Christopher Tumber

Speaking of which... Anyone name any other side-scrolling 2600 games (not just side scrolling shooters, platform games too but I don't think there are any..??) Defender, Vanguard and Super Cobra all have the same kind of rough scroll. Defender II has a nice. smooth scroll but the background is really, really simple. Anything else noteworthy? (There are plenty of games which scroll a whole screen at a time, like Pitfall or Xenophobe - Not those!) Chris...

>I think I'm missing something here...like a good working knowledge of >Stella Shrug, you seem to be getting by okay... >It just seemed like a lot of processing to me but I guess if that's what >you have to do... Ah, not really. There are huge open space on the playfield. Plenty of time to be messing around. All the kernal needs to do during a screen draw is: write to PF0/PF1/PF2 (Once - It's a symetrical playfield), determine if the Player/Particles/Rods need to be drawn and switch the playground colour back and forth (timing on that would be a little tricky as it needs to be adjusted as the core expands). Oh, yeah and draw the decoy if needed, but it flickers so it's probably multiplexed with the rods or something...

>A quick disassembly shows they use missiles and balls but the ball >has to be the same color as the PF So change COLUPF [Playfield colour] mid-scanline? Chris...

Re: Reactor Uhhm, am I missing something - It seems pretty straightforeward? There's the player (presumably P0 or P1) and three particles which could be any 3 of P1, M0, M1 or B. Everything else is playfield graphics, except the rods which are whatever's left over of P1/M0/M1/B, flickered. Chris...

>Video Games are legally (I say legally, because this was all legally >defined in court when Magnavox took several companies to court during >the 70's over this) defined as an appartus that displays games using >raster video equipment: So, the Vectrex is not a video game console? And the following arcade games are not video games either: Battlezone, Tempest, Star Castle, Omega Race, Rip-Off, Asteroids. Yeah, okay, Asteroids is NOT a video game. And neither are any handhelds using LED/LCD displays, which is pretty much all of them. In addition, hooking any conventional console (Pong, Atari 2600 to PSX/Xbox) up to a flat panel display suddenly turns them into non-video games as well! Any legal definition determined in the 70's pre-dates these display devices (or things like oscilliscope scrrens just didn't occur to them) and if the claim still held any validity, you can bet Magnovox would expand it to include alternate display methods. A car is still a car whether it's made from steel or plastic. Chris...

>The Cube shows two faces of a 3x3 tile cube with 7 colors! running in >z26. For what it's worth, each square of the cube can be a different colour (ie 18 different colours) Chris...

If you've been following the technical discussion, my illustration of how the display is done is available here: http://www.capitalSsoftware.com/TheCube.bin Obviously not complete but it should illustrate the technique... It's a combination of Playfield and Player graphics, there's a more detailed description posted to the Stella mailing list that I won't reproduce here. Chris...

A whole bunch of replies: Thomas wrote: >1. You meant "less horizontal space", right? Yeh, thanks for providing the translation.... >2. Did you have a general framecounter? No, the closest thing to a framcounter is a counter which counts down the number of frames to move the coulmns of Instigators. But it starts at 31 (frames between moves) and works its way down to 2 (frames between moves) as Instigators are eliminated. I didn't use this counter because of it's variable duration, but, it occurs to me that I could have say, masked out the low bit in order to determine every other frame. Except that then I'd have limit the possible frames-between-moves to odd values else I'd wind up with two even values in a row when resetting after a 0 value. Shrug. opcode wrote: >How do I get a copy? The game sounds good. >I visited your website but just found Vectrex games... Yeah, updating my website is one of the many things on a very lengthy to-do list. Just email me if you want a copy. Is your Colecovision version ready? I'd be up for a trade... (BTW - I only have an NTSC version at present) ZylonBane wrote: >So Chris, you're saying that in the current version of Instigators you're using every single byte of available RAM? Yes. >I think that if there's any way possible to make the saucer move the way it does in the arcade version, you should. It's done, it's out there. A bunch of people already have copies. It's not going to change. Cupcakus wrote: >I was just wondering if a release image was released yet. No, not yet. See that to-do list above. Now that I'm home for a while and my flu seems to be clearing up, I hope to have the release binary in the next couple days. Chris...

