Zach

John says he has chosen someone else's label, so it looks like a FP label design contest is not needed. As soon as the Stratogems label is official, I'll invite you to do the Four-Play artwork.

Has anyone tried "z26 -r250 pitfall.bin" yet? Don't know why I didn't think of it earlier.

By running z26 in slow motion, I've found that the scanline count sometimes becomes 263 for one frame during a jump. This might account for the skipping Bob observed. It's interesting that the scanline increase did not affect the screen on my TV. I am working on stablizing the scanline count for the switchable NTSC/PAL version.

If you look at just 2600 Homebrews, it's already up to #7 (which I did not realize until I looked at your post)! ..Al 979592[/snapback] It's at #6 now. If we assume most of them correspond to $50+ orders, Albert will indeed have happy holidays.

I wouldn't go so far as to say Venetian blinds are wrong, but I do prefer solid pieces and wanted to challenge myself to draw them. The closest I came was a technique that works, but uses a huge amount of ROM.

Yeah, what Gateway said.

Stan still visits on occasion. I wouldn't give up yet on hearing a statement from him. Supercat and I have been discussing how to follow up the Breakout hack I did for the 2004 awards. He came up with a pretty good idea.

Since no one else has mentioned it yet, I'll recommend Space Treat Deluxe.

I was wondering about this too.

Ah ha! I was right! Man... you can find anything on the internet. Yep, you were right. That's a different ad than the one I had in mind. I haven't given up looking for the other one. (Thanks for the link. I'll be spending lots of time at this site.)

Placed my order. (Crazy Balloon, FlapPing, and Hunchy II)

I seem to recall a Connect 4 commercial with live action faces superimposed on the checkers. And they were singing too. Of course, my game has nothing to do with Connect 4. It's too early to think about a label contest now.

I would update the PF data just before each row. I'd need 30 bytes to do it (5 columns*6 doubled scanlines). The quickest way I can think of to assemble the playfield data is to save the board with one byte holding the shapes for two pieces. If each byte corresponds to a PF column, then there would be 40 bytes (5 columns*8 rows). Each number could serve as an index to quickly retrieve playfield data from a table. If I used another 8 bytes to store the colors, I can hold the entire board position in 48 bytes. The more I think about this kernel design, the more I think it's a case of "Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should." Maybe if Infogrammes were more permissive with their IP, it would be worth trying to merge this new kernel with the Video Chess A.I.

Awesome label, Nathan. In the event that John chooses another design, your label idea could be adapted to Four-Play as well. Kentucky Freud Chicken, very funny.

Thanks, John. There's no denying that Venetian blinds worked brilliantly for your Strat-o-Gems title. I figured you would have some good ideas for my kernel. I'll have to study your code to have an inkling of how it works. Here is a sample scanline for my chess kernel, so you can see how tight space is: ;assume left side ;of PF0 and PF1 ; are stored, and ; PF2 is in Y ;--------------new line STY PF2 LDY $80 STY COLUPF sleep 14 LDY $83 STY PF0 STX COLUPF LDY $84 STA COLUPF STY PF1 STX COLUPF STA.W COLUPF LDY $85 STX COLUPF STY PF2 STA COLUPF STX.w COLUPF STX PF0; whether X is set to black or white, this clears PF0 LDY $86 STY PF1 LDY $87 ;---------------new line ; code repeats It's true I have 14 cycles of downtime, but I'd need 25 to update the addresses for the playfield data (5 cycles to update 5 addresses for LDY).

I'd wager it'll be Helena's first word.

You did well in the contest, Chris. Jetman was my favorite of the 1K VCS games. I never turn on the Minigame multicart without playing a few rounds of it. Thanks for the comment on Marble Jumper, by the way.

Yep, these are going to be some of the best graphics ever in a VCS game.

Do you like this kernel better than the mockup of 10 X's I sent you?

Brilliant! Three player Pente is possible then. It may take some time to work out the best color scheme. Furthermore, I don't think that 128 bytes is enough to store a 19x19 board with four colors and the dynamic code. However, there is nothing wrong with playing Pente on a 17x17 or 15x15 board. (Of course I wouldn't publish a game under Parker Brothers' trademarked name. I'd call it "Pyat!", which is Russian for 5.)

Since the code is stored in RAM, we can set any of the 3 colors for any piece. For example, instead of STX for 1,3,5,9, we could set STY for 1, STX for 3, STA for 5, and STY for 9.

I was wondering Thomas, have you determined conclusively that your path is the fastest? If not maybe we could do an A* search or something.

LOL. I can imagine Albert making a non-stop drive to Europe. That is, as soon as an Alaska-Siberia ferry is operational.

That's right; the 9 pixel figure is just the STA. It could also be STX or STY, so we have three colors to work with, two for the pieces, and one set to the background color. The A,X, and Y registers can be loaded in the scanlines between pieces, and there is enough time in the HBLANK to change one register between black and the background color. My other board games use the same technique. See above. I could have been more clear about this in the first post, but I'm also using missiles. The pieces are represented by: BK P0 BK P1 BK P0 BK P1 BK P0 BK P1 BK M0 BK M1 BK M0 BK (In some spots, the missiles and players overlap) I chose to use BK instead of PF for pieces because I figured the BL might be useful for masking pieces at some point. No RESPx trick needed. Exactly. Similar self modifying code is part of my other board game kernels as well. Here is the code for managing 19 pieces, stored in RAM. ; start at cycle 15 stx COLUBK ; 1st piece sty COLUP0 ; 2nd piece sty COLUP1 ; 4th stx COLUBK ; 3rd sty COLUP0 ; 6th stx COLUBK ; 5th sty COLUP1 ; 8th sta COLUBK ; 7th sty COLUP0 ; 10th stx COLUBK ; 9th sta COLUP1 ; 12th stx COLUBK ; 11th sta COLUP0 ; 14th stx COLUBK ; 13th sty COLUP1 ; 16th stx COLUBK ; 15th stx COLUBK ; 17th sty COLUP0 ; 18th stx COLUBK ; 19th jmp BackToStaticCode

There are other systems besides the Atari 2600? (just kidding)