MikeMika

I would love to finish some of the prototypes, particularly Tempest. But it does take a long time to get into the code and figure out where the programmer was intending to take the game. Also, programming styles are so different, in my case- it is easier to start from scratch and do the entire game than it would be to pick up where someone left off. In some cases, it may not be too bad. In the case of Tempest, I am sure I'd probably need to start over and use the disassembled code of the original as a basis. Mike

Scott: You're welcome! As for Vanguard, I was trying to convince Lee Krueger that he could add voice to any game he wanted to. If I had the time, I'd like to add it to Gorf, with all of the player rankings between rounds, and maybe turn Jungle Hunt back into Jungle King, and put in the Tarzan yell. Alas, Berzerk was the perfect candidate. Now I'm back to more original creations! I'll have some brand new games to show soon... Mike

Mega Man II Coleco Cart in system AtariSoft Pac-Man(?) above the Gorf not 2600 compatible. Your taste in lamps? Mike

Thanks to everyone that showed up for Berzerk! It was great meeting you all. I just got back, so I can answer some of the questions posted since the show: 1. Continue to sell after the show? Albert has been advising me on this, and we'll figure out how to do it for those that missed out. 2. Will the ROM be released? I intend to do it, but to respect some requests at the show, I might modify the title screen or something else minor to commemorate the show seperately of the wide release. Nothing major at all, mind you. After all, this is Dan Hitchens and Atari's baby, not mine. I just hacked it. So it will be released. 3. Will it work on Cuttle/Emu's? Z26 and Cuttle will work fine, the others like Stella and PCAE seem not to work. As I told people at the show, Eckhard deserves a lot of credit because he was the first to do voice in the homebrew scene, and it was his Stella-List posting that inspired the whole thing. He proved it could be done, I just followed his lead. New questions from other places like private e-mail: 4. My label is peeling! Well, we applied them on the show floor Saturday morning next to the Hot Dog stand. The climate was weird. If you are having problems, a glue stick does the trick. If you ruin the label, I'll send you new ones. It all sort of came together at the last minute. 5. My cart doesn't work! E-mail me, and we'll arrange for you to send it back to me and we'll swap it out. I can re-use the specialized internal board to fix it. 6. I just saw Berzerk on Ebay for $1000000.00! It makes me mad! I'll sell you one for $100, and save you a ton! No, really, we intend to get everyone a copy who wants one. If you are in the bay area, that will be much easier. Shipping is an issue we'll work out. It may be at extra cost, but nothing major. Thanks to all for the great time! Everyone at the show was very cool and easy going. Kudos to Alex and Albert for working their asses off for all of us, and of course John, Sean and Joe- Who put it all together. Mike

Wow! I didn't expect this much response so soon! Thanks for all the kind words. I'll try to answer some questions here while I take a 5 minute break from work. I had not anticipated continuing production of the game beyond CGE. That said, if the response remains high, I'd gladly keep it alive and available. This is a hack, so it is still the great 2600 Berzerk game, just with voice and some very minor changes to art here and there to bring it closer to the arcade version. The huge credit still belongs to the crew who pulled off the original version for Atari. Unfortunately, there is still no diagonal shooting. I got pretty far with the code on getting this to work, but I had too many kernal problems and the clock was ticking for CGE. For the record, I got pretty close. Maybe, if I pick it up some time later, I'll give it another go for a BIN release. And again, it is great seeing positive response. I'd like to do more things like this, and since people seem interested in it, it is very encouraging. See you guys at the show! Mike

I have been looking for this Atari 400/800 title for a long time. This is my last resort. I traditionally hate posting these "What is this game?" posts. It has been a while since I would ride my dirt bike to my friend's house to play this, about 20 years actually, so here goes: I think the title is BattleLyrae(?), or at least something like it. It is a side scrolling, left to right shooter. It played a whole heck of a lot like Scramble. It looked like a cross between Vanguard and Scramble. Any potential leads would be great. When my friend got rid of his Atari computer, the game went with it. I have looked for ATR files, lists, screenshots, anything. Such fond memories. Thanks, Mike

Thanks Jindroush and Albert... Now I have something to actually look forward to. I thought I was crazy for a while, because I had lost so many details over the years. I tried talking with a lot of folks who just thought I was insane. It really is an amazing game. Albert, if you're going to CGExpo, we should sit down and play through it! It was amazing! Mike

