raindog

Yes, we've all seen the same two links to your own website that you post every single time this comes up as if repeating your belief makes it the truth. What you consider a "static action puzzle" I consider a world to explore and then return to again and again, until I know that world as well as I know the towns I visit on real-life vacation. But more salient to this thread, Whether something is necessary or not is a judgment call, making it a matter of taste. Track and Field would, in my opinion, not have been as good without the frantic tapping of buttons. I considered Decathlon a halfway-decent attempt to capture that at home, and while I broke a joystick playing some version of it, I never got an RSI from it, and this is the first I've heard the idea that anyone would have, while I (like many others) did get an RSI from playing Wii games -- the kind with all the "Why don't you take a break?" messages and millions of dollars of R&D to make the Wiimote "ergonomic" -- that put me in a sling for 3 weeks, and not the good kind. Not every game, genre, or control style you dislike is bad. I'd be a fool to say GTA III or Street Fighter II or Halo were bad games, but I can say they're not to my taste and I resent their existence for spawning hundreds of games (in the crime simulator, fighting game and multiplayer-focused FPS genres) while my favorite genre, 3D mascot platformer with green grass and blue skies, has become something that developers practically apologize for or cripple with gimmicks from other genres (vehicle building, heavy combat, time limits) over exploration. I loved Joust, too, back in the day. It would kind of tickle me to get a Flappy Bird clone up and running on Joust hardware. I bet someone will reveal something like that in exactly 15 days, the 'long-lost' arcade version of Flappy Bird.

I personally couldn't care less about "CIB" or shrinkwrap or authentic Supercharger cassette releases or any of that stuff. Honestly, if Al shut down the store today, I'd still be playing stuff on my Harmony, or more often, in Stella. If there were something I absolutely needed to have on cart for some reason, I have a feeling there's a Tiki-faced douchebag who'd still be happy to take my money. But what we are doing is nostalgic for a lot of people -- not me, because I never had a VCS growing up, only got one in '99 when I'd done a couple hacks and was writing my first homebrew, but I think most people. A lot of us did have a vision when we were kids of having this huge, pristine video game collection, and the "limited edition, complete in box" phenomenon is a manifestation of that. I do still have my first issue of "Retro" shrinkwrapped and read the PDF on my tablet, the nostalgic urge to read a paper magazine currently offset by the nostalgic urge to have a "sealed, mint condition" issue #1 of anything. I hardly think someone who likes randomly-generated crap more than Zelda is qualified to be a self-appointed arbiter of taste in video games.

Unless your 8-bit samples are confined to 16 linear values or fewer, you are going to have quantization error; it's just a matter of how much, and whether you can shape it into something less offensive. I'd thought about doing what that perl script did, figuring it would create the least noise since anything below 50% amplitude would be eliminated, but that only works if you're using unsigned samples. If it's signed, you'd want to remove the four middle bits, not the lower four. If it's unsigned, I'd think it would be better to condense each set of two bits into one using OR, so that 10110011 becomes 1101, but I haven't tried that. (Edit: that would probably actually be pretty bad since 75% of 2-bit combinations would result in a 1, so maybe just discarding every other bit would be better.) I also started looking a few years back into a different approach. I wrote a Perl script in the late '90s to find duplicate images by reducing them to 8x8 greyscale or 16x16 1-bit bitmaps, subtracting them from each other and counting the remaining bits, and if the number of bits fell below a given threshold, it was a match. It was incredibly effective, but quite slow (my directory of about 20,000 images took about 2 days to process) and other free software programs do a much faster and easier job of it now. But imagine converting each 17 millisecond (1 NTSC frame) chunk of audio into a bitmap using FFT, having reference bitmaps of 17ms worth of every possible VCS distortion/pitch combination, and playing the most similar one on each frame. I remember programs purporting to make the Yamaha DX7 (an FM synth) simulate sample playback using similar methods in the late '80s, with varying levels of success, but they didn't have anywhere near 17ms granularity. I haven't had a VCS toolchain set up for a long time due to DASM's sorry state and my own lack of time to get it to build, so I haven't tested it, but it sounds awesome in my head. The errors it would introduce would certainly make 8->4 bit quantization error look like nothing, but maybe it would be possible to at least get speech that's more intelligible than the Intellivision's "YER OUT" growl, if not music, while not having to blank the screen or use the DPC+. (With the DPC+, I'd think it could be possible to make it sound much better than just hitting AUDVx on every scanline with the same distortion pattern.)

