RevEng

Ah, see what you mean. Indeed, it looks like I didn't try with Superchip ram. Carry on.

Yeah, I tried that before. The ram is in page zero and your rom data isn't. The timing differences cause a corrupted display. It needs a kernel change.

So I'm glad to hear the news, and I trust updates will be posted to this thread. In the meantime... If it is ever finished, how do you guys think MGD should end? Presently you fall into nothingness when you reach the final black zone. Some thoughts... You land on a final basement floor, the game stops scrolling and plays some victory music. Game over. It never ends. The initial levels repeat, only faster. You grab a final prize at the "bottom" and a helipack. Then you start your ascent, with helipacks scattered around on your way up. The inky blackness is fine.

Yes, thank you for posting VectrexMad! Truthfully I too had assumed the worst after reading some of the posts in this thread, and I'm sooo glad to have been wrong. That's not a slam to you VectrexMad! To me you were just a random guy on the Internet who I didn't know anything about, and I'm glad that's changed too! Alex has brought a lot of happiness into my family with his creation of "Man Goes Down". We all play it regularly. Its the kind of game you can't watch someone play without needing to try it yourself! Totally addictive. If he doesn't want to finish it at this point that's cool... No pressure! I'm just truly relieved to hear he's alive and kicking!

I think using the person's current name preference (or last in this case) is respectful. Others may beg to differ.

Danielle Bunten Berry of M.U.L.E. and 7 Cities of Gold fame stands out most in my mind. To me, the A8 platform wouldn't be the same without M.U.L.E. And the randomly generated disk-cached new world in 7 Cities of Gold was a great technical achievement, given the constraints of the A8.

I dunno. It looks like this one fits fine, and regular sized SD cards are cheaper and less difficult to lose. If I had a choice, in this application I'd pick regular SD.

Very nice! Looking at the split in the board, I'm guessing you've designed this with Melody in mind, and a Melody is a Harmony without the upper half? And if the LED pads get populated in the production run, it looks like we'll have blinkenlights folks!

I'm in total agreement. If you're going to spend your time coding up a masterpiece, why make it one that you have to hide away after the lawyers show up? And if you're intent on revisiting some classic game's play, be sure to add in something new or remix existing game mechanics in a new way. This is especially important on the 2600, where original games shine most because they can be designed to take advantage of the hardware's strengths, rather than suffer it's weaknesses.

Not directly, but to get the most out of bB its quite helpful to know about assembly language, page boundaries, vblank, overscan, opcode timing, and all kinds of things you'll learn from Andrew's tutorials. If someone is new to programming it might be overwhelming. But if someone is an old hand at coding in other environments, I'd say its recommended reading.

No, and I doubt anyone else has anything to say on the subject.

Yeah, there's only one pore I'm really interested in seeing.

I'm glad to see the new gen enjoying classic gaming. I've done my part by introducing my kids to it, and they love it. Like their dad, they enjoy both new and classic games. Not trying to threadjack, but I though it might be interesting to see who is the oldest 2600 fan as well. I have elviticus beat by a year, since I'm 39, but I suspect the numbers go much higher than that. Who is the oldest Atari Ager?

Yeah, that's pretty terrible. Though I admit it would be an appealing concept if they were converted tables that could pull a transformers act and be both coffee table and fully functioning sit-down pinball tables.

The special characters get put into the hex digit positions starting with $a, in the order that they're defined in score_graphics.asm. The following example puts a "©1983" with a space after it in the score. Be sure to add in the spaces that the AA forum eats from the margin, or download the bas at the end of the post... const fontstyle=ALARMCLOCK const fontcharSPACE=1 const fontcharCOPYRIGHT=1 dim sc0=score dim sc1=score+1 dim sc2=score+2 rem we update the score bytes individually... sc0=$b1 sc1=$98 sc2=$3a scorecolor=$0f gameloop drawscreen goto gameloop font.bas.bin font.bas

You're welcome. Glad you like the fonts! You need to use them in place of the hex characters. The bB score can only access 16 characters per digit. It's also possible to replace the regular digits with special characters by setting "const fontstyle=NOFONT". That may make more sense when there are a lot more characters and your game doesn't need numbers. (so the score can behave like an inventory list, or what have you) No need to do that; the fonts and characters that you don't select aren't compiled into the rom, so they don't take up any space. It would be cool to be able to do that, but that's not possible without some modifications to the bB score routine.

