Andrew Davie

I don't charge by the hour. I just don't want to feel taken advantage of. But if you actually wanted to pay me to write a game for you - say something of the quality of Wen Hop or Boulder Dash... then it would cost you probably $50K give or take. It's a lot of work.

Of interest to me, on a bit of searching - I see there are already laws in Australia covering the resale rights of artworks, where 5% of the resale value is owed to the original creator of artworks. At least to my reading of the legislation at https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2021C00461 -- and apparently this concept (called droit de suite) is standard practice in Europe (and of course Australia) but apparently rejected by the USA (although California did legislate similar requirements but overruled by the supreme court).

What incentive is there for homebrew programmers who might, for example, spend years developing a title and then perhaps see a few hundred dollars total in-pocket from sales of that title - and subsequently see individual copies of the game selling for $1000 or more? I mean, why even bother releasing binaries or ROMs? Where's the benefit for the developer here? I might as well just write stuff for myself and never ever release games. I loathe this whole "profiting off my hard work" situation. I most certainly do not write games for "investors" who look to make a profit by holding onto my work for some period and then selling at a markup. I write games for people to enjoy and play. It is extremely demotivating when I see my work, for which I may have actually "earned" a few dollars (e.g., $5/cart)... selling for orders of magnitude more than that. This is imbalance, and it's "using" other people. If you really want to support artists and encourage people to write more games, then you have to make it worth their while. You need to find a way to stop profiting off them, and start channeling funds their way. That can start with not quibbling over $10 or $20 being some sort of imposition on the community. It can also be recognising that on-selling for profit is also in some way taking advantage of the original artists. A small percentage kickback is hardly too much to ask.

Actually, what I'm hanging out for is some sort of scheme (for example NFT) where a certain percentage of royalties is paid to an author on ever sale of an item. Why should I sell something to a collector for (say) $50 who then tries to flip it for $500? This is not a fair balance. We need to recognise the long-term "ownership" of artworks and fairly include authors in the money made as a result of that artworks' creation. It's totally unfair to be selling something at a profit, without including the original author as a beneficiary of that sale. IMHO.

My next game is going on sale for 1 cent. For the first copy. I'll double the price every copy after that. Second person gets a copy for 2 cents. The third for 4 cents. It will be interesting to see how many copies I sell.

The market for '2600 games is very very very small. Even the best of the games might sell a few hundred copies. $10/copy would not even begin to cover paying for the time required to develop a game. So let's not be critical of authors asking for whatever price they feel is reasonable. If people don't buy, fine. But literally telling authors they can "shove it" for daring to ask for a reasonable price for their work... hmmm. I think I worked out some time back that the per-hour take-home for Boulder Dash was something like 5 cents. Thank you for the support.

Me! Got quite the surprise tonight when our TV recommended that I watch... me! on the @ZeroPage Homebrew show. How totally unexpected that was, seeing my ugly mug on the TV!!

Stuck. Banging my head against something that's not working. I have to be in the right frame of mind to push through this one and I'm not there at the moment. Probably the interleaved chronocolour, as every-time I think about what it's doing it's astounding that it works. We're still a 1-colour playfield, 40 pixels across. It sure doesn't look like it. On the other hand, the spinning planet stuff is pretty neat (see earlier demos). To be honest there are quite a few things I really like. For example, the title screen with the 6-sprites over animating interleaved chronocolour background. I'm the only one doing this at the moment. Integrating the zooming/spinning planet sequence, the spaceship landing/takeoff, and progression from planet to planet. Not really, but I will say that all feedback is very motivating to me. To be honest, with the amount of stuff I put out... the actual feedback is very very small. So I feel somewhat that I'm doing it all for my own satisfaction (which is true enough), but people who would be interested in actually buying it are minimal. So most days I think to myself "it's never going to be a cartridge, so just enjoy tinkering". I haven't thought about it, but thanks for the sentiment. Maybe I should design a level editor/designer for everyone to use. That would probably start the ball rolling. Or someone else could do a level editor - that would be super-neat! When I realised it might, just might.. be possible to have 6-sprites over asymmetric playfield. Tried it and it didn't work... made a tweak and it worked. That was a huge "aha!" moment. Another was perhaps the realisation that I could map a texture onto a sphere in real-time using just simple code... that was pretty cool too. But mostly this hasn't been "aha!" moments; it's been lots of little tweaks, and some really solid optimisations over many many hours of programming. TY!

Many years ago (over 20) he did have my permission to sell 'Qb' for a short time, but I asked him to stop doing so literally decades ago. He continues to list Qb on his site, though -- although whether he sells it or not is obfuscated. Please do not buy pirated homebrews; it's hard to overstate how damaging this can be to the community in terms of encouraging authors to write new games.

Having a bit of a lull. But just as a what-if, I added gravity to the particle system. Video shows the effect on the "splash" at the bottom of falling water. Looks pretty cool to me. I do like trying to make the low-res playfield graphics look quite capable. The particle system was a brilliant addition to the whole system.

Perfect.

If you are planning to sell eventually, let the new owner decide. If you destroy an artefact by making it look pretty to your eyes, you have literally done what I just wrote -- "destroyed it". The history and originality is gone. Originality is critical in collectables. Remember that old church painting where the grandma decided to "fix it" -- she totally destroyed any value it had (mind you, she gained huge notoriety for her town). Don't, under any circumstances, replace labels on rare items. Otherwise you might as well do stuff like this and think you're doing the right thing...