No reason it can't be both. License it as AGPL3 if you want to ensure you reap the benefits of any commercial forks, since there aren't a lot of web-based palette-aware pixel editors out there.

Thank you, johnnystarr, for making a VCS sprite editor that doesn't require Windows!

Isn't there already a forum for indie games? I think they're distinct from homebrew games, which are generally for non-PC platforms. I'd love to see the day when everyone regards Windows as a dead platform on which people make demakes and other homebrew, but I'm not holding my breath. Edit: Huh, it looks like there isn't one... so, carry on, I guess.

I'd never heard of X before. It's cool looking (and how strange that 25 years later they're releasing another game by the same name in a totally different genre), but most of the lines are orthogonal. In Tempest, even some of the more orthogonal levels start getting squirrelly once you reduce the resolution: I know someone creating it by hand could do better than this (took the clearest Tempest screenshot I could find, inverted it, made it greyscale, scaled it down and reduced colors to 4, not sure about the order of those last two), and I hope someone will try, but there are only so many pixels on that screen.

There was a Tempest port to the 2600, albeit an unfinished one that kind of sucked. Pretty much anything is capable of playing it. The Game Gear certainly should be able to, and even the Game Boy ought to be able to handle a very chunky-looking port. But playing it well? I think you need a screen with a high-enough resolution to simulate the vectors nicely. A knob would really help too. Looks great on my 5" 1080p phone, but I'd think even a 480p device would look nice enough if there's antialiasing. I could hook my USB knob up to it for the whole experience, but that would kind of defeat the whole portability thing -- maybe there's a way to interface my Nintendo DS paddle to it somehow, but I don't have the hardware-fu to figure it out. So I don't play Tempest much on the phone.

It's the same reason my aborted VCS DK clone years ago was called "Congorilla". Nintendo has trademark lawyers, bootleg and knockoff makers usually don't. (Besides, I played a Congorilla machine before I played Donkey Kong, back in the day.) I personally would be staying away from "DK" when doing a clone, since Nintendo has called Donkey Kong "DK" in his post-Rareware form. But I guess this is the wrong thread for that kind of advice. I do think making Zippy a blue porcupine might be a little risky. Apparently "Princess Rescue" was too close even with the sprites, board layouts and name being different, so, you know, proceed with caution and all that. Commander Keen, on the other hand, was non-infringing even after starting life as a pixel-for-pixel Mario clone, as did Supertux -- and you know what? I've actually played more hours of Commander Keen than I ever did of 2D Mario games -- so maybe just making an original scrolling platformer for the 2600 is what someone needs to do.

Cool! But don't Atari cartridge model numbers take the form of "CX-26xx[x]", not "CX-01xx"?

http://www.1up-island.com/8140/prge-zippy-the-porcupine-the-sonic-the-hedgehog-atari-2600-clone The flash game is a lazy physics puzzler, apparently made in one of those "make your own game without writing any code" tools, that seems to have just stolen Sprybug's title screen and game name. The second level might have nicked some of the playfield, but I don't think the sprites are ripped off; they look too hi-res. I'd probably still send a takedown notice just because it sucks.

Doesn't that just mean you ran out of gas?

Wait, if you can feed the bits from a write to a latch circuit, and store them until a new bank is selected, why isn't there already a "65536 banks of 4k" bankswitching scheme out there that uses only two trigger locations, storing the most significant byte until the least significant byte is written, providing up to 256MB? Or even a "256 banks of 4k" one that uses only a single location and eliminates statefulness while still providing a megabyte? (Or the equivalent of each of those with 2K banks that can be mixed and matched, at the expense of doubling the number of write locations to 4 or 2 respectively and halving the total amount of space.) I realize that these questions must demonstrate my near-total ignorance of how hardware works, but I'm really curious.

