EricBall

Hi Darrell, Here's the sample I used (which fails): # WaveFront .obj file - a single square based pyramid # Start a new group: g SquareBasedPyramid # List of vertices: v -0.5 0 0.5 # Front left. v 0.5 0 0.5 # Front right. v 0.5 0 -0.5 # Back right v -0.5 0 -0.5 # Back left. v 0 1 0 # Top point (top of pyramid). # List of faces: f 4 3 2 1 # Square base (note: normals are placed anti-clockwise). f 1 2 5 # Triangle on front. f 3 4 5 # Triangle on back. f 4 1 5 # Triangle on left side. f 2 3 5 # Triangle on right side. Unity doesn't handle the in-line comments like # Front left. Remove them and it works fine.

The dangers of too much storage space - a huge backlog of stuff to watch. (Although I shouldn't throw too many stones - I'm multiple episodes behind on Gotham & Constantine - although I am up to date on Agents of Shield & Amazing Race). However, I recently changed my internet & phone plan to take advantage of a lower priced bundle and got the cableco's version of Netflix. And while I can watch it via the Internet, a lot of the content is also available through my cablebox (so it doesn't impact my internet usage cap). So what shall I watch tonight? Star Trek (TOS and TNG)? Quantum Leap? Top Gear? My wife has already binge-watched Jane the Virgin and now is talking about Americans. (Unfortunately, the cableco doesn't have the rights to Game of Thrones, but we're on the library waitlist.)

The other day I decided I needed to set myself a goal to work on in Unity. A game project to help focus my self education. What I settled on is a Battlezone style game. (Not a port - just the basic ideas.) So one of the things I need is a tank to shoot at. Which means I need to create a model which Unity will then display. While I could download Blender (also free), that seems like overkill for something as simple as a Battlezone tank. What I wanted was something dead simple - an ASCII file format which Unity could use to create simple objects. With some Googling I learned the "OBJ file" supported by Unity was just that - a simple ASCII file format. So I sketched out my tank (which is even simpler than the supertank in Battlezone), figured out the coordinates for the vertices and mapped those to faces. All nice & neat - and I even commented stuff. And Unity refused to load it. At first I didn't even see the error message - putting it in the scene just created an empty object. But then I happened to look at the console and saw the ImportFBX error (which confused me even more as FBX is a completely different file format). I bashed my head against the keyboard trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. Was it because my OBJ file was too simple? (I didn't specify normals or a texture.) I selected different options to no avail. Was I missing something in the file which was causing Unity to misidentify it? I copied the sample file I used as a template and it failed too. Then I grabbed another OBJ file off the web and that one worked. Huh? I looked at the file closely. It didn't include normals or textures either. The basic format was the same. Then I saw it - this file didn't have comments after the vertices and faces. So I removed them from mine and Unity was happy - and so was I.

Thomas Jentzsch - saving bits and impressing other Stella programmers since August 1999! http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/199908/msg00090.html

@Cybergoth If anyone is interested in developing for the WiiU, it looks like https://wiiu-developers.nintendo.com/ is the place to start. @SpiceWare Predictably Nintendo sent a C&D letter to Roystan so you can't download it anymore.

Just an example of what can be done in Unity: https://roystanross.wordpress.com/super-mario-64-hd/ Yep, the first level of Super Mario 64 ! (Well, not 100% complete, but still very, very impressive.) And he provided the actual Unity project file (which I've snagged) to learn from.

For those who've never heard of it, Unity is a cross-platform game creation system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_(game_engine) You can use it to develop games for current systems including Windows, OSX, web, IOS and Android. Free to download & use and practically free if you ever decide to sell your creations. Lurking on gamasutra, I've known about Unity for a while. But I'd never considered actually using it until they announced Unity 5 and I realized there was zero reason for me not to. First, let me say that Unity is f'ng amazing. Out of the box it does amazing 3-D graphics, lighting & collision detection. For someone used to coding close to the metal it's like going from crawling to flying. Now, there is a pretty steep learning curve starting out. While the UI is fairly intuitive, there's no "beginner mode". And there's the whole "how do I do what I wanna do"? But there are tutorial videos out there (which are also free). Unfortunately, they often are using earlier releases (so some UI differences) or show features only available out-of-the-box with the paid Pro version. (Not to say these can't be done with the Free version, but the content isn't included in the install.) Currently my hope is to actually get my 14yo son interested enough to start crawling up the learning curve himself.

