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raindog

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Posts posted by raindog

  6. Posted

    So here is my idea - Glory Hole Galore.

     

    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.

    • Like 1

  7. Posted · Edited by raindog

    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.

  8. Posted

    the easiest and cheapest one is vectrom 32 in 1. its on ebay quite a bit, and its 40 bucks. and its got 4 homebrews :D

     

    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.

  9. Posted

    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.

  10. Posted

    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.)

  11. Posted

    The thing about "tweaking" the music is that the music code just does 8th notes in Ms. Pac-Man and in my original hack. El Destructo's version does 16th notes like the arcade version, but that means the sound data space is doubled. There were also other glitches in that hack. I'm sure it's doable... if there's enough space left in Nukey's hack for the extra data.

  14. Posted · Edited by raindog

    This is why USENET was so much better than web forums can ever be. All the fora you want, under one powerful interface.

    And every site kept its own copy of the archive, so you didn't have to worry about your thousands of posts disappearing one day because one sysadmin didn't realize backups were being made, or the site ran out of money.

     

    I still keep a pay Usenet subscription, and read a number of non-binary groups (they're not all dead or overrun with spam, believe it or not) but I've made only one post in the last 5 years.

     

    (Edit: just signed up for the vector forum. I see this is another one of those hosted forum sites that not only has the usual forum disadvantages of not allowing me to read them with my choice of reader, but instead of simply having a mobile stylesheet they want you to buy a 3 dollar phone app. I really, really miss Usenet, and mailing lists, and even Yahoo groups. But the alternative is to not hear about new vector developments unless someone happens to mention them on Atariage, so I signed up anyway.)

  15. Posted

    (I don't mean to come across as excessively demanding here, by the way. I recognize that Intellivision Productions is a business and that they don't have a duty to give anybody anything,

     

    They do if they want new customers, not just the ones already waiting on fulfillment of months-old orders. I have more sympathy for them than I do Atarigrames, but "we're little guys catering to a small market" only goes so far when you make representations you can't fulfill.

     

    Glad to have bought all the variations of their emulator products, but unless they make a compelling Android one someday, I think the DS version might well be the last.

  16. Posted

    This strikes me as pretty much a fatal bug as far as any kind of non-trivial Harmony-based games go, yeah. You've been putting more effort into working around it than I think most hobbyist coders would.

     

    Incredible work, whether or not you end up considering it complete.

  17. Posted

    Donkey Kong graphics and with only 2 levels is not amazing but still fun to play

    ( still waiting for someone to propose a homebrew with the 4 levels)

     

    That's been on my todo list for a long time, though I'd be calling it Congorilla or perhaps taking the Pesco approach and putting in different characters entirely (for example, I think it'd be funny to make "Super Pick Axe Pete" and have it just be Donkey Kong with stick figures). If I were actually going there, I'd love to include the 4 new levels from D2K as well.

     

    But the most recent VCS code I've written was for my Ballblazer demo in 2005, which has since been made very redundant by roland p's incredible work recently. So I would bet on someone else getting there before me. The Harmony cart is the only reason it's been on my mind again lately, and I've yet to even try a Hello World with it.

  19. Posted

    I think the "1" is off-centered then -because there are large gaps in the score after the 1's which look very odd to me. Is this score font supposed to look like that?

     

    That was pretty common in the early 80s. It's similar to multi-segment LED displays, where the 1 is always off to the right. Jeff Minter has done that in most of his games too, in some cases just using a font that looks exactly like a multi-segment LED. I kinda like it, in keeping with the other visual upgrades that make this look more like a C64 or Atari 800 game than a 2600 game.

  20. Posted

    Lots of people have smartphones to play games on now, but there's always a market for something cheap and simple you don't feel bad about giving your 5-year-old to help the TV babysit him. It'll never be as big as it was around the turn of the century, but these things have always been about games that are a couple decades old, and now the early 90s is a couple decades old.

     

    Unfortunately, the early 90s is when the transformation of video games from casual diversions of a few minutes to sagas of many hours and/or many buttons reached fruition, so at some point they're going to run out of 20-year-old games that are a good fit for a huge joystick and a couple of buttons.

