Differences between Homebrew and Comercial Game Developers?

[Differences between Homebrew and Comercial Game Developers?]

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.

[Differences between Homebrew and Comercial Game Developers?]

And as for being led around on a chain, don't knock it 'til you've tried it.

 

Er, when was this dinner, again?

[Differences between Homebrew and Comercial Game Developers?]

"Why do most professional game developers seem to be afraid of controlled randomness, replayability, and freedom? Is it possible that most of you are manipulative obsessive control freaks who want to make people do exactly what you want in the way that you want it done as if they are your own personal dancing monkeys that you lead around on a chain? Instead of focusing on how you can get your rocks off by making people jump through flaming hoops in a torturous world of your creation, how about focusing on how you can give players joy?"

 

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.

 

[AtariVox rev2]

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.

[D.K. VCS]

I'd say it's more for purists who want to see as close to 100% arcade accuracy.

 

I count myself among them, since I'll never be able to afford all of these original Arcade Cabinets at home.

 

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.

[D.K. VCS]

Pacman and Donkey Kong arcade games both failed due to buffer overflows.

 

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

[D.K. VCS]

That's an interesting point. Should the game go on forever, or should it end at some point, maybe when reaching level 10? I could make a special Game Over screen with Kong upside down.

 

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.

[D.K. VCS]

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.

[Comprehensive Plug-and-Play Listing]

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.

[Wizard of Wor 2: The Arena]

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.

[10 Years of Hacking]

I admit it's a bit self serving (my apologies), but I thought it'd be fun to repost all of my old hacks from years ago as most people probably don't search back to the early days of the hacks forum. I remember being excited when the original Hack-O-Matic came out (thanks Rob Kudla!)

 

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.

[D.K. VCS]

Nothing illegal about the DK Pie Factory game ROM. Nintendo programmed it for release on virtual console.

 

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".

[D.K. VCS]

That has been corrected in Donkey Kong Pie Factory available at Retrozone. Game has all 4 arcade levels but is missing the intermission screens.

 

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.

[D.K. VCS]

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.

[Has anyone attempted to program Rogue for the 2600?]

Someone was working on a Robot Finds Kitten port about 10 years ago. I don't remember how far he got, but if RFK is possible, Rogue (or Nethack, or Moria) should be, albeit with some extra RAM unless you're gonna have the same dungeon every time.

 

I like the 32x16 or 32x20 text idea. But there have been Nethack ports that used custom character sets to make monsters, and since you have to create a character set regardless, you could always do that. It's not like you have to animate them or anything. It'll be hard in the heat of battle to distinguish between H and M, but ports can take liberties.

 

Venture, Adventure, and other Atari dungeon-crawlers aren't really roguelikes because the dungeons have the same layout every time. I wouldn't know how to begin to create dungeons algorithmically on the VCS.

 

Whatever you do, it can't be as bad a play experience as the guy back in my college days who tried to play Nethack on a teletype.

[D.K. VCS]

No, that would be far too complex. I'll have to reuse the graphics data that is already there. Adding new graphics costs a lot of memory, a new level map only a few bytes. Maybe, I'll add a few pipes for fun . Maybe! Just thinking out loud.

 

 

Very cute!

 

I think all of D2K's graphics (the arcade hack, not the INTV remake) were actually repurposed somehow from the original DK ROMs, if I remember the writeup correctly. But something original and unique to the VCS version might be even better!

[D.K. VCS]

For people who don't like the scrolling, it may help to know that if I have some memory left when the game is finished (not unlikely, I currently have more than a bank free) I'm going to use the available data to build a very high pitfall-esque bonus level.

 

Awesome! One of the new levels from D2K, or have you already thought of something new?

[Which Vectrex Multicart?]

I got one of the 72-in-1 with no case when it seemed impossible to find a Sean Kelly one and before Richard made the VecMulti. I very rarely used it, because its method of game selection was a set of jumpers. I like on-screen menus, personally. More importantly, though, I like playing new homebrews, and VecMulti is my only option for doing that on a real Vectrex.

[Anyone think Ballblazer is possible on the 2600?]

True all this is but the ARM is almost like alien sci fi tech that didn't exist back in the day. Maybe if you had a time machine.

 

Well, ARM chips (and micros based on them) were around years before Atari stopped releasing 2600 games. It's just that an ARM CPU cost far more than an Atari console, much less a cartridge.

 

Of course, the same could also have been said of the 6K of RAM in the Supercharger, or the DPC... in 1977.

 

I'll be happy to buy Ballblazer even on a Melody cart (or play the ROM on my Harmony). It'll be an amazing demo of the Atari for the rare occurrences that I have someone over who would understand what a big deal it is. But all this talk about it makes me wonder if my old "pre-render as much as I can" strategy would make a more smoothly-animated version of my original playfield-based demo workable as, say, a Supercharger game. It could never be as nice as Roland's, but it'd give the purists something to play.

[Anyone think Ballblazer is possible on the 2600?]