Having bought two AtariVoxes, I'd really rather hear what you can do in software, even if that means no speech during the actual gameplay. I bought them but I'm unable to use them -- long story. But I suppose speech during gameplay was one of Berzerk/Frenzy's selling points back in the day, at least in the arcade.

Nothing illegal about emulators on iPhones. Apple has terms of service for developers that say you can't provide a way for users to execute their own choice of code in an app published in their app store, but that's not illegal, just an Apple control thing (mostly because Apple wants a cut of whatever you sell iOS users), not a legal thing. Otherwise Google would have been sued long ago for having a couple different forks of Stella in theirs. This is why the few emulators that are available, such as the C64 and Amiga ones, have their own set of games you can't add to except by actually buying them from the same developer in the app store. For what it's worth, Nguyen gave an interview to Forbes in which he claimed he'd removed his game because it was too addictive. Nothing like claiming you took your game down because darn it, it was just too good. I'm on the "PR stunt" side of the debate at this point and am going to try not to give him further attention. It was a very lucrative fluke and he's going to do whatever he can to hang onto it. I bet his ad revenue skyrocketed after he pulled the app. I'd still like to see a nice VCS version of the game, just because it's a NES-level thing that the VCS should actually be able to do, even with the horizontal scrolling. Maybe just call it "Flap" and render just that part of the FB logo in big, chunky playfield graphics on the title screen, as though it's cut off because the screen is too small.

It's just the same version as we've been discussing this whole thread -- or is the sack of monkey shit holy because "here is the city" is covering it? (I've never heard of them and neither has Wikipedia, though the first page in the search results is for one of my favorite songs from the last decade.)

Flappy Bird is basically every one-button game ever made, with cute, simplified retro graphics and the "button" is the entire screen. I'd be astonished if anyone could make a case that it infringed the gameplay of anything. The graphics are pretty clearly derivative, but it's not hard to imagine him having drawn them himself in an hour or so in a pixel graphics editor, or pretty much any drawing program with zoom. If it wasn't Nintendo (and indeed, Nintendo says it wasn't) I don't know who it could have been.... if that even happened. Look at Phil Fish. He's an attention whore and he even gave up the ghost for a while after all the twitter abuse. It's totally understandable that a typically shy programmer (whose native language isn't the one most critics are even using) would do the same. It will also give his next game a ton of attention it wouldn't have otherwise gotten (get it before he decides to pull this one too!), though that kind of attention probably would have happened even if he didn't remove this one from the app stores.

Just want to lead with what I came here to say: Come on, bB guys. You can do so much better than that guy did. I mean, really. I think the state of the mobile app markets is already far, far worse than the video game market of 1983-85. Not economically... the sector is making a ton of money even if the vast majority of devs aren't. I mean if you just go in and choose based on the screenshots and description, just like we did by looking at the backs of boxes back in the day, odds are you're going to get a crap game and possibly spyware to boot. There are some amazing games out there for an eighth to a tenth (less, if you're an Android user and buy Humble Bundles) of what we were paying back then. Even Flappy Bird, for all its unoriginality, is not a broken game, though it does have ads. We have an embarrassment of riches, with many games more sophisticated than anything we were playing on our Ataris, our Apples (played "Organ Trail" yet?), even our Amigas, as long as you stick to genres that work on mobile. Many great games are even free, and if you're playing them on an airplane you won't even see any ads. But finding them sucks. I look at a game like Ittle Dew, with cute art and a wonderful sense of humor and solid (and, yes, completely unoriginal, but it's clearly a parody) gameplay, and realize its developer is one of the lucky ones, to have even gotten reviewed by some of the big sites, yet still most people have never heard of it. It's five dollars on Android, a bargain for a game that can easily last 10 hours, and many people actually consider that to be an absurdly high price point. (I gladly paid $15 for the Linux version, and then got it again through some bundle.) Bard's Tale, a game we played on PS2 that cost 60 bucks at launch, and we paid something like 4 bucks for it on Android during a one-day sale (and then got it again through a Humble Bundle). That's with better graphics than it ever had on the PS2 thanks to all of us carrying 1080p monitors and quad-core CPUs in our pockets. It boggles my mind how spoiled we've become. Most developers are losing their investment in mobile games, but since those investments come mainly in the form of time, I don't think the market is going to crash anytime soon. It's just too easy for the next guy to take your place when you give up, and device shipments are somehow still growing. Anyway, I hope some VCS programmer (bB or not) can at least reach the very low bar set by Mr. Nguyen. TACS Games... hasn't.