     

    I'll pick this up if and when it shows up on store shelves, just because it's nice to see they still seem to think the big draw is the oldest game in the set. Now that people of my generation are starting to become grandparents, maybe we'll see another wave of slightly more faithful recreations of the early stuff (with higher price tags but still mass-market) in a few more years. I'll probably buy those too, if for no other reason than because I lost a bunch of my PnPs (including all the Radica ones in their lame paper and styrofoam cases) in a flood earlier this year.

    • Like 1

  21. Posted

    I recall someone once made a demo of a lunar lander that used multiple copies of players to draw a big lander on screen that could rotate 360, explode and had the low gravity dynamic with it. the rotation of that appeared mathematical in nature and ran quite smoothly. Wish I knew who did that demo cause if the rotation of that image were to be applied to the playfield, it could appear to be very quick for driving.

     

    If you mean the Lunar Lander demo here: http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/78627-lunar-lander-super-kernel-demo/ the author said, "There's a lot of precalculated data for the rotations". Having both rotation and perspective would require a lot more precalculated data.

     

    We know a 1KHz 6502 can do the stretching and scaling necessary for a first-person shooter at 10FPS... if it has a decent video subsystem: http://noname.c64.org/mood/screenshots.php

     

    But even that doesn't have floor textures.

  23. Posted

    What's the difference in the frenzy variation going to be?

     

    The biggest differences in Frenzy that I remember were destructible walls and shots bouncing off of walls, but according to Wikipedia it sounds like a bigger leap than from Pac-Man to Ms. Pac-Man:

     

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frenzy_%28video_game%29#Differences_from_Berzerk

     

    I'm guessing I never made it to the fourth level to see the giant Evil Otto, because I would have remembered that. I also never tried to kill Evil Otto, not realizing it was no longer impossible.

     

    Lot to squeeze in there...

  24. Posted

    It would probably take a bit of searching the forums, but I remember a few years ago (2-3 years or so), someone was working on something like this. It may have been a blog post. I remember they had worked out a flat ground 3D effect, possibly attempting a start at a new battlezone port. I remember they had screenshots, but didn't get too far beyond the ground effect before stopping development.

     

    And then there's roland p's work-in-progress Ballblazer, which works far more smoothly than I'd have ever imagined, and with no DPC+. But that's a fixed, orthogonal viewing angle, while what made F-Zero special was the mode 7 rotation of the ground tiles. I think you can do that with a two-color ground, given enough RAM and possibly not updating the screen every frame (or using DPC+), but the trick where the track markers alternate lines with the ground color won't work if the track is turning.

     

    If you want to make something like Pole Position with faster gameplay, looser controls and different graphics/music, though, you might be able to approximate the feel of F-Zero if nothing else.

  25. Posted

    We're talking about a not-for-profit organization soliciting donations here, not a multinational corporation. There wasn't even enough of a market for two Computer Museums in the US, 3000 miles apart, as my partner and I discovered when we went to the Boston Computer Museum 11 years ago only to discover it had been merged into the science museum, and then into the other Computer Museum in California.

     

    A video game museum sounds appealing, but even the American Classic Arcade Museum gets pretty quiet from October to May -- most of its customers are people at the lake on vacation and looking for an arcade/pinball experience, not people like me who choose Weirs Beach for vacation just because we like old games. We went the week after Columbus Day in 2009, and it was a little depressing being the only one playing games in there all week (my GF's class schedule had changed and I ended up on my own a lot while she holed up in the cabin writing). Even the smaller, ramshackle arcades in the village were closed for the season. But last year we went the week before Columbus Day and I frequently had to wait in line to play the more popular games; the summer crowd hadn't completely left yet. I can only imagine what it must be like this weekend.

     

    Regardless, beyond our being the biggest market for video games, the US was where video games were invented and commercialized, whether you consider the invention to be Higinbotham's tennis game, Baer's Odyssey or Bushnell's Computer Space. Japan got control of the industry 26 years ago, but between Apple, Google and Microsoft, that may not be the case for much longer, if indeed it still is.

     

    Edit: I just happened to visit the ACAM's page on Facebook and saw a reference to the International Center for the History of Electronic Games in Rochester, NY ( web site is http://www.icheg.org/ ) so maybe there are a number of video game museums already out there.

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