EricBall

My Saturday mornings in the mid 70's were spent watching ridiculous amounts of Looney Tunes. (I seem to recall at one point being able to watch 4 hours straight.) Yes, I do have the Golden Collection DVDs, complete with some bits which I don't remember seeing and all the stuff they cut out since. So would a lot of other B5 fans. Unfortunately, there's a lot of FX and very little source material to work with. To start with, most of the 3-D models were deleted, along with the other rendering info. And it's a crying shame. JMS shot the live action to make the HD transition possible, but then they did the CGI for NTSC (and I think the telecine is also wacky).

FYI Skeleton+ uses the ball at the edge of the screen as a skeleton direction finder. I'd start with trying to get one space station, the player, one attack formation and some shots on the screen at once. Hmmm... Since the player is fixed in the center, maybe use the playfield for that sprite. Blocky as hell, but that would free up one player sprite. In fact . . . playfield - player ship & station direction indicator(s) player 0 sprite - space station (4x wide) player 1 sprite - attack formation (tripled, like Combat) ball - space station shot missiles - player shots (max 2?) I don't think a background is really necessary as long as there isn't too much distance between the space stations.

I agree that the explosion in widescreen displays has been astounding. Now, what percentage of those displays are HD capable (and not some EDTV 858x480 or 1024x768 16:9 plasma), are actually used to display HD content, and have an HMDI (w/HDCP) port, is a completely different question.

I have generated those in the past. (Let me know and I'll dig through my archives.) The easiest way is to create the waveforms as raw binary (or text) files, then use SOX to convert them to WAV.

Yep... I did exactly that. Some spreadsheet testing showed that simply using the MSB for the 1/64K caused the peaks to slowly decay. I thought that fiddling with the Carry bit as a kind of rounding might work, so I made up a small C program to test it out. (More control than the spreadseet & I could let it run longer.) It works perfectly, staying within bounds and not decaying. EP_Y_T DS 3; working space for EP_Y calculation EP_Y DS 3; current value MSB FIRST EP_Y_P DS 3; previous value EP_Y_CALC ; y[n+1] = (2-1/65536)y[n] - y[n-1] LDX #2 SEC 1$ LDA EP_Y,X SBC EP_Y_P,X STA EP_Y_T,X DEX BPL 1$ BIT EP_Y BPL SEC ; EP.Y negative, sign extend LDA EP_Y_T+2 SBC EP_Y+2 STA EP_Y_T+2 LDA EP_Y_T+1 SBC #-1 STA EP_Y_T+1 LDA EP_Y_T SBC #-1 STA EP_Y_T BIT EP_Y_T+1 BPL 5$ ; round down SEC ; round up BMI 6$ 2$ BIT EP_Y_T+1 BPL 3$ SEC ; round down BMI 4$ 3$ CLC ; round up 4$ LDA EP_Y_T+2; EP.Y positive SBC EP_Y+2 STA EP_Y_T+2 LDA EP_Y_T+1 SBC #0 STA EP_Y_T+1 LDA EP_Y_T SBC #0 STA EP_Y_T 5$ CLC 6$ LDX #2 7$ LDA EP_Y,X STA EP_Y_P,X ADC EP_Y_T,X STA EP_Y,X DEX BPL 7$ The code isn't complex, just a little long to handle both the sign extend and to handle the rounding for both positive and negative values.

For Leprechaun I ended up breaking the repositioning routine into three separate chunks. I can't recall offhand why three worked best. It was also inline, no jump table. But, then again, I couldn't dedicate 4K to the kernel (actually 365 bytes).

