yllawwally

I was thinking about a raspberry pi, they start at about 700mA. They contain a powerful processor, lots of storage, network. Everything you could ever want. Easy to obtain and relatively inexpensive.

How much power can the cartridge port safely provide for these types of carts?

All 5 bosses now have some graphics, and can be fought against. They're not complete, but at least they show up, and can be defeated. The screen size no longer gets 5 lines taller when the bosses are on the screen. However that causes a small graphics corruption of the player. Level should now increment properly, and reset to 0, when boss 5 is killed. I was comparing to 5, when I should be comparing to 4. The mummy is no longer skipped. This version has a boss every 4 monsters. This will be changed later, it's just so all the bosses can be fought easily. I think the score is finally fixed, sometimes the last digit would go over 9. Boss 4 is messed up, will need to look into what's wrong, maybe a page boundary problem. Sometimes hitting a monster in one lane hurts another monster in a different lane, maybe related to boss code? Sometimes if player touch boss, especially mummy he gets corrupted. I've seen this before, but can't remember cause. Still need to add bosses special attacks. Will-o-wisp is done(blue ball), mummy is done(just needs color fixed), the other three I haven't started on. Tumulus_39.bin

Are you using a switchbox, with a slide switch for tv and game?

Mylar is a brand name of polyester cap, so that won't make a difference electrically. The shape different, but as long as you can make it fit, go ahead. NTE960 is a replacement for the 7805, so it will work just fine. The thermal paste from Radio Shack is what you're wanting. The .22uf would be correct. The voltage listed is simply the max voltage that it can handle, so as long as it's at least 10v, you should be fine. So technically the 130 would be slightly preferable. Although in use, it would indistinguishable.

I don't have much time to dedicate to it. But this will eventually get completed. New version. Now the sword disappearing on the far right is fixed. Pits should no longer override monsters, when overeyes is active. And a couple minor tweaks, that probably won't be noticed. Tumulus_38.bin

Fixed some of the screen size issues. I believe the only time the screen goes to 263 lines long, is for one screen, when you first start. The sky now only changes color, if the enemy is one you must defeat. Fixed the recently introduced bug of losing the horse if you were touching the horse, while you hit it. The potion no longer makes the opponents act as if they are hit. It simply changes their color, and reduces their life. This change helps with using a potion on a creature you can't reach. This caused them to sometimes stay there forever, and you could never defeat them. Tumulus_37.bin

F4 is the bank switching method. The PLD program can be downloaded from pixel's past, it's called pld code f4. That PLD is used to control the bank switching, it's what allows the atari to see more than the first 4k of the eprom. The PLD doesn't need to be released, however the cartridge will need to have one.

The bankswitching scheme is how you swap between the 8 banks. Does your game need ram on the game board, or only rom? Is the game written already? Can you burn PLDs? Because the board the pixel past had, used a pld to do the bank switching. Since you are doing only one game, you could take any 4k game, and remove the ROM. Then you would have to dead bug connect the chips to the board. It's a pain, but if you want to do a one off by yourself it's probably a good method.

With the way atari games are designed, they would probably enjoy practically any game. There are only a handful of games that need a manual. My kids like to wander around, they found ET very entertaining. Pitfall is another good choice.

Significant reorganization of code. Changing the way enemies are chosen. Switching to a routine to randomly choose enemies. For now, it simply increments through all the basic ones. This saves more than a 100 byes. This is probably the first version, that I think is playable. You can score points, and you can die. Remember to press fire to start. Tumulus_36.bin

TV Shows : Six million Dollar Man, Man from uncle, Charlies angels, Battle of the planets(there was a c64 version), Hong Kong Phooey Movies : Rocky(coleco version), West World, Highlander(spectrum only), Smokey and the Bandit

I hope you enjoy it, sodarun. If anyone sees any bugs, please post them here. I'm trying to stomp them out. A few more fixes, and improvements. Trees and pits no longer change color when you hit them, since you can't destroy them anyway. Pits have returned, I improved the graphics a little. I have increased the shake with the eyes, and turned the pits back on. Potions now decrement when used. This one was completely my fault. At some point for some reason I can't comprehend right now, I had put in code to randomly remove a potion when it was used, instead of always doing it. Don't know what the hell I was thinking, putting that code it. But the offending has now been removed. The game now starts off paused, to play simply press the fire button. And now you can die as well. Removed a few bits of unused code. This is going to be an ongoing thing. I need to find some more space in the rom, for adding more monsters. Still need to create 2 more bosses, and figure out how to fit them sprites into the ROM. At some point I'm going to create a routine to set up the levels. I don't have the room for the levels. This will also make replay a little more entertaining. Enjoy the new version. Also need to fix the bug that causes extra lines when you touch a boss. Tumulus_35.bin

Thanks. I'm hoping to actually finish this up this year. My vision of this game far outstripped the meager 4k I was willing to use. Which slowed progress down. But when down, my first game will work without any fancy bank switching.

