode?
  2. yeah that makes some sense. I have backburnered this but might try to bring it out to work on it a little
  3. I could consider it. (i've pivoted my attention away a bit) I don't really have my head around the DF*FRANCINC stuff. Are there any games that take advantage of the multicolumn stuff in gameplay?
  4. yeah, I should see if it can shut off the FreeSync thing. Other than that I like the monitor a lot
  5. Along time ago I was able to change my rank to "HMBL 2600 coder", from the usual "Chopper Commander" / "River Patroller" etc Is that still something I can edit? I'd prefer it be "HMBL 2600 Toolsmith", but I can't see if there's still a place to change it..
  6. Got the 3 basic assembly kernels (48x1 mono, 48x2 color, 96x2 color) of @RevEng's bB Titlescreen Kernel in, along with an affordance for saying if it's minikernel 1,2, or 3 of that type.
  7. I suspect it's related to this : https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202580 So don't quite get what's going on, but assuming it IS this, seems like it should be ok (and temporary... I'm sure if it was big enough for Apple to have this support ticket AND it was permanent, we'd be hearing about it a lot more)
  8. TLDR; can 60 FPS flicker kernels in Stella damage a Mac screen? So, I was playing around running the Yoshi flicker kernel on stella: It does a 60 FPS flicker to get multiple colors. So one thing that's funny is that my main monitor (a 32" LG screen) doesn't display the flicker at all; it's like its doing a weird "AMD FreeSync" thing and like just showing every other frame or something. But it DID show up fine on my 2020 (Intel) Macbook Air. But then, as I moved it around a bit, I realized there was a bit of a shadow effect, almost like a hint of old arcade burnin... and a bit later when I stopped it, I realized the area it was at was shimmering a bit (by coincidence, that was a big green patch on my desktop wallpaper, and the Yoshi was kind if turquoise green, it seemed less bad when I put a white background window over the area.) But now it seems ok. Still, kind of scary! Has anyone seen similar?
  9. the aforementioned work is started Three major differences from the old methods: 1. multiplatform because a-b-b is browser based 2. much, much easier than the old techniques - it provides the 1.8 zip, and then the 4 or so critical files (the .asm for the image, the overall templatelayout and templatecolor, an then a launching .bas file) 3. I noticed that my important routine actually isn't great at importing already sized files - so like if you import a 48x?? image, presized, it won't be quite pixel perfect. But it is good at resizing big images and I think the results overall are good-looking! For now it only does the color 48x2 , and for now only the 48x2_1 "location" of it. Plans are to add all non-trivial kernel types, though maybe not the sprite one for now. But I would like to try the animations and the flicker color ones. Thanks to @RevEng for the main work and @Karl G who has helped my tired and not reading carefully enough brain sort through the abundance of files in the zip. (Of course, thanks to Karl's earlier work, a-b-b has many different modes that are already pretty good for making a bB titlescreen And if you haven't been following, this thing supports DPC+ (including per scanline background color changes), has tools for doing gradients and text and various shapes, copy-and-paste, image import, "undo", etc etc. But hopefully while keeping it relatively easy to use, and always with ready to run code.