Why the saucer is the way it is... The Reader's Digest version is, "Because that's the way it first turned out and I felt it worked well with the game and was balanced so I decided not to fiddle with it and try to make it more like Space Invaders". If you can't stand, wordy, long-winded posts that should suffice as an explanation. If you're like me and can't get enough of insider, behind the scenes, game theory type discussion then enjoy...! There are actually two issues with the saucer. First the the speed at which the saucer moves and the second is the frequency it appears on screen. In Space Instigators, the saucer moves considerably faster than in Space Invaders, it also appears on screen considerably more frequently. In Space Instigators, the saucer moves 1 pixel per frame. This is kind of a default speed since it's the simplest to implement - You don't need any sort of counter variable or flag to determine when to move the saucer as you would if you were moving it ever other frame or slower. The saucer appears on screen every 256 frames. That's because as soon as the saucer is off screen, a 1 byte variable counter begins counting down from 255 to 0 and then reactivates the saucer. (When the saucer is on screen, this variable keeps track of the horizontal position) In order to make the Space Instigators saucer more like Space Invaders, the saucer would both have to slow down and take longer between appearances. A big part of Atari 2600 development is resource management, not completely unlike a RTS games. Do you buy archers or do you reinforce castle walls? In order to slow down the saucer I'd probably need to use a variable. If I use a full byte variable, that's a byte of RAM I'm not going to be able to use elsewhere and Instigators is very demanding on the RAM. I could probably get away with using only a 1 bit variable, but a 1 bit variable is slower and uses more ROM (bitmasking out the extraneous bits) and Instigators skirts right up near the 4k limit and every CPU cycle is sacred. Making the saucer appear less frequently also implies using at least 1 more bit RAM, if not more, with the same repercussions. There aren't really any existing counter variables that the saucer could share - There is a variable which controls the speed of the Instigators columns, however, using that variable would mean that the saucer would speed up as the Instigators speed up. Not good. So what I am saying is that while making the Space Instigators saucer behave more Space Invaders-like would be possible, it wouldn't be a trivial undertaking and it might lead to resource problems elsewhere. Which is where the game theory comes in and I decided the saucer was good the way it is. In any port there are going to be differences from the original, and again there are tradeoffs between gameplay vs accuracy. A little bit of difference from the original game can result in a big change in game design and balance. In Space Instigators, the enemy columns have significantly less vertical space to travel than in Space Invaders. There's really nothing that can be done about it and it means that the advancing enemies tend to drop more quickly and it also means that the player has a lot less room to the left or right of the columns to shoot at the saucer.* In addition, I did not implement the shot counting bug from Space Invaders (just as I didn't implement the T bug used in Qix to trap Sparks when I wrote VIX for the Vectrex - Strategy&Tactics=Good, Exploitable Bug=Bad) and instead the value of the saucer in Space Instigators is truly random. This means that on average the saucer in Space Instigators is worth considerably more than in Space Invaders - In Space Instigators the chance of a 300pt saucer is 1 in 4, in Space Invaders its 1 in 14 (or 1 in 22 to begin the level) without shot counting. And presumably other values are similarly skewed in Space Invaders (ie: It's also probably a lot more likely to get 50pts than 150pts). I could have gone for an uneven (but still random) distribution of point values for the saucer but we're back to dedicating more resources - either a more complex random number generator or a table of saucer values weighted towards lower values. Once again I'm back to having to expend resources, resources I don't really have, on a point of accuracy that's not really (IMHO) key. So given that the Saucer in Space Instigators is generally worth significantly more than in Space Invaders, it's important for game balance that the saucer in Instigators be more difficult to hit. Otherwise the game becomes even more skewed towards harvesting saucers. As it stands, a screen of Instigators is worth 810 points, so nailing a few saucers per screen can make a big difference in score, particularly given the likelyhood of saucers being worth 300 points. With the more crowded screen and faster saucer, the saucer seems balanced. At the same time, the increased frequency of saucer appearances give you more chance to hit it. Which rewards skill in the long run while hopefully preventing the saucer being a cheeezy exploit. (The potential to abuse the saucer a little is there, but only once you're really good which is as these things should be. It would be a really bad thing for a newbie to be able to rack up a big score just repeatedly knocking off the saucer) So I decided to leave well enough alone and go with the slightly faster saucer... Chris... *But this also presents an added strategy not really present in Space Invaders. In Space Invaders, the prevaling strategy tends to be to eliminate a couple columns from the right and/or left edge of the formation in order to slow the Invaders decent and allow you to pick off some saucers. In Space Instigators this strategy still works, however you can also eliminate a couple columns from the center of the formation. This gives you a clear, safe path to shoot at saucers since the remaining Instigators won't pass over you (or you can easily avoid the one column that does, depending upon how many columns you remove).

