ZylonBane

Dude, should have just said that in the first place! (or the Reader's Digest version anyway). Heh, brings back memories of "please exucse tjhe typos. local echo not working".

He's talking about this and this, BTW. I dunno about BLEREVAL. Hmm... BLER EVAL... Bler Eval. Sheesh, I can't think of any Jag games, released or othewise, that might reasonably be abbreviated as Bler. Wait-- "Blue Lightning Encrypted ROM", perhaps?

Hardly. Ballblazer and Fractalus were great, but Eidolon and Koronis Rift were little more than interactive graphic demo. If there's a single "best" Atari software maker, it'd have to be Synapse.

Ah, my bad. Usually when someone quotes back 150+ lines of text for no reason, I just assume they're an idiot. Or lazy. Or both.

Please explain why IE needs to install Vector Graphic Rendering to view your site? And a word of advice to anyone here who's done any amount of web development... view source at your peril. This site's HTML makes baby Jesus cry.

NE1, there's this netiquette thing called "only quote the relevent portion".

Would "Basketball" count?

Ummm... well, if by "Namco" you meant "Time-Warner", then yes.

Erkkk... someone please tell me this is a joke? NES Ballblazer

Based on this topic I can only assume Godzilla is a "chubby chaser" in real life. Eek.

Who cares what they said about the graphics? They mostly said the GAMES sucked! Grrr.

<language nazi>No, it doesn't LITERALLY make your PC into an Apple II. </>

The silver lining in the BattleMorph CD problem is that it prematurely pressured Atari to release the level skip codes.

Hardly undisputed. BS's most impressive bits are all "under the hood". Graphically it's pretty plain, about on par with Zero 5. I'd give the award for most obvious use of the Jag's power to Iron Soldier II. Aside from being a first-class game, it does everything Jag detractors say the Jag can't do... and does them really, really well. It also isn't burdened with a front end that feels like it was designed by a committee of democoders.

Just checked out your SI page. WOW! That's the sort of insane attention to detail that every arcade port should have. Did I mention I have a cocktail SI Part II sitting in my living room?

Cool! Where did you get this information? I was just Googling for the Space Invaders source and couldn't find anything.

Which is sad, really, because it has so many flaws and shortcomings. Zero use of player/missile graphics or DLIs. Lots of flicker in the animation. Wimpy sound effects. Many of the enemies don't even look right (the basic Lander being the most egregious example). And check out this quote by the author-- I think anyone who's played the unreleased Stargate ROM (yes, that's the one he's talking about) can attest to how far off this statement is. It's a damn shame the guy behind DropZone never got the chance to do an official Defender or Stargate port.

So Chris, you're saying that in the current version of Instigators you're using every single byte of available RAM? I think that if there's any way possible to make the saucer move the way it does in the arcade version, you should. If you just go arbitrarily changing things, you're undermining the entire point of the exercise. The shot-counting thing with the UFO is not a bug. They programmed it that way on purpose. SI2 added even more of these little tricks. Also, the bottom-row invaders could look a lot closer to their arcade counterparts.

Kind of sad that the 2600 actually got more Williams ports than the 8-bits. Anyone else here played Zone Ranger? That proves the 8-bits could have done a dead-perfect version of Sinistar. Little-known fact about the computer version of Defender... it was actually written on an Apple II! That sure explains why it uses none of the Atari's special graphics features.

Dangit, where's the eyes-bugging-out smilie on this forum? I mean come on, it was a Brøderbund game. ALL their premiere stuff was created on the Apple II first. Karateka, Choplifter, Drol, Gumball, etc...

Humans are missiles. Since they're basically just bonus items, they could could be programmed to stick to their own horizontal zones to avoid flicker.

Hey Chris, did you fix that bug that caused the saucer to zip across the screen twice as fast as it's supposed to?

CrazyImpmon sort of answered it already. 2600Hz was a frequency very dear to early phone phreaks. From the alt.2600/#hack FAQ-- Given the hacker culture prevalent at Atari in the Bushnell days, I think it's safe to assume this is where the "2600" product number came from.

The mockup I posted represents a 40x16 grid of Grunts -- in actuality a low-rez framebuffer with each pixel representing an enemy. Nothing technically special there... we've seen these sort of displays since the Surround cart. At 5 bytes per line, this buffer would consume 80 bytes of RAM. This would be the only RAM required by the Grunts, no matter how many were on screen. It would basically be a screen-sized cellular automaton, with the rule for each cell being "move toward player". Under this scheme you could reasonably cram 300 Grunts onscreen. So 128 - 80 leaves 48 bytes of RAM. Figure 3 bytes per enemy for X/Y/heading/etc. That gets you 15 enemies + 1 player. But of course you also need RAM for game stats, flicker algo, and other overhead. So knock that back to a conservative 8 enemies. That doesn't sound like much, but if you budget those 8 toward the enemies that directly threaten you (Brains, Enforcers, Tanks) it should be more than enough. I think it would even be acceptable to players to have new enemies "warp in" during a wave. IIRC, the only enemies in Robotron that shoot at you are Enforcers, Tanks, and Brains. Enforcer and Tank projectiles move pretty fast, so you could use the ball for one shot at a time onscreen. Brains launch Cruise Missiles, which are slow and rely on swarming for effect, so these would probably have to be cut. The only threat of Brains then would be their ability to turn Humans into Progs. So you'd have to reformulate Brain Waves to rely move heavily on Grunt presence.

GTIA. Actually they weren't new to the XE or even the XL. Only early 400/800s were stuck with the CTIA.