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raindog

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Posts posted by raindog

  1. Posted

    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

  3. Posted

    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

  4. Posted

    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 :P

     

    It's GPL so anyone is welcome to mirror it.... of course, some people will doubtless be glad it's gone ;)

     

    Rob

  5. Posted

    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

  7. Posted

    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

  9. Posted

    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

  11. Posted

    I might be showing a little bit of winter blonde here, but I can google for various Atari 2600 controllers and I get links to things like the following:

     

    http://www.atariage.com/controller_page.ht...3&SystemID=2600

     

    I can change ControllerID and get access to various info pages about different controllers but not a list of them. And I can't find my way to those pages through the "front door". Here is what I see listed as subcategories under the 2600:

     

    Rarity Guide

    Box Scans

    Cartridge Scans

    Catalogs

    Companies

    Conversions

    Hacks

    Hardware

    Label Guide

    Manuals

    Overlays

    Programmers

    Screenshots

    Tips & Cheats

    Forum

    Archives

    Emulation

    FAQ

    History

    Links

     

    "Hardware" is just a list of actual 2600-compatible consoles made. Under "Archives" there's a similar list of controllers but each entry just links to a picture.

     

    Is this stuff under construction or have I missed something obvious? In every other way AtariAge is a total joy to navigate.

     

    Rob

  13. Posted

    heh, I saw your post just after catching up on the stella-list where Christopher Tumber posted a few side scrolling demos that reminded me of Scramble. If I'd been a big Scramble fan, I might have tried hacking Super Cobra into Scramble, but I think I'll let Chris come up with whatever side scrolling game he's got planned because it'll be better ;)

     

    Rob

  14. Posted

    I came to the homebrew scene after Edtris had already come and gone, and I didn't have too much trouble obtaining a copy. What would be funny is if some homebrew programmer who put the "no distribution" stipulation on his game got all indignant when his 4,096 bytes started making the rounds, and maybe even Quit the Scene® in a Petulant Frenzy.

     

    The way that you people who'd pay someone actual money for Chase the Chuckwagon feel about having as many carts as possible.... I feel the same way, but only about the bits. I'm sure I've chewed someone out for bragging that they had something and wouldn't release it at some point in the past, but more because of the bragging part.

     

    However, as I posted on stella-list when a topic like this came up some time ago, there's a non-trivial but effective way to render this whole debate moot: put value-added hardware on your cart. If you're really serious about wanting people to buy the real thing, put your time, money and effort where your mouth is. It took years for the emulators to be able to play Pitfall II, for example, and I seriously doubt the emulator authors or homebrew RAM/flash cart makers will ever want to piss you off enough to, say, emulate your game's speech synthesizer or 16MB of bankswitched ROM containing machine-generated kernels for 4,096 different screen configurations ;)

     

    Whether he intends it or not, Paul's game ideas almost fall into this category just by virtue of the various emulators' comparatively poor handling of anything but the joystick. More power to him, I say, and I could see myself doing something similar in the future for similar gameplay-related reasons, but it won't stop his game from floating around the net. I just ordered a pair of paddles off of ebay just so I could buy Marble Craze and actually play it, but I'll certainly grab the inevitable dump of the final version when it appears as surely as I'd grab Ebivision Pac-Man, or the Starpath games back when the Stella disc couldn't be had at any price.

     

    Rob

  15. Posted

    Bomb Jack on the C64 used the popular bits of Jarre's "Les Chants Magnetiques" (literally Magnetic Songs, though it was meant as a pun and was sold in English as "Magnetic Fields") but I don't remember any arcade games using Jarre music. (Though I have run into some random amusement device somewhere, a palm reader or something, that kept playing a little sample of Equinoxe.)

     

    Rob

  16. Posted

    Here is the official documentation for running Hack-O-Matic (I'm improvising here, but since I never wrote any now's a good a time as any.)

     

    Using Hack-O-Matic

     

    1. Start Hack-O-Matic. Under Windows this may be accomplished by double clicking hackomatic.exe. Under Linux using a command line you would do "wish hackomatic.tcl" or "./hackomatic" if you downloaded the all-in-one version. It varies on other platforms.

     

    2. Using the menu, select and open a 2600 BIN file or other small binary file you wish to edit. In case you need it spelled out, you click the File menu, then Open. Pick the file you want in the dialog as you would in any other application.

