raindog

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.

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.)

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.)

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/165516-whats-the-highest-settings-for-batarimelody-cart/#entry2044591

Yes, you can.... the Super Game Boy port and D2K are proof of that. You could always call it Congorilla Deluxe

Looking forward to Super Donkey Kong: Harmony Edition ...for the hundred or so of us who actually have a Harmony.

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.

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.

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.)

Sounds awesome! Doesn't run so well under wine. Any chance we'll see the sources?

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.

Yeah, this is pretty clearly one of those "different people's brains are different" debates, which is why I left it alone after my response. I understand campaigning for something that seems blindingly obvious to me but makes no sense to 90% of the world. I do it all the time. When I play games, the kind that are designed to be played for more than 5 minutes at a clip, I want blue skies, little to no violence, a compelling story, a relaxed pace that allows me to explore a world I can get to know and revisit at my leisure, and puzzles that are hard enough to make me want to look up hints on forums -- which can exist only because the same puzzles are in the same places in everyone's game. I strongly dislike brown and gray, head shots, blood spatter, "press X to not die", twitch timing, and randomization to keep me on my toes. I don't want to game on my toes. I want to game on my ass. I don't want to pretend I'm somewhere that's uglier than my living room. I want paradise. I don't want to engage enemies or find cover. I want to be transported to another fully realized place that I can go back to again and again. I don't want the game to be different when I go back any more than I want the cabin we rent up the road from Funspot to be different when we go back, or the place we stay on the cape. (If you've played even the demo, you can see why Fez is my favorite game of this generation, if not all time. It does have a random component, by the way. Black holes randomly appear when you go into some levels. They irritate me. I keep exiting and re-entering until they go away, even reloading if I have to.) And everything about what I like in games is a rarity now, except for everyone sharing a common experience and hints on forums. For the casual games I play standing in a queue, my definition of which includes pretty much all console and arcade games before the release of the first Zelda, I like bright colors on a dark background, extremely tight and responsive controls, and patterns I can memorize because my reflexes aren't good enough for Rip-Off or Super Hexagon. Sadly, I'm not 13 anymore, though on the plus side, I do have Maker's Mark, leather bars and some disposable income now.

And as for being led around on a chain, don't knock it 'til you've tried it. Er, when was this dinner, again?

Last year, Fez gave me joy and I thought Spelunky was an enormously overrated hunk of mindless crap. I know that playing yet another Roguelike is probably a really fun thing for you based on your name and the articles you write, but some of us prefer Pac-Man over Ms. Pac-Man *because* of the patterns, and some of us like a finite number of finely crafted puzzles better than just more of the same algorithm. I played Fez for close to a hundred hours, obsessed with completing it. Same for Xenoblade (over 100 hours and only at about the halfway point) and about five different Zelda games. I've played through Ocarina of Time at least ten times, just as I read books by Greg Bear and Neal Stephenson over and over when I was younger even though they didn't, to my recollection, randomize the story every time I read them. Just watched Hedwig and the Angry Inch last week for the umpteenth time. Spoiler alert... after a few dozen playthroughs she still gets it cut off. Sometimes I like to change it up by watching the deleted scenes on the DVD, or putting on the cast recording in the car instead of the movie soundtrack, but even in a film with a narrative as loose as that, it's the same every time and I still love it. I like the studio versions of Phish songs better than the live ones. Seriously. I've heard improv that I've liked, but more often than not it's a poor excuse for composition to my ears. There's never been a game with significant parts of its structure generated randomly that has held my attention that long. Knowing there's no end just means I play until the game starts repeating itself (no new items, enemies, environmental puzzles or whatever) or I figure out the algorithm by which it invents new things. And waking up for the first time in Kokiri Forest only to discover it's a different Kokiri Forest than the last ten times I played, and the gameplay and story are the same but I have to internalize the entire game world from scratch again, would be more like the video game equivalent of occupational therapy than "joy" to me. I also like pushing the boundaries of the game rules, finding deliberately provoked glitches (like falling out of the map in Quantum Conundrum if you use slow motion to back through a one-way door as it's closing, or jumping up into the program code in Mountain King) to be endlessly entertaining. Not much fun discovering glitches if you can't reproduce them because the map changed, though. I can imagine someone with eidetic memory not being able to derive joy from a second playthrough of a well-designed scripted game with puzzles depending on a particular layout of the map, but my memory is far from photographic, and I think that's true of most people. Randomly generated games are the Jersey Shore of video games. They're disposable entertainment that's cheap to make, shallow as hell, and not for me. Not to hijack theloon's thread or anything. But this discussion will probably live on longer than his dinner. Edit: by "articles you write" I guess I mean "articles you wrote", since bringing them up from my history gave me a 404. I've watched my site's pagerank slowly sink over the last decade as real life got in the way of new posts, but I can't even imagine deleting my old stuff because it reduces my mean popularity (per the message on your 404 page). So I guess this whole debate is just one of those "brains wired differently" things.

