raindog

Wow, sure am glad I don't follow the Colecovision and Intellivision homebrew scenes anymore. At least we have Atariage already set up to make quality carts for the 2600, eliminating much of that "OMG I CHOSE TO SPEND THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS ON MY HOBBY AND THUS AM ENTITLED TO A RETURN" issue.

I think the only way I'd want to try to improve on what the Compumate already did would be to add a DPC+ chip or something into the mix, allowing more flexibility in the "use the console as a video(/audio) card" concept. But I'm definitely no hardware hacker.

Ouch. Let it dry out, it may still be playable. Be careful with the power supply, they don't dry easy. Sorry to hear about this mishap. You still have neat hardware, though. I'd set up the 4-banger and keep it set up Yep, drying out is the plan, and already being implemented. As for the 4-banger,I have a 4-port switchbox on our TV... PS2, Wii, Xbox 360 and DVD player. At some point I am going to lose the DVD player, and if we don't end up getting a PS3, the Atari would be a contender. But I'm too old to sit on a hardwood floor in front of the TV... unless I pick up development again or acquire some wireless 2600 controllers somehow, I don't see myself using the Atari on a regular basis.

I may not be "everyone else", but I'm really pretty happy with my Samsung Epic running Stella and tricked out with the "Dark Rosewood" skin from DecalGirl and the Game Gripper. Yes, it means I'm controlling Atari games with a Nintendo-style d-pad and buttons, but it's not like a Legacy-developed portable is going to have those big, chunky, blister-inducing sticks we all love. All I'm missing so far is the paddle. Of course, I'd buy another Legacy AOAC product if the price weren't too far out of line with the others they've produced or other entries in new Atari market segments they pursue. Our basement flooded so badly last night that the shelving unit I had most of my P'n'P collection on tipped over (70s-era buoyant plastic shelving = epic FAIL), and I'm pretty sure I lost my NIB FB2. Still got my AV-modded 4-switcher and Harmony cart, but to be honest, that's kind of a pain to set up even with A/V. Whipping out my phone is a lot easier.

While Mr. Atari has some other netiquette lessons to learn, and the attitude on AtariAge may be a little more mercenary than it was on [stella], it's never, ever inappropriate to inquire about source code in a homebrew discussion forum unless someone has already said they weren't releasing it in a place the poster could reasonably have been expected to see (e.g., on the same thread). Especially when the project involves something that might someday incur a C&D letter.

I don't think I'd call it "fancy" so much as "groundbreaking". At this rate it might end up looking better than the C64 version

I think there are a couple reasons we haven't seen as many attempts to improve Donkey Kong as there have been for Pac-Man and Space Invaders. 1. The original 2600 Donkey Kong is very playable, and looks and plays more like the arcade version than I'd have expected possible on the 2600. Yes, we were underwhelmed in 1982 by the missing screens and animations, but we still played it like crazy, unlike Pac-Man. It's an amazing feat in 4K, and I think Garry Kitchen should be proud. Almost 30 years later, the sound effects he made are still being used as generic video game noises on TV all the time. 2. Nintendo enforces their trademarks more ardently than Namco or Taito. Nonetheless, I've seen some graphics demos that look even more impressive than your mockups (the one I was immediately able to find in my collection was Ivan Machado's) and someone's already put out a ROM of the elevator level based on the Coleco version, albeit not playable. That does look sweet. The score and bonus on screen at the same time will probably not be possible without flicker. It could actually be possible to improve Donkey Kong's sprite, or at least the parts of it that aren't on the same scanline as any playfield stuff, since he's quad-width anyway. I seem to remember the Colecovision version flickering when Mario was on the same level as him, so maybe it's okay to flicker Mario's player to give him a lighter tan face/ears, chest and feet, and maybe even give him blocky little whites in his eyes by making clever use of the playfield as well. On the first level, the ladders pretty much have to be the same color as the slanted girders, or the bottoms of the ones at the lower end of each girder will have to be drawn using something else, making a pretty complicated kernel. The oil cans have to either be the same color as the playfield, or not occur on the same scanlines as other playfield items (an alternating line thing here would be fine for me, don't know about others), or be made out of a player, which will create flicker when Mario and a barrel/fireball are on the same level as one. I'm sure there are other practical issues as well but those are what jumped out at me. I think it could certainly be more playable than the Colecovision version given the same space (16K) or even less. But if I were to try it (and I did get as far as starting work on a kernel for the girder screen a few years back; that or Moon Cresta would probably be my next 2600 project now that someone else came up with a Ballblazer that makes my demo look dumb) it'd be from scratch, and I probably would be trying for something like "Congorilla" or, I don't know, "Super Pick-Axe Pete" rather than "Donkey Kong Arcade". Doing something that takes comparatively little work and getting more attention than people who actually write brilliant stuff... been there, done that.

