raindog

no particular order.... Mountain King Pitfall Wizard of Wor Yar's Revenge Space Invaders Space Instigators (can't very well include Space Invaders and not this) Oystron Kaboom Commie Mutants and, um, Pac26

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: "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

Of course it's the programmer's choice. Which doesn't change the fact that if I ever get a copy of Ebivision Pac-Man it's going on alt.binaries.emulators.*. Rob

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

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

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

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

I wasn't aware of this programming forum till tonight, but this thread seems like a pretty obvious place to mention Hack-o-Matic, my cross platform graphical binary editor. http://www.kudla.org/hackomatic/ It's a bit slow loading, and I'd like it to have more features eventually, but it's fairly easy to work with. Rob

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

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

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

We get G4 here starting tomorrow, and if it's anything like all the other digital cable channels they'll rerun that show about 60 times over the next week. I'll see if I can grab it. Rob

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

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

hee, I had forgotten all about that magazine until I read a few of the articles! I'm pretty sure I had a number of issues of that, so the only question is whether they're in my parents' attic somewhere, or a landfill Rob

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

Oooh, speaking of dead brain cells, I don't know how I could have forgotten Yar's Revenge. I'm sure there are others too but that one seemed especially grievous to have forgotten... Rob

Mountain King, Kaboom, Pitfall, Wizard of Wor, Commie Mutants, Starpath Frogger, Space Invaders (yeah, even the original Atari one), and I always give Adventure a whirl until I realize my memory of the maps lived on some brain cells that have died. Rob

Have you actually downloaded Tempest 2K from theunderdogs? The game's page is at http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?id=2337 but the "Where to get it" is a link to some closeout retailer selling the DOS version for $12. Good luck getting that to run under anything recent. Rob

Atari already HAS come back, in the form of that entirely above-board and licensed but terribly botched joystick with the games built in. Like it or not, that's technically an Atari video game system, or as close as we're ever going to see because Atari the company simply doesn't exist anymore. (I bet playing Breakout with a joystick is no more painful than playing Asteroids with the 5200 joystick, so maybe it fits right in with Atari's early 80's product line....) But the joystick's appearance despite Atari's nonexistence as a company also proves that Infogrames is happy to license the name and some of the game code to people who think they can manufacture the hardware and make enough at it to afford Infogrames' terms, whatever they may be. So if one of us wins big at the lottery, here comes the Atari® 2600boy I guess Rob

I started messing with that idea a couple years ago, but realized eventually that I liked Ballblazer better and started working on that, which I never finished (the most recent 2 year old demo is at http://www.kudla.org/raindog/games/hspt.zip or in much more optimized form in Cybergoth's latest annual mega-demo.) It wouldn't have to be as butchered as Zaxxon, but I would say it'd be about as lame compared to the arcade game as, say, the Odyssey2 version of Popeye. i.e. at least it'd be recognizable, if terribly lacking. You could do all right gameplaywise until the first time you wanted to do one of those 3D snakes that come at you Rob

Well, Stella (even in full screen mode) still isn't quite right on with regards to colors, sounds and maybe screen position due to how TV-out cards in computers work. Z26 or PCAE would help on the first two issues but they're not ported to Linux. I suppose I could make a DOS bootdisk with one of those emulators and the desired game to get a little closer, but.... being able to finally obtain an industrial grade 2600 arcade stick would still be a lot cooler! Rob

One thing I don't understand is how Avon can call them "exclusive" when they're basically available from every direct mail or web company that sells assorted cheap Taiwanese gifty gadgets for thirty- and fortysomethings. I'll probably pick one up when they hit the bargain bins in another month, though. I know it sucks but if I see one for 10 bucks, no harm done. I could conceivably even play Atari games on my niece's GBA using the TV tuner backplane I gave her for xmas, as one of its much-hyped features is its ability to act as a composite monitor for other videogames Rob

Reactor was always one of my more favorite 2600 games, but probably only because I loved the arcade game and found the 2600 version a nice simplification. I got to play it a few times with a trakball (in joystick mode of course) though I can't remember if that made it better or worse. There are lots of 2600 games I probably would never play again, but they'd probably be the unmemorable ones whose names I've already forgotten. I have no real desire to play Air/Sea Battle, E.T., the original Atari Pac-Man, or the original Atari Asteroids again though, off the top of my head. Rob

Yeah, I'm the Pac-Man-hack-of-a-thousand-names guy. And I would like to play it using a better joystick, because somehow stella.sdl and the Hotrod SE aren't enough Rob