Zach

She's very cute, Bob. Are you and Manuel having a mini-person competition?

That's OK, I probably overestimated how many people are following my blog. The four-in-a-row board game I'm making is called Four-Play and I just abbreviated to FP. More details at Zach's Projects.

Supercat's proposal looks good. I went ahead and drew a mockup of how it would look:

Looks entirely doable. So many board games, so little time. If anyone takes this on, I'll be happy to share my minimax code with alpha-beta pruning. (BTW Yuppicide, Reversi Attack is still high on my to-do list, immediately behind FP.)

Good luck with the job search.

I took a quick look at your screenshot. It looks like this kernel (graphics program) by supercat would be perfect for what you are doing. http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=79626 I haven't looked into it myself, but I've read that Batari Basic can be combined with any kernel.

There seems to be a lot of interest in Zookeeper out there. As for the Electric Yo-Yo, I had the opportunity to play it on an arcade cabinet a few years ago, and my immediate reaction was, "This is just like Elk Attack!"

That looks really good, Mayday! I went ahead and programmed the full board with your set, slightly modified. I made the queen less rookish, and made all the pieces taller. I was able to free 4 bytes from the self-modifying code and put them towards an extra line on the pieces. Now the dimensions are 3x13. The new screenshot and binary are in the first post.

I wouldn't judge the level of interest by the number of responses during the holiday season.

Thanks for the comments. Different levels were always part of the plan. I'm just working on the maximum level now because it's easier to reduce the difficulty than increase it. The game gets faster towards the end because as columns fill up there are less moves to search. I can work on speeding up the searches at the beginning, but the endgame will always be faster. It's true that the game takes just as long when there is an immediate three-piece threat. That's because the search is depth-first. It searches in a particular order, and unless your threat is in the first column it searches, it will analyze other columns many moves ahead before it gets there. It's not a bug; it just means I'll need to adjust the search pattern to spot threats sooner. Thanks for the suggestions regarding graphics. I'll get to that when I'm satisfied with the AI. Wow, 3:0, Thomas? Have you studied strategy, or are you a natural?

Yep, it's a minigame by cd-w. (Of course, it's spelled differently)

That's a good list. Since you asked for comments, here are a few: To me, Q*Bert and Pac-Man are basically the same game. The pyramid of cubes is very similar to a maze, and both games require you to traverse the entire layout. On the other hand, some maze games have different objectives. (Crazy Balloon, Malagai) You probably need some kind of card game category. Maybe make it cards/gambling so you can add Slot Machine too. IMHO a text adventure is still an adventure. Tapper is almost a Catcher. Maybe a Thrower/Catcher

Looking forward to it. It certainly may concern (i.e interest) a lot of people around here.

Considering what you've accomplished in just one year, I look forward to what 2006 brings. I would be excited about PoP, Jetman Deluxe, or Hunchy 3. I'm not so familiar with Sopwith, and I agree that Pipemania is best on the back burner. ps. I like the new avatar. I trust it's a scene from Hunchy 2 that I haven't reached yet.

Reindeer Rescue, of course. I recently caught the first deer from the 4th level.

Uihjah... actually I just bought the HoFD DVD. Was that already in 2005? Then it should obviously be in my list as well I also liked Kung Fu Hustle. So OTT that it almost qualified for a "real-life" version of Dragonball-Z Greetings, Manuel Flying Daggers was released in 2004 for most of Asia, and 2005 for both of our countries. I counted it as 2005 since that was the first chance I got to see it.

I think 2005 was a record for the fewest movies I saw in a theatre, and only one of them appears in your list. Here then is my top 5. 1. Kung Fu Hustle 2. House of Flying Daggers 3. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire 4. Corpse Bride 5. Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith

I have to agree with supercat here. On top of the player, guard, bell, and missile, Chris has managed to draw an asymmetrical playfield. The graphics are not as simple as they look. BTW, just got to level 7 tonight. Now it's really getting interesting.

List of Atari 2600 games This was long overdue. On the discussion page I describe the criteria used for selecting the homebrews to include. Note that homebrews like Synthcart don't belong in a list of games. Feel free to look over the page and make any changes you think are appropriate.

Thanks for sharing the code Bob. The scrolling routine is simpler than I had imagined. It had never occured to me that you can use ROL/ROR to transfer data between different bytes via the carry bit. (I ought to read others' code more often.) When you experimented with different songs, did you try out "O Tannenbaum" (a.k.a "O Christmas Tree)? I was thinking of using that song if I ever get around to doing "X-Bert" I'm getting good at the suburban level, and have reached the train in the city.

Nice job. I like the knight, rook, and king. I've posted a mockup with them, plus some new designs for the bishop, pawn, and queen.

Thanks for the contribution. I forgot to mention that the pieces can be drawn with full scanline resolution, so you can design pieces with more detail. The dimensions are 3x12. The data for the chessmen graphics is stored in RAM so it can be retrieved quickly, and the 128 bytes limit their height. EDIT: The new dimensions are 3x13.

Nice to see you back. I admit I was concerned by your long absence.

Now that I have a cart and have been thoroughly enjoying it, it's nice to read how it works. Two things I'm wondering about: 1) For the scrolling playfield, how did you cope with PF1 and PF2/PF0 being read in different directions? 2) I keep reading that it is easier to write original music than to port existing songs to the VCS, and yet all the songs you did sound great. Did you use any special tricks? p.s. Suburbia is quite a challenge.

I was wondering, does anyone have a Helium Heroes badge yet? I searched the forums but couldn't find anything about it.