     

    3. Wait far too long. On my Celeron 400, a 4K BIN file like Space Invaders takes 20 seconds to load; on my Duron 800 it takes 10 seconds. Sorry.

     

    4. You should be looking at a sort of chessboard with the squares all mixed up. This is a graphical representation of the data in the file. Scroll down using the scrollbar on the right hand edge of the window until you see patterns that resemble the shapes in the game you want to hack. They will probably be upside-down because that's how many 2600 developers did things. And they will probably be pretty near the bottom of the file.

     

    5. Using the mouse, click on the squares to "draw" your hacked graphics. Clicking on a black square turns it white. Clicking on a white square turns it black.

     

    6. When you have finished, click the File menu, then click Save As. Choose a new name for your hacked BIN file, and click the Save button.

     

    7. Go back to step 2, or if you're all done, click the File menu then click Exit.

     

    I don't know how to spell it out in any greater detail than that without making your head swim.

     

    Rob

  18. Posted

    I definitely saw that paragraph on more games than just Donkey Kong, maybe even more than just Coleco games. In fact, I never had a 2600 as a child so maybe it was a Colecovision idiom.

     

    Rob

  19. Posted

    Despite Stan's enthusiasm I think you should know that there's only one Atari 2600 game developer who has said he intends to use cart sales to support himself (a quixotic if noble pursuit), and as far as I can tell from Stella-list and elsewhere, there's no one who's really doing this for the money.

     

    If you can't justify your time spent doing this stuff purely by the enjoyment it gives you, you should consider not doing it for all our sakes (including your own sanity.) I am convinced that the best and most prolific of the coders out there right now are doing this stuff because if they don't, all the ideas they're keeping bottled up will render them unable to sleep.

     

    Rob

  20. Posted

    The last time I played a game in an arcade was 3 or 4 months ago, when I discovered a local mall had reopened a "Just Fun" which happened to be the same chain I first visited back in 1977 or so (back at home 120 miles away in a mall which is now a Home Depot parking lot.)

     

    I'm not exactly sure when my first arcade experience was, because I was going to arcades to play pinball from about age 7 and then these other things started showing up. More to the point though, my parents bought a Magnavox Odyssey when they first appeared (still boxed and in decent condition in their attic, IIRC) so my first videogame experiences extend back before my long term memory started kicking in. :)

     

    That KLOV graph is interesting, and of course arcades did sputter along for a while in the mid to late 80's (at several points a mall here had two arcades open, but whenever that would happen they would have a token war and about the time they'd get up to "100 tokens for 5 bucks" one of them would always close) with a brief resurgence thanks to SF2 around 1990, but it was never like 1980-1983 where most games would have rows of quarters/tokens lined up on them and it was tough to walk around without bumping into people.

     

    Still, I wasn't even wondering about the arcade crash per se so much as the arcade crash as an indicator of Americans' general disillusion with videogames that just seemed to happen in 1984. I was still playing games a lot, everyone my age that I knew was still playing games a lot, but our opportunities to play seemed to largely dry up all of a sudden. Yeah, a lot of us had Colecovisions and then got home computers which filled the gap and were probably better for some of us in the long run, but the crash kinda robbed us of a social outlet.

     

    Now that I look back on "arcade culture" if there was such a thing, it seems like it might have also suffered from just being a fad. Lots of people who have probably never played videogames since were playing them then, just because it was the thing to do. For a while it was okay to have an Atari sitting on your living room floor even if there were no teenage boys in the house. These days, despite being such a huge moneymaker, videogames are much more of a vertical phenomenon.

     

    Rob

  22. Posted

    Over the last few months I've read a number of articles about the American videogame market crash in 1984, naming a variety of causes: the availability of cheap home computers, the glut of badly written games, the major players' miscalculation that people would want to convert their videogame systems into computers, the sale of Atari to the Tramiels, etc.

     

    That's all well and good for the home side of things, but doesn't anyone else remember how almost overnight in the summer and fall of '84, the arcade industry also tanked? My biggest local mall went from having three arcades to one in the space of a few months, and that one closed for some time a year later (it's open again now, which is what brought this up in my mind.) Arcades in strip malls closed and reopened in '85 or '86 as video stores, pizza or Chinese food joints, etc. Bowling alleys converted their huge arcade rooms back to storage areas. People just stopped dropping quarters into arcade machines and did whatever else with their time.