I added in my 3 new fonts to the first post and updated the zipfile. If anybody wants to add to the pack, just post your score_graphics here and I'll do the merge and preview graphics. All additions will be attributed, naturally.

Cool! The more the merrier! I've actually added a few new ones since I releaseed it this yesterday! In my defense, I find font work very relaxing and a productive way to procrastinate when I'm not working on my game. There's no practical limit to the size of the file, other than your filesystem's maximum file size or dasm's maximum file size, whichever is lesser. Either way it has a lot of room to grow!

No problem. Glad to give back a little!

I created and collected various fonts and stuck them all in a single score_graphics.asm file. The font is selectable from within your basic code by setting the the "fontstyle" constant. The stock font is the default, so this score_graphics.asm will function exactly as the stock score_graphics.asm that came with bB if you don't specify a custom font or custom characters. This file is a drop-in replacement for the official bB score_graphics.asm. You can either replace the official score_graphics.asm with this one, or just drop the file in your project directory: score_graphics.zip My fonts are public domain, though it would be nice if you mention them if you use of them in a project, to help spread the word. Plok is one of Ste's bitmap fonts and the license for it is basically Public Domain. The bB stock font is under the bB license. rem Example of enabling a custom font. Options are: NOFONT, STOCK, NEWCENTURY, rem WHIMSEY, ALARMCLOCK, HANDWRITTEN, INTERRUPTED, TINY, RETROPUTER, SNAKE, rem HUSKY, CURVES, or PLOK... const fontstyle = WHIMSEY rem Example of enabling a custom font and enabling hex characters... const fontstyle = HANDWRITTEN const fontcharsHEX = 1 rem Example of enabling custom characters. Custom chars are: fontcharSPACE, fontcharDOLLAR, rem fontcharPOUND, fontcharMRHAPPY, fontcharMRSAD, fontcharCOPYRIGHT, fontcharFUJI, rem fontcharHEART, fontcharDIAMOND, fontcharSPADE, fontcharCLUB, fontcharCOLON, rem fontcharBLOCK, fontcharUNDERLINE, fontcharARISIDE, fontcharARIFACE const fontcharSPACE = 1 const fontcharCOPYRIGHT = 1 rem You can only use 16 possible characters, so while the following is valid syntax, rem you'll never be able to access the custom characters... const fontcharsHEX = 1 const fontcharSPACE = 1 const fontcharMRHAPPY = 1 [edit: added in PLOK, and some new custom symbols.]

They're trigram screws, and you're unlikely to find a screwdriver for them in a bricks-and-mortar. If you're dead set against ordering them online (dealextreme has them for less than a buck, but they take a while to ship) then you can make your own with a normal screwdriver and a grinder/file. Google around a bit.

I prefer Vinyl die over spray paint for this kind of work. I've done cameras other handheld items with it before and durability isn't problem, since it bonds with the plastic.

Very true that there's an overlap in the price range of today and yesterdecades. I blame that on the fact that in the mid to high end price range these goods are treated less like a commodity by the consumer, and consequently the manufacturing cost has little to do with the end price. But consider the price of the low-end. It has changed drastically. Today I can buy a digital flip or still camera (with superior video capture compared to an old camcorder) for less than $100. Ditto on the stereo. There were no options at these price points back in the day.

I finished it back in the day. It's probably in my top 5 list of a8 titles. Sometimes we'd have a whole crowd of kids playing this game, all huddled around the computer, passing the joysticks around when each kid's turn came. Definitely a classic, and you owe it to yourself to finish it!

I've done something similar with my personal copy of the RETROPUTER font. If I define the constant "hexfont" in my bB source, I get hex digits. (with the ORG/RORG recalculated, naturally) But I've been mulling over something a bit more ambitious lately - the ability for the user to pick a arbitrary characters in the alphabet. It would go something like... rem regular 0-9, in an alternate font const fontstyle=RETROPUTER rem 0-9, a-f const fontstyle=WHIMSEY const fonthexdigits=1 rem 0-9, space, arbitrary letters const fontstyle=PLAIN const fontdecdigits=1 const fontcharSPACE=1 const fontcharG=1 const fontcharA=1 const fontcharM=1 const fontcharE=1 rem default font, only arbitrary letters const fontcharG=1 const fontcharA=1 const fontcharM=1 const fontcharE=1 const fontcharO=1 const fontcharV=1 const fontcharR=1 There's not a lot to it, except that the additional additional fonts represent a fair bit of grunt work, and I don't have the cycles to do it at the moment. But it's on the back burner.