Ryan Witmer

I made a picture of the RealSports family welcoming their newest member: Football is still self-conscious about the lack of "RealSports" on his label.

My copy of Blaster showed up in time, so we're spending some quality time together.

Thanks for the feedback, glad you enjoy the game! Be sure to try the 8 player mode if you have a 4-port 5200 and lots of like-minded friends!

It's been slow going on this project lately. My real job's been busy and I've had the irresistible urge to play Ys VIII again. Despite this, I have made some progress, although a lot of it has been weeding out bugs in existing code. There are a few interesting new things in this screenshot: This first new bit is that the wisps now shoot at the player. You can see a few of those shots in this image, including one that's wandered to the bottom of the screen because I haven't yet clamped the shots to the playfield boundaries. There was a really nasty bug here that took me quite a while to fix, but I think I finally nailed it. As long as you left the wisps alone, everything went smoothly. As soon you started shooting the buggers, really weird things started happening with the wisps and their bullets. It turned out my wisp-spawning logic had some flaws in it which now have hopefully been remedied. Also in this image are a pair of suspicious black lines on the left side of the screen. This isn't the dreaded "2600 comb," those are markers that I stuck in to test my first attempt at vertical scrolling. I've been trying to figure out exactly how I'm going to have other things flying around on the screen. The player objects are all used up in the player itself, and the four missiles are used for the wisp shots and the player shots. That means I have to resort to the playfield if I'm going to have anything else on the screen. The problem with this is that the playfield is dreadfully slow. The solution to this is to make creative use of ANTIC's scrolling capabilities to simulate motion. This is a common trick in 5200 games, I'm pretty sure that the invaders in Space Invaders are just a static background that's being scrolled about. I learned how to do horizontal scrolling in RealSports Curling but vertical scrolling is a rather different beast. There's a easy way and a hard way to do it. The easy way is to simply do a memory scan reset on every line of the display list, and update the addresses as necessary. The problem with this is that it's very slow. In my case I would have to update as many as 276 bytes on a single frame to achieve this, and that's way too much time. Instead, I pulled off a sort of dynamic scroll which migrates a single wrap point through an in-memory display list. This pattern is used both on the top and bottom of the screen, the top scrolls up and the bottom scrolls down. Now that this is in place, I can have pretty much anything I want "raining down" on the players. I'm still trying to figure out what exactly will be placed on the background. In the meantime I might do some busywork like clamping those wisp shots.

Don't forget Galaxian. 5200 Galaxian is border-line unplayable for me with the 5200 joysticks, but with that trak-ball... totally different game.

Ratcatcher actually got ported to the 8-bits, twice even! Once without three player support and again with it. I've made the code available for Curling, so some enterprising individual could port that too.

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

That whole discussion made me realize how few overlays I have. I'm only missing 10 games now, and I only have overlays for Star Raiders and Tennis. Star Raiders was the only set of overlays I actually cared about, though.

I was listening to this while working on my next 5200 game, and then you guys started talking about me working on my next 5200 game, thus the circle was completed. Oh, and that should have been my Gorf. Next time Gadget, next time.

"Editing" really just means "adding goofy sound effects."

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.

Oh wow, a Zoo Keeper clone! I'm not really into porting games to the 5200, but Zoo Keeper was on my list if I ever decided to try. Guess I don't need to worry about that one!

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: 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