Zach

Tonight I finished off the last few puzzles. The most difficult by far was #19, where I was stuck for months: Even when you've solved all 24 puzzles in Marble Jumper it still has replay value, because you are not likely to remember all the solutions. Indeed I doubt I could complete #19 again without spending a long time.

Go slower, not faster up or down the raster refrain from jerky motion and splash into the ocean I'll leave you with this clue: It's 10 days early for you Happy Easter!

Actually for both the test program and Four-Play I set the bits one at a time.The color of the grid is $b4 which translates to Nv1BdIzc. The I flag is set at the beginning as usual, the N flag is set with a cmp, and AFAIK the B flag is always 1. For the test program I just used SED, SEI, lda #0, etc. to set flags. By "weird errors" from setting the D flag, do you mean unexpected arithmetic or something else?

Have fun at the beach! I'm doing taxes this weekend.

I am pleased with the improvements to Stella. I just started using the debugger, and it may not be perfect, but it is definitely making homebrewing easier. Please note a slight bug that causes Four-Play to display incorrectly. The two right lines should be green rather than blue. I use php to color the two right lines, and after studying the problem, I believe that the 'b' bit of the status register is copied as 0 when it should be 1. I wrote quick program that sets the status register to #%01111111 and copies to PF1. The difference is clear.

Agreed. About 90% of the time I'm playing Atari, it's a homebrew.

Yeah, tried that.

Now Globetrotter has visited every continent but South America and Antarctica.

I guess the answer is not as obvious as I was hoping. Anyway I was able to work around the problem by adding an extra line of code to the program that stores to RAM at the same time it stores to PF1. Then I just use this instruction: breakif {*$f0 == $aa}

Well, I'm hopeful that sometime within the next fifty years, the American people will wake up and no longer allow special interests to control our government. At least Mickey Mouse's early cartoons are public domain in Canada now.

I finally decided to wean myself off z26 logs and learn to use to the Stella debugger. It will obviously make homebrewing easier once I get used to it. I am trying to set a break when PF1 is set to $aa. I tried the instruction below, and the program is clearly not breaking when the condition is met. Does anyone see what is wrong? breakif { *PF1 == $aa}

Getting the ROM image for use with emulators is relatively simple. Making a cartridge is more work because Parker Brothers had their own bankswitching method, and the boards that AA uses don't support it. With some effort, it is possible to build a compatible board, and it is also possible to hack the binary to use a more standard bankswitching scheme. The biggest obstacle to selling AA carts is copyright. If you have young children, I believe LOTR will become public domain in their lifetimes.

Cool, program, Fred. Infinity is a tenuous concept when it comes to counting, but it is notable that if you got your infinite number of monkeys and computers, a subset of them would create an infinite number of copies of Combat. Every other possible program would be duplicated infinitely too.

Hunchy 2 is a great game. It's just that it's not the only one.

So tonight I'm gonna party like it's 1999.

To use an analogy, should the director's cut of Blade Runner have been eligible for the 1992 Oscars?

Cool! We agree on something. I haven't paid much attention to the Terry Schiavo case, but I'll be sure to follow your thread.

Yes, I had read about her on your website. You've been through more than I can imagine.

That's cool. Not everyone makes their own avatar. I had been meaning to ask you about the last one. Did you make it?

Just received a 4K board with a socket from AA. Aparently it is not compatible with an Answer Software chip. Of course I don't have a statistically significant sample to work with.

Sounds like a fun class. The teacher also covers programming Infocom-style games in Inform.

Does anyone know if these chips will work with one of the PCB's from the AA store?

You're welcome! Thanks for the 52 pixels. Glad you like the 52 pixels. Keep in mind that a 52 pixel image consumes a lot of ROM, so programmers may not always want to use it, especialy in a 4K game. The current version of the title graphics is about 3.33K. Almost Live not available on DVD: Lame! EDIT: There are a bunch of Almost Live clips at youtube.com.

I've been keeping up with your blog, but I missed your mention of it. Looking back, I see it's called "David's Football game".

Nice job with the mockups. I was afraid we had scared non-programmers away from dreaming up homebrews.