raindog

This is a game that's already been designed, though, 30 years ago. It's not game design, per se, it's cramming an existing design into 128 bytes of RAM, 76 cycles per line, etc. Ballblazer on the 2600 is both a port and a demake. I agree that the most gratifying part of writing a 2600 game is getting the kernel going, which is why my own lame attempt at a Ballblazer clone never really went anywhere after that (I never even got as far as things like ball or rotofoil scaling). But there was no game design to do, and frankly, Ballblazer's actual gameplay is so basic that it was tedious to implement. Not hard, just tedious. Gameplay-wise, it's a tarted-up Pong variant where your paddle can move across the whole field and the goals move. It was way more fun as a tech demo than as a work-in-progress game. For me, the remaining big, interesting challenge in Ballblazer, after prematurely giving up on making it look like what Roland eventually did -- I was using cheats like pre-rendering 8 frames of playfield in POVray and resizing down to 40x50, minus the horizontal lines which I implemented with hand-computed lists of color swapping intervals, but it never got smooth enough for my liking and then a douchebag from this forum made an empty legal threat over Pac-Man which cemented my burnout -- was implementing the procedurally generated music with only 2 voices. I did like the solid, larger, partially anti-aliased playfield of the 32K version much better than the 4K version, but props to Roland for overcoming burnout and starting fresh.

I've gone down this rabbit hole... more than once. First you want authentic controllers, but they make USB versions of most of those now. Then emulation isn't good enough anymore, so you pull out the old behemoth or hit ebay. Then you miss the scanlines and color bleeding. (Or, for us children of the late '70s, the fuzzy black and white.) Then you miss the tinny mono sound. Then you miss the woodgrain contact paper on the side of your cheap old TV. Then you miss the controller being too big for your hands. Then you miss the feel of the carpeting under you as you sat crosslegged, miss the sounds and smells of your home as you once knew it. Then you want your parents back. That was where I stopped and went back to Stella.

That's okay, there's a Supercharger thread that's been hijacked to talk about how awesome Joe's game is, along with some rather misguided wishes that it were a Supercharger game. HOW HIGH CAN YOU GET? PRESS PLAY ON TAPE

If someone can show me a proof of concept in the form of a title screen plus the first level of a Donkey Kong that's as good as what Joe did, but fitting into a single Supercharger load, I will believe the "one load per level" idea is at least possible. Even if it is, though, I still think a Harmony/Melody solution would be able to reach more players and be a better experience for them, even if they consider using modern data storage or DPC+ to be "cheating". As others have noted, Supercharger RAM is slower to write to than other forms of expanded RAM, and even then, you still have only 6K for all of your game code plus at least one level of game data, a title screen if you want one, and whatever you want to do with the RAM. Meteroids/Suicide Mission is pretty much the only production example of the Supercharger RAM being put to good use, and that is a far, far simpler game than Donkey Kong. I look forward to seeing what you come up with.

Er, that's assuming that a single level of Joe's masterpiece could fit into the Supercharger's 6K. I don't think that's a given at all. Also, that limits you to a single level order, you have load times between levels and every time you start a game after having beaten the first level, and eventually you'll even have to rewind the tape mid-game. I still hope to see an epic Harmony-specific game someday that loads megs and megs of assets and level maps from the MicroSD card, the conclusion of the logical progression that started with the Supercharger and Pitfall 2. Given the size of the audience (smaller than that of the Supercharger) and the effort that would require, it seems unlikely to be more than a thought experiment. But it'd be fun to have, say, a demake of Knytt Underground, the enormous non-scrolling adventure platformer which itself is kind of like the conclusion of the logical progression that began with Pitfall.

Looks pretty sweet... better than Atari's own reboots from the last 20 years, certainly. If you ever release it, it'll give me an excuse to try Virtual Jaguar. Now that hi-def is standard, this video reminds me I've been wanting to try a vector game again, like Geometry Wars but more spare, probably something between Space Duel and what I see in the video above. Probably for Android. My very first non-text-based game was an attempt at Lunar Lander for the C64 in 1983, but 320x200 was just not enough to make it look good. Sure, there's Vectrex, but not many people have those and Vectrex emulation seems to have mostly fallen by the wayside in recent years.

