Zach

That's cool that homebrewers are getting recognition at Mobygames. But batari has his own page at the IMDB. Thanks for all the cartoons, Fred.

Back to the original subject, Trader Joe's is now selling Double Rainbow Pumpkin Ice cream again.

Thank you for your continued interest. Unfortunately my work takes all my energy these days (First year high-school teacher. Classes are Algebra II, Calculus, Introduction to Programming, and AP Computer Science.) Maybe I can spend some time on it during winter break, but it's more likely we'll have to wait until summer for an update.

Out of that, I understood России, Я, мой, русский, and не. When I get home I can probably look up the rest. I may ask for your help with Четыре at some point.

I knew of the two-shooter coop mode, but I didn't even know Space Invaders had split movement and shooting. That should be an easy hack for a lot of other shooter games.

If you haven't seen it in the homebrew forum yet, I have posted a demo of a well-known Russian block game. The kernel manages 10 independently colored blocks at 8 pixels wide. (Well, 9 pixels for the far right one.) Although there are only 4 COLUxx registers in the TIA, VBLANK offers an often overlooked 5th color (always black). There are four colors available for the first 4 cells: background, playfield, player 0, and player 1. There are also three registers that can be pre-loaded with new colors. Then there is just barely enough time to load and store the last three colors, only because I am running code in RAM and using immediate addressing. Finally, to close off the edges of the play area, I turn VBLANK on and off. In order to turn on VBLANK on the right side, I chose color values whose bit #1 were set. Then whatever value was saved to COLUPF on the right could also be saved to VBLANK. Turning it off on the left side was more of a challenge. I ended up using PHP, knowing that none of the color values loaded were zero, and bit 1 of the status register would be clear. I also experimented with SHX to clear VBLANK. It has the advantage of using fewer cycles and freeing the SP, but the disadvantage is that it is a little understood illegal opcode that may not be entirely stable. So far, my tests with SHX have been successful, but I'll stick to PHP unless I find another use for the SP. Currenlty it takes two scanlines to update the colors for the next row. I wish I could have done it in one line, but the block data has to be compressed to fit in 128 bytes of RAM, and I don't see any way to unpack and store 10 colors in only 76 cycles. Without further ado, here is the code for coloring the blocks, part of an unwrapped loop. ;------------------------------------------ pla lda #<BackToRom1 sta SelfMod+22 lda color4; sta COLUP1; block 4 lda color1 sta COLUBK; block 1 lda color2 sta COLUPF; block 2 lda color3 sta COLUP0; block 3 lda color5 sleep 4 jmp SelfMod BackToRom1 ;-------------------------------------------- SelfModCode; byte count php; 0; turn off vblank sta COLUBK; 1 2; block 5 stx COLUPF; 3 4; block 6 sty COLUP0; 5 6; block 7 lda #COLOR0; 7 8 sta COLUP1; 9 10; block 8 lda #COLOR0; 11 12 sta COLUBK; 13 14; block 9 lda #COLOR0; 15 16 sta COLUPF; 17 18; block 10 sta VBLANK; 19 20 jmp BackToRom1; 21 22 23 ;------------------------------------------- EDIT: Added a screenshot using DEC VBLANK. (I tried this on hardware too.) EDIT2: Check out what INC VBLANK does!

Off the top of my head, all I could think of was Euchre. Then I checked the list and remembered the other "E" games are recent ones. Looking forward to the reviews.

Not sure if that was an intentional pun, but still, .

Weird, I was just thinking about some of the Bible story games for the Nintendo, and wondering why there weren't any for the 2600. Turns out there was, but we didn't know! I would be very surprised if this were not in the AA store by the end of the year.

I am indeed interested to hear about this. It's interesting that checkers was so much more difficult to solve than Connect-4, even though for non-perfect play it's easier to compute heuristics for checkers. In checkers you can just count pieces to get a pretty good idea who's ahead. In Connect 4 you have to search for patterns. On the other hand, it is the search for patterns that makes Connect-4 easier to solve completely. I wonder how much longer until we see unbeatable checkers on home computers?

If you like Frogger and Space Treat, take a look at Elevators Amiss. It's like Frogger rotated 90 degrees.

Well done, John. And nice use of public-domain text.

Way to highlight a homebrew! I can't think of one that deserves it more than LadyBug.

It's not exactly an Easter Egg, but Four-Play does have a bonus puzzle game. As the manual states it can be unlocked from the title screen. Has anyone figured out how to unlock it yet?

Thanks Nathan. I look forward to more of Artie the Atari. Speaking of cartoons, I just discovered Piled Higher and Deeper. Don't know how it could have been around since 1997 without my knowledge.

Thanks John, I'm glad someone finally got around to doing this port. Clever use of the playfield you're using. I always imagined using the multi-sprite trick, but your way fits in a lot more rocks.

Well said, Bob. I would just add that z26 is accurate enough as long as you know not to write to any HMxx registers too early in the scanline. I learned that the hard way.

I was not aware that homebrew may contain a negative connotation. Albert does make a point that the quality of 2600 homebrews match or exceed the commercial games, but he may need to emphasize it more. Maybe providing a zip file of all the homebrews in the store whose binaries are released would make it easier for people to test drive.

Great job on the Elevators Amiss label, Nathan!

Great suggestions, Fred. Thanks! I'm all for Nutcracker music if we can get it in tune. I imagine we will have to try lots of musical pieces before finding ones that sound good on the Atari. I've also been looking into some excerpts from Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition: Market Place Bydlo Ballet of the unhatched chicks And another fun piece by the same composer: Sorochinsk Fair (Incidentally, I thought a platformer with the Nutcracker as the main character would make a nice Holiday cart, but since I'm not programming it, I won't push the idea too hard.)

UPDATE: Just wanted to let you know that I haven't given up. I've had more time for programming this summer and got a lot done this weekend. Mainly I've been busy adapting the game to standard memory, rather than the RAM+ bankswitching. With the latest demo you can move pieces and rotate them, but rows don't dissappear yet when they are full. Note that the score and next-piece icon are not active yet. Also, I took care of the wrapping problem when moving to the left or the right, but you can still wrap while rotating. Also, the shapes are not random now. Do any of you programming gurus know the mininum number of bits to seed a good pseudorandom sequence of seven numbers? chetiry_18Jun07.bin

Sounds like an interesting project. I look forward to seeing a demo.

Congratulations on your latest homebrew, Bob!

I just checked out Paladin for the first time today. Keep up the great work!

I've actually considered 'T' as an alternate name to my non-infringing Russian block game. It is the first letter in tetronimo, and is one of the few letters that is the same in English and Russian (other languages too, of course). Best of all, one of the shapes in the game has a T shape.