raindog

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.

I'd get one of these too, if the new version is going to support the Vectrex.

I had a bug in one of the last releases of my version of the hack that had the wrong number of scanlines, so maybe it stems from that. Do other games work on the Harmony?

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.)

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.

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.

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.

Guess I've been hallucinating using a Supercharger with my Mac since 2003 Works fine on Linux too (or did when I last tried it 7 or 8 years ago... not even sure I have a copy of makewav right now except hopefully in backups). In my experience, every reputable 2600-development-related tool is open source and cross-platform.

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.

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.

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.

I wrote something in the late 90s called "Hack-o-matic" for that purpose which I understand a number of other people have since improved on; try searching for their versions.

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...

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.

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.

For what it's worth, I've been playing my Vectrex for almost 25 years without overlays. We got it the xmas of its release, and then the following summer all these games in Ziploc bags with manual and overlay but no box showed up in Acme Surplus (we lived in western Massachusetts, where Milton Bradley was, so a lot of their stuff showed up in surplus stores... Coleco too, I got a lot of spare CV controllers for a quarter each back in the day and some even worked). Then I went away to college and when I came back, all the stuff that had been in my desk had gotten packed away. My Vectrex was just a Minestorm machine, and stayed that way for 15 years until I got my first multicart. I never got around to searching the crawlspaces for them. My mom's gone now, and my stepdad is looking at selling their house, so we've been cleaning out the crawlspaces over the last year. They still haven't turned up, but almost my entire Odyssey2 collection did, as well as my dad's original Odyssey. My Vectrex and Richard's multicart (and Sean Kelly's, and this one I got from a guy on ebay that requires you to choose games using jumpers) are here in my office now. I think from time to time about trying to make my own overlays using a color laser, transparency stock, masking tape and white spray paint (don't laugh, did an unrelated project that way 10 years ago and it came out great), or just ordering some from someone who makes them, but honestly, we almost never used the overlays "back in the day", just like we never bothered with those slide-in controller overlays on the Colecovision. I can always fire up MESS for the whole overlay experience, though emulation didn't have that "electron gun leaking into the speaker" sound last time I played them and an Xbox controller isn't quite a Vectrex controller. So, still tempted, but I've been playing without them for my entire adult life. Knowing it would cost far more to make a whole set than it did to buy the multicart means I might never get around to buying them, but if someone ever finds a way to mass-produce them cheaply, I'll be all over it.

They also have a pretty good 8-bit computer/console collection. None of it is turned on and the last time I was there it was a bit condensed to make way for about 30 more arcade cabinets, which is what I go there for anyway. But they do make a token effort to be a general video game museum (slash bowling alley, slash sports bar, slash ticket-game-capital-of-the-world).

Why on earth would someone try to make an officially licensed 2600 game in 2011? How would Sega's blessing have made Turbo 2600 better, or would Thrust+ have been improved by a little "Approved by Superior Software's Successors And/Or Assigns" sticker on the box? You're essentially asking lawyers to give you something for no significant benefit to their company. It's their job to say no to things like that. The answer is never going to be anything other than "no" unless there's some unusual situation where the rights reverted to the programmer and he isn't looking to monetize them, as with Randy Glover and Jumpman. The best you can hope for is that they won't bother wasting any time on you, since there are no real damages to be collected (even the most successful Atari homebrews haven't sold enough to have the royalties pay for one hour of a competent IP lawyer's time). Even Halo 2600 is likely a "look the other way" situation with no lawyers involved; certainly Microsoft didn't make any announcements about it and Fries left there over seven years ago. If he "ran it by legal", he hasn't mentioned it and neither has Microsoft. Better to just work on your game, put it out there with source code and if they slap you down, adapt (or let others adapt) the game into something more original. I say that after having been approached, fradulently, by someone who was once a member of this community (his account still exists, I just looked) and claimed to own the home console rights to Pac-Man. It put a bad taste in my mouth about doing Atari stuff for a decade, but at least my code and notes (for my hacks and the Boing and Ballblazer demos) were out there for other people to make use of them, and in at least two cases I know of, people did. Thanks to the DPC+, there are all these new possibilities for 2600 adaptations that weren't possible 2 or 3 years ago while still having been within the realm of possibility during the 2600's original lifetime. The ones we actually get to play are going to be the ones whose authors release early and often and wait to be told they're wrong rather than seeking denial up front. Be smart. Try to pick inactive trademarks, and realize that most lawyers are not gamers and don't know the difference between an Atari game that might make you 50 bucks and an iPhone game that'll make you a million.

Saw this on 1up.com today. Youtube video here: If I'd ever owned an Intellivision, I'd be preordering now, though I suspect that since it's getting more press now it might attract unwanted attention from Nintendo before it ships.

I don't have MisfitMAME installed. dkongx11 works fine in my slightly out-of-date plain old MAME and is the same sadistic game I played at FunSpot/ACAM. Maybe the debian/ubuntu packagers enabled the misfit games at build time, I don't know, but since MisfitMAME is packaged separately I assume that's not the case.

The top and bottom entrances are hilariously brutal. I just sat there watching myself die 2 or 3 times a second when I used a bottom exit on a later level. But very, very impressive. Looking forward to trying it on the Harmony.

Wonder how much time AtariAge has left... hope the estoppel defense works out for Andrew, assuming the doctrine of estoppel exists in Australia, and eventually for AtariAge.

Didn't see this thread till now for some reason, but I can confirm that dkongx11 works in MAME 0.142. Loaded it up on my laptop when going on vacation to New Hampshire last fall in preparation for playing Donkey Kong II at Funspot (Didn't really help my playing, though ) Don't ask me where to find dkongx11; I'm sure I have no idea where one would find dkongx11.

Congratulations, you might have found the first reason for me to dig out my 4-switcher and the selection of boxes that allows me to hook it up to the TV so I can try my Harmony cart for the first time (Even without hearing the speech, it always amazes me when the 2600 version of an arcade game looks better than the original...)

This thread feels like one giant troll. In short, it's "Look-- I made something. You can never have it. Well, you can if someone pays me an insulting price, maybe. But that doesn't guarantee that you'll have it anyway." No kidding. I miss [stella] more and more every time another would-be Ebivision pops up. What happened to open collaboration?