raindog

Well, the starfield in SCA is very similar to the arcade game, though I still can't see it. I don't think it's a "use your imagination" thing, I think it's an "if you're the sort who sees naked bodies in everything, or has seen the original centerfold circa 1980" thing.

That one's my choice too. I could never see the pattern in the starfield (still can't, and OUI was never my kind of pr0n anyway), so I didn't make the connection. But I think that label captures 1981 in arcade game marketing pretty well. (There's one other that does a good job without the boobage, but I miss how trashy arcades were back then, something even Funspot can't come close to capturing.)

Album? You mean a Supercharger release on vinyl? Can't imagine that would last for too many plays, but what tremendous style...

I dunno, I was easily able to pick a favorite (the one most like late-'70s, early-'80s arcade cabinet art while simultaneously having the least to do with the actual gameplay). I can't imagine it'll win, but if it does, if I wasn't already guaranteed to buy a cart... I'd probably buy two if I could afford it, just to keep one.

I don't know what it's like on a Mac, but I'm able to choose DDG as my default search engine in Firefox or (with an extension) Chrome for Ubuntu, as well as on my Android devices using the DDG app/widget and third party browsers like Firefox and Dolphin. And I did just that when Google started throwing a hissy a few weeks back, saying that there was "unusual activity" coming from my machine and making me enter a CAPTCHA every single time I tried to search, most likely triggered by my constant refinements to my searches to get around their recent policy of always returning results even if they're not relevant and don't contain the specified keywords. The announcement yesterday that they would soon begin showing my real name and Google Plus profile pic to any Android user who called or received a call from me may cause me to delete my Google Plus account altogether. They provide a way to opt out, but then, Facebook used to do the same regarding the use of your name in ads, and they no longer do. Ever since Google Reader went away and we discovered TT-RSS on one of our old desktop machines provides a better experience anyway, we've been slowly swapping out other parts of the Google infrastructure. The various OpenStreetMap options are a lot better than they used to be for maps, though still not so good for navigation. (Waze is better, but Google recently bought them.) Our gmail addresses are all over the place in the wild and it's unlikely we'll be able to shut those down anytime soon, but Roundcube is an okay webmail we can run ourselves for our main accounts. Haven't found a good substitute for Google Docs yet, though (my girl and I use it all the time to share non-privileged info such as our ever-expanding cookbook project or xmas shopping lists). Owncloud may be an option, but I would need to hack rudimentary online spreadsheet editing support into it, unless someone has done so since I last played with it. It was nice having a big corporation throw so much weight behind free/open source software projects over the last decade, but one only needs to look at the latest Android release and announcements like the one yesterday to see that those golden years are over, and the balance has shifted from providing no-BS web services with non-intrusive advertising (as they once did) to arrogant, monopolistic behavior. They're still less annoying than Microsoft was when I used to run Windows around the turn of the century, but there's no doubt that's where Google is headed. May I ask what video sharing service you're switching to, if any?

Nah. One-time calibration so the emulator knows where the sensor bar is relative to the screen, and then it's no less imprecise than the NES Zapper. It's "Wii Motion Plus" that needs crosshairs due to the drift.

As I suggested on the other thread, it'd be a hell of a lot easier to just add Wiimote support to emulators (and stick a couple IR LEDs on top of your monitor, or candles on top of or just below your TV) than to produce a flat-panel display that would work with lightguns. <oldman>And in 1973, we played light gun games on hardware so primitive you could point the gun at a lightbulb and win every time, and we liked it!</oldman>

No, we need emulators to support the Wiimote and you can get one of the many light-gun enclosures for it.

