e1will

What kind of TV do you have? NTSC CRT, about 36 inches wide. --Will

I just received my Harmony in the mail, and wow, is that flicker horrible! I'm definitely going to go with the blocky-for-real-hardware, flickery-for-emulators approach on this one. --Will

Awesome! And perfect timing... the Atari 2600 homebrew article is scheduled to be featured on the front page of Wikipedia very soon. --Will

Stella for the 2600, no opinion on the other systems (commenting here since it won't let me cast a "partial" vote.) --Will

Strat-O-Gems Deluxe is an excellent game and extremely addicting.

Oh yeah, I don't know why I didn't remember that. --Will

Thanks Jonathon. Did this end up on a cart? If not, no problem, a screenshot of a bB game would still probably be useful in the "creating homebrews" section. Is there a list someplace of which games in the AA store are bBasic games? I know Melbourne Tatty is one, maybe Solar Plexus too? --Will

Thanks Erik! --Will

Thanks Ed. I understand things aren't quite as clear-cut in this case, but at least the screenshot will be able to indicate you don't have an objection to it being used, which should help. --Will

Thank you Thomas! They do allow animated GIFs. Nukey: The concern's basically if we want a single "fair use" screenshot to illustrate the idea of an Atari 2600 homebrew, no problem. If we want a bunch of them, "fair use" won't fly. Personally, I'd prefer a bunch of them. If they're "free images", they can be used much more easily on articles that aren't about that game specifically, and nobody will try to delete them. --Will

Hello everyone! If you've written an Atari 2600 homebrew game and would like to make a screenshot available for Wikipedia to use in an article, please see this thread. Thanks! --Will

Good news, everyone! There is now a Wikipedia article on Atari 2600 homebrews. The bad news is, there aren't enough screenshots in that article. Now, of course, anyone can take screenshots, but due to various boring legal reasons it's much, much better if the person who wrote the game (1) takes the screenshot and (2) releases it either to the public domain or with a CC-BY-SA license. I agreed to release a whole bunch of Duck Attack! screenshots CC-BY-SA, so there's a Duck Attack! screenshot in there, but it would be great if we could make some other games' screenshots available to the good folks at Wikipedia. Basically, if you've written a homebrew game and you're willing to offer a screenshot to Wikipedia and whomever else might want to use it, please post the screenshot in this thread and say something like this: "I, _______, wrote this game, took the screenshot, and release the screenshot with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license." I'm especially hoping the following people are able to help out: - Ed Fries, because there's a Halo 2600 article that really needs a screenshot; - Zach Matley, because there's already a Four-Play screenshot there, but it's tagged as "unfree" so it could get deleted; and - Bob Montgomery, because there's already a Go-Fish screenshot there, but it's tagged as "unfree" so it could get deleted. Everyone else who's written a 2600 homebrew is welcome to offer a screenshot too: if we had some free screenshots of Medieval Mayhem, Juno First, Lady Bug and K.O. Cruiser available to the Wikipedia folks, I'm sure they could find a good home for them. Thanks! --Will

Have you considered using DPC+? Stella supports it as long as you're not doing any ARM subroutines. DPC+ is definitely on my radar. And it would definitely help the cycle issue if I wanted to keep the ball sprite in play. As it stands I'm looking at using the ball sprite only for the title screen, since Pac'll only need to go left and right there. In the game proper, I think I'm going to have to use a player sprite, so I can use up and down sprites, as well as to not force the adjacent playfield (maze + door) pixels to be yellow. I'm trying to think, would DPC+ let me implement cd-w's idea of the venetian blind effect on the whole screen (in the flickery mode)? I'd love to try out the venetian blind effect, but I'm struggling to figure out how to achieve it since I'd need to call RESP0 and RESP1 each line; I can't get away with just HMOVEing P0 and P1 since the fruits/keys (frame 1) are going to potentially be horizontally far away from the ghosts (frame 2). --Will

...and I'm not 100% sure, but I think I can get it so that both the blocky and flickery versions have solid (non-flickering) pink doors. I've already got the maze solid. Getting rid of the ball sprite frees up a lot of cycles. --Will

Interesting idea, I may try that. Yep, right now with the binaries I'm playing with, all of the objects have a luminance of 6 or less. Seems to help a little. I still need to add the score and lives, so I probably won't have scanlines to spare. Thanks. Right now I'm re-writing it to use two separate kernels depending on the setting of the TV Type switch. Color for "flickery" (similar to the kernel I posted earlier) and B/W for "blocky" (colored squares instead of fruits, but they don't flicker). In both cases I've decided to rework Pac-Man as a player sprite instead of the ball sprite, so up- and down-facing sprites can be easily supported. In "blocky" mode, that will essentially generate the same flicker as Ms. Pac-Man, which is (IMO) acceptable, especially since I'll be tweaking the ghost AI to avoid being on the same scanlines if they can. The Pac-Man sprite will not flicker at all in "blocky" mode. I'm thinking "flickery" mode might just be a "bonus" mode for people with emulators, since Stella can make it look pretty decent with the phosphor effect enabled. --Will

I hadn't seen this thread before, these are awesome. I for one would pay good money to play 27 Turtle Games or Batgammon. Don't think I'd want to try Boweling, though...

Yes, around 2510 or so we could be seeing some serious shortages. Al's great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson may have to start paying $5.00 for old carts. --Will

I don't know Batari Basic, but I'd be happy to whip up some assembly for you tonight. Can you clarify what you mean by "cycling through a set of numbers"? --Will

Try including one of the external references from the Halo 2600 Wikipedia page. They'll be less likely to revert it if it's referenced. --Will

Wild! I tried it out, and yep, that video's accurate. A little tricky to do, but I got it on the third try or so. Nice little quirk. --Will

I mentioned this in another thread, but I'm working on a $15 ROM pack that will include the cartridge version of the Duck Attack! game binaries, some alternate versions (like the all-green St. Patrick's Day version), a big ol' behind-the-scenes document with early prototype screenshots, the manual, and a game world map. It's entirely optional, of course. I'll keep a basic version of the game binaries posted online so people can play for free if they're inclined. (And the manual, of course, will stay online, so people can figure out how to play it.) The ROM pack is really more of an experiment than anything: is there demand for a digital "extras" package on a 2600 homebrew, or are people satisfied with a free binary and/or buying a cartridge? I dunno. But I'm curious. If you've got any suggestions for other cool stuff that ought to be in the ROM pack, let me know. Anyway, here's a sneak peak of one page of the game world map. --Will

I agree with Thomas. Come on Kurt! Thirded! Fourthed. The stuff he did for the 8K Adventure alone was more original than many "original" games. --Will

Ha! Fuzz up the resolution a little bit and Travolta could pass for the Tron sprite in the I/O Tower. On-topic: If I had to choose between "retro" and "good" in the art department, I think I'd stick with "good." --Will

What popular games can you think of that have a constant 30 Hz flicker on most or all of the sprites? Asteroids is one that comes to mind off the top of my head, but I'm having a hard time thinking of others. I know Yars' Revenge flickers the playfield at 30 Hz but not the player and missile sprites.... Surely Asteroids isn't the only one, is it? --Will

I loved the games back in the day, but the stuff people are doing now is just amazing. --Will