raindog

Yeah, I really wouldn't want you to change things, anyway. Glad to see others haven't been discouraged, and for bB that other one is looking pretty impressive, but what you've done is superb.

Donkey Kong is different than Pac-Man, though. The only screen where it matters whether you can see the top is the third one, and in this version, the springs always come down in the same location. I think this is an excellent solution to the eternal "most arcade games are portrait mode" porting problem.

Dead? More like complete, I think. Surprised a cartridge was never made, since this has to be close to the best VCS platformer ever made (and, admittedly, too difficult for me to get through).

Oh, I misunderstood what he was saying, thought he was talking about the Galaxian ship they used for one of the fruits in the original game.

You'd be making some sacrifices (I think you'd need more frames of animation for the bugs to look right, and you'd be stuck with a single color) but the graphics hack itself should be pretty easy... fire up one of the Hack-o-matics and go for it!

What a beautiful sight that is... wish we had that kind of retro gaming convention here on the east coast. My 1702 had a 30-year life, serving as a monitor for two C64s, a C128, Amiga, NES, Genesis, two different Famiclones, Gamecube and Wii until my stepdad sold my mom's house this past spring. (Maybe it's still going somewhere else; I have no idea what he did with the stuff I left behind.) D.K. VCS has to have been the belle of that ball.

I agree, but I (and apparently Nukey, and GCC long before either of us) was never able to come up with anything better using the VCS' dozen or so "voices" (really distortion patterns). Can you point out a sound in an existing VCS game that's closer to the arcade Pac-Man dot eating noise?

I really don't think downloading games I've bought and then lost to hardware failure counts as piracy. Nintendo would, but then, Nintendo thinks it's acceptable to make customers forfeit downloadable games (and unspent points, for that matter) when their hardware fails, which I consider fraudulent. I've also downloaded every one of the 60+ DS games I've bought, to include on the flash cartridge I bought for homebrew , and have re-downloaded every arcade ROM that came with each of the Microsoft Arcade series and my Hanaho stick's companion CD, as MAME versions required new formats. There's obviously a pretty big grey area, or I wouldn't be able to download hundreds of VCS roms right here at AtariAge. I'm certainly not going to put up a ROM site or anything, other than what I already have with my hacks (also technically piracy, by the way, but knock on wood, only one threat in 14 years and it was a crank) and demos. As someone whose sexuality was illegal in many parts of my country including my home state until well into my adulthood, I'm able to differentiate between law, ethics, and what's practical. It's a valuable survival skill.

Oops, I edited my last one due to premature posting and the forum for once didn't tell me there was a new post before I submitted it again. I have a classic controller. It's okay, but I ended up getting an Xbox (original) to Wiimote adapter to play Xenoblade with. I can't imagine why someone would recommend a classic controller over an Xbox 360 or PS3 controller. It's missing half a dozen buttons, clickable sticks and analog triggers, and is the only video game controller I've ever owned with a cord coming out of the bottom. I even prefer the Wavebird. We spent around $200 on the VC and Wiiware, and when our launch-day Wii died out of warranty and we bought a replacement, we found we couldn't transfer any of it over. (Yes, twerps on forums have informed me I could have just sent them both to Japan or wherever. I shouldn't have to jump through hoops to play games I've bought, especially when I don't have to jump through those hoops to play illegal copies of them from the interwebs.) Nintendo will never get another dime out of us for intangible goods until they fix that policy, which is still in place on the Wii U. I look forward to playing the games we bought again when we build a gaming PC sometime this winter, install Dolphin and hit the torrents. (Of course, I can already play all the VC games on the Android stick, and with my choice of controllers at that.) At least we're talking about an on-topic company now.

