raindog

If you're asking whether you'd be able to figure out how Ian, Will, Andrew Davie (who coined the term "Chronocolour") and others accomplish what they do, sure, you eventually should be able to. I understand most of it and I was never really that great when I was doing homebrew. But if you're asking whether there are calculations that will allow you to change the color of any given pixel independently, no. But you can learn tricks and techniques, as Ian, Will, Andrew and others have, to make your program look like it's doing more than the 2600 should be able to do. Without those techniques, you have four colors per scanline (background, playfield, player 0 and player 1) and control over 20 chunky playfield pixels, mirrored or duplicated to fill the whole screen; a 1-pixel ball of varying width; and the two 8-pixel players. With them, you have a lot more flexibility, but every technique has its tradeoffs.

I was interested in doing this myself years ago, and actually got as far as starting on a kernel to display the "tubes" and as many invaders as I could inside them. I think I got it displaying 10 invaders (well, featureless players) across after messing with Thomas Jentzsch's "11 Invaders" code, but then realized I wouldn't have any cycles left to do the UFOs. I think flickering would have been OK when the UFOs came onscreen though. Maybe someday, in my copious free time. This was my favorite arcade game, but I never seriously thought of doing it on the 2600 because it's so incredibly horizontally oriented. Maybe you could use a technique like Mountain King's for the playfield, but oh my god the flicker. I think it would be tough on the Colecovision, never mind the 2600.

Space Invaders also came out in 1978, and plenty of people have done ports and hacks of that. I think it comes down to name recognition, nostalgia and the hacker's passion, and there just aren't a lot of hackers who remember (or care about) games like Fire Truck compared to stuff like Space Invaders and Pac-Man. Even so, there have been homebrew projects of Sea Wolf and Death Race (renamed Death Derby).... both of which came out in 1976.

Or the Japanese ones that they were ripoffs of, in the case of Make Trax and the incredibly rancid Kangaroo (which may be one of the rare examples of an arcade game whose 2600 conversion was actually less awful).

I'd be happy with just Moon Cresta (and have contemplated doing it myself.) Who am I kidding, I'd just find a different old game to obsess about after I got it going.

Hmm, could have sworn I posted to this thread yesterday but can't see my post now. I think that it would be possible to incorporate Galaxian into Gorf, reducing the number of attackers and making them more aggressive than Atari's version, adding Atarivox support, and making the whole thing a 16k game. But I also think that doing so would take almost as much effort as just writing a new Gorf from scratch.

Yes, I'm Rob Kudla. If you give me md5sums (or better yet, a link to the collection or a torrent thereof), I might be able to tell you which is the "real" one and which is the "alternate" one and what the difference is -- I seem to remember someone correcting my scanline count or something because it was displaying in black and white on PAL TVs -- but I've never been able to figure out how ROM namers choose to name ROMs.

Nope, didn't realize someone had done a PAL version of it. Mine was the one AtariAge was selling as "Pac-Man Arcade" years ago (my original name was "A Better Pac-Man", but the AtariAge name was the one that stuck.)

You sure you don't mean no PAL ROM in circulation? Because I did the Pac-Man Arcade hack, live in the US and have never even seen a PAL television in my life.

If I remember right, the joystick is the same and the left fire button corresponds to the 2600 fire button. I don't think any of the other buttons do anything with existing games, homebrew or otherwise, or even whether the 2600 is capable of reading those.

It was a little expirement of mine. The movement should cause your brain to see a higher resolution. Just like when the checkerboard is moving left/right. The checkerboard looks hi-res in movement, while the actual resolution is very low. I did not hear any complains about it so the feature is still there. It really does help the subjective resolution, and normally during play you wouldn't be spending a lot of time staring at a slowly-moving opponent (or probably see the quad version of the sprite for more than a second or two at a time).

I only just got the chance to try it. I think the rotofoil animation is better than all right; it's really amazing. Way beyond what I would have done. Can't wait to see the final product and more intermediate steps.

Got mine today. Looks pretty sweet. Now I just have to find my AV-modded Atari, since the TV I used to use with the coax input is long gone....

You are not alone here. When I think of the possibilities that could be opened up by the Harmony, I think not in terms of increased CPU speed, infinite bankswitching or even DPC-type data pushing tricks, but Supercharger-esque multi-load capabilities with random access and without requiring manual intervention from the user. Can't wait for Myst2600

My youngest niece was too young for these when they were first released, and when I went back the following xmas to look for them, they had evaporated. I don't know any kids of an appropriate age to buy this for now, but I'm still pretty curious. Thanks for the video.

AtariAge is selling hacks again. The store has been up and down, but it hasn't been down for 11 years. Please PM Albert for information about the store. Of course the store hasn't been down for 11 years; it's been about 11 years since I put that hack together, and it was available through the AtariAge store for probably years 2 through 7 of that (or at least that's when Albert stopped sending me my "royalty" balance each year to feed my homebrew habit in his store.)