I look forward to Android2600 with its quad-core 2GHz ARM chip and flickery 160x200 display

 

But when it comes to "see? the Atari can do what more expensive consoles of the time could do", I prefer it to be using the kind of hardware available for the 2600 at the time. I'd be trying to jam it into 16k, maybe at most using the Harmony to do what the original DPC could do, but then, my own Ballblazer demo with its orthogonal grid and pre-calculated forward/back animations was really, really cheesy compared to what Roland has accomplished. Even then, I "calculated" them by doing renders in some 3D program of a grid at the appropriate perspective, scaling down to something like 160x60 and counting pixels. Even our write-test-debug loop is far tighter than just about any actual developer's back in the day. But even so, I can't help but think that if you somehow found a way to capture the video of a PS3 and bit-blast it into a 2600 game, you'd be playing a PS3, not a 2600.

 

It's like a guitarist who replicates a difficult classical piece by using modern recording technology to play it at half-speed and have it sound as though he played it at full speed. If it sounds as good, who cares if it couldn't have been done at the time? By and large, it's other guitarists and musical purists who see it as less of an accomplishment. Someone who just likes listening to music will just say "huh huh, that's pretty".

[Anyone think Ballblazer is possible on the 2600?]

For 'the best possible version' you can check the last binary

The last improvements are the hardest because the codebase gets more complex every time. It sometimes feels like moving an elephant through a small house.

At least the kernel (the part that draws the checkerboard) is more or less set in stone.

 

The ARM code will only be twice as fast as 6502 code?

 

No, as Thomas said, it's higher than that. But Ballblazer was on the Atari 400/800/5200, which had a 1.79MHz 6502.

[Anyone think Ballblazer is possible on the 2600?]

I'd like to see the best possible version that can be done on a ~1MHz 6507 before you resort to using a 70MHz 32-bit chip to match a ~2MHz 6502.

 

But you need to do what makes this fun for you, or you'll burn out.

[A2600 Harmony v1.1 ROM Pack]

I'd have to dig it out (haven't used it since my last move), but it may actually be one of those "video stabilizer" boxes they used to sell at Best Buy. All I remember now is that it was grey and smaller than I expected, but worked a charm.

[A2600 Harmony v1.1 ROM Pack]

I actually prefer playing most Atari games with recent releases of Stella and my USB Atari joystick replica on a laptop hooked up to our big TV more than on my modded 2600 and Harmony cart through a consumer TBC (never got the TV not to roll without one). The phosphor effect simulation and various scanline options make it seem a little more realistic than the real thing, and I don't have to worry about PAL vs. NTSC. If we were still using CRTs maybe I'd feel differently; certainly nothing has matched my actual Vectrex and VecMulti for Vectrex gaming, though I'm taking a stab at porting MESS to my Android tablet (with Moga analog stick) in hopes it'll give me a more portable alternative.

 

In short, this pack is more of a nice archive for me to use with Stella, though I'm grateful for its intended use as a Harmony-ready ROM pack.

 

But I never owned a 2600 until 1999-2000, so it's not as much of a nostalgia trip for me. All my 2600 gaming was at my friends' houses; we were a Magnavox family, alas. And then Coleco, but no other machine appeals to me for homebrew like the good ol' VCS.

[A2600 Harmony v1.1 ROM Pack]

I expect I will be banned from here shortly as I have now got moderators PM'ing me stating:

"It's against forum rules to post links to ROMS."

 

Where I read in the forum guidelines:

"We will tolerate posting information regarding binary images for classic gaming consoles and computers"

 

Bah! I dont know why I fucking bother sometimes!

 

Turns out there are unbalanced people on the Internet. Who knew?

 

Years ago, someone from this site (don't remember whether he was a moderator, but he was a well-regarded user) threatened me with a lawsuit over Pac26/Pac-Man Arcade, claiming he had bought the exclusive rights to Pac-Man games on Atari consoles. I immediately stopped work on all my Atari projects. 10 years later and I see Pac-Man Arcade is still the #1 seller in the Hacks section of the AtariAge store, not that I've gotten my cut in years. Perhaps this moderator hasn't visited atariage.com/store lately. AtariAge clearly does not have a problem distributing or even selling copies of 2600 games, whatever one moderator might say to you.

 

While I'm not concerned anymore about some crank filing a lawsuit against me for an 8K ROM, the experience killed my enthusiasm and life has prevented me from picking Atari programming back up. (At this point, most of the work I see being done is beyond me, anyway, with all but one of my projects from that time having been superseded by someone else's far better work.) I hope you don't get discouraged, but yours is already the most complete set available at this point, in all likelihood. I have a feeling your Harmony pack will live on through torrents even if this thread is deleted.

 

I hope the moderator in question will clarify his position (and its apparent conflict with the forum rules) on this thread.

 

Thanks for the second link, BTW; downloading from the ISO Zone now. My popup blocker seemed to be effective; clicking "free download" and entering the reCAPTCHA was enough to get me the file.