I keep forgetting the editor likes to merge text after a link with the link. Here's what it was supposed to say: See http://atariage.com/forums/topic/221754-differences-between-atari-2600-and-atari-7800-sprite-colors/?do=findComment&comment=2925976 for some details on sprite bit to color mappings for the various modes.

I'm at Townhall level 7 and I've hit an interesting wall - my resource production can't keep up with how much can be raided from my resource storage. Here's how it works: I have 6 level 11 gold mines which product 3000 gold per hour. So that's 18K gold per hour, or 216K gold in 12 hours or 288K gold in 16 hours. An attacker can raid 20% of my gold storage, so if they flatten my village and I get a 16 hour shield that means I will only be able to recover up to a maximum of 1.44M gold. (And that's assuming my defenses don't stop them after they've taken all my gold but before they destroy over 90% of my village and that I collect from my gold mines just before the shield runs out.) This makes it difficult to accumulate the 2M gold needed to build Hidden Teslas. And it gets worse at higher levels as you don't get another gold mine or exlir pump until TH10 and production only increases 16.67% at TH8. I could buy (with the free gems I have accumulated) a longer shield, but that's only a temporary solution. Raiding other players for gold can sometimes be fruitful, but it takes time. I have dropped down to a lower trophy level, which has helped, but I'm still flattened on almost a daily basis.

Unity is a cross-platform game creation system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_(game_engine) You can use it to develop games for current systems including Windows, OSX, web, IOS and Android. Free to download & use and very reasonable licensing if you ever decide to sell your creations.

Have you ever considered working in Unity (or Unreal)? While there's going to be a significant learning curve - there's lots of tutorial material out there.

You might want to overlay the eyes & mouth on top of the the body sprite - then you can animate them independently. See http://atariage.com/forums/topic/221754-differences-between-atari-2600-and-atari-7800-sprite-colors/#entry2925976 for some details on sprite bit to color mappings for the various modes.

Putting on a purple C clamp is probably out of the questions :-)

That looks suspiciously like a Hot Wheels track....

Back in the early 90s I got sucked into the Magic: the Gathering collectible card game craze. Little Alchemist is a "free to play" mobile version of a collectible card game. And while you can spend real money buying cards (just like I used to do with MtG), it is quite possible to have lots of fun playing without spending a dime. In the basic battle the goal is to reduce your (computer) opponent's hit points to zero before they do the same to you. Each card has an attack & defense value. You play a card fro your hand of 5 cards which gets matched up with your opponent's card. Any attack value in excess of the opposing defense value does damage to the player's hit points. Played cards are replaced with new cards from your deck and play continues until either player has less than one hit point or runs out of cards. There are three main battles against computer opponents. "Arena" where you play against other player's decks - earning trophy points & awards, "Adventure" which is a series of battles against unique opponents in a pseudo story mode - earning experience points & awards, and "Portal" which is a special series of battles against a single opponent which get gradually more difficult - earning experience points & awards. There may also be a way to battle against another player directly (true PvP), but I haven't explored this. Awards include in-game coins (used to buy a pack containing a random card), cards, and jewels (usually purchased with real $$). There are two types of cards: "combo" cards - which may be combined with other "combo" cards to yield a different (hopefully more powerful) card and "final form" cards which cannot be combined. Combining two combo cards also adds to your total combo points. Playing a final form card has no impact on combo points, while playing a combo card on its own will cause your combo points to reset to zero. Before each battle you can set whether your current combo points cause damage to your opponent, add to your hit points, or increase the attack & defense of the card you play. (Special final form card upgrades also have special abilities which consume combo points.) So unless you spend lots of $$ purchasing high powered final form cards, a big part of Little Alchemist revolves around combo cards - more specifically around the combination themselves. Each combination must be researched separately - so a new combo card is of no real value until you have researched the various combinations. Fortunately, research only takes time - not money; although you are limited to only researching two combinations at a time. There's over 50 combo cards (although ~20 of those are rare) and over 800 combinations. Even after you have researched the combinations, the big challenge is figuring out what combo and final form cards to put in your deck (minimum 35 cards). I wrote a program which tries to determine the best set of combo cards via brute force exhaustive testing. Unfortunately, this is O(2^n) (where n is the number of different combo cards) and on my i7 iMac the test would take ~24 hours for 35 combo cards; and my wife (who has been playing for several months) has over 40 different combo cards. My current plan is to try to prune down the problem space somehow. But I'm having fun playing - even if I can't research combinations as fast as I'd like.