If a developer starts working on something, knowing (as he should) that people do this stuff, he has only himself to blame when they do it. Same as music, films, and any other artistic work. Wring your hands all you want, it's still gonna happen. You can work with that or against it. If you work against it, even if you have the biggest legal team in the world, sooner or later you're going to lose. Even if someone implemented one of the copy protection schemes that's been bandied about over the years, and it actually prevented someone from ripping the code out of the ROM, if it were popular enough to sell, someone would come up with a pixel for pixel clone eventually. Respect has nothing to do with it. Market forces do. In homebrew circles, those forces aren't limited to price, supply and demand. They also include pride, which with this size community is far more important than price. The only option available to those who aren't comfortable with this is to turn off their computers and walk away. But I haven't noticed a mass exodus of homebrew developers with the availability of things like Harmony, which on any newer console would have been branded a "copy cart". Every time Crihfield's trade name pops up, people grumble a bit and then get back to coding. Even if they did leave, a significant number of people would say "eh, he was burned out and looking for an excuse". And it would probably be true. No one can say they came into the Atari homebrew scene not knowing that people pass bin files around like cat memes. So, by and large, we are sucking it up.

Well, that could probably be added easily to bB. This is pseudocode because I haven't written assembly in a few years: shiftLeft rol a bcc shiftLeftCarry+2 shiftLeftCarry ora #$01 shiftRight ror a bcc shiftRightCarry+2 shiftRightCarry ora #$80 For all I know, there's an even simpler/faster way to do it. But I don't know that you could use these for a full-playfield horizontal scroll since you'd want to carry over to the neighboring PF byte, not the current one.

Geez, you could get four Harmony carts and far-too-large SD cards for that price. Plus, I'd think the price is just about peaking because "asshat with a tiki face" hasn't noticed and started cranking out counterfeits.

I'm guessing batari Basic doesn't have a 4- or 8-way scrolling kernel yet, which would mean you'd need RAM to do the horizontal part, redrawing the playfield offscreen into an array or something (I assume bB has arrays that don't need to be populated by data statements at compile time). Then you should be able to use that array instead of "world" as your playfield data in your existing code. The easiest way to horizontally scroll in assembly that I know of is just ROL/ROR to rotate the playfield data, checking the carry bit and ORing it with the first/last bit in the following byte to carry it over. I don't know what the equivalent code would look like in bB, but it wouldn't surprise me if assembly were actually easier or more concise for this, at least till someone comes up with an (n > 2)-way scrolling kernel for bB. If nothing else, you ought to be able to look at the released source for Princess Rescue to see how that does horizontal scrolling, and combine it with what you've done here.

Congratulations! I think this'll be the first gaming magazine I've bought since Nintendo Power died... it'll be nice to get my gaming info on something bigger than 5" diagonally and that doesn't require batteries. And with little to no brownish-grey first-person shooter content, no less, at least until the Doom retrospective issue

Amazon will continue to stock them for a long time. I can still get a 128MB CompactFlash card like I had in my first digital camera in 1999, on Prime even, just not in most retail stores.

Yeah, every variant of every Atari ROM, including WIPs and proof of concept demos from [stella] and here, is still well under 100MB. You'd have to have 20 redundant copies of everything to even fill a 2GB card. But the smaller cards are gonna get hard to find in another couple years. We just went looking for a card locally a few weeks back and the smallest was 8GB (we bought a 32). So I'm glad to know it'll support the bigger cards. I think to find a 2GB card I'll have to dig out my old Nintendo DS flash cart, which maxed out at 2GB.

Yeah, despite the horizontal scrolling, the way the playfield looks in PR made me immediately think bB. It's those Surround-style evenly spaced blank lines. I think PR is a stunning achievement too, but this one looks and feels like an asm project to me.

This is awesome; can't believe I haven't seen it before. It actually feels better than the Vectrex one to me, and I think the flickering vector effects are neat (at least with phosphor effect enabled on Stella 3.92 on my laptop's LCD screen). Makes me think someone could do a credible Space Duel someday too, maybe. Been a few years since I've bought an Atari cartridge, but if I ever buy another, this is on the list.