Actually, now that my 2600 dreams of Road Warrior are dashed, Road Warrior Atari Arcade?! That is equally as cool.. He also mentioned the Superman arcade game, which I can only imagine would have been like that Superman III version.. hehe. Mike [ 05-10-2002: Message edited by: MikeMika ]

Damn, my hopes are dashed! I was so stoked! I was hoping to find a way to get more details from him in e-mail without freaking him out. He is an extremely nice guy and his memory of the GCC days was remarkable. I think we'll be hearing more about GCC now that we've made contact. Mike

E-mail me, Tempest. I'll get you any and all information I can get. Mike

I was also there, and it was amazing. I managed to get an original Arcade Pong Motherboard signed by Nolan and Al Alcorn. It was really cool. Steve Russel was fantastic if not a wee bit as crazy as everyone says. Al was entranced by the board and started going through it and figuring out what version it was. Nolan was as kind as ever, and a much more humble version of him this time around than previous encounters I have had with him. During his talk, he said it would have been more appropriate to have Ralph Baer on the panel as well next to him. That was pretty cool. Al Alcorn was fact checking during the whole discussion. I believe I ran into Cassidy- Was that you I talk to, Cassidy? I was wearinig the Digital Eclipse jacket. To my surprise, we met one of the creators of Ms. Pac-Man, the arcade game, and numerous GCC Silver-box Atari games. He had some original brochures, talked about the prototypes he still had (ROAD WARRIOR FOR 2600!!!). It was an amazing contact. I have his business card, and I plan to follow up on the GCC games that never got released for AtariAge to complete their list. Alex, please e-mail me and I'll get you some more info. He had some great stuff. I think he'd scan and give images for just about anything. Very cool indeed. I have some pictures, but mostly containing myself and the luminaries, so not too great. I think I have some general shots though of Space War in action and the talk I can contribute for whomever wants them. Best, Mike

Andy Capps is now called Rooster T. Feathers, I think it is in Cupertino- They have a web-site. We brought the Pong machine to the location for the interview with Nolan. It was cool. I have a picture of myself kicking Nolan's Pong butt at the game while we were there. Mike

Also, be sure to pick up the Midway Collection 2 for DC, it is a best buy exclusive and a very low manufacturing run. It has Gauntlet, etc, on it. And look out for the Atari Classics on GBA. Super Breakout, Tempest, etc. You can play Centipede and Super Breakout sideways for more accurate aspect ratio. Mike

Hey Tempest, if you need a Lockjaw, I'll check for it. You can have my spare if you want it. I make my way back to Michigan at least once a year to the folks house, and I am 99% sure I have a spare there. Mike

Just to be mean... I paid $6.00 for a supercharger, and all of the games, brand new in the box.. Only caveat, they were all taped together with shipping tape. I needed to use a razor-blade to cut them free but keep the tape on. I bought three bundles at a flea market where the guy had an entire table-top stacked with them. Mike

Hmm.. Just to add to the searching, if anyone finds a European release of KLAX for Game Boy Color, a version of Adventure is hidden as a mini-game, unlocked by a password. I can get the password. If anyone can find the game, let me know. I really want to get my hands on a copy. Mike

It was the Christmas a year or two after Atari VCS's debut, and I had NO CLUE what an Atari was. I was probably six years old, and I was still playing our Sears PONG game on a small black and white TV that served as the portal to the world of PONG and a transmission device for the Professor on Gilligan's Island to send an episode a day to my retinas. I opened a rather large gift and observed the weird packaging, then my father took over with a kind of zeal I had only witnessed on a few other occasions, such as when he purchased the new family Pinto station wagon. I remember my Mom telling him that the gift was "for the boys, not him." regardless, when he got it hooked up, I couldn't help but notice it shared the same cool woodgrain panelling that we had on our family wagon. But what was it? Well, along with the Atari came Combat, a given, and one other cool game I immediately recognized as the game I played at the drive-in that stood next to Carnival. It was Space Invaders. When that switch went up, it was like Han Solo making a failed attempt into hyperspace. Nothing happened. Aha! It was because we were on the wrong channel. The second time, BAM! Space Invaders, and it was in COLOR (We hooked it up to the family room Zenith, the "top of the line", with nice clicking knobs and a fine tuner wheel set behind the UHF dial). Of course, I could "emulate" what it was like to play on my dingy Gilligan box by switching the Color/BW switch. So to make a long story longer, it was Space Invaders, and thanks guys for letting me relive a memory for a bit. Best, Mike

