Zach

Glad someone else out there knows Xiangqi. The major hurdle for westerners is to learn to identify the pieces, represented by Chinese characters. I agree that it's a better game than western chess. As for programming feats, there are many, but Robot City 1K stands out.

X? Y! Really? I could have sworn it was C.

I haven't checked whether you've done this already, but you can squeeze a few bits of RAM out of the PC. In fact, supercat described a lot of clever ideas for milking extra RAM out of the Atari during our chess discussion.

Well deserved, John. I still slightly prefer Conquest, but both Champ Games are in my collection. Any plans to publish Avalanche?

Thanks for the encouragement, Chris. Oh yes, I'll get a break this summer. That's the nice thing about working in education. The thing is I'll be busy catching up on all the things I haven't done since September. So the question is, will there be enough time to finish a homebrew along the way?

Hey Manuel, I found a fun remix of Amazing. You can listen to a sample at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0013IE6US/ref=dm_dp_trk7 Zach

Tried a credit card when I was right out of college, got blindsided by a hidden charge, and never used one again.

Congratulations on reaching Beta, Chris! Regrettably I haven't had much time for testing lately. I haven't even downloaded Cabbage Patch Kids yet!

Here I go again on my own... Oh, and I have to agree with Bob about Heart. Who Will You Run To? is one of their best.

So the story of your Meltdown proto is over?

Anyone else put off by pricing at $79.95 rather than $80? (EDIT: What I mean is a price only 5 cents away from $80, but unless you pay close attention, it appears to be in the $70-something range. This doesn't happen only with Actionauts, of course)

Yeah, a restart function within the applet would be more convenient.

I'm not using the missiles yet, so I could put in some treasures the same colors as the worms, assuming there's enough time in the kernel. The question is though, what could be more valuable than blocks of solid diamond? Yeah, that's an issue with Java applets. I don't know how to activate the keyboard without the user clicking on the applet first. (Anyone?) One solution is to make a title screen with a "Start" button.

Nice Bob. All that, and you have time for homebrewing too? I'm impressed.

Just listened to it. It's pretty good, although I don't think I'll be starting my own blog entry on it. Speaking of amazing, I am amazed that the record industry was so upset over p2p networks, and yet you can find just about any song on YouTube nowadays.

I dunno. When I made a Java prototype of a possible Atari 2600 game, there wasn't much interest in it. I don't know whether few people noticed it, or they were waiting for a real 2600 binary. (Comments on the project should go in my blog.)

If anyone is interested, I now know how to fix the flicker using double buffering. However, I wouldn't be able to get to it until next weekend at the earliest.

Hi Devin, That's great that your sample songs came originally from MIDI files. Nice job on the conversion. I think we are all a little spoiled around here having heard some great Atari 2600 music by talented programmers. By comparison, your demos are, shall we say, primitive. The notes need more variation with the volume to show more flavor. However as I understand it, your tool just extracts notes from the MIDI file and converts it to ASM data. It's still up to the programmer to write a music driver to play the notes, right?

Hey Manuel, we have similar tastes in music, so I look forward to checking it out when I'm caught up with work. (Or rather when I'm caught up enough.)

For Pi Day my Algebra II class calculated π to 20 digits by hand as a team. They used Machin's formula and the Taylor series for the inverse tangent. (I've explained that they will learn how the series works when they get to second-semester Calculus.) I like π as much as the next math geek, but I have to agree with this article that argues that 2π is a more important constant.

Great characters, Devin. My favorites are the Easter Bunny and the Bee Man. um... How about Boxing Day?

Go here to read about "early" HMOVEs. You'll find it under "HMOVE Timing Chart". In short it's a trick that lets you do HMOVE without leaving a black line on the left of the screen. The catch is that it only moves sprite leftward, and if you need them to go right you'll have to use RESxx.

It is definitely OK to set HMBL during VBlank. As I understand it, the 2600 still counts cycles during Vblank, and you still need to watch when you write to the register. To find out at which cycle you are setting HMBL, you can use the trace feature in z26. Use the -t switch, but be sure to exit z26 quickly, or you will end up with an excessively large log file. You can also use the Stella debugger and set a breakpoint when something is written at HMBL. I don't know at exactly which cycle setting HMxx becomes reliable, but you should be OK if it's at cycle 50 or greater.

Hey Devin, I had the chance to test on hardware this weekend and, well, you can see there are some bugs that the emulator doesn't show. This is probably due to writing to some of the HMxx registers too early in the scanline, the results of which are one of the few traits of the 2600 that emulators don't replicate. I had to learn this the hard way too. I've also attached a very short video clip that shows the sprites going berzerk: KO_Cruiser_WIP_2008_03_11_001.zip

Can't wait to see the rest of your characters, Devin.