e1will

To be fair, Scott didn't start this post. And to his credit, when people asked him for technical details, he offered them, and when they asked him for a video showing the gameplay, he posted one. I understand why he's wary of piracy... heck, before Duck Attack! was even finished, somebody grabbed the work-in-progress bins from the homebrew thread and uploaded them to their pirate ROM sites. The key thing for me is that he feels the game's not finished. Once it's done to his satisfaction hopefully he'll want to share it with the world. Finishing a game like that is no small feat, so it makes sense to me he'd want to focus on that before considering a release. And if he truly only wants one copy of the game to exist... well, there's certainly nothing stopping other 2600 developers from making our own version(s) of Star Castle that could be released to everyone. I wouldn't at all be surprised if this thread inspired somebody to do just that. --Will

You're welcome! I just wish there was a cart with a "proper" ending... I know a lot of people here would love to give Alex some $ for the awesome game he's created. --Will

Interesting suggestion. But what about the bubble? When you have that, it's controlled with all four joystick directions. --Will

Nice!

Completing the kill screen is hard, since the right side of the screen is "dark," so you have to know where the dots are. I made it easier on myself by giving myself infinite lives (I just commented out the 2 lines of code that decrement the "lives" count when a ghost gets you.) Levels 257 and up play identically to levels 21-255. I just finished patching a speed-up cheat into the JavaScript. Next I'm hoping to hack the game into Pac-Man Plus, with the disappearing maze, Coke cans, etc. --Will

Nah, I can only get up to the 4th key or so on that version. I tweaked the JavaScript to start the game at level 254. What's interesting is that there's a whole bunch of code in there to handle that level, and one line of the code actually forces an immediate "game over" condition. If you take out that line of code, you can actually complete the kill screen and proceed to the next level (it just continues on to level 256, 257, etc.; it doesn't loop back to the cherry level.) --Will

And if you're wondering what the kill screen looks like... --Will

This sounds really neat, I'm looking forward to playing around with this. --Will

For the record, if Nintendo ever asked me to redo 2600 Donkey Kong for them, I would totally accept. I'd even throw in an Easter Egg, free of charge. --Will

I second all of these. Great games. I've spent way too much time playing Strat-O-Gems lately. Other great games (as mentioned above) are Thrust and Conquest of Mars. --Will

Deja vu...

Thanks!

I've always been partial to this version of the video myself. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqD1KAQYey8&rel=0&fmt=18&showinfo=0 --Will

Very interesting! I didn't notice that. I guess that would explain where those letters came from. --Will

Just some minor tweaks to make room navigation go smoother and fixes of some extremely obscure bugs. --Will

Thanks! Carts hopefully coming soon. --Will

Latest version attached for your duck-zapping pleasure. --Will EDIT: These ROMs are free demo versions... the cartridge version has a few extras. DUCKPAL5.BIN DUCKPAL6.BIN DUCKNTSC.BIN

Arkanoid fans might find this mildly interesting. I came across a screen that was coded, but never actually appears in the game: More details here: http://willnicholes.com/arkanoid.htm --Will

Ah, neat use on Bowling. As for Breakout, I had always figured the sides and the top were made of the same thing... interesting that that's not the case. --Will

Excellent! I'll have to install the new Stella and give YR a try. --Will

There's some helpful information in this thread: http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/152167-hacking-for-atarivox/ --Will

Ah, interesting!

Hard to tell... if I had to guess, though, I'd say random, since it speeds up and slows down wildly a few times. It may be possible to make it a constant scroll velocity with another tiny hack, that would let us see even further. --Will

I was curious what there might be "after" the golden bars of death, so I tweaked a couple of bytes to make it survivable. It's posted in the Hacks forum, if anyone else is curious: http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/161888-man-goes-down-hack/ --Will

This is a simple hack that lets you see what's after the "ending" of Man Goes Down (i.e. the golden bars of death.) I modified 4 bytes of the code in the Stella debugger to force the "man" to the top of the screen at all times, which lets him survive the golden bars. It's not playable, really, but if you've ever been curious what would happen if you could somehow survive past the golden bars of death, well, now you can find out. It's mostly just more screen glitches; not too exciting, but sort of interesting in a Pac-Man split-screen sort of way. I was curious if it would loop around to the beginning, but nope: eventually the scrolling slows to a halt. Here are some screenshots of the "new" ending. Enjoy! --Will EDIT: If you play around with the memory location $AA as RevEng suggests below, it will indeed loop back to the playable screens after a VERY long time. mgd_hack.bin