I normally use emulators with an Xbox 360 controller, since they're a superset of every currently emulatable (by my hardware) system's controller. So, not too afraid of buttons here. My biggest complaint with the Wiimote is that it didn't have enough inputs and developers porting games were often forced to map button presses on the PS3/360 to borderline-obscene motions on the Wiimote. (I'm concerned that the same will be true of the new Steam controller, except it'll be touch gestures instead of shakes.) But I do also have a USB Atari joystick for Stella, for when a D-pad or analog stick won't do, and a Hanaho arcade stick with 14 buttons and 2 sticks that weighs like 20 pounds. As far as CRTs go, we'll be recycling three of them in the next month or two, and our last one will be replaced before the winter's over. As I said on the "In search of Scanlines" thread, purism in the name of nostalgia is a rabbit hole that leads, at least for me, to unhealthy places. Which is why I'm so happy to see demake remakes like this one. A purist would either play the crappy Coleco version on a heavy sixer and an early '80s vintage television with antenna terminals and a switchbox, or get a 1981 Donkey Kong cabinet. My 47" LED-backlit LCD, Stella with phosphor effect enabled, and an Xbox controller are just fine. (So is MAME, when I want the original or D2K.)

I can think of at least one thing... a SNES game played on my Android stick over HDMI. If I had a physical SNES (have never even touched one, so no nostalgia) I would totally be getting it out right now for a photographic comparison.

Well, that's pretty open-ended. Here are some possibilities: A 128-color, flicker-free 11x200 (or less) display (yes, that's 11 as in ten plus one -- the best you can do if you brute-force LDA/STA color values to change the background color and ignore the players/missiles/playfield altogether), a slightly flickery 8256-color ~23x200 display, a seizure-inducing 96x200 flickerfest with CGA colors and solid bars on the sides, a shimmery 96x200 display that's close to monochrome (striped at best) and has bars on the sides, a rock-solid 40x200 full-screen monochrome display, a shimmery 40x200 full-screen display with CGA colors, a seizure-inducing 40x200 full-screen display with 10 colors... those are the easy ones, off the top of my head, but your vertical resolution would have to be reduced a lot to get a good-sized loop into 32k, especially with the first two techniques. Monochrome literally means you get 2 colors, the background and the foreground. 128 colors is the full 2600 palette. 10 colors is the unique combination of 4 colors (i.e., 15Hz flicker). CGA colors are the unique combination of 2 sets of 2 colors with 30Hz flicker (if you start with red, green, blue and black, you get one of the two CGA color palettes[*], which was dark red, dark green, cyan and magenta), or 15Hz if you're doing the 96 pixel thing. 8256 colors is what you theoretically get when you have the full VCS palette on 30Hz flicker and every other frame horizontally offset by half a "pixel" (unique combinations of two out of 128 colors). With any of the non-monochrome techniques, anything with a lot of camera movement will probably dissolve into a hash of pixels since each frame of video is displayed across 2 or 4 frames displayed by the 2600. In other words, there are a lot of options, but probably not really a way to do something like "Dragon's Lair". Though I bet it would be funny to do a 20x20, 8256-color Dragon's Lair on the Harmony with each new section loaded from the SD card. The blank screens during the load time would be a tip of the hat to the authentic Dragon's Lair arcade experience, with the laserdisc players needing a few seconds to seek between scenes on a good day. I've expressed opinions on both sides of this debate, and I think both are valid. I consider it cheating if your C64 demo requires a 20Mhz processor and a hard disk, but the 2600 is different because the hardware is the hardware and all we have access to is the cartridge slot and controller ports. Pitfall II was not cheating in my book; neither was Mountain King or any of the other games with extra RAM. So, the Harmony isn't cheating either, but it's a different ballgame. I see the value (and challenge) in 2K and 4K demos, and in "let's see how far we can push this" Harmony projects (obviously, since I own one). In addition to the challenge factor, there's the "how many people will ever be able to play this on real hardware?" factor; there are several orders of magnitude more 2600 owners who don't have a Harmony cart or even a Supercharger than those who do. But it's the coder's choice, not the would-be audience's. If I can do something in 4K, that's my preference, but oh, the toys we have now. (And that applies to development tools, coding techniques and even the community, not just exotic hardware.) Edit: *no, that wasn't one of the CGA palettes, it just looked like one when I visualized it, and there were apparently more than two CGA palettes.

