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I'm comparing between my jr and my 7800. Using the same cable, and TV RF connector. The colors are darker, and muddy on the 7800. While on the 2600 they are relatively crisp. I only have one 7800, so I'm not sure I want to mod it.

When working on Tumulus. I noticed that the Visual Quality of 2600 games seem to better on a 2600 instead of the 7800. I had always assumed the quality would be the same. Or maybe my 7800 just needs a tune up. Do other people see this same thing?

I finally figured it out. I did something incredibly stupid. What put me on the path, was that I thought I burned the wrong ROM, when I went to verify the ROM was burned properly. Every time I started the game, the corruption was slightly different. I was trying to determine what the emulator and harmony had in common. Then I noticed one of the times I started the game, the red eyes appeared immediately. Those are on a timer. The only way they could appear immediately is if the timer was set over 240. So I looked back at my code. What I had done was accidentally remove LDA #0, from the clearmem procedure. So I was initializing all the memory to some random number that happened to be in the accumulator. Stella probably sets it to 0, and the harmony might do something similar. So I added the LDA back in, and burned the ROM again. Presto weird ROM issue fixed.

I tried the new eprom, with the same problem. The graphics are messed up. The game play is still good. I tried on both a 7800, and a jr. The same rom on a harmony cart works fine on both machines. Are there problems that could be masked by using a harmony cart? I can't think of anything the harmony does that should make a difference. I played a few rounds of ghost manor. There were no problems with that game. The only thing in common is the PCB. I got the PCB from here a few years ago, and mounted a socket on it. I've used it before for older versions of the game. Would somebody mind burning the ROM on an eprom, and testing it. I'm not really sure what to check for at this point. The ROM on the 7800 The Rom on the JR Harmony on the 7800

I pulled the bin from the EPROM and compared it. It is identical. Maybe the voltage is low, and the 2600 can't read the EPROM properly. I don't know. I burned a new EPROM, with the identical version, and will see tonight if main player is messed up during game play.

Problem.binI tested out several of the revisions on a harmony cart. I can't replicate the problems. I had used an eprom when I saw the problem. Other than the Harmony using a little more power. I don't believe it could cause a problem. I will change the background colors to make it easier to see on the TV. And probably need to replace the RF cable. But those changes wouldn't help the weird issues I was seeing. Perhaps some kind of 7800 compatibility issue with my game. Although that wouldn't explain, why it worked on the Harmony. I'm going to burn a slightly older revision on an eprom, to see if for some reason on eprom it doesn't work, while it works as a Harmony bin.

I just played this on my TV last night. OMG, it's awful. The screen is jittery. The colors aren't good. The main player is bad, it's hard to describe. He changes size. Becomes a 2 pixel tall block. Shifts colors. It's a little harder to figure out what going on. Stella is a really good simulator. However it seems to mask these problems. On stella, colors are vibrant, the player and monsters look good. I tested on a 7800,with an LED tv. The colors may be because of the TV connection. I had not tried it on a real machine in many months. It looked good before. I've changed something, that makes this into a pile of steaming #$%^. Luckily I have most of my revisions. I'll have to load them on a harmony cart, and go through them and figure when the graphics got broken. Hopefully it's something I can easily revert back to. I suspect I broke the graphics in revision 85. Which is when I switched from 5 enemies to 8. I've considered going back to 5. If anyone has an opinion on this, feel free to speak up. For a point of reference, Version 11 here is revision 129. And I'm currently using 132.

Tumulus_11.binI needed to add an RNG generator, for when you take too long to kill the enemy onscreen. An earthquake occurs, and pits will open in the ground. I'm using galois generator, and reseed it from the rolling counter whenever it returns 0. The countdown for the eyes begins as soon as an enemy appears. I need to fix it, to only when the enemy would leave the screen or the player interacts with it. Desperately out of ROM space. Some of the player corruption has been fixed. There seems to be the ghosts dead enemies that can kill the player. A single pixel goes across the screen sometimes. The player sword is messed up a little, on the left edge. The player graphics are messed up a little on the right edge. Killing enemies seems to cause the screen to jump. Haven't implemented using magic yet. Been tightening up the code a little. using bne/beq after a lda, instead of cmp. Once again I messed up the mountains a little. Adjust player sprite accidentally overlapped with horse. So that the sword became black. However this is way easier to see the knife.

Fixed the pictures for the mandrake. Now they award both health and potions. Compressed audio a little mode, got 80 bytes. Scoring is a little messed up, because some of the new enemies give more than 10 points. Changing how I store level data. At the moment I use 160 bytes. But with the current scheme, I would need 300. The new version will use 200 total. I'm trying to compress more, but I'm not sure that is feasible. This will put a hard limit of 30 different monsters.

I'm working on a side scrolling beat-em up, called Tumulus. The current Bin is in the Homebrew directory. http://atariage.com/forums/topic/213104-tumulus-2600/

Does the TV have an S-Video input? You could mod the 2600.

Tumulus_10.binI just realized I can edit my first post. So I will place the most current version there as well. So people can find it easily. Fixed the man getting crushed. Something was wrong with the code for switching to the attack pics. Not sure what was wrong, but it now works. Added eyes to the sky when paused. This will eventually use a delay, and then attack the player for taking too long. Mountains get messed up, probably timing issue, in those lines. I think I'm updating to early in the middle of the line. Mandrakes now exist and will convert when hit. Although the pics are in reverse. And they don't grant life or magic yet. Now pits move too quickly. I suspect this is related to speeding up the game when on the horse. Still player and enemy graphical glitches. Trying to determine what bosses will be like. The only difference between levels will probably be color. There is just not enough ROM to change the levels significantly. If anyone likes this game when it's done, maybe a part 2 will be made with larger ROM space.

