raindog

Look again, everything's on "back order" meaning they don't have any and don't know when they'll get any! There are lots of online stores like that out there (at least EB2K tells you.) They were in the same state when last I looked in November. But that new USB "XG Flash 128" they have on preorder looks pretty sweet if anyone ever writes Linux drivers for it And if it ever really becomes available - the "Flash Advance USB Xtreme" came and went kinda quick last year. Rob

Well, the GBC and GBA (and probably the GB as well) all have flash cartridges available, though unfortunately since the interface to the PC also acts as a dumper Nintendo has done their best to make it difficult to obtain one. (I suspect they would do so even if the dumper functionality weren't there.) So they're at least as valid as the Atari games that only play on the Cuttle or Supercharger. I bet there are even more GBx flash carts out there than Superchargers despite N's efforts. Someone else mentioned Astrocade homebrews - as far as I can remember, people wrote and released Astrocade homebrews back in the day using the cassette tape intended for saving BASIC programs. I assume the games weren't all written in BASIC. Rob

Let me add that I received my order the DAY AFTER I placed it. Doubtless that has something to do with being in the next state, but I'll certainly be ordering more from Collector's Cards and Games even with the security loophole in their order system. Rob

I gotta think 2600 on a chip will finally come into being in the next two years and you'll get your wish, albeit expensively. Rob

If people feel for some reason that they need to choose between the two, I really hope they will choose Space Instigators. I've ordered mine and can't wait to play it on the real thing. Seriously, if I hadn't gotten a comp of Space Invaders Arcade I probably wouldn't have bought it after Space Instigators came out, and it's my own hack. I encourage everyone who likes Space Invaders to buy Space Instigators because it will show support for Chris who is a genuinely talented homebrewer, and it's just a far more accurate take on Space Invaders besides. Rob

Won't know till I (or someone else) tries it, I suppose. Rob

I got the GBA last July or so and have gotten about a dozen games for it, half used and half not. Only two were Nintendo games (SMA and MKSC.) But all of them were ports or updates of older games (Pac-Man Collection, Sonic Advance, Namco Museum, Doom, Wolf3d, Bomberman Tournament, etc.) I have a feeling I'm not exactly a normal GBA user though. Anyway, when I go to videogame stores everyone seems to love the GBA, but that could just be because I love the GBA and they want to sell me more games. Rob

You'd need to go to 12 or 16K to add the intermissions into Pac26/Pac-Man Arcade. I used the space I gained from the three removed mazes for extra code (mainly sound stuff). Believe it or not, each screen only consumed 42 bytes of data (the playfield data for the maze.) I could have made more space (probably not enough for intermissions) if I'd had a disassembler and assembler that handled 8K carts, but I was hand assembling everything and entering it with a hex editor. This made doing things like removing the "decide which screen to display" code kinda impossible. I've heard that 8K-compatible versions of dasm and distella exist (and presumably more, since people have released 16K and 32K homebrew games) but I have no idea where they live. If anyone has links, especially to source, please post 'em. Rob

I'm searching through the forum threads trying to find the post where someone recommended Collector's Cards and Games. I have no reason to believe they're anything but legitimate and they come highly recommended. BUT, the online ordering service they use EMAILS YOUR CREDIT CARD NUMBER IN PLAIN TEXT. All the encryption in the world on the order form won't protect your number from snooping via email. I doubt this will be my last order from them (unless I just never hear from them again, as with 4jays) but I'll probably use Paypal or mail a money order next time. On another note, would someone who's ordered from them a few times consider adding them as a link on the AtariAge links page? I couldn't find them in my own bookmarks because their page has no title Rob

The Gameboy, Gameboy Color and Gameboy Advance all have a ton of homebrews, just never actually released in cart form as far as I know. You can't release a homebrew GBx cart without either fashioning it to take an existing GBx cart piggyback style, or breaking Nintendo's copyright (as the unit itself checks for the presence of the Nintendo logo in the ROM image.) Rob

Totally! I'm buying my contact paper now! Rob

I'm pretty sure one of our handhelds was by Bandai, though I couldn't tell you which one. Rob

Coleco-tabletop-style GBA: Lik-Sang was actually selling a drop-in case for the GBC that made it seem very much like a Coleco tabletop game (actually, more like Epoch Galaxy II or the Adventurevision.) Except since the GBC wasn't backlit and the lights this thing used were two really dim flashlight bulbs, it really kinda sucked. I started messing with mounting my Photon light inside the thing with no luck. Too bad, because I think it would have been pretty effective. Obviously the GBA is the wrong form factor, but the GBASP (or whatever it ends up being called) seems even more amenable to that sort of thing than the GBC was. GBA with all manner of peripherals: Part of the hype when the GBA was first announced was that you would be able to get peripherals to do web and email (sometimes they said it'd be wireless), which to me means they would have at least been shipping a keyboard. Someone actually did make an aftermarket email cartridge for the GBC that worked by dialing up some proprietary service, but I haven't seen anything like it for the GBA, nor any of the PDA-like stuff they also were talking about at the trade shows. I did get the TV tuner for my niece from Lik-Sang and it works surprisingly well (and now they're selling them at my local Gamestop) and there are all manner of lights and rumble packs out there for the GBA, but Colecovision it ain't. Rob