  10. 10 years ago (yeesh!) @RevEng made The bB Titlescreen Kernel I am working to incorporate full-ish support for this in atari-background-builder... starting with the "48x2" minikernel (currently just one of the 3 "locations" for it) This method should end up being MUCH easier to import images for than the previous steps using windows-only software. Other fixes included a nasty undefined color bug fix, and some internal improvements to accomodate the new kernel types
  11. Yeah I was thinking similar! I guess you could also compre projected sales volumes as well as ballpark money, if that's too crass. And then personal recognition like Activision started using vs Atari's "toil in anonymity, you're roll is similar to the people assembling the cart" Yeah, gaming is a great things in games. That was a weird thing about 4K - at some point you can say... alright that's all about all I know how to pack in there (though of course there are always people who will show you how to get just a bit more in.) But I know I pushed JoustPong to be more than it would have had it just been a "trophy" port of my basic JoustPong concept
  12. Yeah... actually my story is even more of that... the game was JoustPong, which came from a random suggestion in the old Usenet rec.games.video.classic ("The future of gaming can be summed up in two words -- Pong and Joust") and I had previously made in Visual Basic, Java, and even PocketC for PalmPilot. I love that it's a reasonably rich game that just needs one button! (years later FlappyBird discovered the exact same thing) Also it was easy to make a good but not perfect AI component. So limitations came into play in a very good way. (later when i wanted to make it release/purchase-worthy I added in Pterry to mix things up, and the Breakout-like wall modes. Sometimes I realize if I had had batari it would have been a month, not a year, kind of project. But it's not clear I would have pushed to extend it as much as i did) Heh. Thinking more about "trophy" game makers looking to sell CIB stuff... my guilty thought - especially for my art joke "game" Sisyphus - is ... when do we start making NFTs for these? Which game was that, is it around? And yeah. One of my focuses is as a tool maker - (in part because I was only gonna be Just Ok at the gamemaking and i didn't have many brilliant games i was dying to make) and most of my tools or tutorials focus on being able to spit out some runnable code. So for people who view insta-shovelware as a problem... well, I'm an enabler, a bit. In some ways the wonkiness of batari is ALMOST a saving grace would love to see something like @SpiceWare's SpiceC come in and capture the same "don't sweat the kernel" vibe but with a more robust system, not so white space dependent... Cool you're brass too. Actually I was glad I didn't have get to defensive about tuba, you were pretty fair! I remember in college I snagged a "Tubby the Tuba" solo part from a senior, in part because she wasn't able to make enough practices, but also because I was willing to just play it down an octave (hell I've played enough trombone sheets that I barely noticed i was doing that) - but in part , if the damn piece is "Tubby the Tuba", why should it be in that stupid high Euphonium register, as you say.... (that said... well... these days I'm an activist "street player", in it for the fun and not the finesse ) PS I had my reservations about digging up an old contentious thread and knew we'd get some of the same old same old "but if Pitfall 2 did it..." arguments, but I feel some of these tangents have redeemed it!
  13. Sounds like me and "going to the gym" Some great thoughts re "trophy coding accomplishments" and "lowered expectations". I know some of the appeal to me doing JoustPong in 2004 was that you COULD one-person-show the graphics and sound, I had enough pixel doodle and musical background to do an ok job at both, but at the 2600 level and maybe not the NES level. (Interesting seeing how CHAMP games uses a team approach!) Here's what I wrote for "why the atari" back when I made https://alienbill.com/2600/101/ , soon after Joustpong: To connect in a fundamental way with the grandmaster of our misspent childhoods. The challenge of it all. Like writing haiku while drunk and on the back of a charging rhino. Actually, I hate challenges, but there's something cool about making a game out of such simple little pieces, kind of like Legos when they were all square, with maybe a few wheel pieces thrown in. To interact with something you made on a real live TV. The groupies. Ok, I'm kidding about the groupies. Why not program for other, more modern consoles? Despite (or because of) the difficulty of the 2600, there is a community and set of resources for it that I haven't seen for other systems you could potentially homebrew for. (YMMV) Why not just make games for Windows, in VB? Or a more powerful language? Or online, in Shockwave or Flash or Java? Yeah, go on, cry to mama you little wuss! But seriously: most successful modern games are big budget productions done by teams of people. Your program is likely to languish in shareware/freeware hell, ignored by millions, and competing for attention with thousands and thousands of other little games. Make a decent classic game, and