raindog

Someone was working on a Robot Finds Kitten port about 10 years ago. I don't remember how far he got, but if RFK is possible, Rogue (or Nethack, or Moria) should be, albeit with some extra RAM unless you're gonna have the same dungeon every time. I like the 32x16 or 32x20 text idea. But there have been Nethack ports that used custom character sets to make monsters, and since you have to create a character set regardless, you could always do that. It's not like you have to animate them or anything. It'll be hard in the heat of battle to distinguish between H and M, but ports can take liberties. Venture, Adventure, and other Atari dungeon-crawlers aren't really roguelikes because the dungeons have the same layout every time. I wouldn't know how to begin to create dungeons algorithmically on the VCS. Whatever you do, it can't be as bad a play experience as the guy back in my college days who tried to play Nethack on a teletype.

Very cute! I think all of D2K's graphics (the arcade hack, not the INTV remake) were actually repurposed somehow from the original DK ROMs, if I remember the writeup correctly. But something original and unique to the VCS version might be even better!

Awesome! One of the new levels from D2K, or have you already thought of something new?

Cord-cutting here in upstate New York means getting everything over the net... we have five broadcast stations. Hard to believe that Houston has a hundred. Unless you're talking "antenna" as in "wireless cable" over microwave, or something delivered via LTE. Edit: Just found your spreadsheet. That's crazy, I had no idea subchannels had taken off like that. One of our stations had 24-hour loops of news and weather, but as far as I know they discontinued them a few years back. I should look into it again... not that we watch more than half an hour a week of broadcast television.

I got one of the 72-in-1 with no case when it seemed impossible to find a Sean Kelly one and before Richard made the VecMulti. I very rarely used it, because its method of game selection was a set of jumpers. I like on-screen menus, personally. More importantly, though, I like playing new homebrews, and VecMulti is my only option for doing that on a real Vectrex.

Well, ARM chips (and micros based on them) were around years before Atari stopped releasing 2600 games. It's just that an ARM CPU cost far more than an Atari console, much less a cartridge. Of course, the same could also have been said of the 6K of RAM in the Supercharger, or the DPC... in 1977. I'll be happy to buy Ballblazer even on a Melody cart (or play the ROM on my Harmony). It'll be an amazing demo of the Atari for the rare occurrences that I have someone over who would understand what a big deal it is. But all this talk about it makes me wonder if my old "pre-render as much as I can" strategy would make a more smoothly-animated version of my original playfield-based demo workable as, say, a Supercharger game. It could never be as nice as Roland's, but it'd give the purists something to play.

I look forward to Android2600 with its quad-core 2GHz ARM chip and flickery 160x200 display But when it comes to "see? the Atari can do what more expensive consoles of the time could do", I prefer it to be using the kind of hardware available for the 2600 at the time. I'd be trying to jam it into 16k, maybe at most using the Harmony to do what the original DPC could do, but then, my own Ballblazer demo with its orthogonal grid and pre-calculated forward/back animations was really, really cheesy compared to what Roland has accomplished. Even then, I "calculated" them by doing renders in some 3D program of a grid at the appropriate perspective, scaling down to something like 160x60 and counting pixels. Even our write-test-debug loop is far tighter than just about any actual developer's back in the day. But even so, I can't help but think that if you somehow found a way to capture the video of a PS3 and bit-blast it into a 2600 game, you'd be playing a PS3, not a 2600. It's like a guitarist who replicates a difficult classical piece by using modern recording technology to play it at half-speed and have it sound as though he played it at full speed. If it sounds as good, who cares if it couldn't have been done at the time? By and large, it's other guitarists and musical purists who see it as less of an accomplishment. Someone who just likes listening to music will just say "huh huh, that's pretty".

No, as Thomas said, it's higher than that. But Ballblazer was on the Atari 400/800/5200, which had a 1.79MHz 6502.

I'd like to see the best possible version that can be done on a ~1MHz 6507 before you resort to using a 70MHz 32-bit chip to match a ~2MHz 6502. But you need to do what makes this fun for you, or you'll burn out.

I'd have to dig it out (haven't used it since my last move), but it may actually be one of those "video stabilizer" boxes they used to sell at Best Buy. All I remember now is that it was grey and smaller than I expected, but worked a charm.

I actually prefer playing most Atari games with recent releases of Stella and my USB Atari joystick replica on a laptop hooked up to our big TV more than on my modded 2600 and Harmony cart through a consumer TBC (never got the TV not to roll without one). The phosphor effect simulation and various scanline options make it seem a little more realistic than the real thing, and I don't have to worry about PAL vs. NTSC. If we were still using CRTs maybe I'd feel differently; certainly nothing has matched my actual Vectrex and VecMulti for Vectrex gaming, though I'm taking a stab at porting MESS to my Android tablet (with Moga analog stick) in hopes it'll give me a more portable alternative. In short, this pack is more of a nice archive for me to use with Stella, though I'm grateful for its intended use as a Harmony-ready ROM pack. But I never owned a 2600 until 1999-2000, so it's not as much of a nostalgia trip for me. All my 2600 gaming was at my friends' houses; we were a Magnavox family, alas. And then Coleco, but no other machine appeals to me for homebrew like the good ol' VCS.