Since I can't find my Leprechaun round tuit, I've told myself I have to work on SpaceWar! 7800 some more. One of the features I really want to add to SW78 is the starfield background (Expensive Planetarium). But the tile map is much larger than the screen, thus it needs to move in some way to show the whole thing. My original idea was to make the movement based on the spaceships wrapping around; they'd kinda drag the starfield with them. The disadvantage with this idea is there are two ships (though "fighting" to controll the starfield might be amusing) and the starfield wraps side to side but not top to bottom. Then I had a thought - why not make the starfield drift model what it does in real life? Have the center of the screen follow a sine wave around the tile map. Even have the period of the sine wave be different than the width of the tile map so it wouldn't be a simple repeat. Nifty! Okay, but how to implement? The cheap & easy way out would be a lookup table. The main disadvantages is it would be limitted to 256 values (compared to the 1888 pixel width of the tile map) unless I went to a 16 bit pointer and used more ROM. Hopefully it could be done programatically in less space. Of course there's this little problem - it has to run on a 6502. No FPU with built-in transecendental functions. No floating point registers. Heck, no hardware multiply or divide even. Just an 8 bit ALU with add and subtract with carry. Furthermore, I don't want to be burning up huge amounts of cycles in some fixed-point multiply function. I must be dreaming to even consider the possibility that such a thing could exits. (To be fair, I'll set my accuracy requirements low.) To my surprise - it is that easy. The Second Order Oscillator from http://www.ied.com/~petr/Oscillators.html meets my requirements exactly. The series y[n] = sin(n * a) can be calculated using y[n+1] = 2 * cos(a) * y[n] - y[n-1] Wow! Perfect! 2 * cos(a) is a constant, and thus I can make it something (trivially) easy to calculate using simple adds and multi-byte fixed point arithmetic. What's more, if you scale y[n] and y[n-1] that scaling flows through to y[n+1] and all other values. So I don't even need to multiply by the height of the tile map; just set the initial values correctly. I've done some testing using a spreadsheet and figured out that I need to use 8+16 bit fixed point with 2*cos(a) = 2 - 1/64K, so no shifts will be required, just subtract the integer portion (with sign extend) from the least significant byte. This gives a period of around 1609 pixels. I need to do some more thinking & testing to make sure the values don't overflow or decay. But it's definitely workable!

Okay, I'm part way through Wind Waker; the pirate has become Zelda and I need to ride the waterspout to get my fire & ice arrows. Of course, I don't know how many side plots I need to follow up on, so there's probably a bunch of random sailing left. Which brings up two points. First, a lot of the reviews really focused on how tedious they found the sailing & wind changing. I disagree. Yes, you're going to spend a lot of time sailing around (often criss-crossing the entire map), but the programmers have tried to throw in stuff to keep it interesting. Lots of little islands to visit, treasure chests to winch up (with or without maps), and enemies to battle. My advice is to swing the camera around and do more than speed to the next encounter. As to the wind changing animation, IMHO it's not half as annoying as some of the other repettive dialogs. However, I wish the game had a built-in "ship's log" to track everything that you're told. You really need to take notes as there are lots & lots of things which you will find & learn before you can do anything about them. (My other advice is to visit the Northern Fairy shown on Tingle's map as soon as possible; I winched up a 200 rupee chest before I got the bigger wallet; sigh.) As expected, the cell-shaded style graphics simply aren't an issue (though watch where his eyes look); the storyline is engaging enough. (Oh, the shadows are 3D.) The story itself is a little clunky; I think they had to make the story fit the sailing concept. Occarina is still tops in the story department; Majora was also pretty good although more complex than Occarina. I'm still having fun, thus playing more than I should.

Like the GameBoys DSs with starting prices over what I can buy one from WalMart, even if I ignore the cost of shipping?

Yeah, it's amazing what gets described as RARE!!!, particularly when a simple search (not even a completed auction search) finds multiple copies of the same item.

Wikipedia has an entry for Artillery which references a BASIC (text) version in 1976 Creative Computing. See also the references in that article.

Ouch! Hmm... sounds like a definite vote for rent first. I wonder if there's a Netflix for consoles....

I use Wave Corrector Pro (though I beought it before there was a distinction). The main advantage of WCP is it gives you the ability to fine tune each correction. Not really necessary with a decent pre-recorded cassette, but invaluable for LPs. Keep the tapes as proof of ownership. :-)

I think there were artillery style games before there were computers with graphics. Certainly many of the original big iron tube computers were used to calculate actual artillery tables.

Just a word of advice to anyone with older tapes (audio or video) - magnetic media ages. Bad things happen over time to the glue which binds the magic rust to the substrate. It can stop holding them together, or (more often) can seep through causing the tape to squeak, gum up the heads or the tape to stick together. Sometimes it's possible to temporarily fix the problem (sometimes called "sticky shed syndrome") by baking the tapes for several hours at low tempature (< 150F) in an electric oven. But other times the tapes are unplayable. So, if you have some treasured stuff on tape, don't delay making a fresh copy or a digital archive.