you will get a lot of attention from the classic game collectors and their friends. You can even sell copies at shows like CVGE and PhillyClassic, and be duly admired in cash form. (If you work out the hourly rate for your programming efforts, you'd probably be better off flipping burgers, but that's not the point.) So in some ways, some of that is the same kind of "scaled back" stuff you're talking about. Also. Pondering on this question now that you mirrored it, and what I wrote almost 20 years ago I would add: Atari-era games tended to have a focus than the NES era and after: more on motion + physical interaction, vs an emphasis on content and large area exploration. You can still see the old Atari/arcade feel in show up in modern gaming: I think of the perennial Mario Party series, many of the minigames are very much "retro feel in new(ish) clothing". But that's another legit reason to stick on this platform, even beyond nostalgia it is the best home for a certain kind of game interaction - joystick over crosspad, one button and not 2-4. (Also, I think there is something to your "trophy" idea, at least for some coders. Maybe that's some of why batari Basic drove up certain resentment. It made a certain kind of simple game very easy (hell Loaded4Bear was a GameJam weekend, and by getting a good guy on sound and leaning on 2 player fun, it came out ok, IMO ? (later I added AI to it) ) Hey, as a tuba player ( https://kirk.is/tag/tuba ) -- tubas players have the biggest range of all the brass We can play fast and high (though usually we shouldn't)
  14. There's a middle course too, that just wants to make sure there's recognition that it's not a level playing field if you're interested in an accurate view of how much to admire a coder (or, what to admire them for, rather, since it's a different set of challenges and having to learn a wider spread of tech to do a good augmented cart) Of course, if your goal is purely setting expectations of a more fleshed out, detailed game, the scarlet letter would not be of shame but an advertisement of likely extra goodness! yeah, the amended view might be "extra hardware from decades after the retail life of the system is cheating". Or if not cheating, at least a different flavor of challenge for coders.
  15. But, we also said "yes" to progress in the form of whole new systems! So going back to the Atari 2600 as a base is a certain form of "no" - which is why I'm intrigued by people's answers about Why Still Atari 2600, and what if any cart cramming tech advance would make it feel NOT Like Still Atari 2600. Anyway, well put thoughts there, Keatah.
  16. IF THE CART FITS, YOU MUST ACQUIT! (sorry for a very American + 90s reference for a rather 80s gaming system)
  17. For some people who are very aware of the difference, the keyword there is "at the time" You are doing tricks that might have been literally impossible with the technology that was available in the time frame when it was a current system. (and the other question is, are there any limits beyond what you can stuff into a cartridge port... could it have its own rasperberry PI and MAME emulator and own HDMI out?)
  18. Heh. Now I'm thinking of a similar sentiment at one point for labeling bB games - like esp. before custom kernels made them a bit more competitive. Kind of the opposite problem. I guess some of the people against think it's akin to wanting asterisks for certain baseball achievement records because of change of length of the season, or from suspected steroid use. (Not to get dragged into another metaphor war, but yeah... it reminds me of the defense of steroid users, that yeah, definitely it added more power, but it didn't really help put the bat on the ball.) But some of the big stuff like ZeroPage keep up the <= 4K category which is good. Along with the Port vs Original Work categories. I just wish they were more specific than "K" in theory could an ARM-assist thing be 4K?
  19. Alright it's a fair cop. He's a lot harsher than I am! Especially than my youthful nostalgia
  20. You might have a point. I guess it's just "force the question" vs "that presumes we already accept _____" for me from now on Heh. yeah, 60 FPS is interesting. Does it look "bad" to some of us just because we're not used to it, or worse because we associate w/ lower quality entertainment (like BBC clips shot outdoors and soapoperas or other things that were direct to video). Or is there just something semi-objectively meh. So it sounds like you'd be... looking for some hard to pin down aspect of "atari-ness". I think earlier posts fleshed that out a bit; using the pathways that were provided to make a game image, and not TOO too much shenanigns using it like a bad 48px or 96px wide monitor. well I think someone previously posted where like Super Cobra was set against Super Cobra Arcade, and the former got an "F" and the latter an "A". I know I'm sentimental for the old Super Cobra and that some of the critique was legit even within the realm of what was plausible at the time, but in the end it didn't seem 100% "fair" to present as an apples to apples comparison. And to be clear, I'm taking a more or less fence sitting position overall. As Groucho said, "Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others."
