EricBall
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Blog Comments posted by EricBall
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It's Balrog, or was that intentional?
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Hmm... as supercat says, the VCS video signal is a little out of spec. I suspect the VCS is making the VCR's AGC circuit work a little harder (low signal levels, with low luma bias anyway).
Cable systems typically use the higher channel frequency blocks for digital channels. Making the TV tuner handle the higher channels is cheap, but it's expensive for the cableco (higher bandwidth amplifiers). The cablecos would rather stuff more digital channels (especially PPV which makes them money) into the same frequency space than use it for analog channels.
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One of the interesting facts about Roulette is the house percantage is the same for every bet...From what I understand, that isn't true in Monte Carlo, or at least hasn't been historically. If the "0" comes up (there's only one), all bets are marked as "imprisoned". If the next spin of the wheel is one that should pay off, the bettor's money is returned.
That just halves the house percentage from 1/37 (2.7%) to 0.5/37 (1.35%), it's still the same no matter whether you bet on 18, 12, 9, 6, 4, 3, 2 or 1 number.
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One of the interesting facts about Roulette is the house percantage is the same for every bet, other than the 5-number bet on wheels with both 0 and 00 - when it's worse. Although it makes sense, if you bet both black and red you will break even unless the wheel comes up 0 (or 00). The lure of Roulette is the 36:1 payout if you bet on the right number.
Keno is the grandfather of the N of M lotteries. Again, the only reason it's interesting to play is the high payout against long odds. Same goes for slots.
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Part of Hunt the Wumpus is you don't know which direction the Wumpus etc is in. So you have to figure out where the Wumpus is by slowly tracking in.
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I still think the game runs too slow, though.
Try different difficulty switch settings. P0 should change the player speed, and P1 the enemy speed.
EDIT: Oh, and: if the leprechaun is on the very bottom row than it glitches the very top row of your score/timer display.
Good info, I'll look into this.
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- I'd tried fire, fire up and fire down thinking the direction you faced would control the side and the up/down would control fill/dig.Nope. The dig and fill actually happen automatically once you start the process.
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Why don't you use a 4-pixel-wide font?
space & speed (what other reason is there on the 2600?)
With the current configuration I can easily map each digit to an address pointer, then use the standard 6 character routine & (zp),y to display the time (or score, or text labels).
Going away from that I'd either need to have a massive ROM table for all 2 digit possibilities (although it would map nicely to my BCD storage), or generate the digits in SC-RAM as a 48 pixel bitmap. And I've learned my lesson with SC-RAM and blits - takes too much time.
Maybe once everything else gets done and I still have ROM space, I'll revisit the possibility.
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Ah - that makes sense. Is the digging working? I tried the fire button but didn't get any response.
fire+left / fire+right to dig the grid square down+left / dow+right respectively
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As much as it would make sense to swap the dirt & rock, doing so then makes digging wrong. The code XORs the bits to dig & fill, so the entire block has to be filled in.
About the only placement rules I have are no rock or dirt in the first row since that's where killed enemies respawn. The editor does this, although it doesn't show it for some reason.
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If you want to, you can use the score font from Crazy Balloon, it's significantly thinner.
Thanks for the offer. Looking at the Crazy Balloon screenshots, I suspect your font would have the same issue - namely the digits are almost 8 pixels wide while the player sprites are only 4 pixels wide.
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They do look a little large, IMHO. The rest of the screen "feels" more like a 40-column game. I wonder how smaller score digits would look?
The problem is I can't make the digits any smaller. (Well, I could make them shorter, but I'm not sure that would be any better.) i'm using the classic six-sprite/48 pixel routine. So each digit is one 8 bit sprite. Even if I make them narrower, the spacing will remain the same. So I'm kinda stuck with what I have.
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I really like how the numbers look (8x8 font ripped from the WinXP Command Prompt), although I didn't realize that they'd look so huge in comparison with the grid & sprites. I have the full A-Z,0-9 for doing the end of level scoring and maybe even a high score table. But first I need to get the level timer working normally and add in the rest of the game-state logic. I've also been spending time working on the web-based level editor. I'm hoping to announce that RSN.
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If the write timing were sufficiently accurate (and it should have been possible to make it so given that it's adjustable), and if Atari could have been relied upon not to add a buffer between the cartridge slot and the bus, an even nicer option would have been to make it so that following the hit of the "write" hotspot, the following write operation would use whever was on the data bus. This would have simplified the chip and made the code much nicer.I'm not sure how well that would have worked. The trick is there could be a variable amount of time between the write hotspot and the destination depending on the addressing mode used. (i.e. ABS is 4 cycles while (ZP),Y is 5 cycles) You also couldn't use a single hotspot and snoop the databus since you would run into bus contention issues.
Yeah, it's disappointing that you don't have either 2K bank fully read/writable. But even Leprechaun only uses 1K for a 1LK background bitmap.
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Yes, early adopters often end up paying for their promptness. Not only do they often pay more for the privledge, there's also the possibility that their leading edge toy will be buggy, incompatible with the mainstream versions, rendered obsolete by something else, or unsupported.