The American version can show 6 gorillas thanks to DK being a portrait mode game. I guess the way to handle that would be to show just the top 4 gorillas when you get to that point (150m through 75m).

Personally, I love the ads in old (really old) magazines. They provide a frozen glimpse into the way advertisers wanted us to think life was 30 years ago. I also love the Bud ad in ppTapper, the existence of the Mr. Boston version of Clean Sweep for the Vectrex, the Namco ads in Pole Position, etc. They were ineffective in that I wasn't going to be buying alcohol at age 13 and I was already playing a Namco game, but 30 years removed they entertain me. (I don't know about '90s games because I was gaming on the Amiga and PC, and didn't play the kinds of games in the '90s (mostly sports games) that featured ad placement. I guess there must have been ads in some of the Mario Kart iterations I played in the '00s, but I don't remember those either.) I just think that it's unnecessary to subsidize one's homebrew development because there are no costs but time -- if you're unwilling to dedicate your free time to a homebrew out of passion, it's probably not going to be very good -- and I don't think ad placement really works out for games with orders of magnitude more distribution than Atari 2600 homebrews have, much less the few dozen to a hundred that a successful homebrew will sell. Someone looking to put ads in a game should be developing for Android and/or iOS. And not ads as in "sign up for an ad network", because those won't stand the test of time and their ocean is already so red that you probably won't make any money at it. Get someone to sponsor your game and put their logo and link directly in it so that ad blockers won't hide it and 20 years hence, someone like us will be digging up the game and saying "OMG, isn't this silly?"

Eh, I was in the habit of hitting Shift-Commodore to switch to lowercase on boot within a month of getting my C64 in 1983. For actual "max retroness" you need to be 'writing code' using switches and/or patch cables without the benefit of an assembly language, as they did on ENIAC. Never went back that far myself, but I did use paper tape to boot the PDP-8 I had in my basement 25 years ago courtesy of my EE housemates.

Vectrex games aren't in the public domain; the rights holders just made public statements that non-commercial distribution of the ROMs was okay. That is not the same thing; a public domain work has no restrictions on it whatsoever, and is not owned by anyone. It may not actually be possible to put something in the public domain in the US before its copyright expires, even if you're the copyright holder, due to the exhaustive nature of the laws bought by the movie industry: http://readwrite.com/2009/03/11/cc_zero_a_tool_to_drop_your_rights_and_go_public_domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_in_the_United_States#Section_203_of_the_Copyright_Act There were two more paragraphs to my post, dealing with sounds created by computer programs and why I'm so interested in copyright law, but this wonderful Javascript editor seems to have seen fit to discard them along with my formatting. Ah well.

I really don't think most of the people asking for carts have the wherewithal to write VCS games, and while Batari Basic is easier to wrap your head around than assembly, even the time I've spent making my 8 or 10 posts on this thread wouldn't have even been enough to get dasm working on my machine (because I've already spent a lot more time than I spent posting to this thread attempting to do just that). As an example, it's been about 90 seconds since I started typing this. (Of course, as an emulator and Harmony cart guy, I couldn't care less about getting a copy of this on cartridge, but most of the people asking for cartridges have spent even less time than me on this.)

Wow, at this point you've really gone beyond what I thought someone could do with Batari Basic. It's flickery, yes (I'd think the phosphor effect would help, but maybe off-screen video capture programs can't handle that?) but just having that asymmetrical playfield with all those players is pretty nifty. Nice work.

It's easy to get a copy. Just download from the first post and stick it on your Harmony or Cuttle Cart. If you meant "get a copy of this burned to ROM on a cartridge", there is no legal way to do it. That's quite different than "zero chance", but for purposes of discussion here on the site that's the de facto nexus of Atari homebrew culture, they're equivalent.