I think it'd be fun to have an "invasion of the chunky pixel men" theme for a game like this. It probably wouldn't work here since he's already using color playfield stripes, unless they showed up as shadows (I don't know what bB's capabilities are as far as asymmetrical playfields go). Another possibility for representing them in the game world would be to render them using missiles, animated in such a way as to make them look like dust devils. Funny, the first thing I saw when I looked at him was the stock Odyssey2 "man standing still" character, which I suppose evokes a bit of the same effect (and was frequently used to denote evil robots, a frozen or dead player, etc.)

Congratulations, this is the first bB project that I wouldn't have guessed was a bB project just by looking at the gameplay. Very nice work. I do wonder if the final product (or the 4-level demo posted elsewhere) could be hacked into a multi-load Harmony game. But reading on the other thread that there are new versions of the Harmony coming soon (first I've heard of it, damn Invision for its spotty new topic notifications) makes me think that would be a lot of work for a stopgap measure.

Wow, between this and the RETRO Magazine kickstarter, we could be swimming in retro gaming magazines next year! Good to see.

Well, you did it... got me to make my first Kickstarter pledge. (I've used Pledgemusic before, but not KS.) With this team I couldn't pass it up. Fingers crossed and hoping for success.

I got pretty confused when I googled that title. Are you also Moon Goon?

Almost none of the blister packs are opened... which made it all the more disappointing when I found the 3 mini Atari pnps (on a keychain) I had, floating in water, only to discover that water had still gotten into them and corroded everything. (Several of the Atgames ones with the weird asymmetrical packaging and styrofoam inside, the same shape as the Sonic one next to the Commodore in my picture, were floating too, but there was no question they were toast.) I opened the C64 one the day I got it because it was just plastic and cardboard scotch-taped to a styrofoam base. I opened the early Namco, Atari and Activision ones that weren't in blister packs, then lost the packaging for the Activision one which is why it's not on display (not even sure where it is). Most of them are unopened. Not because I think they'll be worth something someday, but because there are a lot of things I just haven't cared about as much since my partner died six years ago. He and I liked playing things like Kaboom (sadly never adequately represented in pnps since it wasn't included in any of the paddle collections) and Pong and every once in a while, Pac-Man or Ms. Pac-Man. Since then I've gotten a few pnps out of habit, but missed a bunch of them during his illness and several years afterward. (The other thing is, having lost some clients during his illness when I didn't adequately balance billing hours with taking care of him, while I'd drop 40 bucks after tax and shipping on a pnp in 2004 the way most people would order a coffee, spending 40 bucks is a decision I have to actually think about even now, making impulse buying something I used to do.) These days I'm happy enough playing emulators on my Android TV stick with a wireless controller and HDMI output, our TV being big enough to represent even portrait mode games bigger than they were in the arcade. My girl plays console games as far back as the PS2 -- as I type this, she's having a conversation with someone in the "Honest Hearts" add-on to Fallout New Vegas -- but having been a PC gamer till we met, even N64 games seem primitive to her, so "old arcade games on a stick" isn't something we can enjoy together. So I haven't opened any more of them in his absence. I don't know that I ever will. But they're brightly colored and to me, fun to look at (well, except for that mini-golf motion controlled one up on top that was in the back of my station wagon for a year and a half between two moves; that one's not so colorful anymore). PNPs are something I used to be excited about. Now I'm merely interested.

Found it in (I think) Target years ago. It's by Jakks, is "GameKey Ready", and also includes 1942. It survived the flood but I've never opened it to see what it's like. I think it's this entry in onmode-ky's list:

Missed this post the first time around -- see below. Not my complete collection -- lost about a dozen to a flood a couple years ago, and half a dozen others are MIA somewhere in a huge pile of unmarked moving boxes. But close enough at this point. I realized I'd never be a completist when they started doing the children's movie license stuff, so it's simultaneously incomplete and, in retrospect, excessive. That's the first plug-n-play I've been interested in since that last Pac-Man one. I'd be pretty surprised if they got Intellivision emulation up and running (unless the Intellivision Lives guys did an ARM port or something), so I just hope they find a way to do justice to the original controller, and not just replace it with a generic Famiclone-style pad again.