Ryan Witmer

512K?! Oh, the possibilities...

Are there details anywhere on this bank-switched board? I'm guessing it's a 48KB board, which would be very interesting for my new project.

The funny thing about Deadly Discs is that on the surface, it seems tailor made for the 5200 hardware. Your have four onscreen characters, each with a small weapon. This is exactly how the 5200 works, four players, four missiles. The problem is the colors. On the Intellivision, the enemies came in different colors and had different properties, plus their discs were different colors with different properties. Getting all those color combinations to work on the 5200 is what's stumping me, since each player shares their color with their associated missile. In all other respects, the game should be fairly easy to do. Maybe I could come up with some other way to show the different enemy and disc types, like different shapes or something. Anyway, the idea has been on my back burner for a long time. I'm glad to see there's interest in it.

I really, REALLY want to do a port of Deadly Discs to the 5200. I've been thinking about it for years now, but I just can't work out some of the technical details regarding the graphics. Maybe after a couple more original 5200 games a solution will pop into my head. Oh, and it would totally support the joystick coupler for dual-stick play.

Oh my. That's a "must-buy."

Yes, it will work. The test just outputs the values that POKEY is reading from the controller. POKEY has no clue what it's actually looking at, that's a detail for the programmer.

Will these be at PRGE?

I'm trying to work out some details about the trakball controller, and I could use a little help. Unlike some of the 5200 superfans here, I only have one 5200 console and one trakball. I've started working on a project that will feature trakball support (I'll just leave this here) and I'm trying to get a sense of the sort of controller values that the trakball sends. My research on this hasn't turned up much, and what little I've found seems to be not quite correct. What I'd like, if anyone is able, is for some kind volunteers to run the Diagnostic Cart's POKEY adjustment test. This test displays the values that are currently coming from each controller. I'm interested in what sort of numbers come from a trakball that isn't moving. I'm mostly curious about how consistent these values are across different controllers. Thanks in advance to anyone who can help me out with this.

Now that RealSports Curling is "in the can" and headed for a PRGE 2018 cartridge release, it's time to move on to a new project. I've been thinking about this one for a long time, and I promised myself (and my wife!) I wouldn't start working on it until I finished RealSports Curling. First a little background: There's this wonderful Neo Geo game called Twinkle Star Sprites. Don't let the appearance fool you. Twinkle Star Sprites is a hardcore competitive shooter with tons of charm. You select from one of several characters and fight against the others by playing a vertical shooter game. It's as if Super Puzzle FIghter II Turbo had a baby with a bullet-hell shooter. The game got a fairly obscure PlayStation 2 sequel. The sequel has a very different look and feel to it, but retains the same core gameplay. I've messed around with it a little bit, but I think the NeoGeo original is still the better game. Now, I'm a huge Neo Geo fan, mostly for the fighting games, but also for quirky stuff like Twinkle Star Sprites. A port of the game to the 5200 would be pretty much impossible, even the mighty Neo Geo has trouble coping with the intensity of the game. Instead, I'm working on a game very much inspired by the legend that is Twinkle Star Sprites. I'm still ironing out the details, but much of the game is figured out, at least conceptually. The title, as indicated by the name of this post, is Magical Fairy Force. Like Twinkle Star Sprites it will be a competitive shooter that I hope will have some pretty intense two-player battles. The current plan is for something very much like Centipede, with one player on the bottom of the screen and the other at the top. If you've played Demons to Diamonds on the 2600, you'll get the picture. In fact, conceptually this idea was born as a four-player 5200 version of Demons to Diamonds. I wanted to do something a little different though, and the detail I have planned for the game won't allow the four-player idea. One of the interesting things about Twinkle Star Sprites is that you don't shoot at your opponent directly. Instead you blow up various enemies in ways that create attacks that go after your opponent. Each character has their own set of attacks, as well as differences in movement speed and shot power. I plan to recreate much of this style in my game, although the specifics will be drastically different. I'm still working out the gameplay, so I don't have much to report on this yet. I've already reached the first milestone however, and that's trakball support. Tonight I got trakball detection working, and I plan to support dual-trakballs. My hope is to get eight characters into the game. I have six characters already designed, and vague shadowy notions of what the other two will be. All of this is contingent on ROM space, so I may have to make some cuts to the roster. That's all I've got for now. I'm very excited for this project and can't wait until I have something decent to show.

