ZylonBane

I thought the main reason was that he ran out of RAM? The warp-speed UFO drastically changes the way it interacts with the player. In the arcade and accurate versions, the UFO moves slowly enough that you can almost always stop what you're doing, scoot over and take 2 or 3 shots at it. The Instigators UFO is more of a blink-and-you-miss-it affair. If you're going to just go and capriciously change elements of a classic arcade port to be "better", that undermines the point of the exercise.

Except for the UFO speed.

When you press up you go faster. When you pull back you go slower. Pushing left and right moves you left and right.

Hopefully he'll realize what an awful title it is and change it soon. Oh, and keep an eye out for my upcoming maze game, MAN PAC! Hey, who are you? Get aw--arghh... "Silence stupid human! Fu Kung be good name! Me like a lot!"

Umm, if it's 3D, then can't you by definition view it from any angle you want? Sounds like you're almost talking about voxel sprites, which are pretty cool but blocky. Blood used them for pickup items.

So would you then g-shade just the bevels, or the entire thing?

Gauntlet doesn't scroll. It's screen-based.

Good grief. It's impossible for a console to change the refresh rate of a TV set. What you can change is your frame rate. With shutter glasses, the left and right images are sent on alternate frames, so with NTSC you'd get a full scene every 30th of a second. This is the same frame rate interlaced NTSC runs at anyway, so it's obviously not an unacceptable drop. And what's this about halving the vertical rez? Each left/right image gets a frame all to itself, so why would you need to do that?

Have fun with it. The colors are too saturated for the 2600 palette, but something close should be possible. And in case you're wondering, the look of the "ATARI" text at the top was the result of trying to match the style of the NAMCO logo font. Now if anyone can make the Galaxians look like this, I'll be impressed.

It's still 99% Adventure, so the title has to have "Adventure" in it. Why not something as simple as "Adventure+"? Or "Adventure HE" (Hacked Edition).

Yeah, I was just wondering why they went to the trouble of changing the colors, but not changing them to the right ones! If you could pull off something like what's below, that would be sweet.

Caverns of Mars II, Tail of Beta Lyrae, Super Cobra, any of a couple dozen side-scrolling shooting-and-bomb-dropping games. Your description doesn't really narrow things down much.

Now if only someone would add sprite multiplexing. And why the name change? Calling it "Quest" doesn't change the fact that it's still an Adventure hack.

Another interesting pseudo-3D technology is Chromatek. The glasses (which are, I'm guessing, a form of diffraction grating) cause reds to appear closer to you, and blues to appear farther away (with a smooth transition on the intermediate colors). A few years ago they were printed into the backs of boxes of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese as part of some promotion... Rug Rats movie, I think. You can also request free ones from the manufacturer.[/url]

Are you talking about adding more polys to the cube, or just changing the shading from flat to gouraud? Because the latter looks weirder, not better.

Erm... seams between flat faces are something you see in Real Life, so I don't see how this would be a bad thing.

It uses a mix of both. Faces which are intended to be curved are gouraud-shaded, faces which represent flat parts are flat-shaded. Looks a lot better than games that just blindly gouraud-shade EVERYTHING, even when flat-shading would look more correct.

Chris, "arbitrary" does not mean "random". It essentially means determined without external consideration, or as dictionary.com puts it, "Determined by chance, whim, or impulse, and not by necessity". As far as games with arbitrary playfields, one need look no further than Surround, Pengo, Cosmic Swarm, Canyon Bomber, or any other 2600 game that uses the playfield as a freeform frame buffer.

Nukey, reread my message. Do I need to put the "arbitrary playfield image" in 72-point bold blinking text? Using players to smooth the scroll is only possible with very specific playfield shapes that don't require more players than are available.

Just a note for the less technically-inclined folks in this thread-- Smoothly scrolling an arbitrary playfield image horizontally is IMPOSSIBLE on the 2600. The smallest possible 2600 playfield pixel is highly rectangular (8 color clocks wide by 1 scanline tall). Since TIA doesn't possess any playfield fine-scrolling hardware like its CTIA/GTIA big brothers, the only way to scroll is at the pixel level. Since the pixels are thin vertically, vertical scrolling can be very smooth. But since the pixels are thick horizontally, horizontal scrolling will always be coarse.

Technically they're both based on Artillery Duel... one of those games that's been around practically forever, like Hunt the Wumpus and Space War.

Nope, it has full scrolling terrain. I'll add-- Road Runner Donald Duck's Speedboat Krull (horse-riding sequence) MotoRodeo RealSports Football RealSports Soccer Snoopy and the Red Baron Sentinel Sinistar (horizontal and vertical) He-Man Super Challenge Football Marble Craze Dolphin Mountain King (H & V) Time Pilot (H & V) Umm, okay I think I'll stop now.

Erm, so you're implying people shouldn't complain about changing a horizontally-scrolling game into a vertically-scrolling one?

There are a lot of old Apple II games that could probably be ported to the 2600. Drol, Aztec, Choplifter, Twerps, etc.

Some screenies, please?