Makes sense.... thanks, Nukey. (And I don't think I had a disassembler at the time I did it, just a hex editor and either PCAE's debugger or my own memory of 65xx opcodes from my C64 days, so addressing modes were probably the furthest thing from my mind.) It's been something like 11 years and there's no AtariAge store anymore (nor were they selling hacks of Atari games last I knew), and my work on hacking and homebrew largely ended when some douche not connected to Atari threatened to sue me over one of my other hacks, so I don't know how much time I'd put into revisiting it.

Those of you who've read my posts in the past know that I'm just here for the homebrew; the Stella list is effectively dead, and this is really all that's left, amidst all the buying, selling and off-topic banter. I have a Google alert on my own name, and today it came up with a result on the AtariAge forums; someone was asking a question about my 11-year-old Space Invaders hack. In the course of responding to it, I found out that apparently there's a "Harmony Cart" homebrew flash cartridge now that basically makes my Cuttle Cart obsolete. That would be what I'd consider pretty big Atari news. In the old days, it would have been all over the Stella mailing list, like the Cuttle Cart and its 7800 sequel were, but apparently "email is hard." I have AtariAge in my RSS feeds. Nothing about the Harmony there. I gave up on keeping up with the AtariAge forums years ago because while I can handle my 800-1000 incoming emails a day thanks to automated filtering, I can never remember to visit a web site each day to see what's new (and Stella used to come to me, not the other way around). But at some point I added the RSS feed for the Game Programming forums, in an effort to keep up. I looked today, and it was completely blank. No idea how long it's been that way, but it seems there might be a problem with it. I used the forum search on the Game Programming forums for any topics about the Harmony; there were none. There were some posts about it in the Marketplace forum, which has far too many non-homebrew-relevant posts to follow, and apparently at some point it's gotten its own forum. Looks like I found the Harmony in time to get one, but it makes me wonder what else I've been missing in the 2600 homebrew world because of the clunky nature of web forum software. I'm considering writing a scraper or Yahoo pipe for those forums I'm interested in since the RSS feeds I'm interested in seem to be broken, possibly scraping the other forums for keywords like "homebrew" or "flash" as well, since that wouldn't have been enough in this case. But I want to make sure there's not already some other mechanism available for me to get stuff I deem interesting sent to me automatically through email or RSS -- without drinking from a firehose -- before I start reinventing the wheel (I assume there isn't, since Invision's still very Web 1.0). Am I missing something here? Rob

I've never seen a Supercharger in person, so I was never able to test it on one; I used emulation and my original Cuttle Cart for testing. If I changed any of the code, it was only a few bytes to deal with sounds. Pretty strange that tripping the Supercharger's bank switch register (the only thing I could think of that would be happening) would change colors of objects rather than just crashing the game. Does the original Atari Space Invaders do anything funny on the Supercharger?

When I was working on my abandoned version, my plan was to rename it "blaze", lower case and italicized (mostly so that I could draw the logo with the playfield and have it be legible) and maybe make the playfield a different color. I was thinking red, to match my Boing demo, but that might have been a bit much on the eyes. After another minor member of the VCS homebrew community threatened me with legal action over my Ms. Pac-Man hack, I realized that it doesn't take a J.D., a corner office or a boss named George Lucas to turn someone into a dick, and that's probably the biggest single reason why I stopped doing 2600 development. Hope you have better luck; if nothing else, the Ballblazer trademark seems to have lapsed so I don't think you have much to worry about unless some twerp comes around claiming to have bought the rights to all home console versions of it.

As I've posted before, I don't have time to browse web forums like AtariAge, which have serious inefficiencies compared to mailing lists. I have it set up to tell me when there are new replies to threads I've posted to, but I don't hear about new threads like the one you just pointed out. It also doesn't tell me when a previous post has been edited, and I'm certainly not about to go back and read entire threads every time there's a new reply just in case someone's made changes to an earlier post. In the future, given the inadequacy of forum software, you might consider posting a comment to indicate you've made such a change.

As long as this thread's been temporarily brought back to life, I saw at Wal-mart a week or two ago that Jakks is making a new Namco plug'n'play that's like 10 or 12 games in one (basically collecting several of their previous plug'n'plays, no idea whether they're any more accurate than the older ones) and there's also a Bejeweled one now, for those of us who think casual games are the new arcade games. I can't find either one on Walmart.com but here's the Bejeweled one at Target: http://www.target.com/Jakks-Pacific-Inc-Be...g/dp/B00153F5NS All the rest over the last couple of years have been licensed movie trash....

This already looks so much better than I ever expected my own version to look. Great job. Now if only I could get the AtariAge homebrew forum as a mailing list so I might have heard about it before today.

Well, yeah, sure, you would expect that from a system only released in Europe the UK, and which is referred to in Wikipedia as a "commercial failure". (a Z80 in 1990 is about as lame as the Arcadia 2001's 2650 in 1982) I don't think the GX4000 counts, any more than the Atari XEGS or C64GS (the latter having been released after the GX4000) would. (Or the Amiga CD32 for that matter, though that wasn't as lame, just released at a point where major retailers were just not going to sell a product by Commodore.)

The hardware needs more time than a homebrew project, so don't feel too bad.