I sent a PM after reading the development thread, but as long as everyone's registering their interest here, so am I. (As both a developer and a user.) The last decade has done a number on my sense of self in much the same way as happened to Glenn, but I'm working on reclaiming my identity and part of that is coding VCS games. I had been experimenting with some audio tricks that I hoped would allow crude (Intellivision Baseball level) speech without needing to blank the screen or use up a bunch of each scanline, without getting very far. Widespread availability of Atarivoxen would make that a moot point.

The 100% arcade accuracy ship has sailed, and continues to sail. Its name is MAME. You can even play D2K in it. In these situations, I ask myself "what would an Atari/Coleco/Nintendo developer in 1982 have done with more time and far greater available resources?" and I think the answer is that they would have fixed that bug and made the game never end. Certainly, they would have striven for pixel accuracy in graphics and gameplay long before the simulation of bugs in the original, knowing that they'd inevitably introduce their own bugs anyway. I don't know if it's the right answer, but it's an authentic one.

Integer overflows. It's kind of an important difference.

Well, I guess it would be better than having the bonus counter roll over so you have only a few seconds to get to the top, which I seem to remember is what the arcade game's "kill screen" is like. But after only 10 levels? I think it'd be cooler to make a Pac-Man style impossible level by using the program code as data somehow. But a proper ending would be good too.

Yeah, there were no SNES games that used only the SUperFX chip and not the 65c816 as far as I know. I mean, someone would have done it in the 80s if it were feasible and the crash hadn't happened, but still.

I think with stuff like GameStick becoming available for under $100, in a year or two we might see another wave of plug-and-plays with HDMI, a wireless stick, and an Android-based emulator and/or licensed games. You can roll your own for about 50 bucks right now, but not with an arcade stick or any sort of legitimacy. If there is another wave, I doubt it'll succeed... 20-25 years is usually the sweet spot for nostalgia. Space Invaders turns 40 in about 4 years. It's no longer the game today's kids' parents played.... it's becoming the game their grandparents played. But who knows, those Victrola-style CD players were doing pretty well for a while there. Still hoping to get one more great Namco-collection-on-a-stick, though.

Looks cool, but here's something weird... at least on Stella, the sticks are reversed from the original Wizard of Wor. Instead of moving the P0 stick to start the game, I have to move the P1 stick.

You're welcome I'm glad you went on to code hacking, though. I often regretted making Hack-o-matic, though I know if I hadn't, someone else would have. Anyway, I remember Adventure Plus and enjoyed it. Looks like it was 10 years for me last month. I consider AtariAge a continuation of the [stella] list, though, and I was on that several years earlier. If the date on my profile is accurate, I actually joined AtariAge after I'd stopped doing Atari projects... which sounds a little off. But I still prefer mailing lists over web fora (showing my age, I know, but mailing lists give me infinite archiving and more control over UI), so maybe I was a holdout.

Ripping the ROM out of the Wii game and passing it around the Internet is, though, and people have done that. That's what I meant by "out there".

Well, the recent Wii/3DS version with the pie factory is out there too... and is about as legal. But the arcade version (and D2K) are out there for MAME, and have been for at least 16 years. So the slightly-more-complete NES version is a curiosity, much like the slightly-more-complete ADAM version of Colecovision Donkey Kong. This, however, is a feat.

Weirdly enough, even though I had a Colecovision and no Atari, I played the Atari port more because most of my friends had 2600s. It wasn't as good as the "real thing", but it was free (well, for me) and we played the hell out of it. It'll be awesome to have a version of Donkey Kong for the 2600 that's more enjoyable than the Colecovision one, and the way things are going, I think that may actually happen here. Even the NES version didn't have the cement factory level.