He looks more like freddy kruegar

The potion no longer damages the player. Touching a boss, no longer causes an extra line. Number of potions is now a max of 5. Still trying to figure out why when you touch a regular enemy sometimes the screen becomes 261 lines instead of 262? I haven't tried this out on a regular TV, yet. I don't know if you would even be able to tell this happens. Also, it seems that the number of potions doesn't always decrease when you use them. Tumulus_34.bin

Improved the potion. The potion was not damaging the enemies most of the time. I kept thinking I needed to lengthen the fire time. But it seems it would damage the first enemies, but not the rest. Now it does damage everyone, however it may be a little too powerful. I'll have to wait and see, as the levels shape up better. I might try to extend the time but reduce the damage. It seems that sometimes when you use a potion that it isn't decremented. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it's getting decremented then incremented by something dying? I will need to look into this. I'm at the stage where I need to rid the game of these pesky bugs. Tumulus_33.bin

I like the idea of enhancing the sound. You would have the run the sound out of the cartridge. Because of the mods on many 2600's, you would need to support rf and av. You would need to mix the Atari sound with output of the cartridge sound. Maybe an rf demodulator in the cartridge. Then you can mix the audio, easily, and have AV outputs. The same problem as the atarivox has. Maybe a couple people would use the DRM. However for the most part this doesn't seem necessary. I don't think you could add C++ support within the cartridge. Being able to access larger amounts of ROM, could be handy, for games with a lot of media. How much would these enhanced carts cost? Having online capabilities would be pretty interesting. Being able to have multiplayer over the internet, or between 2 consoles side by side, would allow for some interesting games. If you did make cartridges. I would like to see enhanced sound support, Enhanced ROM size, such as being able to use all the space on the SD card for a single game. Capability to connect to another console locally, or over the internet(wifi or bluetooth). Can this be done at a reasonable cost?

New version, I fixed the scoring to support 5 digits, I thought I had added this a long time ago. I didn't check to see if I broke it, or never completed it. But it now works. I enhanced the skyline, I think it looks better with a changing color when enemies are on the screen. The multi-sprite bosses no longer have the line that slides through them. I had to do a bunch of moving around to get enough cycles to skip the positioning code, if it was a boss. And somehow I never noticed that the roman number for 4 was backwards, and looked like a 6, oops. Tumulus_32.bin

I've been pretty busy lately. However here is a new version. Killing a creature on lane 6, no longer causes a creature on another lane to die. This was related to the Boss code. I wasn't clearing the link ID after a BOSS was shown, so that the link ID was still set to that lane. Some of the creatures couldn't damage the player, was because I accidentally replaced the list of must defeat creatures with the list of creatures that can damage the player. Hitting a creature no longer causes an increase in the line count to 263. However it now causes a reduced line count to 261. I will need to test this on my TV, and see if it's a problem that must be fixed. I changed the ordering of the monsters, this affected which ones need to be destroyed, and which can damage the player. Tumulus_31.bin

Testing on real hardware is a necessity. However Stella is topnotch. It's probably the most accurate emulator I've ever used. You're not likely to see much difference. The harmony is really a bargain. It's cheaper that doing the game on chips, and significantly faster. Unless you already own an eprom burner and uv eraser. If you're willing to post your bins, there are many of us here that would be happy to test it on the real hardware. Unless you're using custom hardware, like a new bank switching scheme, the AA store could put practically any game on hardware for you. If it can be run on a harmony, it could be put onto a melody board by AA.

I saw a few parallax kits, the last time I went to rat shack. They also had two small shelves of soldering and electronics gear.

You are seeing weird things, because PFData is only defined for 24 lines. In your first post you have them defined for 0-96. You simply need to copy the play field data from the first source file you posted, and put into the newest source file you posted. Then to get a full screen you will also need another complete set of PFdata, for the right half the of the Screen. So you will have pf0data,pf1data,pf2data,pf0dataB,pf1dataB,pf2dataB. Then you will need to update the play fields a second time on each line.

Thanks, for the support. I never thought this would be so many years of effort. But at least it's finally looking like a real game.

The 2600 is quirky beast. It's fun to work with because it's like a puzzle. The biggest challenge to what your trying to do is that the 2600 does not have a line buffer. It is run by objects. You can easily have more that 4 colors per line. You can't really get 160 pixels across. People have gotten 96 pixels with only 2 colors, while other use only 40 pixels across, and maybe 40 different colors. To be safe you would then need to have 160pixels with 40 colors. So 6 bits of data per pixel, about 120 bytes per lines. Might as well use 160 bytes per line, and 192 lines per screen. So you would need 19k to store a whole screen of data. However, it cannot readily display a bitmap. Which seems to be what your wanting to do. I'm not sure what your background is, but you're going to need some skill in electronics, and programming to pull this off. Your co-processor will need to be fast, minimum 70 Mhz, if it's risc. Double that if not. A That is just for it to feed the atari. It takes a lot of overhead to sync. The harmony cart runs at 70Mhz, and most of it's power is used to sync up to the atari. This carts has DPC+ which uses the leftover power of the ARM processor. You should look at that. It is the closes t thing that exists right now to what you want to do. Or at least the hardware portion of what you want to do. http://atariage.com/forums/topic/157182-harmony-tech-specsprocessor-architecture/