Wow, you've covered two out of my five childhood video game systems now. (hope that works outside the forum...) The other ones (Colecovision, Vectrex, Odyssey 1) are either well-covered or too primitive to emulate or (in the case of Odyssey 1) do much homebrew for anyway.

And for those of us willing to hang on to our 70-pound vacuum tubes, that's a viable option. As for me, in another couple months the only CRT we're going to have in the house will be the Vectrex. Too bad no one ever mass-produced an all-in-one 9-inch TV with a 2600 built in, or I'd probably have one of those in the junk room office too.

I would agree, except that the SGANB CD worked fine on the same MP3 CD player on which the MP3s failed, as did burning an audio CD of my own ROMs converted using makewav. (Also, I was using the CC, not the Supercharger.) But it doesn't surprise me that AAC would fare significantly better.

Unfortunately, as I learned when using my Cuttle Cart with several different mp3 players to get every Atari game and demo on one disc or SD card, even the highest quality MP3 compression settings still distort the audio enough to cause the load to fail most of the time. If the $6 mp3 players will play lossless audio, though, that's a fun way to distribute games... at least to Supercharger and CC owners. Even sending a whole MP3 player out is probably cheaper than getting a cartridge made. But most of your users will need a cartridge or ROM image.

Yeah, having already bought a $100 consumer-grade TBC to make my AV-modded 2600 (which itself was fairly expensive) work with my last CRT, I have no intention of dropping more than I spent on the PS3 to move Atari into the digital age. On the other hand, a computer the size of a pack of gum that hooks up to the TV, runs Stella like a champ and even accepts my USB Atari joystick is about 40 bucks, and I have one of those already. (Haven't tried it with the Atarivox yet, admittedly, and I don't know where my USB spinner went, so paddle games are not as awesome as they were on the real thing... but I'm thinking DK VCS is.)

At least here in the US, the DS lasted almost 9 years. I remember waiting in my car on an equally rainy Sunday morning in November 2004 for GameStop to open so I could claim my preorder (and then going back a few hours later when the one they gave me had a broken touch screen). Sad to see it go, as I spent well over a grand on DS games, but I moved on about 4 years ago when I got my first smartphone. Never did spring for the DSi, XL, or either version of the 3DS.

I used to believe that. I'll believe it again when I start seeing HDMI-modded Atari 2600s. Till then, it's as much a part of my "home entertainment center" as Dragon's Lair or the ZX Spectrum... to be experienced largely through emulation. (And the irony of that statement having appeared in an ad promoting the 2600 version of Pac-Man is delicious.)

Always nice to see more O2 homebrew! Can't try it at the moment since o2em is messed up on my system, but I look forward to seeing what you've done so far.

To change the sampling rate in Audacity you just choose Tracks, Resample from the menu, and enter a number. But don't do that unless it turns out you have to, because you'll lose quality if the new number is lower, or use more disk space for no better quality if it's higher. Audacity will also convert mono to stereo (you can even add a little artificial separation to simulate real stereo) and overlay tracks. I can't say I've ever done a 14 hour project in it, so you may run into its limitations, whatever they may be, but I've done 2-3 hour projects with it and things were still smooth.

At uncompressed CD quality which is 44.1KHz/16-bit stereo, 8.5gb (which would be a dual-layer DVD) is about 14 hours of PCM audio. If you use DVD-Audio lossless compression you should be able to increase that by 40-50%. If you're able to use AC3 compression (standard DVD-Video compression) at a decent 192kbps, you can get upward of 90 hours on there, though I don't know if you have to include a dummy video track which would eat some space. I don't think either DVD format, video or audio, will handle 32-bit float audio data or 8KHz audio. That's some high-resolution sampling for rather low-quality audio (highest frequency that can be represented is 4KHz). You'll probably have to convert to a different format before making a DVD, regardless of which codec you use. If you're using Audacity, I assume you're working in stereo or mono and not, say, 5.1 surround sound, which would take much more space. (I used to make CDs with 20 hours of heavily compressed FM-quality music for my car stereo all the time, so I've thought a lot about this stuff.)