While the project itself is dead (as is the site), the OpenTrivia data files are still out there. They don't have the wrong answers necessary for multiple choice, but they're a start. (They do have some pretty low-quality user-submitted questions toward the end, but there are 2000 questions -- the latest You Don't Know Jack has only about 700, so even if you threw out half of them it should be way more than you could use in an Atari game.) http://replay.web.archive.org/20070806032841/http://opentrivia.com/download.php?category=movie (and 10 other categories) I really don't think the 2600 is a very appropriate platform for a trivia game, myself, and what the OP is proposing seems like Jeopardy only in name. But we did play a pretty ancient coin-op trivia game at the American Classic Arcade Museum last fall. It was sort of fun once we moved our brains back to 1980 or whenever the thing came out. Still, even the disk-based trivia game I had on the C64 had a thick question and answer book.

If this were 1980 and Nukey worked at Atari, he'd be making about 15 bucks an hour and told 8K was too much for Pac-Man.

My own little Atari projects have provided me with the means to acquire probably 4 times the number of other people's homebrew cartridges than I'd have been able to with only my own disposable income. All my Atari income stayed in the Atariage ecosystem as store credit (and has long since dried up) but that's more than I'd ever have expected from such a niche hobby. I roll my eyes whenever people start talking about market analysis and potential profits... either you're compelled to write a 2600 game as a passion project or as an artistic or scholarly statement, or you're embarking on a quest which you've already failed. Hardware is a more complex issue, but 2600 accessories haven't been an industry in about 28 years and it's not going to just spontaneously come back to life now. It gets created when there's an itch to be scratched, and someone figures out how to scratch it without having to win the lottery, like the need for one-off portable 2600s with tiny paddles, or a RAM-loaded, flash-enabled 2600 cart with a coprocessor. I have both a Cuttle and a Harmony. I've never actually tried the Harmony because I have no more TVs with antenna inputs and can't find either my old VCR or AV-modded 2600; my life has been chaos for over half a decade now. But I look forward to finally, after all these years, being able to have every variation of every homebrew ever made -- hell, almost every game ever made including Pitfall 2 -- on a single cart with a nice menu and 5 bucks worth of SD card in it. I'd guess that the Harmony's continued production alone means that there are more out there than there are of Cuttle Carts.

Anything with dots + Nukey = epic win. (Should that be "winning" now?) Thanks for revisiting my old hack; you made it much better.

Not exactly hard to find, anyway... just not on AtariAge.

Well, it'd be nice if people didn't cut you off in traffic or talk in movie theaters too, but it'd be about as effective to lament those practices here as it is to lament piracy of homebrew software. It seems unlikely that any significant portion of the ROM-distributing communities out there is here on Atariage, especially when it comes to things that aren't Atari-related. For the most part, you're preaching to the choir; few communities hold homebrew authors in as near-universal high regard as we do. Nonetheless, trying to prevent piracy -- especially on a shoestring budget -- is spitting into the wind. The best you can do is to put a personal appeal out there directed at the people who are buying your game, get them to feel like they're on your side and don't want to hurt you. 2D Boy accomplished this masterfully. I'd defend those guys till the end of time, and so would many other gamers. I've literally bought World of Goo three times. But it's still all over the usual places you'd find pirated software. All it takes is one copy to get posted to Usenet or a torrent or file upload site, and whether you've convinced one person or a thousand to not share, it's all for naught. If you use some kind of watermarking, you get that threshold up to two copies. Bill Gates has tried it both ways -- from a letter trying to guilt people into not sharing his software in 1976 to millions spent on enormous, byzantine anti-piracy measures in the last decade -- and he's done about as well at preventing piracy as your friend has. He got rich anyway.

A few seconds of Googling reveals that it's out there on Usenet and torrents as well, so it's in the wind. If it hasn't already been, it'll be added to one of the lists of known NES ROMs, and will be a part of every NES collection torrent and "NES flood" on Usenet from now till the end of time. Reporting one site at a time is like trying to put out a forest fire with a dixie cup. If the legal teams for several multi-billion-dollar industries (and Harlan Ellison) can't keep things out of circulation, you may not have much luck doing it vigilante style either. I'd never heard of the game till now either, but NES stuff interests me less than Atari/Vectrex stuff so I'm not surprised to have missed it.

Sweet! Since the NES was after my time, I'd never have thought to look at a Castlevania post....

I've searched the forums and googled it without being able to find any reference to it: where's the 2600 Marble Madness thing?