Exactly. There are few people trying to make new, original games for the VCS, as you describe. (Most who are do so with Batari Basic, and rarely tread new ground.) The challenge is to see how much gameplay from more powerful hardware you can replicate on the VCS. The only psychology involved is recapturing nostalgia for your players, as evidenced by the vety thread upon which we're having this conversation. We're not oohing and aahing over the character development. We're just happy to have our childhoods un-raped by an amazing coder. There are exceptions -- I know I mentioned Panky recently, either here or on another thread -- but most of us have been doing demakes of one kind or another. Look at the first page of 2600 homebrews in Al's store. Even with the ever-looming threat of copyright smackdown, we have a minigame collection full of mini-demakes, a demake, a sort-of original game, a demake, a remake of one of my demos, a remake of a calculator game, an original, an original, a Mario clone with the graphics and name changed soon enough for Nintendo to not send a nastygram, and another remake. Maybe 30% original games, 20% demo-ish stuff and 50% "just for the challenge of it" ports and clones. The "replayability" and "good level design" and "character design" and even the colors and storyline (if any) come from the source material. The other things you mention -- sound/video sync, progression, flow of activity -- are all present in demos. Demo coding is all about pushing hardware to its limits, as VCS coders do -- some C64 techniques actually remind me of what we have to do in Atari kernels -- and cramming code into a tight space, and doing mathematical calculations that shouldn't be possible with so few cycles to play with, but are, due to clever techniques along the lines of what makes Ballblazer possible on the VCS now. Even when they move more into game design territory, it's still the demo scene. Ever see the C64 game MOOD? It's a 3D first-person shooter. That's as crazy to do on the 1MHz C64 as Ballblazer is to do on the 2600, and it came from where? The demo scene. The company that just released GTA V started out as just some guys doing Amiga demos, one of which literally became the game Menace. Their second game, Blood Money, was more interesting for its opening demo than the gameplay itself. There is definitely more to game design than writing a demo. But what most of us here are doing is not game design. It's clever code.

This is how I've always seen 2600 homebrew, like a demo scene unto itself. It's just a standardized virtual machine with a mature set of tools available for it, ton of interesting quirks to exploit and a widely available hardware implementation. And the results are usually a lot cooler than, say, Wolfenstein in 5K of Javascript. I look forward to getting my hands on the source, but what you've done to date stands on its own.

I agree in general, but who's "we"?

Well, you can still download Princess Rescue even though it's been removed from the store, and to the left here you can see the label I made, which has been downloadable for free from my website for 14 years, for my ambiguously named Pac-Man hack from which I've never technically seen a penny, so I'd say yeah, "less wrath". Not to be confused with "no wrath", though.

I've never played a Castlevania game, but I did beat Pitfall numerous times before I even had a computer. And that was just at friends' and relatives' houses when I had the opportunity, since we were a Magnavox house. Funny, that's where 3D Dot Game Heroes is for me right now. All I have is the final tower, which (like some Zelda games) retreads some earlier boss battles before a much harder final boss that my girl (who's generally better at combat than me) hasn't been able to beat yet.

I can't speak for Stardust, but I already had a C64 by the time my little brother got the NES, thought consoles were kid stuff by then (I was 16, and spending more time downloading Macpaint pr0n at 300 baud than playing games), and apart from a little bit of the Mario stuff I never played any Nintendo console games until buying the Gamecube in 2002. My only experience with the original Zelda was on the Zelda Collection disc on the Gamecube, and since then in emulators. I played it enough to realize what was happening in 3D Dot Game Heroes where I'd lose half a heart and my sword lost its power, but I had no idea what was going on. Ocarina of Time went too far in the other direction with Navi's constant interruptions, but it's still my favorite game, and knowing how to play is a part of that. Unless someone actually remade the original with some of the tutorials and stuff we find in modern games, I'll probably never get through it unless I just bring up a walkthrough when I start playing. It isn't that I'm especially dense, but the days when I could, say, spend several entire weekends in a row at a friend's house finding the easter egg in Adventure based on a vaguely-worded rumor are far, far behind me. Mario has the accessibility advantage in that we've been playing "just keep running to the right and jumping over stuff" games since Pitfall.

