Klankster

Yeah, PD 2012 has a high score leaderboard implemented on the Android "Colleen" emulator -- it routes through a "B:" device ("Browser") on that emulator that sends scores to a leaderboard database at http://analog.klanky.com -- I'd be happy to set up additional leaderboard functionality.

I'm working on porting my 400/800 game "Planetary Defense 2012" -- a version of the ANALOG Computing game with enhanced bonus features) to run on the 5200 for an Android emulator. I've never done a port to the 5200 before, and am unclear on what operating system vectors apply (if any) and how other registers etc. are mapped. Is there a good guide available for the 5200 (sort of like the old De Re Atari)? Any help would be appreciated.

I have to also mention, after the live band was done on Saturday afternoon, they had a DJ start playing stuff -- I was playing a hot game of Tempest when the "End Of Line" theme from TRON: Legacy started up. Man was that perfect music to play to! What a great expo.

Well, on behalf of everyone who played it (especially the kid in the photo, below, who was on it just about every time I looked), let me say THANK YOU for allowing it to be used at the expo. I used to play Battlezone at the Southwest Missouri State University campus union basement bowling alley back in 1980-1981. My best score back then was 997,000 points -- Got taken out by a missile right after I looked up and realized I was about to hit a million points! ARRGGGH!

Sure was a great show! The Mega-cade was fantastic -- got to play Battlezone and Star Castle for the first time in about 25 years. Nice job by everyone involved, and I hope I can make it to next year's show as well.

It's a simple custom PHP script I wrote. When a game completes, the code builds a URL query string, like this: analog.klanky.com/leaderboards/SaveScore.php?game=PD2012&name=HUD-----&level=23&score=030400&key=... The PHP script parses it all out and makes sure the key is valid for the given score and level (prevents people from posting bogus scores), and if it's valid it looks up the player name in a SQL database and updates their high score for this game. It's all set up to handle any number of games in the future. A lot of fun to set up -- and I thought it was kind of neat to have an old Atari 8-bit program saving scores on the Internet!

Should be doable; I thought they both used the same setup. Let me check -- I think I may have a Touch Tablet here to test that with. If you run this build with the Touch Tablet, are both axes reversed? Or just X or Y?

Go to http://analog.klanky.com/8bit.htm -- about halfway down the page is a download link. I just decided to keep it simple and retain the clean look of the original. We have an "ultimate" version we're working on for the iPhone that looks a lot alike as far as the playfield and bombs go, but has MASSIVE graphics upgrades in explosions and gameplay. We really took advantage of the faster processor and graphics capability on that.

Well, I was pretty amazed last night when I got the score over 100K -- you probably couldn't get near that score with the original, but with the new terraforming bonus, you can get your planet built back up periodically and extend your score substantially. The biggest trick is to shoot the saucers as fast as you can! Those suckers can drill down into your planet incredibly quickly, and if another one comes in from the same direction and shoots into the cavity left by a prior saucer, youir planet is probably doomed. Good luck!

OK, I have the new Planetary Defense 2012 executable (playable on original hardware and emulators) up on my website at THIS LINK Enjoy!

Actually, a single finger would work there as well as it does in PD2012 -- tap where you want to fire and it aims and fires in the same action. That would rock. (Anybody have that source code? I could add the leaderboard mechanism to it as well! )

I'll post the executable on my website ASAP. The same code runs on a stock 800, just no touch interface (duh!) or Internet leaderboard. If someone will send me specs on how they get the system to communicate via telnet, I can add that to the code as well so that someone with real hardware and SIO2PC can use the leaderboard.

Thanks, Bill -- always nice to hear that people liked our work. It's funny -- I saw that Buried Buck$ was used in a high score competition here some time back, and there was a comment that someone got "stuck" when the $ became unreachable under one of the pools of water and they had to quit the game. Actually, IIRC you could hit the ESC key in that situation and it would abort the level and you'd be penalized a certain amount of cash for it -- but you could play on, having to replay that level. I'll have to run it on my office machine and see if my recollection is correct. You know, if someone comes up with a way to connect a standard Atari 8-direction joystick to an iPhone, I'd finish up the iOS port of BB and release it! Lee Pappas found the old source code and I went through and converted the assembly to C++ and initially used the accelerometer interface to control it, but it was pretty much impossible to fly the chopper underground that way -- the project's just sitting there waiting to be finished. I have the USB Legacy Joystick, which is awesome -- and I picked up the iPhone's USB adapter to see if it might be possible to get them to work together, but unfortunately there don't seem to be any guidelines from Apple for writing USB drivers.