I have at least 30 of them, including nearly all the "retro" Jakks Pacific and Radica ones, both Flashbacks, the C64, Coleco and the bigger of the Intellivision ones, and some random, possibly-unlicensed stuff. Once they started doing the licensed movie/TV ones, I stopped being a completist, and most of them are packed in boxes from my last two moves, still in their original packaging. Maybe in 30 years, they'll be worth something to me or whoever gets my estate.

I'm surprised Disney didn't have Jakks Pacific put something like that out to coincide with Tron Legacy's release. I know the PnP fad has pretty much come and gone, but they're all about the licenses now, and they could hit both the movie license and nostalgia markets with that. But they couldn't do it for 20 bucks, not with any kind of decent controller.

Or you can put it up on ebay, as many indie developers already do, or make a deal with Amazon and list it there, or bundle it with an appropriately-licensed emulator as someone else suggested and go talk to Steam or any of the other "content distribution portals". You have options. Some of them are hard. Making money is hard. But I'm thinking the guy I just bought my Vectrex flash cart from was up to the arduous task of taking my email address down and physically going somewhere to ship my cart, so anyone who can post to a forum like this ought to be able to handle doing the same thing minus the physical object. No, the people who see a problem with things as they are now need to come up with a "better way to do this". I was pretty happy with my AtariAge store experience, just as I was pretty happy to get 50 bucks or so in honor-system donations when I posted my very first shareware program to QuantumLink in 1986, before nag screens and time bombs were invented, not to mention online stores. You guys are the ones who can't accept that bits have no value to most people.

(Edited to fix broken quote.) We already have those choices; nothing's stopping anyone from doing these things right now. I think the reason no one's doing it is because it adds friction -- not for people who just want to download a ROM (they'll do that anyway), but for developers who need to add to their development time the time it takes to execute agreements and the restrictions those agreements will impose on them -- and for very little in return. But you can do this already as things stand now; I look forward to reading about it on Wired and IGN. Probably not much, maybe $1 a game. Which is, of course, more than $0 a game. I really think that's still a bit optimistic, but since getting a 360 for xmas I've seen some pretty stupid, trivial things on XBLA for that price (thankfully with trial versions, but I'm sure someone out there is still paying a buck for a prettier take on copter.swf). Knock yourself out. I hope to get in on that myself one day, but I probably won't try to do it with an emulator and an embedded ROM.

...to an audience of dozens, or at most, hundreds.

"Try Oystron! It's a new original game for the Atari 2600, but you can't play it on your 2600, only on your Windows box using Steam!" I just picked Oystron because it's one of my favorite homebrews, not because I think it has anything to do with this idea. How much do you expect developers would be able to charge for a nostalgic experience minus the nostalgia? The successful "retro style" games have either had more to them than 8- or 16-bit games (e.g. Geometry Wars, Bit Trip) or been tied to a nostalgic license (Mega Man 9) or both (Pac-Man Championship Edition). I think that the odds a developer could recoup his development time and expenses on an Atari, Coleco or even NES/Genesis title through Steam are about as long as the odds that he could recoup them on cartridge sales. Personally, if my goal were to make money at developing little retro games of the sort people develop for the old systems, I'd be doing it for the iPhone and Android, with a lot less time and effort and a little more visual panache, and selling them for a buck or two.

Whatever happened to: I think a great homebrew is a great homebrew whether it's named "Space Invaders" or "Space Instigators". But to ask permission is to seek denial.

This was once depressingly close to the truth, though I think that window of opportunity has long been closed. It was more than a graphics hack, but my Space Invaders hack involved no disassembly (except what little I did in my head) and still probably sold more copies than some more deserving homebrews. Thankfully, now there's Space Instigators, which itself is a more deserving homebrew. In any case, what I made from that (and my other, more involved hack, and my demo, before the three of them were made obsolete) was enough to give me a nice discount on other people's homebrew games, perhaps two or three hours worth of my time at the rates I charge professionally for coding. It took me more than that just to find the locations to change the colors the first time around. No one is doing this for the money, or if they are, they're a bit deluded.

The arcade version actually has two-toned girders; there's a highlight, which does have a magenta tint to it, and a shadow, which is close to pure red at about half brightness. Put together on a fairly low-resolution CRT, I think the effect is much more red than the various Coleco implementations, but still not completely red like your second-to-last screenshot. Most of the screenshots I've found on the net are also not quite as magenta as the one you posted. Combining the two colors gives a color somewhere around hex CB102A, and I think that's where I'd start when trying to find a single-tone facsimile of the girder color. I'm not that familiar with the 2600's palette anymore, but the A51818 of your "Donkey Kong Arcade red" screenshot could use more red, a touch more blue and a little less green.