     

    So you can't just blame the home videogame industry's screwups for the crash; it was a pandemic. What caused Americans to just suddenly and collectively become sick of videogames for a couple years, only to go back to them with the NES and end up making them the single biggest segment of the American entertainment market? And (less relevant to this discussion board, but an interesting question) could it happen again?

     

    Rob

  23. Posted

    I started working on a version of Pac-Man for the C64 that I envisioned as looking almost exactly like what you've come up with for the CV ;) I only got as far as the maze though. It should be a lot easier on the C64, but what little time I have for 65xx coding in recent years has gone towards the 2600.

     

    Anyway, this is exactly what I was talking about in the post I just made to the INTV/Atari/Coleco thread.... the CV's programmers never bothered with too many tricks like this back in the day, and a little extra time and effort could have made a huge difference in playability. Congratulations on your progress.

     

    Rob

  25. Posted

    I had an Odyssey2 and Colecovision when I was growing up (among various other systems.) The Odyssey2 - forget it. It was almost closer to being a character generator than a game system. I really liked some games (KC Munchkin comes to mind) but all the games had a certain "sameness" about them, and a simplicity that was much less charming than that of the other systems of the era. I got it only because the guy at the Magnavox store told my mom that the keyboard meant you could expand it into a computer (that same guy tried to sell her an Atari 400 the next year but by then it was once bitten twice shy), but I always enjoyed playing Atari more at other people's houses, at K-mart, even at the corner store where they let you play Asteroids for 15 minutes for a quarter.

     

    But that "sameness" applies to a lesser extent to the Intellivision. Even though the graphics were prettier than anything else at the time and the sound was better, all the INTV games to me seemed kinda clunky and slow. I envied my friends who had them at first, but lost interest pretty quickly. And those controllers were blister city.

     

    The Colecovision had the sameness problem too but to a lesser extent. With the O2 and the INTV you pretty much had to rely on the predefined sprites in the BIOS because your resources were so limited, but the CV broke away from this somewhat (sadly, most of their arcade ports still used the Coleco character ROM which detracted more from my experience than you'd think. One of the first things I did when I found a CV emulator was hack the coleco ROM to use the Namco/Nintendo character set. ;) )

     

    Still, I often find CV games feel a little awkward, the sound is a bit shrill or out of tune, the control is slow, whatever. I remember getting Defender for the CV and thinking how much better it was than the 2600 version I'd played at my friends' houses, but also feeling like I was flying a Galaxie 500. And Donkey Kong was impressive to look at (sure made my Xmas morning when I first fired it up) but when playing it, a lot of things were just "off" - jumpy, too slow/fast or just not quite right. I can't help but think Coleco's programmers relied too much on what it looked like and not enough on how it played, but somehow no one ever seemed to surmount that problem.

     

    The CV controllers were a lot better in my mind than the INTV's, but still produced blisters. I never found an adequate substitute and kept breaking the joysticks. Luckily I lived not far from Coleco so the surplus stores in my area would frequently have CV controllers available for a buck or two (and everything else up to and including Adam systems, which I never bothered with.) Eventually I settled for a pair of those Y-adaptors that let you use a normal Atari joystick for control and the CV keypad and second fire button when needed.

     

    Finally, while the CV coders got around that "sameness" by using up a lot of ROM space, they didn't have enough control over the hardware at a low level to get around sprite limitations the way you could on the 2600. (This complaint really applies to every system but the 2600, though on the more popular later 8-bit machines like the NES and C64 people eventually figured it out.) So CV games always had this "flat" feel I also associate with TI 99/4 games or with the Spectrum, the "look how many objects we can get on the screen but they're all only one color" syndrome. I never played my CV much after I got my C64, and the sort of experience I got from it was easily replaced for good once my brother got a NES. I'd go back and play Looping once in a while since no one ever did that for any other system that I know of, but otherwise, the CV was largely redundant for me.

     

    This is why even though I never owned a 2600 back in the day, I'm most nostalgic for it out of all of them and it's the only pre-1990 system I have in my living room. All the processor specs and graphic abilities of the second-generation systems didn't mean anything if its programmers weren't able to pull rabbits out of their hats the way 2600 coders did. In a way its hardware was so rudimentary it forced programmers to work around it, and they did. Its popularity ensured a lot of choices in terms of controllers and games, and somehow they usually ended up being a lot more fun than even the so-called "arcade perfect" CV ones.

     

    Of course that excludes Donkey Kong. ;)

     

    Rob

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