Ryan Witmer

Let's introduce our second hero! Pork-Chop Age: 44 Likes: Sewer Fruit Hates: Sewer Alligators When he's not working his day job as a city ratcatcher, Pork-Chop likes to spend his time in Fairy Land. How he discovered Fairy Land and the way he reaches it are unknown. His ratcatching partners, Biff and Buzz, know nothing of Pork-Chop's secret double life. If they ever found out, he would die of embarrassment. Pork-Chop is secretly in love with Queen Sugar and would do anything to protect her. Is his rock-headed bravery enough to stop Zevasha's conquest? Notes: Pork-Chop is player #3 from Ratcatcher. This design is based on the PC version of the game, which of course had much more detailed characters than the Atari 5200 version, where Pork-Chop is just "the yellow guy." Kind of a comic relief character, he's really a very very deep inside joke from my childhood. My goal right now is to have a playable demo featuring these two characters ready for PRGE this year. If progress goes well, additional characters might be added to the game before then.

Wholly original might be a bit of an overstatement. I'm basically ripping off Twinkle Star Sprites for the Neogeo.

Fairy Land is in trouble! The evil fairy queen Zevasha and her dark minions have their sights set on conquering this peaceful land! Good Queen Sugar rallies her forces and calls her allies to defend sweet Fairy Land from evil! Are you ready to answer the call? Magical Fairy Force for your Atari 5200 will place YOU in the Fairy Arena! Strap on the wings of one of eight characters and fight to save Fairy Land... or conquer it! Get ready for intense head-to-head trak-ball action! Don't worry, joysticks work too! While still very early in development, it's time to start showing off some characters. All screenshots are from early development builds and are extremely subject to change. So, let's meet our first hero! Pink Barrette Age: 7 Likes: Justice Hates: Evil Robots A superhero from Earth, at least in her imagination, Judy assumes her powers when she puts on her favorite pink barrette. She frequently visits Fairy Land, where she is known as a great hero and defender of justice. Although usually locked in battle with Dominic, a boy in her neighborhood known for his evil robot creations, Pink has chosen to answer Queen Sugar's call for aid and rushes to the defense of Fairy Land. Will her powers of justice be enough to stop the evil Zevasha? Notes: Pink is a character I originally came up with for a PC game I was working on. That project kind of fell apart, but I loved the character so much that I really wanted to use her for something, and this game seemed perfect. I still want to put her in her own game someday, hopefully it will happen. Who is that other person on the character select screen? Stay tuned to this thread to find out!

I think 5200 Pole Position is a decent game on its own terms, but not a terribly good port of Pole Position. I very much prefer the 7800 or even the 2600 versions, which just feel better to me. I also played the crap out of the Intellivision version back in the day, but I don't remember how good that version actually was.

OK, I tracked down one of these palette files, and now I think I have all the tools I need for what I want to do. Thanks for the help.

I'm trying to convert some color-indexed RGB images for a game I'm working on. I have a utility I wrote that generates the data bytes and color tables in a way I can use, but the color conversion has to be done by hand and my eyesight isn't up to the task. I was hoping to have some way to convert, if only approximately, the RGB triples to the GTIA color codes. I've stumbled across some of those crazy cylinder formulas, but the principles involved are a complete mystery to me. Wow, I even posted in that thread. I don't remember that at all. I'll check this out later. Unfortunately, I develop on a Linux machine and this isn't running with Wine. The next time I'm on Windows I'll see if this can help me, thanks.

I've been looking for this for some time and haven't had any luck. Is there some kind of formula somewhere that can convert from RGB or HSV color values to NTSC GTIA codes? Alternatively, if someone has already brute-forced this, a table of color mappings would be quite helpful.

Great episode, just got done listening to it. I own "The Arcade Game" and kind of enjoy it, but your descriptions of Death Star Battle have me really curious. I need to go play this game and see if it's as insane as you guys make it out to be.

My current project is a trak-ball game, but the project I have planned next will use the controller coupler. Don't hold you breath, though. It's a long ways out.

Been a while since I posted here. I've been suffering a bit of a creative block lately, but I've been forcing myself to keep moving forward on this project. I've got some really cool things going on now and some of the gameplay details are starting to become clear. Here's a current screenshot: A few things going on here. First, the orange diamond looking things are obstacles that move toward the player. I achieved this by getting vertical scrolling working on both playfields. Right now I'm calling these things "stars," but that's subject to change. The graphics are temporary, of course. I'm still not exactly sure what the stars will do, but I have the ability to spawn them at different rates and control the scrolling of each player's "star field" at different speeds. I've also added a health system. Those four red dots on each player's status area are health points. Collision with the wisp shots is currently implemented, and health is removed accordingly, although neither player can die at this point. I also have a nifty hit-invincibility blink that happens when you get hit. I may need to tweak the rate on that a little, though. Hopefully I can get this project moving a little quicker and have more updates and eventually a simple demo to post.

I'm only in the market for the games, although I'll take boxes/manuals/overlays if the price is reasonable. Only 10 games missing from my collection, getting harder and harder to track stuff down.