I bet you could call it "Tank" and claim it was an arcade port, though.

There are so many conspiracy theories that have recently turned out to be true and actually have an impact on our day-to-day lives today that it hardly seems productive to resurrect a 50-year-old one with a dash of crazy.

Oh, believe me, it's readily available elsewhere. (The copies on Youtube were pirated, of course, so I assume you're not just referring to legitimate sources.) Pulling something popular off of Youtube is the surest way to drive people to the darker corners of the net. And of course that tiki-faced douchebag is going to keep making pirate Atari carts. I suspect it's all he has left.

I'm more sad that I'll probably never see a cartridge of D.K. VCS now, though the D2K guys don't seem to be having any issues. Ah, well, at least there's the Harmony. You're conflating copyright with trademark, which is a common Internet mistake. Copyright protection is not "use it or lose it". Trademark is, but since PR wasn't using the Mario name or logo and you can't trademark music, trademark wasn't involved in this case. It was just a legal department being a legal department, and distribution for money always attracts more attention than free distribution (though that hasn't helped a lot of the fan-made Zelda tributes). Nintendo is a very litigious company, as witnessed by their Youtube takedowns of reviews by people and sites who are too small to have legal teams. That we as a culture haven't already kicked Nintendo to the curb is a statement about the quality of their work. That said, it's been my experience that making homebrew to correct missing and poorly-ported games on our favorite systems is always a risk, in that you might attract the attention of not only the companies who hold the copyrights and trademarks in question, but also parasites who pretend to and who have a bigger legal budget than you. You suggest making a "tribute" that doesn't involve the name or characters. The only such example I can think of that I consider any good was "3D Dot Game Heroes", and even that's mainly decent because of its parody elements and design conceit. And I'm an outlier for even liking that game; most people passed it up. Okay, and also Zork.

He could always stick a picture of a dumb tiki face that you want to punch on the label, for plausible deniability.

I don't think any of the things you suggested are "fantasyland" at all. They just require the same person to have enough interest in Raiders to make the changes, the knowledge of VCS coding to make it happen, and the free time necessary to execute. It may seem like a long shot, but that's what making a decent Pac-Man seemed like to me when I started my own hack project 14 years ago, for example, and what other people have done with it in the years since I burned out go far beyond what I thought possible. What you've done so far looks good, what I've been able to see of it -- I still have no idea how to get past the second screen without dying, and the game seems to mix "up is north, down is south, you're viewing it isometrically" and "up is up, down is down, you're viewing it as a cutaway" willy-nilly. I don't think you'll find the boulder and whip easily because just the way they drew the whip makes me think it's a missile being drawn by staggering its horizontal position, and the boulder looks like something similar is going on, maybe drawing it mostly with playfield and using the missile(s) to make the edges jagged.

You might be able to edit both the sprite and level data using something like Hack-o-Matic, depending on how HSW and company stored it originally. That was how I got my start, then started playing with disassemblers to figure out where the colors and stuff were stored so I could hack those too. If by "jazz up" you mean things like adding gradients to simulate shadow and things like that, you'll be messing with the kernel, but you don't really need a VCS 101 class to learn that every line of graphics is displayed in real time by your code, every opcode (command for the CPU to run) costs a number of cycles and you have 76 cycles to play with per line (or you won't even get a usable image on screen). You'll need to learn how to reassemble code after tweaking it, which is (usually) a lot easier than writing it from scratch. More substantive changes like adding rooms, showing the whip or adding enemies who shoot back will require more substantive code and possibly a bigger ROM size. I never played Raiders back in the day (not being a fan of the movies) but it's an impressive game with a lot going on for an 8K ROM, one of the few Atari games that benefits from using an Xbox controller (mapping both sticks and multiple buttons) when playing in Stella. If you achieve the things you mentioned, you'll automatically become one of the better homebrew coders out there.