Planetary Defense 2012 is now IN THE HOUSE! Well, IN THE EMULATOR, anyway... The new version of the "Colleen" Atari 800 emulator is up in the Android Market and Planetary Defense 2012 is bundled in the package and launchable directly from the "Preferences" menu: Colleen Emulator Link After completing a game in the emulator, you'll get a screen which will allow you to submit your score to the leaderboard with your name (up to 8 characters). Just bring up the Atari keyboard with the Preferences menu, enter your name and press ENTER -- your score will be submitted and you'll be taken to the leaderboard to see where you rank. Top my high score on the leaderboard, if you dare! I had Kyle Peacock try it out last night on his Asus tablet, and he said it plays great on the larger screen -- Please give it a shot and let me know what you think! This has been an extremely fun project -- revisiting the old Atari 800 assembly-language code was a blast, and going beyond the magazine's old 16K limit was very liberating! I'm thinking about some additional projects using the touchscreen capability...

Cool! I'm really looking forward to the Expo and talking to people about all this fun stuff! By the way, the new version of the "Colleen" emulator is now available and includes the Planetary Defense 2012 game, bundled and launchable via the "Preferences" menu. Colleen Link More about PD2012 in this topic

Yup, new version of Colleen released today, with some new functionality that allows us to write new Atari 800 games using touchscreen input and Internet linkage! Kostas has bundled my Planetary Defense 2012 executable, a new, improved version of the ANALOG Computing type-in program that uses the touchscreen feature and submits scores to an Internet leaderboard. Colleen Link This has been a very fun collaboration, and I'm looking at other programs that we can upgrade to the improved functionality.

P.S. Is there a "standard" established for that sort of telnet action? Or is it just something a few people have set up? P.P.S. Yeah -- is there documentation on the xbios method? How is that accessing the scores in the games? I have a method implemented in my leaderboard system that protects against counterfeit scores, so it will all need to be automated -- and no manual entry by the user to do it.

Well, for the Android touch screen interface, we were in new territory anyway and just came up with a quick way of pulling off the high score submission that could be done without breaking anything else and would be transparent to the user -- no needing to type anything, etc. It was only afterward that I came up with the other features that would be seen on standard hardware. So that said, it would be cool to fall back to the R:/telnet communication method to submit the scores if someone has their system set up for it. Since I haven't really been exposed to any of that (I do have an SIO2PC interface with my 800), is there any documentation on doing it?