Turns out there are unbalanced people on the Internet. Who knew? Years ago, someone from this site (don't remember whether he was a moderator, but he was a well-regarded user) threatened me with a lawsuit over Pac26/Pac-Man Arcade, claiming he had bought the exclusive rights to Pac-Man games on Atari consoles. I immediately stopped work on all my Atari projects. 10 years later and I see Pac-Man Arcade is still the #1 seller in the Hacks section of the AtariAge store, not that I've gotten my cut in years. Perhaps this moderator hasn't visited atariage.com/store lately. AtariAge clearly does not have a problem distributing or even selling copies of 2600 games, whatever one moderator might say to you. While I'm not concerned anymore about some crank filing a lawsuit against me for an 8K ROM, the experience killed my enthusiasm and life has prevented me from picking Atari programming back up. (At this point, most of the work I see being done is beyond me, anyway, with all but one of my projects from that time having been superseded by someone else's far better work.) I hope you don't get discouraged, but yours is already the most complete set available at this point, in all likelihood. I have a feeling your Harmony pack will live on through torrents even if this thread is deleted. I hope the moderator in question will clarify his position (and its apparent conflict with the forum rules) on this thread. Thanks for the second link, BTW; downloading from the ISO Zone now. My popup blocker seemed to be effective; clicking "free download" and entering the reCAPTCHA was enough to get me the file.

Not something I would pay for, personally, and rotsa ruck getting that patent with all the existing prior art.

Wow, you're moving pretty fast! Already looking amazing and feels better than the officially released one. I don't feel like I'd be breaking my joystick playing it.

Looks pretty sweet! I think the availability of Harmony/Melody should make Ivan's project at least possible if someone were to try it again.

How awesome that you've been saving that one for 14 years and finally got to use it!

I'm pretty sure that not talking about glory holes has been around for a lot longer than not talking about Fight Club.

Come on, I love glory holes as much as the next guy, but now you're just trolling, aren't you? No? Okay. Your graphic is impossible without a ton of flicker. I realize that's the AtariAge equivalent of being a grammar nazi, but it is. I wouldn't care to be known as the guy who brought the next Custer's Revenge to the world (as mild in comparison as this would be), so you might want to look into learning assembler or at least Batari Basic. Even NE146 knew his way around a 6507, back in our competitive Space Invaders hacking days, and his avatar is the dude from Beat'em and Eat'em. Regarding gameplay, you know, a far bigger element of tension in those situations would be the manager asking you to drop more coin or leave. Or not knowing the local hand gestures. Or accidentally picking a movie whose subject matter doesn't correspond to your orientation. Or fending off the wasted guy trying to break into your booth because he thinks he's your soul mate. Or running into someone you already know from the waist up. Not that I'd know anything about that.

Thanks! I'd been missing obscure glyph puzzles since completing Fez back in May. Edit: And may I suggest you name your new letter order EDSCII, or perhaps EDCDIC. It wouldn't be that wasteful to deal with compared with other 2600 text routines if you just treat it as a character encoding... you don't even need a translator utility since "tr" will do it in one command line.

Cheapest, definitely. Easiest, not unless it's a lot better than the DIP-switch-based version I bought before getting my Sean Kelly one. (Which, in turn, was better than the jumper-based one I got first.) I'd say Sean's (version 2) is the easiest to deal with, due to its nice menu, followed closely by Richard's after the initial setup. Richard's is my go-to cart because it's not frozen in time circa 2004. Of course, all of this is moot if all that's for sale is the Vectrom or something similar.

Even backing up an original, legitimate DS game is illegal in the US thanks to the DMCA, unfortunately, which is why I didn't suggest that approach. (Nintendo has argued that even running your own code on a DS with a flash cart violates the DMCA, but with courts legitimizing jailbreaking of phones, I think they're out of luck.) It doesn't outlaw copying, it outlaws merely accessing something "protected". We've obviously crossed that line in the past here on AtariAge with no problems, with all the discussions about how to circumvent the Atari 7800's crypto, but Nintendo's still trying to sell the DS. It looks like a sweet hack, though, and I look forward to dusting off the old DS, NSMB and my DS One and trying it out.

Since it's a patch to a commercial game that's still in print, I think the answer to this question probably falls outside the purview of this forum (since you'd have to either copy your original cart or find a pirated copy in order to patch it). But legitimate homebrew works fine on flash carts. To get them on a big screen you'd need either a PC-based emulator or a DS development system. I used to use the M3 Simply and DS One back when I did DS coding. (I prefer platforms whose creators don't actively work to exclude me these days.)

I downloaded it, but apparently the guy who was maintaining o2em for Ubuntu stopped some time ago. Looking forward to giving it a try when I have the free time to build o2em.

Well, even in the arcade version of Robotron there are plenty of glitches when you have enemies overlapping each other, and their animation is pretty jerky. On the 2600, if they're overlapping and all roughly the same color it may not be a bad effect, and it may be possible to minimize that by having their "follow the player" routine favor the horizontal over the vertical. But I won't have time to test that anytime soon, unfortunately.

Screenshots look awesome! For me it throws an ARM error on start with Stella 3.4.1 with DPC+ selected in Game Properties. I see there's a newer Stella out there (even a .deb for my specific Ubuntu version) and will try that later. When I see 50 sprites on the screen at once, what immediately comes to mind is a screen full of grunts in Robotron. One of your Frantic test builds reminded me a lot of that already, plus the walls. Don't know if it would be possible, but it seems more possible now than it did before you started doing all this work.