What I found amusing is how Crawford complains about the video's "extremely narrow point of view" but then goes on to pin Atari's collapse on two games (Pac-Man and ET)! No mention by Crawford of the loss of key personell to Activision (&etc), or a changing market (the shift to home computers), or Atari's inability to counter Nintendo's innovative gameplay (Super Mario Bros, Zelda, etc), or Atari's inability to shake it's image as a has-been and take advantage of the NES's revitalisation of the market, &etc. Crawford's just as guilty of oversimplifying a complex story as anyone. Particularly since Crawford complainins that "bad management" as the cause of Atari's woes is an oversimplification after he's just spent his essay outlining how that same "bad management" led to both the Pac-Man and ET debacles. (Insufficient dev time for ET = Bad Management, Poor employee morale leading to Frye's mutiny for for royalties = Bad Management, Placing too much power in a disgruntled employee's hands = Bad Management, Releasing Pac-Man or ET as is = Bad Management, Paying too much for ET's rights = Bad Management, Over producing ET = Bad Management). It sure reads like Crawford actually agrees with Warshaw's video but they just didn't get around to Crawford's favorite anecdotes...

>So will this game ever be available via the Atariage Store? The standard edition should be available shortly from the AtariAge store.

>Sounds like programmer snobbery again..... Actually, I prefer to think of myself as a prima donna... C'mon, if you read the Stella mailing list you'd know that Thomas, Manuel and Andrew are usually the first to offer advice, suggestions and code to WIPs. Paul was a tremendous help debugging Space Instigators (I think I went through about 15 "final versions" all of which Paul patiently tested the hell out of). The members of Xype are easily the most helpfull and personable "snobs" I've ever met.... My impression of Xype, and a big part of why I joined (and I gave it an awful lot of thought (eh, Manuel?) for reasons like this very thread) is that the members of Xype want ALL games released to be of Xype quality and carry the logo and the group is more than willing to help developers achieve that level of excellence (if they need/want that help, obviously). Xype is inclusionary, not exclusionary. >But if I work my butt off to program a game to the very best of my ability and I am proud of my work, yet for whatever >reason it doesn't pass the XYPE review board, then I guess my game just sucks and I've wasted my time. Well, no, there's an awful lot of room between "excellent" and "worthless"... Just because a movie doesn't win an Oscar or a song doesn't reach #1 doesn't mean it's crap. People write these games for different reasons and with different levels of skill. For someone with no programming experience to come along and put together a functional game, that's a huge accomplishment! Regardless if it's groundbreaking or not. And sometimes it's enough just to be able to say "I wrote an Atari 2600 game". But that doesn't neccessarily make it Thrust. I don't think it's elitist to acknowledge what's probably self-evident to everybody anyway. Then maybe that person's next project builds on what they've learned and goes that much further. Or maybe that person keeps at it and refines their first game into something really special. Learning is never a waste of time and there's certainly no "shame" if someone's doesn't put together a classic right out of the gate, or even if they just get to a certain point and say, "that's it, I've had enough, I just want to finish it and get it done with". But on the other hand, what's wrong with patting someone on the back and saying "Attaboy!"? There are always people who will take offense to anything, but the point of Xype is to acknowledge accomplishment, not to slam anyone for doing their best.

>Does anyone know if Chris plans on selling the 6K version on cart? No, the 6k version will just include some kind of credit screen with my URL &etc. As mentioned my last Vectrex releases contained something to the effect of "This game is available for download for free at (URL), if you paid for it you were ripped off" but I think that was right after a rash of ROM CD's on eBay and I was a little cranky. Space Instigators will probably be a little more... understated. The way I think of it, the .bin is an advertisement for the cart version and it doesn't do any good if someone can't find their way back to me if they might be interested in a cart. Once the .bin is released there's no way to track where it goes and you never know what obscure website, newsgroup or IRC channel someone's going to get it from and it's no good depending upon such sites to maintain contact info (I've lost track of how many websites I've had to harass into not representing my Vectrex games (or all Vectrex games) as being in the public domain.) It also helps eliminate the "Dhuh, I thought they were all in the public domain" excuse for ROM CDs (as well as making anyone who buys a ROM CD aware of what's going on).