Spector, Tempest nailed it.. It is very difficult to program for. It has a lot of similarities to the Atari 400/800, so that is the first place to start. I would also recommend the Commodore 64 (This was my path). But the more you hear about 6502 assembly being difficult, it can be misleading. Try programming any modern CPU in pure assembly, and you'll understand what I mean. The 6502 is a very easy processor next to the Z80. What Tempest and crew are talking about is the Atari 2600's display system, which is brutal to say the least. You do have to count cycles, etc. The problem is, you do not have as much a robust sprite system as most modern consoles have, or a bitmap system, etc. You literally have to build the display line-by-line, and to some extent, during the line draw. Imagine one frame of the screen being printed on a dot matrix printer 60 times a second. You have to tell the print head what to do as it is moving or returning to the left side of the page. So if you want a sprite to turn on in the center of the screen X&Y, you have to first, sometime before you begin to print it, tell the head which X location it will be. Then you wait for the print head to reach the Y location. As soon as this happens, you then tell the registers to start printing the sprite and let it do it until you decide to stop. Then when it reaches the last line, you tell the print head to stop printing. That's extremely basic... 6502 programming is fun. In fact, you can write code for the 2600 very easily. I have friends who cannot even write a basic program much less tie their shoes, who are now tinkering with 2600 code. I'm trying to avoid mentioning the book that Chris Charla and myself are working on, because it is taking way to long to do around our daily job, but we intend to finish it. It is essentially "2600 programming for dummies". First off, it teacehs rudimentary 6502 assembly. It provides display kernals already, so you don't have to learn it right away. This gives you 2 bitmap sprites of varying height, X&Y coordinate system, 2 missiles, 1 ball. You just have to say where and when and what frames to display, and you also provide a reflected or assymetrical map source for a backdrop, with color tables. So all you have to worry about is what frames to show in the sprites, where they are all located, and what background to display. Later in the book, you get a variety of routines to insert and play with, like a 6 digit score counter, hires sprites, sound effects and music, etc. The ifnal chapter goes into How to make your own Kernal, which we'll leave up to you to figure out, or we'll write a sequel by the year 3000. Overall, the book will teach you to write your own compilable code, and how to burn eproms, and make your own cartridges, and how to use Chad Schell's Cuttle Cart to develop your software. Best, Mike

Just to add to what Glenn is saying, you could create a large number of specialized kernals for displays, unravel your code to created hires graphics, etc. All of these can be ordered into banks. The key, though, is making sure that you don't let those kernals change the bank to retrieve assetts like graphics, etc, in other banks, without causing a major crash. So as he says, you may want to create self-modifying code in RAM, but that quickly eats up space. That's where the fun starts, because with so many obstacles it then becomes time to "get crazy", and start writing bank handlers and trick the bank switcher with a RAM resident controller. Also, like Glenn said, if you look at what the Supercharger did with Frogger and compare it to Parker Brothers, you cna immediately see the advantages of more RAM or ROM. Mike

