Ryan Witmer

Frooty: Lollipop Smash Frooty makes use of that mean looking lollipop to brain any and all who stand in her way. It doesn't look like much, but Frooty's fearsome lollipop of doom bounces around your opponent's playfield like a trapped Breakout ball, endangering life and limb. And with that, all eight character attacks are complete! This is a major milestone, and now development is down to details and bug fixes. Cartridge space is becoming scarce, by my math I have a little over 4KB left. I ended up implementing a compression routine to reclaim some space since some of the larger data assets compressed really well. I have a few more tricks I can pull off if I have to, but let's see how much I can cram in there. A rough checklist of remaining work includes: Single player mode. This includes the CPU opponent plus the general structure of the single player game. I'd like to put some simple character endings in there, these will be just text at best. Sound effects and music. Sound is almost entirely lacking. Some simple music would be great, but again, space is tight. Tweaks and adjustments. I need to spend some time playing around with everything and making minor changes. Bug fixes. There are a few known issues, including one that dates back to before last year's PRGE. Joystick tweaks. The trak-ball control feels great, but the joystick mode could use some work. So that's it for now. When I next post about this project, I plan to have a demo ROM available that should roughly resemble the final product.

The Saturn is my favorite console of all time. I love the Japanese pads, and it always depresses me that they didn't become the standard for gamepads going forward, I hate the current trends in gamepads. I want my six face buttons! I've been resisting the urge to do another Shining Force III playthrough on my own Saturn, but I'm not sure how much longer I can hold out.

I got laid-off from my job at Expedia right before everything got insane, so I've been taking some time off to get stuff done, and it just happened to align with all this craziness. I've really only been doing one thing 5200 related: My original goal was to have this done before PRGE this year. PRGE has been cancelled, but I'm still keeping August as a target date. So yeah, lots of socially-distanced days hacking out assembly for my beloved 5200.

I release the source code to all of my games, and my two previous releases (Ratcatcher and RealSports Curling) both got ported over by some kind folks. I expect this game will find its way over eventually as well.

I saw it complete-in-box, I think it was still shrink wrapped, at PRGE a few years ago for over $100. It's one of the few games I'm missing, but that was just too much for me. I've never seen it anywhere else.

Kitty: Litterbox Splash Bad Kitty! Keep that stuff in the box! You're going to hurt someone! Avoid the deadly Kitty paws on the edges of the screen and watch out for the littler pellets that fly across the screen. Kitty has no respect for the people that have to clean up after him. That's why he's a villain.

I use DASM for 5200 development. Am I weird for doing so?

Pink Barrette: Justice Fist The pink fist of justice is coming for you! A plethora of powerful pink punches proceed from the background. Dodge these fists or meet your doom! No, I won't explain why there are three hands.

I only use the stock joysticks and the trak-ball. I have no real interest in any of the crazy controller options for the 5200. For some games I prefer the joystick, others the trak-ball, some I could go either way. I actually depresses me a bit to see how much discussion in this forum is controller related. I'd love to see a subforum created that all controller discussion can be moved to, I'm just sick of seeing it all the time when there are so many more interesting things to talk about.

Well, let's look at what's listed as homebrew in the AtariAge store: Adventure II, Beef Drop, Castle Blast, Koffi: Yellow Copter, Pac-Man Arcade, Ratcatcher, RealSports Curling Definitely homebrew Castle Crisis, Scramble New games, but were these first released on the 8-bits and then converted? I don't really know. Zaxxon 32K 8-bit port, at least according to the store page. Xari Arena Unreleased game from the 80s. I think this was complete, and no additional work was done. Tempest Unreleased game from the 80s. Unlike Xari Arena, this was not complete and work was done to complete it recently. How many of these do you count as homebrew? Depends on where your personal lines are.

The definition of "homebrew" is a little fuzzy on the 5200. You have actual new original games and ports, 400/800 conversions, and a slew of unreleased games from the crash in various states of completion. So, we need to figure out exactly what counts as homebrew in order to answer that question.

Yeah, this is where I'm getting confused, probably because I'm not a 2600 programmer (I just clicked this topic because I saw C++). I just don't understand the use-case for this at all which makes it really hard to know when I've got it right. My code should be most of the way there, maybe someone could embellish it a bit for your needs. I'm going back to 5200 land where things makes sense!