However, one benefit of being an easly adopter is you often end up with something of higher quality than the mass-marketted versions which have been cost-cut so much that they barely live beyond the minimal yum-cha manufacturer's waranty. And almost as evil as the marginal quality of the bargain priced versions is the creeping features of marginal or even negative value. (i.e. your 5MP camera probably won't take pictures better or even as good as your 1.3MP camera due to lens & sensor size & quality).
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It turned out to be less pain & suffering than I thought. I needed to:
rename the ASM files (so LEPBANK1.ASM contains bank1)
change the ORGs/RORGs in LEPBANK2.ASM to $3000-$37FF
change the SCCTRL updates in the code and in the header (forgot that last one the first time around)
change the INCLUDE order in LEPRCHN.ASM
reorder the page number table (file -> bank layout) in the header
and, finally, change the page counter in the header so bank2 got loaded.
Now I've got to debug my 6 digit routine so it works....
Part of my annoyance with the SC bankswitching is Starpath used D0 to enable (power) the ROM and D3 to map the ROM. If they had used the same bit for both functions then there would have been enough bits to handle the six RAM+RAM possibilites.
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IIRC the arcade game removed the shields once the invaders got to that level.
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If there's a real bomb emergency you will find me 100 miles (not 100 feet) from the building
Reminds me of fire drills in high school. I decided if the teacher ever looked surprised, I was going to put some serious distance between myself and a building with natural gas valves in the science rooms and oxy-acetalene tanks in the auto shops.
Of course, at work, they have the designated meeting areas in the adjacent parking garage. Yeah, I want to be in a semi-enclosed area with lots of cars when a fire happens.
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=Interesting enough, while the Arcade indeed uses an analog controler, all the MARP pros rely on a digital configuration, as either the Arcade controller (spinner/paddle? No clue actually ) or the MAME driver or the Arcade code itself tends to oversteer easily, so with digital input you incredibly gain on control precission for this game in MAMEAnd according to KLOV, it's an optical spinner. I wonder how well the DC would work, reading once per frame - probably not real well. I wonder...you could probably squeeze in 2 DC reads during the kernel, for a total of 4 reads per frame. Wonder if that would be enough?
Kick used a 1-axis (L-R) trackball. IMHO a paddle would work best, although I don't know whether you have enough cycles in the kernel for it. You'd have to read a DC during the kernel as well, which would probably eat up even more cycles. A joystick can't do the fast/slow you really need.
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The only one I know (without looking at the answers) is #8.
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Well, my 5 1/2 year old loved it. But then again, his Mom's a NASCAR fan. (For NASCAR fans there are some homages which are quite impressive.)
But I'll agree with you that it was one of Pixar's weakest films from a story, character, and emotional perspective. (Although I haven't seen Incredibles yet. Heck, some of the shorts were better.) I think one of the problems was the race put too much time pressure on the plot to change LMcQ (and the rest of the residents) in a hurry. Plus, the story didn't leave you guessing very long about what was going to happen next.
I'll agree that the graphics were stunning. (Mac leaving the city looked like places I've seen in real life.) As for the implausibility & issues surrounding a vehicle-only world, I was able to suspend my disbelief sufficiently to enjoy it anyway.
I was also amazed by the number of CGI animated movies coming out this summer. I guess the cost of doing movie quality CGI has dropped enough to make it the first choice for kid's features. I definitely want to see Monster House, although I think I'll have to wait for the DVD since I'm not sure I'll be able to persuade my son to see a "scary" (to him at least) movie.
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The way most of the "inside the computer" live action scenes were done, it almost qualifies as an animated film. Shoot in B&W, blow up each frame into greyscale & multiple positive and negative high-contrast cells. Matte and ink each cell by hand, when re-shoot each frame as a multiple exposure backlight shot.
Speaking of Cars, I was looking at a promo poster and a thought hit me - where did Pixar get all of the 3-D models for the various cars? A Porsche, a Hudson, a Jeep, a VW van, a Dodge van, a Model T, and and and. There's easily a couple of dozen unique, recognizable, and decently accurate models in the shot.
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I don't have enough entries to conclude the contest as scheduled. I have to either extend it or claim no winner and start the next contest cycle over again, or just cancel it outright. I would really appreciate having another SC entry, and the competition might help get PoP and Leprechaun back in development.Leprechaun is still in development. I've actually just fixed all the bugs I introduced during my recent "let's make to many changes at once" endevour. However, it's obviously taken more time than expected. But one of the nice things about homebrews is you aren't on a release deadline unless you want to be. Perosnally, I'd love to see PoP completed simply because it would represent an amazing achievement.
I'd actually prefer the later. Why "force" people into doing something they don't really want to? The 7800 contest didn't work too well either. I'd rather see them both switched to a fitting cartridge format. Chimera, Sara, 4A50 - anything is better than wasting time on a dead-end branch.I will respect Glenn to make his own decisions regarding the contest. He's made no bones about wanting to see SC-specific homebrews and he was willing to put up his own money to try and make that happen. And although it may be possible (even preferable) to adapt Leprechaun & PoP to an ultracart, you can't deny there is an existing base of SuperChargers and SC compatible carts out there.
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You wouldn't need a separate kernel for falling objects, just pad out the top and bottom with zeros and set up the pointers to split the sprite into top and bottom halves. You'd need to have a separate kernel for each row of sprites.
Hmm... sounds a lot like a A7800 DLL.
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in EricBall's Tech Projects
A blog by EricBall
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