  21. Ah, but "a-TAR-i CARts" sounds GREAT And yeah, we're pretty much in agreement. Homebrew games aren't really a competition except in a limited way of "in the marketplace of attention" (and I guess, marketplace of sales) and it seems unfair to know that casual fans absolutely will judge a coprocessor cart right up against one that only uses tech feasible in the 80s. But I do think you could find some blurred lines where amateur hobbyists have decided to place restrictions or at least make new categories for stuff involving much fresher gear (so I didn't agree that it was the "only hobby" where it happens) Right, but I guess one thing that bubbled up for me in this conversation is that... developers putting 1984 tech were doing it for a system that was still pretty viable (modulo the crash) at the time! By 1987 or 1988, those developers would have been moving on to a different platform! But we love retro. But in part we love it AS RETRO. So it forces the question, what retro limitations are worth heeding so that it's still retro and not just modern, and which ones worth blowing off? and what makes Atari still "worthwhile" as a retro/semi-retro platform. (I got other folks to agree that a cart using its own HDMI out, usb sticks in would probably not be authentically retro... so there's a conceivably some line to think about drawing ... and people may never agree on how exactly to handle the lines or which ones to emphasize but that is all ok) (PS @MrTrust- notice I said "forces the question" where someone might say "it begs the question" - but "begs the question" was an important unique concept - "assume the question had already been answered" and I can't bring myself to be part of the loss of that meaning ;-D )
  22. Personally I find this tangent interesting! It's prescriptivism vs descriptivism. And even descriptivists like me - who recognize that language is a living changing thing and a dictionary is a score card not a rule book, will have usages that they find irksome and want to draw arbitrary lines. I tend to be a utilitarian in my judgements, then... like if the word is the most concise descriptor, I'm fine with its use, but if there's another word that's just about as concise but more correct, the alternate shouldn't have to be used. So: "carts" are about as good as "tapes" so why not be correct? But we don't have simple replacements for "dial" the number or now for "Hang up", even when the physical actions aren't exactly that! ("End the call" is more words and "disconnect" is more vague) Which is why I don't like "literally" being used for "figuratively", because we don't have a nice substitute for denoting "no, surprisingly, this is actually real in the simplest sense of true" (I wish people would say "he was absolutely driving me up the wall" instead of "he was literally driving me up the wall", if they still need something with more punch) But sometimes it's just personal preference. I say "soda" because thats what people around here say but I was in "pop" country for a lot of my life, and I think it's the better word - a lovely short palindrome that captures the onomatopoeia of the carbonation! Yeah, but from the "nearly the beginning" - the people making games back then would have moved on to more powerful base platforms! They wouldn't have - and didn't - use their efforts to cram hardware into chips when there were more fruitful options shifting platforms. Which is what inspired my line of questions: "so why stick with Atari, vs other platforms?" I think the answer is usually "I want to see what can be done within the limitations of the platform", and if we accept that then the question moves to, what's the definition of "the platform". And it's a decent argument to have, even if we never quite agree. And I think you're right where you say, it feels better when it still has the certain 2600 vibe. I'd say you're not right that it's the only hobby - like take swimming. They've banned certain high performance swimsuits! There are records that were set that might not be broken for a long time if ever because of the era when swimmers had weird material advantages. Or even for Golf, there are "forbidden" clubs, just google. Now, that's usually about the competition, esp at pro and semipro levels, so i guess you could say this is just a hobby and not REALLY a competition, but I think it's that sense of "unfairness in the competition of the marketplace of attention" that drives some of the negative sentiment.
  23. I've only skimmed it (shame!) but I mean to swing back to it - in fact it leads off the list of resources I assembled: (hopefully to be pinned soon) because I think videos tend to be good introductions for people.
  24. Oh, is that like an English term that has moved into other languages?? Interesting if so! Yeah, video does have a problem where sometimes the language doesn't keep up w/ the technology. I guess you could say "did you record that" or "did you get that on video" (of course the way we have "record" as a noun for both a disc and a general, presumably paper based thing...) And visually it's weird too. The classic floppy disc save icon, the ear- and mouthpiece style phone icon (i heard kids today, if they're miming talking on the phone, use a flat-slab like hand rather than stick out their pinky and thumb)
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