Qix was the first 5200 game I ever played, and to me it completely epitomizes the system. I must have been around 5 years old when I first played it, and it's fair to say it changed my life. I'm still totally in love with the way the game sounds, if nothing else.

Don't worry about it. I was testing all week anyway, just another thing to look at.

That's great to hear, because I've been trying like crazy to reproduce anything like you described. What scares me the most is thought of weird bugs on 2-port 5200s, since I don't have one of those to test on. Just out of curiosity, is yours a 2 port?

Alright, this is it. Release build 1.0 of RealSports Curling. After some intense negotiations, RealSports Curling will be receiving a cartridge release here at AtariAge with the full box and manual treatment. The manual has already been written, and some draft label/box art has been made up (and it looks fantastic, but I'm not going to reveal that!). The current plan is to release the game at this year's Portand Retro Gaming Expo. I'll be there myself for a few hours on Saturday, so anyone who finds me can challenge me to a game of curling. I'll play left-handed to make it interesting. So, here's the "final" build and complete assembly source. Some very kind folks ported Ratcatcher to the Atari 8-bit computers, and if anyone wishes to do the same with this project, feel free. I've tried to make the code as easy to port as possible. I imagine this would make a fine paddle game, and a few adjustments to the potmap.s source file should make that easy to do. I will gladly answer any questions anyone has about the code. rs_curling.zip

You guys inspired me to go back and do a much more in-depth video, hopefully I got the setting right this time. Here's a 15 minute introduction to RealSports Curling, shot again with my crappy little phone:

Yeah, I saw that option and considered it, but might as well let people find it. I eventually won this game 11-10. The computer made a fantastic late-game comeback. It had me pretty worried for a moment, if it can almost beat me, and I know every detail about how it works, I really want to see what it can do to other people.

I just switched it from private to public. I didn't realize private was that private. It's not a very interesting video, now it's all hyped up.

After seeing so many videos of upcoming homebrew titles I decided to try doing a quick video of my own. This is the first time I've ever done anything like this, so it isn't that great of a production. This is just me going through a couple shots during testing. It's not terribly informative, but I may make more videos in the future, especially for my next project.

Hmm, I haven't seen anything like that. I spent some time trying to just flood the system with stick inputs like you mentioned but didn't see any problems. If you see this again, let me know and see if you can narrow down a few more details.

Time for beta 2: Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on your perspective, I've found a couple of bugs in beta 1, both related to the code that detects if a rock is in the rings or not. Big shout out to my CPU player for helping me find these. The "spectator" mode where the CPU plays against itself has been extremely valuable in ferreting out these last few bugs. The bugs only showed up for rocks toward the bottom of the screen. I got a little too clever and tried to mirror the edge detection using the values for the top half of the screen, and I did it wrong. It just happened to work near the center, and the results got increasing bizarre as you moved down. Now that I know how much extra ROM space I have to spare, I've just duplicated the edge values for the bottom half. This also makes the edge detection code slightly faster since I'm no longer doing inversions of the rock Y values. Attached is the ROM for beta 2. There are quite a few ROMs for this game floating around now. You can always confirm the version you have on the game configuration screen, which prints the build ID and date on the bottom corner. If you can't run the game but still want to check the version you have, the build ID string is 256 bytes from the end of the ROM, so any kind of string dumper utility should easily pick it out. rs_curling.zip

The top screen displays the rings all the time, so you can always see where the previous rocks ended up. It also has a secondary aim arrow to help you line up your aim.

This might be stretching it a bit, but some fine folks ported Ratcatcher from the 5200 to the 8-bit line. The original port had to drop the three player mode, but they did a second port that put it back in, but it seems to require some special hardware or something. I think that counts as being better on the 5200.