Putting the banking hotspots at the highest addresses possible makes for easier coding as programs typically grow from low addresses to high addresses. Also, because the interrupt vectors are at the highest addresses, that chunk of memory is already "used", so reserving a few more addresses for hotspots leaves the maximum number of address chunks available. Hmm... using the interrupt vector addresses as hotspots could be useful as it would auto-initialize which bank the program starts in.

While possible, the biggest difficulty is going to be memory to store the cell map as the 7800 doesn't have a true bitmap display. 160x200x2bpp = 8K and the 7800 only has 4K available.

There were 154 million DSs made versus 50 million 3DSs; so by making a DS version they quadruple the potential number of buyers - probably without significantly increasing the development & licensing costs. (And I didn't mean to imply you are a sucker - you're a collector.)

Nah, the DS isn't dead - it lives on even in the "new 3DS XL" (as opposed to the GBA, which died with the DSi). So there's logic for companies to keep making DS games - it maximizes the number of possible buyers while minimizing the development costs. And just look at these last few releases - licensed shovelware; exactly the kind of "game" which needs to minimize development costs (the license is probably the majority of the cost) and maximize the number of suckers who might buy it.

Don't assume you will be able to mirror your iPad to your AppleTV - the app from my cableco blocks it somehow (although we could mirror the audio). IMHO the problem with the WRC Yaris is mainly with the styling of the rear fender. How "stock" are these WRC cars? It looks like the track is a good 12" wider than the body so they've had to build out the fenders to match. It's okay on the front, but ridiculous on the back. If the car isn't using the stock frame, why not just make the whole body wider?

http://www.cnet.com/news/4k-content-guide-what-to-watch-in-4k-today/ 4K content sounds like an easy way to blow through any usage caps since everything seems to be streamed or downloaded.

Ah, the old space versus speed tradeoff. When I was doing Skeleton I was looking for ways of saving bytes so I went through the various lookup tables. I had one for the color sequence for when the Skeleton died. I changed the code to just use the PRNG instead - saving a goodly number of bytes.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_2000 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_1000 for info about Tandy's (owner of Radio Shack) PC compatibles, which eventually got sold off to AST. I certainly heard of people buying them back in the day. However, IIRC they tended to be slightly incompatible (probably somewhat by design for lock-in. Dells had the same issue - particularly the power supply), so there ended up being quite a quite a lot of model-specific information wandering around. The pre-PC stuff was certainly model specific (other than the Model 4 which was Z-80 CPM and the Model 16 which had 68K Unix) see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80 more details.

(Eyes cleared so I've finished reading.) Oh and Radio Shack / Tandy did try to do the PC thing. As I mentioned, they had the pre-IBM PC TRS-80 computers (and offered training). Then they had the PC "compatible" Tandy computers. And when that didn't work out they sold HPs and Compaqs and some of the other clones. But where they always made money was on the accessories. Not just peripherals, but cables, consumables and the occasional upgrade. But you're probably right. Their failing was more that they would stay in a market for longer than they should have. And while they would occasionally be leading edge, there were many occasions where they were caught flat footed or be late to the party.

I got so misty eyed reading your article that I couldn't see the screen anymore and had to stop. Radio Shack has an extra special place in my heart as my Mom worked at one of their dedicated computer stores for a couple of years in the early 80s to help make ends meet while my Dad was between jobs. I got to play with the Model 2 & 3 business computers, got free 5.25 disks which wouldn't format in the Model 3, but the Apple ][s at school would. And it meant that my first home computer was a CoCo (complete with tape drive (which I later killed by accidentally magnetizing the head), dot matrix printer & 300 baud direct connect modem). And yeah, those Radio Shack catalogs & flyers were better Christmas wish books than the Sears catalog. Giant speakers were what I lusted after (although I now know they were almost certainly crap). And even if it was cheap crap, it gave you an idea as to what something would cost. Come to think of it, my first CD player was a Radio Shack portable CD player which I bought when CDs first came out and ended up taking to university. I also had a RS calculator which had a membrane keypad on the inside cover and would handle hexadecimal and fractions. It died after getting bent too often in my pants pockets. The weird thing is in Canada Radio Shack became "the Source" and is now owned by Bell Canada so isn't impacted by the Chapter 11. Unfortunately, it's still too much electronic junk & cellphones and not enough DIY parts although I was able to buy a decent TV balun there.