Except a SuperCharger would lock the system into 2600 mode, thus making the POKEY inaccessible.

One of the things my mother-in-law brought with her was her copy of Wind Waker. Last night I sat down for an hour or so and played through the intro island. I really enjoyed playing both N64 Zeldas (though I prefer Occarina to Majora) and my hands instantly "remembered" the controls; pressing R to shift the camera and still pressing A to jump :-). The big change from the N64 Zeldas is, of course, the cell-shaded style graphics. My first thoughts were "ick, ugh, how annoying and distracting." But once I got into playing I noticed it less, so there's hope. Also, everything is still 3-D, so it's not like Paper Mario with 2-D characters in a 3-D world. Hmm... I'll have to check out the shadows the next time I play. The story set-up is also radically different from the N64 Zeldas; although I could see the sister-napping coming from the first "Big Brother". (Although I thought I might have been wrong when the sassy pirate first appeared.) It will be interesting to see whether saving the sister remains the driving force behind the game, or whether Link simply assumes the mantle of hero to rid the world of evil.

Well, I haven't touched Leprechaun in over a month. I thought I might find the time over the holidays, but the drive simply wasn't there. Sigh Big news on the home front is my mother in law is in town 'cause my wife had jaw surgery to fix her overbite. She's not wired shut, but she is swollen and on a liquid diet. I don't think either of us were prepared for the full impact. Ah, well; it's a temporary thing. My son is having fun playing New Super Mario Bros on his DS, although I think he's replaying the same levels. Whatever. At least he's building up his experience & not getting so frustrated. I think he finds Super Mario 64 DS too hard for the moment. Since he's playing the DS, I've put some batteries in the GameBoy pocket and I'm playing Pokemon Blue. I figure my son will probably get Diamond for the DS at some point, so I might as well have some experience myself. I also treated myself on the weekend to some classic GoldenEye action. Of coure, when I first grabbed the controller my hands went to the outside prongs and I had to look down to figure out why it felt wrong. I've also started some eBay wishlists using ("Title 1", "Title 2") searches for specific N64, GCN & PSX titles. I'm going to keep my bids criminally low and only bid on one thing at a time so my wife doesn't complain too much. I've already won Blast Corps, though I lost on Shadows of the Empire from the same seller. Oh well...

I picked up a PSX at a garage sale a while back. Suprisingly, the only game I have for it is "Blues Clues"! I went through the top game list at IGN recently to see what I might want to start hunting for. There are some notable RPGs (FF7 & FF8), but I don't have the time to invest in them. I was thinking about Metal Gear Solid (although my wife would not be happy with me getting another FPS, not matter how good), but then I discovered there's an enhanced version for the GameCube (so I added it to that wish list). The only one left is Castlevania : Symphony of the Night.

From what I've heard you're better off waiting until you get a Wii before getting Twilight Princess. Post a review of Super Princess Peach. I know my son (6) is going to want it.

I'll say that New Super Mario Bros. for the DS is very much the old skool 2D game.

baratri, I'm not sure it was as simple as you indicate. Sure tools like NMI cards could halt the program, exposing whatever was in RAM; and boot tracing would reveal some of the disk structure, but not all. Really, A2 copy protection came down to two main fronts: 1. Make it as difficult as possible to duplicate the diskette without detection. 2. Make it as difficult as possible to find and remove any disk access code once it was loaded into RAM. I've only seen some references to #2, but it's amazing what you can do when code is in RAM - i.e. self-modifying code and on-the-fly decryption & re-encryption. I also read one reference to one game which was nearly uncrackable - each level was loaded off disk and contained fresh copy protection code.