The TIA won't be in identical states on each line even in a 2 line kernel. The 2 line kernel, allows you to do the work for one sprite on one line and the other sprite on the second line. This was built into the TIA, via delay graphics commands. This is also helpful for single line kernels. Allowing you to update one set of graphics at any point during the scan line, and then display the new graphics at the proper time on the next line. Asymmetrical playfields are expensive in several. It takes a great deal of RAM or ROM to hold the playfield data. 192 lines with 5 bytes per line, is a lot of data. Also the playfield must be written at certain times, also increases the difficulty. It doesn't matter much what calculations are done during each section. It is whatever makes sense to you, for the particular game you are writing at that time. The period before names, is to make local names, versus global names.

Tumulus_9.binPotion counter is now active. However no way to use or collect them yet. I think i got the horse fixed so that you don't lose him immediately. Also should not get hurt touching any of the pits. Although those are disabled in this version. Lots of moving code around. I had increased the calculations significantly. Which added 5 more lines to each screen, which I didn't notice. Stella still displayed fine. Probably would have rolled on a real TV. Got that fixed now. Used significantly more illegal opcodes. Worked on scoring. I think it's fixed now. Player still gets corrupted, sometimes. Also sometimes the weapon flashes on and off, depending on where you're standing. Moved the code into the graphics area, to make use of left over space now have, 400 bytes left. However 200 of that will be used for enemy lists. Still need to add about 8 more enemy types. Mostly level end monsters. Which will eat up at least another 200 bytes alone. So really don't have much space left. May need to be creative with level data. Might be able to squeeze out 100 bytes, by forcing the amount of time between monsters or which lane they must appear at. I'm hoping there will be 5 levels., each with a boss. I'm not sure how I'm going to handle these. Might need to fool with the kernel, to allow it to let the monster leave their lanes. Not sure if there's an easy way to do with with the amount of ROM I have left to work with.

Tumulus_8.binSomehow I had forgotten to add a way to disable the pits. I could move them, but not hide them. That is now fixed. It seems somehow the sitting on the bottom pit issue got fixed. However I don't know why it no longer allows unlimited points??? It seems that sometimes you lose the horse, for no apparent reason. Perhaps ghosts? One enemy seems to pick the wrong palette for some reason. Pushed a bunch of code into the graphic space. So now I have about 200 bytes, more to work with. I can probably get another 200 bytes later by pushing more into the graphics. Level design is just starting. I can specify when enemies appear, and on which level. The enemies have different behaviors when you attack them. Next I want to adjust behaviors when you don't attack. If you attack a required enemy the screen will pause. This is needed to prevent the enemy being delayed and causing the next enemy to share that lane. I'm not sure if this is what I want or to allow the enemies to not leave the screen but allow new enemies up until that lane would want a new enemy. Would anyone out there have a preference for either behavior. Still no work on potions. But, they will be two parts. First a plant that is picked, then a mandrake will get out, and run away. Killing the mandrake will get you some potion. The roman numeral on the bottom is the amount of potion. Current hard coded to 2. This will max out at 5. I think using one will give 1 point of damage for each potion, you have, but only consume 1 point of the potion.

Rabbit 2600, do you have you're source posted?

Have you gotten your music to work in your game, yet?

Does anyone know why they decided to do double-enders? Did they just have left over circuit boards, and decide they could use these games we couldn't sell by putting them together in a new shell.

Tumulus_6.binI improved the scoring. Player Health is now implemented. Started adding indicator for potions. Added some new enemies. Screen now pauses, when there are enemies that must be killed to proceed. I am considering adding an extra enemy if the player takes to long to dispatch bad guys. A flash is now shown if the enemy is hit. Different enemies have different hit points, and different score values. Most of the portions for using and getting potions remain to be added. The player has graphical glitches. The enemies have a glitch where they are recolored when too far to the right. I don't seem to have enough cycles to fix it. Sometimes the player will gain points by sitting on the lowest pit. For some reason this pit is killed by sitting on it, and awards points, but doesn't disappear.

Although I've never seen that before. It would be trivial to make controllers like the ones there. The 2600 has the simplest controllers possible. If you tell us what you want the controller to look like, and how you want it to work. I could probably make something pretty easily.

Thanks SuperGun, that's what I was wondering. I would have thought, they would make a custom board, and then only use a single larger rom chip. Maybe they had left over game boards, so they just made a custom cartridge. I had thought they were interesting forever, and finally picked one up at ebay. But didn't want to dismantle it.

What's in a double-ender? Is it two separate boards? How many rom chips are there?

Yes, it's a horse. I need to go through and make new graphics. But that has been low in priority so far. I still need to add a few more enemies, and potions or scrolls for clearing the screen. I had hoped to make a second level. However, I won't have enough rom space. I want to make this a 4k game. I'm getting very tight with space. Every time I add a few lines of code, I have to compress code in other spots. However there is some free space around the graphics, that I can weave some code through.

You could try the homebrew medieval mayhem. http://www.spiceware.org/atari_medieval_mayhem.html

Minor fixes to color problems. More efficient code. I was using lda and then tax, converted those to lax, for graphics loading. No rom to upload today, the fixes wouldn't be very noticeable.