Channel 2

I seem to recall that the original arcade Crystal Castles had a trackball.

There are a couple of people I have on ignore because of their avatar. Yeah, NE146 is one of them. Come to think of it, I don't really need avatars at all. The only thing is, they help to keep track of who's who. I'm turning avatars off, I'll see how that works. I assume you can do that with the new software too.

I wish I could ignore someone's avatar only, that is, not have the avatar show up but still be able to read that person's post, and still see other avatars.

Here's an update with about 40% of the new layout in place. All three of the dark mazes I planned are there. But I'm not sure I'll stick with things as I originally planned. Larger and more detailed might not necessarily be better. Anyway this isn't a playable version really, item distribution hasn't been changed and I made the dragons ignore you unless you collide with them. And sometimes the bat flies the chalice into the castle. I found something that can cause dead dragons to revive, but only if you're already holding the chalice. I'm assuming that doesn't explain most of the cases since it's hard to kill them while you're holding it. avalon02.zip

I expected it to be ugly, but actually it looks really cool. Kind of a neon version of Ms Pacman. Good work. Is there a way to vectorize the mazes? Like the ground in Thrust? As a bonus maybe you could have the dots be a different color like the Ebivision Pacman.

I hate mazes. In order to get through with designing the ~60 rooms I need I've had to create a little visualization tool in Excel. You put ones and zeroes in the first area, and it shows you what it looks like both repeated and mirrored. And it also shows the bytes in binary form, which you can copy and paste into your adventure code. apftool.zip

I'm working on the new 60 screen layout and it's going to take a couple days. But if people are enjoying the first one, maybe there should be another version, a 30 room one (with 3 dragons) like the original? The bigger game will probably have a different feel to it. The randomizing of levels is really poor. There's no built in timer to use for random numbers, so Adventure just uses a counter that increments 20 times a second. And then the distribution is poor anyway. I think there will have to be a different way of setting up. Maybe the user can pick the seed number, which would effectively create hundreds of game variations. When the reviving dragon glitch occurs, is it always all the dead dragons? There are a few things that add a lot of cycles which is where the screen jumping is mostly coming from. The added dragon, and positioning extra objects i.e. two missiles instead of the ball. The first is easier to fix, the second will require some work especially when the ball is added back in.

I have a bankswitched version working now. It was easier than I thought. I still haven't seen the reviving dragon problem. I went through the code and couldn't find any reason for it either. I'm going to let it be for now. If it persists maybe I'll just call it a feature. To be sure we're on the same page, you do know that dragons revive every time you open a gate or pick up the chalice, even if you're done so before? And also when you continue a game after being eaten of course. The game variations were removed to save space, but also because I don't play game 1 or 2. The playfield is supposed to be a shield. Next to do is a new layout. Just a bunch of rooms at first, I need them in place to try out things like regional dragons.

First, about glitches etc. I haven't seen dragons come back to life unexpectedly, but then I haven't been playing that much. I'll look into the code, I have no idea what would make that happen. It isn't the bat picking up the chalice. And I don't think the key can interact with the gate unless you're in the room. I don't know what to do about the key/gate colors. I tried to make them as distinct as possible, one each of red/blue/green/yellow. With the variable background color it's just going to be hard to tell I guess. I could make the green one black or almost black, the yellow one white. There's also the problem that they get lost sometimes on a wall of the same color. The green key and blue dragon aren't in the matrixes yet. Notice the magnet won't attract the green key. I think I'll put them in, you might get stuck otherwise. But I may change a lot of preferences around too. The top of the castle rooms might end up going somewhere in the new layout, or maybe I'll leave it as is. The bronze castle (the flashing one) will definitely have something more inside of it. Rooms that are a bit taller than others without objects in them seem to be related to where the data is in the file. Likewise, objects causing the screen to stretch in some circumstances is something that happens in the original Adventure if you just move the data around. So I think crossing page boundries is the issue for most of that. I'm pretty sure the display routine doesn't go overtime. When the whole screen is jumping wildly, I think that means there's too much going on between frames. The fourth dragon especially takes up a lot of extra cycles. If I had regional dragons, I couldn't have more than four anyway, there's not enough ram. I thought of sharing data, but the memory structure is too limiting. Perhaps if state data for two dragons were stored in one byte. The regional dragons would each live in half of the layout, a particular byte of the room number determining whether they can enter a room. Furthermore they would only move when the player's in their half, so there wouldn't be so much added processing to do. The problem with doing things like that is I'm not much of a programmer. And if I go to 8k bankswitched, I'll really be out of my depths. I'm pretty sure it can be done though, if the display routine and graphics data is moved to the other bank. There would have to be some redundant data I think, but not too bad. I played around with the display routine a long time ago, for high res rooms with layer by layer mirroring and colors and repeating segments. I don't think it would really add to the game to do too much in that line though. As for mud rooms that slow you down, I think that would be really unfair. The room graphics weren't meant to make it harder to move anyway, just make the game look better. I've also looked into ways of reducing flicker. Basically you have to remove objects. I tried having playfield simulate lighting in the dungeon; that was too much work, it would require a whole seperate display routine and doesn't look very good. The ball (which was the player in Adventure, I've replaced it with the missile graphics) might be used as a limited third sprite but there's not a lot cycles left to handle it. I thought of getting rid of seperate gate graphics, just have a door appear in the castle when the key's there. Even getting rid of mobile keys, having some kind of switches instead. Okay that's more than enough for now. I'll look into the reviving dragon problem and check out bankswitching.