With a Celeron 400 and 256MB of RAM, a 4K game took about 20 seconds to load. I have no idea how big Gyruss is but figure on a Celeron 300 it might take 10 seconds per K. Sorry, I know the loading is slow but it's pretty zippy on my new Athlon 2100 that cost all of $109. I don't know if it'll be possible to write a reliable color editor for Atari 2600 games because unlike sprite data, there's no way to tell just by looking which data is the color data. You have to look through the actual code to see where it's storing a value to a color register and trace back to see where that color came from. Since all the objects are reused so frequently in many games you pretty much have to do a little trial and error to see what your changes do. Even then, it can have unintended consequences - I got an email this weekend from Albert mentioning that my Space Invaders hack does some unexpected color cycling in 2 player mode, and I sure didn't do that on purpose. So I could probably write something that looked for all the places where a game writes to color registers and traces it back and lets you pick from a color palette to change the data it's reading from, but the results could be nasty and you're really better off learning a little about programming than trying to point and click your way through it. Anyway, I wrote Hack-o-Matic as a way to entice more people to try messing with Atari games, not as a universal game construction kit. If you enjoy hacking sprites but find that you want to go further, you should do what most of us did and visit The Dig and start gathering your arsenal of 2600 coding tools and documentation. It's incredibly gratifying once you actually get your first bit of code working. Rob

I still like Oystron best, but I just got a set of paddles so Marble Craze and SCSIcide will have a shot soon I'm probably more impressed by Thrust than anything else but it's a little too difficult for my reflexes nowadays. Rob

Don't know if this is your problem, but a 16K game will take four times as long to load as a 4K one.... it's possible it could be running out of memory of course (being that I'm creating a canvas with 131,072 little black squares, each an object, to edit a 16K game ) but it seems to me if someone edited Jr. Pac-Man you should be able to do Sprintmaster. Rob

I think Amok and J.G. Munchkin (hack of Attack of the Timelords with K.C. Munchkin as the villain, various PG-rated speech synth epithets, and extra features like 3 lives instead of just 1) are probably the closest to what owners of other systems would consider "arcade games", but in terms of playability, add both KC Munchkin and KC's Crazy Chase, Pick Axe Pete, Smithereens, and um.... that's about where I run out of games Lots of people like UFO and Freedom Fighters (weird Asteroids and Defender clones respectively) but I had both of them back in the day and they were both good for all of about 15 minutes of play. Rob

It's back now, for better or worse! (And my new machine is so spiffy...) Rob

For that you pretty much need generalized programming tools.... a disassembler like Distella, an assembler like Dasm, an emulator with a debugger (I used PCAE back in the day, I suppose most people would use Z26 now if they're able) and all the documentation you can stand to read Rob

Sorry, yes, the page is down at the moment. I built my shiny new Athlon 2100 system without realizing my network card was an old ISA 3com card, so I'm off the net till tomorrow sometime It's GPL so anyone is welcome to mirror it.... of course, some people will doubtless be glad it's gone Rob

I was a big c64 guy too and if no one ports Jumpman or at least Jumpman Jr. by the time I get to it, that'll be a project of mine @someone on the previous page who mentioned O2 Smithereens, someone on stella-list is working on a Scorched Earth type game IIRC. (Scorched Earth being Smithereens on steroids, albeit without the voice and digitized explosions) Rob

I apologize! No tomatoes! (cute hack though, anyway!) Rob

Oh, and in all fairness, I don't know whether it would be possible to write a good 2600 Pac-Man if you actually did stick to all of Tod's restrictions (6 weeks and 4K of code), but I'm pretty sure Ebivision's game is 4K while Ms. Pac-Man and therefore my hack are 8K. Doubtless having someone work on it who really liked Pac-Man would have helped though! Rob

Yep, Ebivision gets the credit for pissing me off enough to do the Ms. Pac hack which AtariAge now sells as "Pac-Man Arcade". Though certainly it never would have occurred to me if Frank hadn't made his mock-ups that resulted in me thinking about 2600 hacks in the first place Rob

There are a bunch of classic-era games that might adapt well to the 2600 but were too obscure or made by the wrong company at the time. To name a few off the top of my head... Moon Cresta/Eagle Scramble (mentioned elsewhere) Astro Invader (the one I used to call "Slot Car Invaders" as a kid) Space Panic (CV version is quite good, maybe better than the arcade) Rally X (lots of scrolling but not too many sprites at a time) Bosconian (ditto, like sinistar but slower and sparser) Mappy (a bit more work but a favorite of mine) Rob