FTFY.

I look forward to seeing the disassembly.

Yeah, this is the first I've heard of a Sound Forge requirement for PSX homebrew. I haven't done any PSX development myself, but I've done music projects with upward of 30 tracks using Audacity with no problem. It's the bread and butter of audio editing.

So now we've gone from whether it's legal to create homebrew games for long-discontinued consoles, to whether knockoff games are ethical, to a piracy discussion? I'm done.

I've made my living creating software too. Have been for 24 years now, 27 if you count Commodore shareware funding my teenage porn habit as "a living". Making a clone of someone else's software isn't stealing their lawn furniture. It's taking a picture of their lawn furniture and saying "Check out my new lawn furniture!" It's a dick move if they're still trying to make money from it, could infringe their rights in some ways you mentioned and others you didn't, but it's never been the same thing as taking a physical object from someone, and it never will be. The butthurt might feel the same, but it's just butthurt. If you can't make a living selling something that can be copied, it's time to find another line of work. I sell a service, not a product, myself. As for the respect angle, you're talking to fans of a console where well over 90% of the games were clones of something else, usually poorly done, and whose manufacturer sued a competitor whose innovative variation on the maze genre was better than their own crappy officially licensed Pac-Man port, rather than competing on quality. The respect ship sailed 30 years ago. I genuinely wouldn't mind if Nintendo went out of business tomorrow, their trademarks diluted to nothingness, their assets and legal teams somehow vaporizing, because it'd free up thousands of developers who have been dying to do their own take on Mario or Zelda but were afraid of getting sued. Most would be crap, but I can guarantee I'd like some of them better than Skyward Sword or NSMB. We'll never know, though, because trademarks are forever if maintained, and copyright effectively is too. Maybe for you, the remix/demake culture is abusive or morally corrupt. To me, copyright as currently constructed is what's been corrupted. But the ones who corrupted it are the ones with the lawyers, and can bankrupt someone who steps on their toes even if a court finds there's been no harm done. Trademarks are abused by the holders about as much as Chinatown electronics sellers; just ask the owners of any restaurant that had "McDonald" or "MacDonald" in the name, even the ones that existed before 1955. And that's why we have these discussions about legality, not ethics. None of which is even on-topic because the OP asked if he needs "permission from the companies that manufactured retro consoles" to make homebrews for them.

There have been officially sanctioned remakes of other games, too (like Jumpman), but I thought Cybearg was talking about asking the manufacturers of discontinued consoles for permission, not the owners of individual game trademarks.

The situations where fan projects get C&D'd and subsequently disappear are perhaps the single best example of why it's important to put your source code out there *before* your project receives wide notice. Even if you can't finish it, perhaps someone else in a more flexible jurisdiction can.

While I'm not a lawyer (I don't think anyone here is), I'm pretty sure Atari sued Activision in 1980 because they'd made third-party games for the 2600, but were unsuccessful. So Atari games should be legal, though plenty of things homebrewers do probably infringe trademarks and/or copyrights in other ways. From the NES on, though, console makers have used DRM (the lockout chip on the NES, code signing on the 7800 and most other consoles up to the present day) to prevent third-party developers from releasing games without getting permission and paying a cut. Atari (well, Tengen) got sued by Nintendo for releasing unlicensed NES games, and lost. I'm not aware of any console maker suing anyone over systems they no longer sell, though. Sites like AtariAge exist because it's widely considered safe legally. Anyone can sue you for anything whether they really have a case or not -- as I discovered, legal threats don't have to come from the console makers, there are plenty of opportunistic douchebags out there, a few of whom are AtariAge users -- but at some point you have to decide what level of risk is acceptable to you to avoid being paralyzed by fear.

Wow, nice find. I'd be shocked if we still have the inspection card intact (I didn't even see the Odyssey for a period of 37 years after my dad died, but inherited it when my mom died and my stepdad sold the house... pretty sure at least the overlays are missing), but next time I'm out in the garage I'm gonna have to look.