My son got a DS lite as an early Christmas present (to play with on the plane). We also gave him "Super Mario 64 DS" and "New Super Mario Bros.", along with the GBA version of Activision Anthology which I happen to have... I have to say I'm amazed that the DS is able to do justice to SM64 from a graphics perspective. It really says what kind of 3D power it has under the hood. NSMB also has 3D graphics, but more in the Donkey Kong Country style - but rendered in real time instead of pre-rendered. Unfortunately, the DS is constrained from a controls perspective. Namely it doesn't have an analog joystick. Yeah, you can use the touch-screen as a pseudo analog joystick in SM64DS, but it's not the same. I wonder if it would have been possible to make the joypad pressure sensitive, with some kind of digital compatibility workaround for GBA titles. And that's my main complaint so far with SM64DS - the control scheme. Y for run works okay until you have to do a running jump. And why waste X on zoom? Maybe the touchscreen mode works better with the wrist strap / thumb stylus (not included with the DS lite) instead of the pen stylus. On the other hand, NSMB doesn't suffer from the lack of an analog joystick. (Both because it was developed specifically for the DS and it's heritage goes all the way back to the NES.) My main complaint with NSMB is you only get to save after defeating Bowser or Baby Bowser - twice per world instead of after every level. Now, that may be better than it's predecessors, but it still significantly increases the difficulty level of an already tough game. (Well, tough for my 6 year old son at least.) Unfortunately, we don't have any way to try out any of the wireless functions lacking a second DS or a game which supports playing over the Internet. Oh, and it is kinda cool to play Skeleton+ on the DS (without any unnecessary HMOVE bar removal which appeared in some of the other versions). The controls are a little weird (or at least not intuitive), but that probably comes from trying to adapt 6 switch + fire +menu to the 6 button GBA.

Got both of these cheap when the local video store closed, along with WarioWare. Just some final thoughs on Pikmin now that I've finished the game; although I ended up restarting from the beginning when I realized I was too far behind to get all of the parts in 30 days. And I guess that's my main complaint with Pikmin: the 30 day time limit is "un-fun". The time limit on each day isn't bad (except for the final boss), but it's disheartening to realize you're at day 20 with 15 parts still to collect. My other complaint is with some of the "boss" enemies it's difficult to determine if you have the right strategy. The final boss was like that - having him eat bombrocks (often including the yellow pikmin carrying them) seemed to be the only way to do any noticable damage. But I found I was running out of bombrocks, Pikmin and time while the boss still had a quarter of it's life remaining. I found myself going to the online strategy guides for help more than once; something else which feels like cheating to me. But a fun game none the less. Oh, and one other item I learned on the last time through was to kill enemies rather than trying to avoid them. Not only does it clear the path, making it easier to get the parts back to the ship, but it builds up the Pikmin reserves. Which then means you have 100 Pikmin to take on other enemies, rather than 50 or less. Power in numbers (although be careful on bridges or other narrow walkways). I'm about a third of the way through Pikmin 2, and I'm finding it just as enjoyable as the first; maybe even a little more. Although it's a sequel, the developers have used this in a positive way. There are little tweaks (like the Pikmin leaving the Onion faster, and sprouting faster) and a little more flash on the menus and other navigation items. I also really appreciate the lack of an apparent time limit (although the day cycle is still there, except when you're underground). The controls have been changed slightly (I find myself pressing Y instead of Start when I want the map), but the basic game mechanics are still there. My main complaint, so far, is the first 5 days or so is very linear. But now that I have all 5 colors of Pikmin it's much more open-ended exploration. (It was a little frustrating when I could see, but couldn't get to, the blue Onion.) I also wish there was some way to tell the game to skip all of the "Pikmin 101", but at least it's over with. The Olivar/Louie split gameplay is interesting (although I wish there was a way to split them without splitting the Pikmin). I also think I need to change my tactics slightly. I was leaving one near the landing place while the other went exploring with a full complement of colors. The one near the Onions could either do some gathering, or simply manage the Pikmin returning with enemies and treasure. But I recently had a fair number of white and purple Pikmin wiped out when they got ambushed by a rock spitting enemy. So now I think I'm going to have Olivar lead a group of red+yellow+blue Pikmin to handle the main exploration with Louie a safe distance back with the purple and white Pikmin; who can be brought forward when their special talents are required. We'll see how that works.

1963 - New Order - Substance 1979 - Smashing Pumpkins - Mellon Collie... 1999 - Prince - The Hits (disc 1) 7 - Prince - The Hits (disc 1)