Hehe.. That's just it. Chad is right, it is crazy to try to push the 2600 beyond its capacities. But for me, my day job is Game Boy Advance and Game Cube. The challenge of doing a higher spec game on a 2600 is pure joy for me, as it is related to the driving force for most programmers: Challenge. Some people genuinely want to create a 2600-like game. The challenge to me is to put something new on the 2600 that hasn't been done already on it. For others, it may be to wear the shoes, so to say, of a Crane or Warshaw, and make a shooter or racing game. Nothing wrong with shooting for the stars, and nothing wrong with coloring within the lines. In the end, the joy for me about programming the 2600 is to see anything come up on the hardware. I would not be where I am today if it weren't for the 2600. When that static screen comes to life with a game I created, it is like finding the lost city of Atlantis, having read about it and studied it all your life, it is like coming face to face with the derelict ruins and turning on a master switch that brings the city to life in surreal and magical brilliance. After that, you want to explore and see how far you can go, observe what exists, and then take the technology to places it may have been able to reach had it not- on one fateful day- lurched from its foundation, sinking into the tides of time. In a way, it is like going back in history and toiling with the primordial ooze of technology. After that, working on today's technology is simple. Everything is essentially done for you. It just isn't as rewarding as programming the 2600. Of course, this is just me. And if you feel the same way, and haven't purchased a Cuttle Cart from Chad, DO IT NOW! It's worth its weight in gold. And back on topic with Bankswitching... Consider using the extra banks for larger worlds. Imagine Adventure with different lands you could go to, etc. All these maps could be stored in seperate banks and retrieved rather easily. Likewise, music, and sprite animation. Core gameplay mechanics can be whiddled down. You could get away with making Super Mario Brothers with the extra ROM space. On Game Boy Color, we had to mess with Bankswitching on a daily basis, and the make-up for that is essentially your core game fits in the "home" bank or banks, and all assetts (Art, animation, sound) would eat up the additional banks. Code across banks gets easy with time, but is a pain to come to grips with. Regards, Mike

I was playing around with the idea of making Dragon's Lair for the 2600 with a 64k bank switch cart. It would essentially just decompress frames to the Playfield (Asymmetrically). It would look horible! I decided against it. But, you could definitely do some cool animation. A game like Prince of Persia would port pretty well with a 32k or 64k cart. With enough flicker, you could get both the player and an enemy looking pretty good... Hmm... This may be my next task! Mike

Jeremy Mika from Digital Eclipse has developed a daughterboard for the 2600 that fits between a chip in the 2600. It outputs perfectly, no more fiddling with Pots, etc. Contact me privately if you are interested, I can put anyone here in contact with him. Mike

Hey, Chris Charla and I are indeed working on a "How to Program the 2600" book. Unfortunately, it's a side project and things are pretty crazy at our day jobs (Digital Eclipse Software) right now. The sad result is that the book, which we wanted to have done way back in April, is still not done! At CGE we hope to show some aspect of the book -- possibly the first chapter in .pdf form, and hopefully some demos from the book. We apologize for it taking so long! We never would have announced it so early if we didn't expect it to be done by now. We hope the finished product is well worth the wait. Just to remind everyone, the book is geared for complete non-programmers to intermediate programmers, offering pre-programmed kernals with explanations, but also exercises to help folks understand the 2600, with easy to modify code. Many won't understand that much of it, except how to change the way a sprite moves and looks, and interacts... while the more intermediate folks will be able to change the kernal and learn display techniques, etc. It is quite an undertaking, and was originally modelled after the Compute! series of programming books. Mike

Imagine that times a million, and you know what modern developers go through, too. It is a horrible dark side that should not at all discourage you from the joy of making a new game. When I read your initial post, I was really bummed that I might not be able to get a copy at CGE, even though I plan to be there, but happy that I could at least get it from Hozer. At least 90% of collectors in any market area are scum, and this is evidence of it. I am very excited for the game, and I hope you have equally as many e-mails of support for it. Ventrue is one of my favorites games, and I used to play it religiously on the 2600. Drop me a line, I'd like to talk to you regarding the possibility of a commercial tie-in with something our company is working on. Also, I'll send you what I've been doodling around with on the 2600, Kickman, Donkey Kong 3, and Zookeeper, hopefully in cart form soon, so that you can be the ultimate bad guy and have two of the *rarest* games out there. Best, Mike

I love the Atari Anniversay collection... but I am biased. I work for Digital Eclipse! So Ken, do this group of folks and myself a huge favor and PLEASE make sure the emulation is perfect. If you need advice or anything, please e-mail me. We've been doing emulation for quite a while, and we can at least help if there are any problems. This software package, as you described, has been proposed to Activision by ourselves as almost verbatim for years, so we are very excited to see it come together and by someone who obviously cares about it. We have Atari 2600 emulation capability right now for PSX, PC, and just about anything else in a flash, such as Game Cube, PS2, or GBA. Best of luck, and I can't wait to buy this! It sounds like I will finally be able to check this dream package off of my wish list. Mike Mika Creative Director Digital Eclipse Software, Inc.