> And does he ship a PAL version for us europeans? Tsk! Should have known I'd forget to mention something. I don't have a PAL version as yet but I hope to have one "soon". So if you're intending on getting the standard edition I'd suggest just holding off until I have the PAL version ready to go. If you want a collector's edition, you should probably reserve your copy now. >Whats the best way to send cash to America from the UK? I've had people send me cash in an envelope from overseas a number of times, it always gives me the willies but it's never been a problem going "western industrialised nation" to "western industrialised nation" you do want to conceal it between opaque pieces of paper. I've also had people send me payment through Western Union but it's quite expensive. Dhuh, wait - You're in the UK, right? Canadian banks can, generally, cash pound sterling checks/money orders from the UK with no problem. But drop me a note with specifics of the instrument you intend to use (Bank name, &etc) so I can double-check with my bank.

Sony has shipped 40 million PS2 consoles: http://www.consolewire.com/news/item.asp?nid=2567 According to Atari Age, the 2600 sold 30 million: http://www.atariage.com/2600/?SystemID=2600 However, that 30 million is almost exclusively North America and Europe whereas the PS2 has sold about 17 million in North America and 12 million in Europe. So the PS2 has sold more units worldwide, but probably hasn't caught the 2600 for USA sales. The Gameboy Advance has sold 6 million units: http://www.pcgameworld.com/story.php/id/197/ But according to this site: http://www.angelfire.com/tx4/videogames113...13/History.html The Gameboy sold over 60 million, the PSX 40 million and the NES 62 million (all worldwide). So make of that what you will....

Yes, there'll almost certainly be a PAL version. My understanding is that it's pretty straightforeward (just adding scanlines and changing colours) but I haven't really looked into it yet.

Yeah, there's not really any way around that. (Hey, it worked for Pokemon! Maybe I should do UTG Red, UTG Blue, UTG Yellow ) Yup, he's my brother.

I'll try to takle this all in one post: - First, thanks to all for your encouragement! - Space Instigators is a WIP, hence no incoming shots yet, you can't die, yet, etc - It does roll on most real machines (Cuttle Cart or Supercharger) though not mine - I'm using a Commodore 1701 and those old Commodore monitors have a rock solid vertical hold (Hence the surprise)! (Wish I had about ten of those things, they rock!) Should be pretty much fixed now, turns out I wasn't drawing nearly as many scanlines as I'd thought. It actually looks quite a bit better now as there's a lot more room between the bottom row of Instigators and your ship at the begining of a wave. - I'll be posting an updated (hopefully completed) version later this week-end. - All my games are available directly from me through my website (Not updated yet to reflect my 2600 work) at www.capitalSsoftware.com. Space Instigators and UTG won't be available until next month, obviously. Instigators and my future 2600 games will almost certainly be available through the Atari Age store as well. - The VecLink cable works really, really well (Wish I could take credit for it, but it took Alex Herbert to implement it). I'm pretty much expecting the same thing to happen as the GBA where most carts include a link-up option. I realise a lot of people don't have a single Vectrex, let alone two but if you do it's pretty cool! And they're not really rare (There's at least a half dozen avaliable on eBay at any time and at least 2 of them sold at PhillyClassic2) just highly sought after. - I am NOT a hardware guy, but, my understanding is that there's no reason the VecLink (or something very similar) couldn't work on the 2600. So should the Vectrex 3D glasses for that matter! (Hmmm....)

Who: You Where: Invisible Cinema, 319 Lisgar Street, Ottawa When: 7pm, Tuesday, Nov 5, 2002 Why: Release party for my 4th Vectrex cartridge, UTG and 1st Atari 2600 cartridge, Space Instigators. Bring your tradebait! Binaries: (Works in progress - Space Instigators is a couple days away from completion, UTG is a couple weeks away...) http://www.capitalSsoftware.com/Instigators.bin http://www.capitalSsoftware.com/UTG.bin * Screenshots: http://www.capitalSsoftware.com/Instigators.gif http://www.capitalSsoftware.com/UTG.gif Driving directions: Get off Hwy 417 (Queensway) at Metcalfe Street. Go NORTH on Metcalfe (you can't go South). Stay on Metcalfe as it winds around the museum (If you wind up on Elgin street, go NORTH on Elgin and follow the directions for Metcalfe, you're just one block over). Take Metcalfe NORTH about 8 blocks until you reach Lisgar turn LEFT (WEST) on Lisgar (it's a one-way street). Invisble Cinema is two blocks away, at Bank Street. Look for the BIG BLUE DOOR (North side of the street) between the Bible House and Wallack's Art Supplies. There's parking on Lisgar on both sides of Bank Street, you don't need to put money in the parking meter after 5:30pm. Yahoo Map: http://ca.maps.yahoo.com/py/maps.py?BFCat=...t%A0Map=Get+Map *Note: UTG is designed for use with a VecLink cable and currently won't work without one, there will be a single player mode, just not yet...