I will try to finish it, though with more time there's more possibilities i.e. more work. The flicker is only worse than the original when it comes to the dragons. With four of them, there's more of them on the screen more often. The idea of having a fourth dragon was that there would be more rooms too. Unfortunately they have a tendancy to clump. Possibly an added dragon isn't needed since I have them teleporting in when you open a gate, and coming back to life when you pick up the chalice. Maybe there could be regional dragons that never meet. The hardness is in part intentional, but I hadn't meant for it to be frustrating. It takes some knowlege of how they move to evade them. The added obstacles make it harder, unfortunately the sticky wall problem makes it unfair. And sometimes you seem to get stuck in the dragon's mouth. The rope is basically the same as the bridge. You just stay on the right hand side of it. I had thought of adding or changing item properties, like a boat that allows travel through certain areas, but there's not really enough space left, and I'm lazy anyway. Of course a bankswitched version would allow more code and a lot more detail especially in rooms, unique graphics for each with multiple colors, but I'd like to keep it within the original 4k. How much does it cost to make an 8k cartridge anyway? And can memory be added?

I was hoping to complete this by the fifteenth but oh well. The gameplay changes are pretty much in place but there's some quirks. E.G., the sword now only kills a dragon when it's attacking, but sometimes the dragon dies when the sword isn't even touching it. I haven't fixed any of the glitching due to page boundries or too much stuff between frames. The main thing undone is to create a whole new layout, though you can see the new room graphics I'm working on. avalon01.zip

Thanks for the help! I think I'll go with the 7 & 19 unless I get close to using them up, which I doubt I will.

Does anybody know how many cycles worth of code can safely be added to Adventure between frames?

I agree on the Pitfall vine-swinging sound. It's iconic of what the 2600 is all about. And that asteroids firing noise definately gets stuck in the brain. But my personal favorite would probably be the first, the tank sounds from Combat. The throaty growl of the engine, the relentless roar of a moving tank, the hollow bark of the turret firing, the resonating blast of a direct hit. And in the middle of it all, the boop-bop-bip-beep of a bouncing projectile.

A month later, I've thought of a term I like for the intermediate step between hack and homebrew -- call it a hybrid. It's still someone else's work, but with significant creative effort put in by the hacker; so it's like crossing the original with a different strain, making it a hybrid. The word also fits in nicely between hack and homebrew since they all start with 'h' and they go from short to long (4, 6, and 8 letters).

Not exactly a "great hack", but here's mine.

It's not a home gaming console. There's some information here: http://www.falcon-capital.com/uWink%20Exec...ry%20(8.5)1.pdf "Ideal distribution points include bar-tops, tourist areas, business kiosks, points-of-sale, and the gaming and lottery industries."

Consider Airheart for the Apple II (1986 I think). It wasn't literally first person, since you were looking over the guy's shoulder (like tomb raider but smaller and in a boat), but it had full 360, scaling sprites, various enemies that moved in different ways, even some vertical motion -- you could be above or below water. It was incredibly good looking for the Apple, and pretty convincing as 3d. You really used those three dimensions, too. I don't think it really influenced the development of the modern FPS, though. As good as it was, it didn't make much of an impact.

I really like the name Mr. Pac-Man. I'm getting the same high pitched beep here. It's really loud and annoying. Is a shortcut in the sound code really needed? My suggestion for an improvement (don't know if it's doable): make the dots white, like in the unreleased Ebivision version, the one Pesco is derived from. They make the playfield white and don't show the maze on those scanlines. I think the gaps in the maze actually make it look better.

So, what we have here is a cartridge that takes cartridges and memory cards and has its own power supply. And the console it plugs into is insignificant compared to the hardware this thing packs. I think I'll wait for the 2600 on a chip to come out, and the next logical step to take place.

Message sent. Cool, I finally won a contest. Apart from the most pathetic collection contest that is. So, do I have to wait 90 days before I can take part in any more giveaways? I got the word list part, and interpreted 'mixed up' correctly, but at first I somehow had 'head' instead of 'dead' when I ran it through an anagram generator. I got unpromissing possibilities such as: He Arrived Hare Drive Eider Harv Hired Rave I, Everhard Vie Harder Her I Raved Hived Rear Adherer IV Even when I reallized my mistake, I almost didn't get it. Dare Diver is as random-sounding as any of them.

Dare Diver. Wow, I won something.

Is it a dead Phoenix cart?

That would be the carefully hidden easter egg. I told you it sucks. The "C2" sprite is the null object, the placeholder that appears when there's less than two objects to display. Normally its graphics are empty. I put something in there for an experiment and was bemused by its odd behavior, so I left it in. It turns out that the null object shares the X and Y coordinates of the bridge, which is why it sometimes seems to move on its own.

Enough with the gradients already! I've got your stinkin' gradients right here. Introducing: A No new mazes. No new challenges. It totally sucks. But it's got gradients! See if you can find my carefully hidden easter egg. advsi.zip