Hi All, Recently I installed the "Colleen" Atari 800 emulator for Android on my phone and after playing with it a bit got the idea that it would be really cool to do a "hack" that would allow people using touchscreens on the Android devices to be able to play certain old Atari games using the touchscreen as input. Back in the day, we had the Atari Touch Tablet and Koalapad, which worked by using the paddle controller registers to deliver X and Y coordinates. So after a little discussion with Kostas, the developer of Colleen, we decided to hack in a special input mode that would take touches on the touchscreen and then scale them to the same range as the paddle registers, and when the touch occurs, set the coordinates and activate the PTRIG0 value. I mostly wanted to do this so that people could play my old ANALOG Computing game, "Planetary Defense" on Android devices using the perfect input method -- If you're not familiar with Planetary Defense, it's sort of like a rotary version of "Missile Command" where your orbiting defense platform fires missiles to stop incoming bombs from destroying your planet. The original could be played in two modes -- joystick or Koala -- you simply moved a target cursor around the screen to indicate where you wantd to fire. So I added a new "TOUCHSCREEN" mode which, when used on the upcoming release of the Colleen emulator, will take advantage of this feature and let you simply tap on the screen to fire. Running the game on actual Atari hardware will still work with the joystick or Koalapad. While I was at it, the old "while I'm in there" mode kicked in and I decided to go for some really fun stuff... Back in 1982 when we wrote the original game, we had a lot of readers with 400s who only had 16K of memory, so we had to keep the programs small enough to run on those machines -- so Planetary Defense was a pretty minimal game. I always wanted to have a bonus in there that would do partial restoration of your planet if you hit certain score levels (kind of like getting bonus cities in "Missile Command"). As it was, once your planet was damaged, it wasn't getting fixed. In Planetary Defense 2012, you not only get bonus satellite lives every 5,000 points, but every 8,000 points (at the end of a level) your planet will get terraformed, restoring up to 25% of the planet at a time, allowing you to play on longer. I also adjusted the difficulty ramping for more levels than the original. This new bonus system works on the original hardware as well as emulators. Finally, and this is one of the most exciting parts -- We set up the upcoming "Colleen" release with the ability for the Atari program to talk to the Internet via a new "B:" device, short for "Browser" -- which allows Planetary Defense 2012 to report high scores to an Internet leaderboard! This is really cool -- the program checks at launch for the presence of the "B:" device, and if it's there, when the game is over it brings up a screen that allows the player to enter his or her name and then it submits the score to my website using a simple URL query. The leaderboard itself is at: http://analog.klanky.com/leaderboard.php You can see that I've been playing a bit -- Once this is out there, it'll be fun to have some real high-score battles. Getting back into the 6502 assembly code has been a huge blast. I used the "ATASM" assembler (compatible with the old MAC/65 assembler) to do the development. It has been really cool to work with Kostas on these "hacks" that push the envelope a bit and expand the old Atari software into the 21st century. So, that said, I think the code should work properly on actual Atari 800 hardware, but it would be nice to have someone help me out with some beta-testing before we release it to the world. If you have a working 32K+ Atari 8-bit machine, and would like to help test this out (using either joystick or Koalapad), please send me a PM here. Running on the actual hardware, you won't have the high-score leaderboard feature, but the enhanced gameplay and bonus features will be there. -Tom

I'm hoping to show "Planetary Defense 2012", an updated version of the old Atari 800 type-in assembly-language game Charles Bachand and I wrote for ANALOG Computing Magazine. I added bonus planet "terraforming" every 8000 points (so that if you survive long enough, your planet will repair some of the damage) and when run on the upcoming release of the "Colleen" Atari 800 emulator for the Android platform, it can be played using the Android touchscreen and will submit your scores to an Internet leaderboard! The same executable runs on a stock 400/800, just no touchscreen or leaderboard submission. What a fun job it was to upgrade! I hadn't touched 6502 assembly language in about 27 years... it all came back to me (shudder!) Also doing some cool new software running on Atari "Tempest" hardware with Clay Cowgill of Ground Kontrol. More 6502 assembly on hardware I would have killed to work on back in the day. Hopefully will have something to show.

I'm making my flight arrangements today! Looking forward to also hitting the Ground Kontrol arcade while out in Portland.

Thanks for posting that -- Unfortunately, I don't see an ASCII output format in there, but I'll try the others and see if I can use them as an intermediate format. Too bad I can't find a description of the STWriter file format anywhere. I'm tempted to just dump out a file and write a quick-and-dirty converter. IIRC, it just starts with "DO RUN RUN" and the jumps into the text with the control sequences embedded...

I have quite a few ST-Writer files that I transferred to my PC a while back. I'd like to convert these to RTF files or plain ASCII text files -- Does anyone know of a file conversion utility that would do this for me? Alternatively, does anyone have a file format description for ST-Writer files so I can write a converter? Thanks! -Tom

The Austin Franklin card was SWEET. I had one while at ANALOG and it totally spoiled me. He used every possible amount of space, even putting components down on the little "ears" at the bottom! A very impressive card that made word processing a joy.

Your wish is my command! Go check out part 2 of the ANALOG TCS story over at http://analog.klanky.com/funstuff.htm#TCS2 I think I'll do one of the entries in "What Might Have Been" next!