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Ryan Witmer

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Posts posted by Ryan Witmer

  2. Posted

    1. What a previous poster said - the track ball for the 5200 is exquisite and makes the ports of classics Centipede and Missile Command the best

     

    2. Two exclusive games..... Realsports Baseball and Space Dungeon. I know having to deal with the 5200 controllers can be a pain in the ass but when you have two working sticks and a coupler Space Dungeon alone is worth the aggravation that can be the Atari 5200.

     

    I think Countermeasure is exclusive as well, and one of my personal favorites.

  6. Posted

    The first thing I always think of for great Atari 5200 graphics is the skull-and-crossbones death screen from Countermeasure. I'm sure you can find it somewhere. That was some really cool stuff for the time.

     

    You're more likely to find great art examples on the Atari 8-bit computer forums. They use the same graphics hardware, but the scene is just a lot more active and there are probably some demo-sceners over there.

     

    As for homebrews, don't even bother looking at my two efforts, Ratcatcher and RealSports Curling. My current project should have some pretty cool stuff if all goes according to plan.

    • Like 1

  8. Posted

    Alright, that was quicker than expected.

     

    Attached is a very early build of my latest project. It's configured for two players, and should recognize a trak-ball for either/both players. Here's a screenshot so you know what you're dealing with:

     

    Magical Fairy Force, October 26th, 2018

     

    The trak-ball is detected on startup, so you'll need to have it attached the whole time. I haven't implemented "reset technology" like all the kids use these days, that comes later.

     

    Player 1 is on the bottom, player 2 on the top. You should be able to move either player around with the trak-ball. On my system, it feels really good, but as has been demonstrated, different controllers work differently.

     

    I really just want to make sure that there's no drift, and that the controls feel good in general. I still have tweaking to do, and you can just ignore the joystick controls right now. I already know that those are way too sensitive.

     

    A big thanks to anyone who has time to test this. I really want to nail this trak-ball stuff.

    fairy_force.bin

  9. Posted

    Allan posted Dan Kramer's 5200 trak-ball guide here if you have not already seen it:

     

    http://atariage.com/forums/topic/125406-8-bit-conversions/?p=3306094

     

    Oooh, that's nice. Thanks a lot.

     

    Between this thread, some of this documentation, my own experiments, and some time thinking in the shower, I think I might have this whole thing figured out.

     

    I plan to rewrite the trak-ball code in my current project to test out some of this stuff. I'll post a demo ROM here at some point and it would be great if some folks could test it out to make sure my understanding isn't totally broken.

    • Like 1

  10. Posted

    I tried to see if the trak-ball games self-calibrate by caching a "rest" value to compare against, and so far I can't figure out what it's actually doing. I've tried starting various trak-ball games while spinning the ball like mad during every point that I believe it might check for a center value, and I can't seem to throw it off.

     

    I suppose what might be happening is that the center value can be read when the controllers are disabled. The way you detect the type of controller is by disabling the controller ports are trying to read a value. Joysticks give a very specific value when you do this, while the trak-ball does... something else.

     

    It's still a mystery to me.

  11. Posted

    The best compromise I can think of would be to have one of the trigger buttons fire both forward and back at the same time, and the other one shoots up and down. Whether or not this is possible depends on how the shots are constructed, if there are enough sprite objects and so on.

    • Like 1

  12. Posted

     

    I never really thought about it before since I'm not generally a big Vanguard guy (although I do like the Atari 5200 version), but yeah, I could see that game being improved by twin-stick controls.

     

    Even the arcade version didn't have twin stick control, did it?

     

    The arcade version had four fire buttons, one for each direction. It was twin-stick without the actual stick.

    • Like 1

  14. Posted

     

    No it isn't.

     

    Good game anyway, though!

     

    I really wish it were. I'm not generally a fan of hacks, but the shooting in Vanguard is so terrible that I would love to see a hack that did something like twin sticks to fix it. I would even consider doing it myself if anyone had a nice disassembly of it.

  15. Posted

    Like it was said above without a doubt Space Dungeon! It was an obscure Taito arcade game whose only home release came on the 5200 I believe. It has great graphics and its loads of fun. Just make sure you get the joystick coupler and have two working oem 5200 controllers to play it

     

    I can't stress the joystick coupler enough. Space Dungeon really isn't even worth playing without it.

  16. Posted

    Qix and Countermeasure come to mind right away. Qix is easily one of the best games on the system, in my opinion, and one of the essential 5200 titles.

     

    Countermeasure I think is a "love it or hate it" game. I personally love it, but it can be a little slow and plodding at times.

     

    Star Raiders deserves a mention as well, since it's a very different game from the 2600 version. I don't think any of these games are difficult to find, either. Getting Star Raiders with the controller overlays might be a little tough, though.

  18. Posted

    The 5200 was the second system I started collecting for, after the Sega Master System.

     

    I never had one when I was a kid, but I knew a few people who did, and I relished the rare opportunities I got to play it. Seeing the superior versions of so many of my 2600 games was mind blowing and I was obsessed with this system, spending hours poring over catalogs and dreaming of owning one someday.

     

    I finally bought one sometime around 2007 and began my quest to collect all the games. At this year's PRGE, I added Mr. Do's Castle to my collection, leaving only 10 games I need to find. It keeps getting harder, but my streak of finding at least one game at PRGE every year is still alive!

     

    It was around this time that I also discovered the Atari homebrew scene. I've been programming for about as a long as I can remember, and of course when I was a kid I wanted to make games! Since Atari was the thing at the time, I would always talk about all these awesome Atari games I was going to make. Now was my chance to make that stupid childhood dream a reality, so I started researching 5200 programming and tried to come up with a project.

     

    Now I have two games done and a third on the way. For me, the 5200 is just as fun to program for as it is to play.

     

    Now, if only I had one of those nice dust covers...

  19. Posted

    :D You can have my money as long as you keep pumping out great 5200 games.

     

    I think "great" is a bit of overstatement, but thanks for the support. Nothing I've done compares to something like Castle Crisis.

     

    That being said, I do have another game in the works, coding it right now, in fact! I hope you have a couple of working trak-balls.

    • Like 2

  20. Posted

    I scored a copy of Mr. Do's Castle, but couldn't find any of the other stuff I'm missing. I would have bought that copy of Gorf had I found it. I'm only missing 10 games now!

     

    5200 Mr. Do looks great, but the controller on the demo machine was a total wreck. On the other hand, I got to help some people play RealSports Curling.

     

     

    Please consider buying all the 5200 Homebrews. They more that get sold the more new homebrews our beloved system may get :)

     

     

    I'm only in it for the money.

    • Like 1

  23. Posted

    If you got a trak ball you gotta have a Millipede

     

     

     

    This is a game that has grown on me quite a bit. I didn't like it all that much at first, but now it's one of my most played games.

     

    I don't think the trak ball feels quite right in this game, but it's still better than the joystick. Centipede has much better trak ball control.

  24. Posted

    Any chance of adapting this to the 2600?

     

    Certainly not by me, but other people are welcome to try. The source code is available, but from my understanding of the 2600 hardware I doubt it would even be all that useful (a 7800 version might actually be able to reuse large chunks of the code).

     

    Any conversion would need to be seriously scaled back, I would think. It took quite a lot of effort to get 16 rocks, the rings, and all the different lines on the screen and I can't even imagine how you would do that on a 2600. Then again, there's some pretty amazing 2600 wizardry going on these days so maybe it could be done in some form.

     

    What I would really like to see is an Atari 8-bit computer conversion. This would be an ideal game for the paddle controllers.

    • Like 3
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