Atarius Maximus

The others are most certainly not horrible, but Star Castle's art definitely stands out. A truly amazing job.

Nope, it's never too late. I spent countless minutes with Pet Rock version 2. It now has an amazing interactive feature. Push the joystick in all four directions to give your Pet Rock commands (which are displayed on-screen), and watch in wonder as your pet completely ignores you. Sorry Nathan, but I decided to go a different direction and use joysticks instead of paddles. Edit: Have no fear, I won't spam this thread with any more updated versions of Pet Rock. It's complete and finalized and ready for a limited cart run. I think the 15 minutes of development time speaks for itself. petrock2.bin

That's something I look forward to seeing.

I think it's a perfect title for a new label competition. It's been a while.

I hereby grant you exclusive rights for manufacturing and distribution of Pet Rock. petrock.bin

Yeah, Hunger Shark was actually a decent game. He did take some time with that, it wasn't a weekend project.

You beat me to it. I was just finishing up on my Pet Rock game, but I used DPC+ so it's probably worth a whole lot more. I think now I'll just make my own cart and maintain my exclusive rights to the only copy ever made.

That's the bottom line for me as well. There's no hard and fast rule as to how much time you should spend on making a game, but if you're really proud of it, take the time to polish it. I'm in no way pretending that I'm a prolific expert programmer, but my first game in the AA store was made with bB (Cave In), and love it or hate it I spent several years working on it. I must have play tested that game thousands of times. I wanted it to be as "perfect" as possible. Edit: Ok, it was 99% bB. I did write the titlescreen in pure assembly.

I'm pretty sure CPUWIZ was being sarcastic. While not everyone loves Boulder Dash, I don't think anyone would say it was a crap release. It was a limited release due to the agreement they made with FirstStar who owns the IP. That's also why the ROM is not available.

It's discouraging to hear you say that, Andrew, as you are most certainly one of the most talented 2600 homebrew authors.

I'm also a programmer and collector, and am also very selective with what I buy. I try all of the games before I buy them, and buy the carts of the games I really like to support the author. I've probably bought over 50 homebrews over the years. If I don't like the game, I won't buy it. It's hard to relate to the people who simply buy a game because someone decided to put it on a cart.

This. My issue has always been with the discipline of the programmer taking the time to polish a game, no matter the language that was used to create it. It is very painful to fully play test a game hundreds (possibly thousands!) of times to try and nail down every little detail to make it as perfect as possible. The last 20% just isn't for everybody.

Thank you! Lots of subscribers received their copy of the game before me. Non-subscribers should be able to buy a copy in the store very soon.

I just received my boxed copy of the game from Al. Wow, it looks great! Many thanks to David Exton for his amazing work on the artwork and the instruction manual. He really exceeded my expectations. Al will take much better pics than these for the store, but I thought I'd share a few photos that I took.

Welcome Solrax! While I'm not an assembly programmer myself, it's always exciting to see the old school programmers pop in on the AtariAge forums. Robotron was one of my favorites and your conversion was fantastic. I bet there's someone out there that would love to help try and read those old 8" floppies.

I haven't checked this forum in a while and just saw your comment. This game has a detailed disassembly so it's probably specifically mentioned in the code, I haven't looked. Without a detailed disassembly, it's just a time consuming trial and error process of changing color entries in the disassembled code, compiling it, and seeing what happens.

Yeah, RevEng is a genius. 'Nuff said. I know I mentioned it in the thread you started in the Intellivision forum, but I didn't even think about adding the ability to use a 2nd joystick to fire in a different direction during development. It wouldn't be a quick and easy change by any stretch, but it's something I maybe can look at in the future for an alternate version. No promises though, I'd rather start on something new when the spirit moves me again. Making sprites for 7800basic has a bit of a learning curve to it, but once you've figured out the basics it's not too bad. I use the freeware image editing program GIMP, which I was completely unfamiliar with prior to writing my first demo game for 7800basic and it's become pretty easy for me now. There is a native version for OSX that doesn't require X11, so that's an option for you. I wrote a quick tutorial for getting started with GIMP as well that you can look at here. I'd love to see what you could do with 7800basic! Edit: Tiled, another essential app for 7800basic in my opinion, also has a native OSX version. I also posted a tutorial for getting started with that app.

Then it's MESS for you!

That's a possibility but not sure if that would actually work well when playing the game. I'm taking a break from coding for a while, I may revisit an alternate firing option in the future. Thanks for the suggestion.

By the way, I am an Intellivision fan too, that was a large part of the inspiration for this game. I have my original Sears console that I got in the 80's and I have about 75% of the released carts in my collection. I'm not a big spender, I don't have any of the really rare games. I wish I would have bought a Cuttle Cart 3 from Chad when they were still available.

Thanks! While I don't personally recommend it due to it's imperfect emulation of real hardware, you can download an updated version of ProSystem here that plays Dungeon Stalker just fine. Despite it's flaws, if you're running Windows it has a nice GUI and is easy to use.

I've never seen that coupler before, but I figured there was probably something out there. I agree it'd be worthwhile to give that modification a shot, but no promises. I'll give it some thought as a future alternate version of the game. Seeing that I personally have no way to couple two joysticks together it'd be hard to test it and it'd be really hard to test play it in emulation on a keyboard.

Good point, and honestly I didn't even think about that during development. I suppose I could have added a two joystick option, but there isn't really a good way to couple two joysticks together to make that a viable/playable option. I always use a Sega Genesis controller with Edladdin's adapter when I play the 7800.

Thanks Byte Knight! I'm a great admirer of your work. Make no mistake, this game wouldn't have happened without RevEng. He tackled the most difficult parts of the code, especially the enemy movement and AI. Trebor too, who is the most meticulous gameplay tester I've ever had the pleasure of working with. I also was a big fan of Dark Cavern and Night Stalker as a kid, as well as Wizard of Wor. I was thinking of Wizard of Wor and Ms. Night Stalker as well during development. It was Mike's idea to add the wizard and it worked out perfectly I think. It's funny that both Night Stalker and Wizard of Wor included an invisible enemy, which I purposely left out of Dungeon Stalker as it's the one design decision that I always disagreed with for both of those games. It was much more frustrating than fun for me. The idea of being able to blast through walls was discussed, but axed. Believe it or not this game really does push the limits of the hardware despite the fact that it seems fairly simplistic, it's possible for 24 sprites to be on-screen at one time (they can only be 8 pixels tall with the zone height I used, so what looks like one sprite could be more). I haven't abandoned batariBasic (I made Diamond Drop for the 2600 this year too), but I have to admit that it's been more fun to develop on 7800basic. Check it out, I'd love to see what you could do!

I'd have to agree regarding Jr. Pac Man. Whenever I fire up that game on the Harmony I always play Nukey Shay's 2005 hack (Jr. Pac Man Speed Throttle). Holding down the fire button makes you move at double speed. It makes an otherwise nearly impossible game fun to play.