raindog
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Posts posted by raindog
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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.
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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.
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At least to get some new SuperCharger games out there. Cassettes can be had for nothing and even MP3 players are less than $6 dollars.
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.
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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.)
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The Atari 2600 is a permanent part of a home entertainment center.
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.)
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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.
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Without these two things it's already the greatest ever Donkey Kong 2600
FTFY.
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I look forward to seeing the disassembly.
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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.
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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.
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Andrew and I did get an official license from FSS to produce Boulder Dash for the Atari 2600.
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.
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if you get C&D'd, well might as well comply since you probably can't afford to fight the suit regardless of whether it has merit. Then quietly "leak" the project when you finish it anyway, har har!
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.
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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.
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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.
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That would be too costly as I have only 6 spare cycles left. The best I could do would be:
; Accumulator contains COLUP1 | ENA in bit 0 asl ; 2 sta ENAM1 ; 3
Even if you put the head of the hammer above the highest scanline Mario can jump? You'd just have to hit NUSIZ1 twice, once on the scanline where you start drawing the head, and again on the last scanline before Mario's highest jumping point.
I mean, you could also draw the head with playfield graphics since you're not doing sloped girders, but I figured the "missile as fake player" trick was fewer cycles.
Which doesn't solve the problem of what happens when the player actually gets the hammer, but right up to that point I'd think you'd be golden
Edit: I just realized I was still looking at iesposta's mockups, which have a shorter Mario and taller gaps between floors. But I'd also think that making the gaps between floors wider would be doable, without having looked at your source.
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It would probably be most fun to have a hammer. A T-shaped hammer is not possible, but maybe I could pick up iesposta's idea and just draw a stick (missile).
What if you started the missile in quad width and switched to double width after drawing the head? Something like this:
<pre> XX XXXX XXXX XXXX XX XX XX XX XX XX </pre>
(Edit: it seemed to me that there was a bit of the handle protruding from the top of the hammer in the arcade game, so I put it in here too. Sorry if my attempts at HTML are in vain.)
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No surprises. Hasbro hasn't shown much lenience when it comes to making games.
Maybe so, but TESS shows that Hasbro (then Milton Bradley) relinquished their Dark Tower trademark on August 17, 2002.
(Edit: I'm actually surprised Stephen King or his publisher didn't trademark the term when he did the series of books by that name. Nope, just Hasbro and some brewery.)
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By default, an Atari ROM is locked to a maximum of 4kbytes. What you are suggesting is putting a 4kb ROM on each separate cartridge and swapping them out as needed. DK VCS is already a 32kb ROM, with 8 individual 4kb banks.
We can build a special Melody that allows up to 128k ROM and 64k RAM.
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You sure can make a lot of cool levels if you do not have to follow the arcade.
Yes, you can.... the Super Game Boy port and D2K are proof of that.
You could always call it Congorilla Deluxe
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Of course, you could dedicate a whole 32KB cartridge to a single level, but then you would have to swap carts all the time. You would also lose your score count.
Looking forward to Super Donkey Kong: Harmony Edition
...for the hundred or so of us who actually have a Harmony.-
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This is sure to draw some strong opinions/arguments, but to re-iterate: the color difference will hardly be noticeable on a CRT anyway and IMO is greatly outweighed by the sloped girders that to me, defines the game.
I agree. The two-tone thing is spit and polish, a nice touch. The sloped girders are an important part of gameplay in the first level (in that some ladders take longer to climb than others) not to mention the reason for the opening animation.
It's Joe's game, though. We can express our opinions, but even without either effect on the girders, it's a tremendous achievement.
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Using the time-stamping above, sampled speech would become huge rather fast.
The big downside of that format, it will almost certainly not be possible to play them back on a real Atari 2600 due to their size.
Except for maybe some harmony-cart solutions etc.
I'm not aware of any actual songs on the 2600 that incorporate speech, even as demos (except for a couple of Atarivox demos, but emulating that is beyond the scope of Stella, let alone a VCS song player).
The Harmony cart seems like it could be a nice approach to writing an Atari 2600 chiptune jukebox, if there are enough memorable tunes to merit such a thing. Otherwise, there are always the original ROMs.
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In the end I'd suggest to dump all TIA writes as propsed already with the corresponding frame+cycle = 24 or 32 bit (clock?)cycle-exact timing.
That COULD be done automatically for title-tunes/demos AND manually for in-game tunes you want to dump.
The resulting files would be much larger though.
6 registers once per frame at least.
That's 360 Bytes per second WITHOUT the timing. My guess would be around ~2K/s.
That's why I think supercat's suggestion (dump each register's state every time it changes, with cycle count) makes the most sense. It's essentially run-length encoding. No input issues, no lost data due to sampling too infrequently, even advanced stuff like DPC and sample playback should work, and if there were some human-readable intermediate format, you could even edit it down to just the tunes or sound effects you're trying to get. It could be transpiled into assembly source, depending on how long it was, or maybe the player could be written to emulate only the audio parts of TIA, "decompressing" the dump and feeding the registers as necessary on each cycle. Not having it be 65xx code would mean that if a single note is being held for 10 seconds, it can generate something like "sleep 11900000" instead of loops within loops to deal with 8-bit counters.
Yes, SID files contain 65xx code, but in practice they're not the actual game images the music was taken from, or there would have been no need for PSID64. I'm pretty sure you can't take ballblazer.prg, rename it to .sid and play it in sidplay or whatever. (And if you did, it would probably be different every time you played it, anyway.)
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I don't think 480i creates a problem with running out of cycles, it just isn't that different than doing 30Hz flicker. If you're clever, maybe someone with a sharp eye can tell that you're displaying a slightly flickery 160x480 image rather than a slightly less flickery 160x240 image, but it just doesn't get you that much.
As for the other formats, the 2600 produces an NTSC (or PAL or SECAM) analog signal. HDTV is digital, at least in the US. Even if you have a monitor that'll take a 720i analog signal (which isn't a legal HDTV resolution, btw, but if it were, it would use half the bandwidth of 720p and less than half the bandwidth of 1080i) and a 2600 that's modded to produce it somehow, you'd have the same 16.67ms to produce 460800 pixels (one field of a 720i frame) that you currently have to produce 38400 pixels (one field of a 480i frame). And it's not like the TIA is going to magically get the ability to produce smaller pixels in the players, missiles, playfield or ball.
So it may be possible to produce such a signal for all I know, but forget about displaying anything useful, and forget about getting your game to work on a stock 2600.
As for simulating widescreen, the way the Wii did it was to compress everything horizontally so that when your HDTV stretches the image, it appears normal. I guess you could make a game with especially tall and narrow graphics if you meant for it to be viewed on a 16x9 screen, stretched. Or you could letterbox your game, have the HDTV zoom instead of stretching, and use the extra black space for more game logic. Either way, you don't get any extra cycles per scanline just because it's displayed wider. The TV will move on to the next scanline whether your kernel is ready or not.
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What makes a Supercharger game... a Supercharger game?
in Atari 2600 Programming
Posted · Edited by raindog
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.