Zach

Well, then, I hope it has an easy setting. I find unbeatable things to fall into the 'not fun' category. Definitely. The plan is to include 4 skill levels. (get it? Four-Play?)

You're doing a Four-Play demo label for the Midwest Gaming Classic? How will it compare to the release version you've been working on? I find that interesting because in the past, Albert has made text labels for event demos.

This is a good time for an update. On Wenesday I sent Albert the demo for the Midwest Gaming Classic. It includes several improvements over the last release: Title screen Board and marbles made taller All winning combinations highlighted when a player wins in more than one direction. Entire board blinks when game ends in a draw. Barndoor effect and a stable scanline count during the thinking process. Game responds to immediate threats and wins instantaneously. The most difficult programming is over. Now it's just a matter of finishing up some final details. I will release the demo binary after those lucky enough to be attend the Midwest Gaming Classic get a chance to see it. In addition, I recently finished the first bonus game, which has also been submitted to the Minigame Compo. I will probably write a blog entry about Knight Jumper after voting is over.

The webcam is a nice idea, Al. That'll be more satisfying than waiting a month or so for photos.

Yup! 19 1K submissions so far , 3 for Atari. I don't expect my little puzzle game to be competitive with Robot City, but I didn't want Thomas' game to be alone as a 2600 entry.

Nice website, and thanks for the positive review of Marble Jumper.

I like the new look for the scores!

The manual looks good. I found only a couple things that should be changed:

Indeed. It hadn't occured to me that you could use ASL on a read-only address, as in ASL INPT4. It takes as many bytes as LDA INPT4, but there may be times when it is advantageous. What does Fred mean by using $82 as a byte skip? Does it affect the PC or something?

You don't even need Arabic numerals. Just turn on a PF block for each level. Maybe you can combine groups of five to make it easier to read. I'm not sure how many bytes it would take, but it might be worth looking into.For instance: Level 1: * Level 2: * * Level 3: * * * ... Level 8:***** * * * ... Level 11:***** ***** * ... Level 32:***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** * *

It is still worthwhile to look at what could be: feasible designs for homebrews, even if they are never programmed. My blog is full of such ideas.

If you haven't noticed yet, I've got the computer set up again and am back online. I don't have as much time to participate in the forums as a few months ago, but if anyone needs to reach me, I should be able to respond in a timely matter. Four-Play is coming along well, and I've knocked off the first 6 items in the to-do list. If the Midwest Gaming Classic had been scheduled for the middle of June, I think I could have finished it by then. Now I'm aiming for August, but I'm pretty sure I can get it done earlier.

You might be able to give 10 pixels to one sprite and 11 to the other. It depends whether you can squeeze the work in the available cycles. Assuming there is time, you can use NUSIZx, HMMx, and ENAMx to produce 2 two-pixel sprites. Then just use the ball for the 11th. You can save a few cycles by loading the HMMx and ENAMx values at the same time, since they are read from different nybbles. When I first conceived of the two-pixel missile sprite, I tried to make a six-pixel sprite to coexist with the regular player sprites, but I couldn't fit them in the available cycles. Making a 10 and 11 might fare better.

Just for the sake of argument, do you have any programming experience with the ColecoVision (specifically with bitmap mode), and how much would you charge for coding this game for me? I'm experienced enough to figure out the ColecoVision. I'd say roughly a few thousand US dollars. If you can make a serious offer, we can work out a more exact amount.

The title screen design is Nathan's work.

Once you understand how AI for board games works in general, checkers is pretty easy. Even chess is not that difficult, though it would be time-consuming to code all the rules. I've even thought about doing chess myself. (If you're wealthy, Pixelboy, hire me to do the coding. I take Canadian dollars )

This one at least is easily answered. Just load the binary in an emulator and see for yourself.

Da Vinci coded Air Raid? He's even smarter than I thought. It may be a primitive game, but it's very advanced for the 16th century.

Ten dollars is probably the maximum I would pay. Even though the odds of winning myself are low, it'd be cool to subsidize someone else's trip to the show.

Glad to hear a Homestar Runner game is in the works again. Speaking of Homestar Runner, did you ever release the RPG demo shown at CGE 2003? That was the version where various HR characters are trying to figure out what RPG stands for. The graphics on that were fantastic.

In case anyone missed it, the "Stella debugger guy" responded to the problem. The debugger sees what the CPU would see. Reading from PF2 doesn't return the value you wrote to PF2 because PF2 is a write-only location... you'll get whatever garbage value (AKA "bus noise") you'd get if your program did "LDA $0F" (probably, you'll get $0F, since there's no TIA read-only register at $0F). So you wont be able to break according to the value of a write-only register. As I described earlier, you can get around this limitation by writing to RAM at the same time you write to the register.

If anyone needs to reach me, please be advised that due to moving, my internet access will be less frequent than usual. Four-Play is still on schedule, and is planned for release in a few months. I'll try to synchronize the release with any events that AtariAge may attend in the summer.

Thanks for putting all your work in one place, Nathan. Otherwise it would have taken a lot of research to identify which labels were yours. (If you haven't noticed yet, my current avatar is Nathan's work as well.)

Update: I fixed the Four-Play kernel by setting the B bit myself with PLP, and that is safer than assuming the Atari's state on startup. Don't know why I didn't think of it before.

Thanks, Thomas. I'm playing some Jammed right now. Is there anyone who can beat level 599?