"implosions" now functional to convert geodoge into *nothing*. That is, geodoge are no longer permanent. I'm trying to have the screen "not static" when you're not actually doing anything. This evaporating geodoge kinda works because it changes a couple of game mechanics; firstly, there is lots of action on the screen even when there's no player action. Dogecoin are scarce, and you only get them by converting geodoge to dogecoin by mining. But now if you leave the mining too late, then the conglomerate reduces in size so your point multiplier is affected. If you leave it too long there won't be enough doge to mine. Also, basically, it just looks pretty cool. I got the effect using the standard particles - I generated a normal "explosion" group of particles originating at center with random outward speeds (and set duration). I then just calculated the final position of each particle, and set the particle to that positon as the starting point instead... and finally negated the x and y increment speed of the particles. So they start at the end point and collapse to the origin. Surprisingly, worked first time.

According to latest accounts, Qb sold a grand total of 19 copies in the last 14 years. No, it's retired.

No,

There was. Quite a few variants over the years. Somewhere I still have one or two of the "special edition" boxes lying around, too. https://atariage.com/features/contests/Qb/QbBox.php

Boul Boulder Dash is contractually guaranteed to be available until December 2024 at least.

This is exactly not true. You cannot reverse engineer a game, make minor graphical and game tweaks, and suddenly you're compliant with copyright and trademark laws. Good luck with that.

Let's say Sunday July 23rd USA

It's now the 20th 22nd (?) anniversary of the first release of my game 'Qb' for the 2600. It's still an OK little game from the 'dawn' of home-brewing for the '2600, but the time has come. I feel that 20+ years is time enough, and it's time for Qb to permanently retire. So I've asked Albert to withdraw Qb from the store, and that will be the end of it. Many thanks to the hundreds of people who have purchased a copy over the years. It's still dear to my heart, and actually for a 4K game it's doing some pretty nifty PF manipulation. I'm feeling that it's done it's dash, so to speak, and better to go out smiling than just be that game that sits around forever in the corner gathering dust.

I'm not so sure. Think about many of those programs being written in C, and memory dynamically allocated with a malloc() type function. I can see definite fragmentation happening and suddenly you need to allocate a large buffer but there's no contiguous memory "slot" that's big enough to allocate. So IMHO those games might have had to do "degragmentation" of sorts - that is, manage the allocation of RAM and/or move things around to facilitate efficient memory usage and prevent many small allocations from making larger allocations impossible. I'm just saying it's feasible.

I don't have much to say about swap file sizes; we generally set them to as large as possible rather than dynamic. But the trashing I was referring to - not the correct term I admit - was in file access, not virtual memory swapping to/from disk. Completely seperate issues in my view. The defragmentation was to address the problem of accessing single files which were distributed over the disk in many fragments and which required many head moves to access and thus were relatively incredibly slow. Defragmenting these files was a big performance improvement. Swap files and RAM area another issue but that didn't really affect us as we used large swap files and generally sufficient RAM. Not in a dev environment. Perhaps an office-type managed environment, but I've never not once ever seen a machine reimaged, as we all had custom configs and software installed and nary a disk image/backup in sight. Re-imaging was never an option for us. Not something I ever ever worried about; wearing out my hard drive. Defragmenting was an excellent way of taking a break, because your computer was busy/unusable for an hour or so while it was defragging. I had a workmate who did it seemingly several times a day

Rubbish! Disk defragmentation made a huge difference in the early days of mechanical drives. There was a significant performance gain to be made by running a defragmenter, and it was common practise in the 80s-90s to defragement when you started noticing performance degradataion (which was actually audible as you could hear your heads thrashing when accessing highly-fragmented files). I lived through this period as a developer and defragmentation tools were essential. Whilst your point about system files not being fragmented as they were installed at the same time on a clean drive is true enough, most of the usage of a system involved data and unrelated files. Defragmentation software removed, for the most part, head seeking slowdowns during accessing individual files -- your head was not wildly jumping across widely separated sectors to read the contents of a file. Head seek on a file-to-file basis was an issue, but not nearly as much as the inside-file seeking was. A defragmenter might indeed move system files so that the seeking on file-to-file may not be as efficient (but unlikely even so because defragementers tended to move files to the beginning of a drive, not randomly placed all over the drive). The efficency gains were in the defragmentation of files themselves, and again... this was a significant performance improvement. I have no doubt that you feel you are right, and I am not going to gain anything by debating with you. But I couldn't let your proclamation go unchallenged, because... "something's wrong on the internet so I need to fix it". And now, I have. TL;DR - my own personal experience in the 80s and 90s was that disk defragmentation made a HUGE difference to the speed of our dev machines. Huge.

To be clearer, I have never said if you don't own the IP don't use it. I've said that one should try to contact IP owners for permission. If you can't get a response, or can't find the IP owner... then that is a choice you have to make - do you proceed anyway? I make no criticism/judgement on those who decide to do so. I'm just saying that you need to make the effort, and recognise that even if you can't contact someone or you simply don't get a response -- you leave yourself open to being in a position where you're facing a C&D or perhaps some sort of claim for using IP without permission. I see this whole "issue" as a chance for the community to get more original games, so there's a silver lining.