SlowCoder

Why PM? Sounds like good information for everyone! Spread the knowledge!

I do believe you, but I would also be interested in pics to see your work.

Sounds like it's time to catalog all of your mom's "greedy" possessions and prepare your counterpoint. But ... as it sounds like you don't have much money, I'm sure that cash could be spent in better says than on a heavy sixer. Your light sixer will do fine until you have more cash flowing in. An alternative is that you could sell your light sixer and use the money toward a heavy.

Wasn't aware of that. I may try that.

http://retr0bright.wikispaces.com/ http://geekhack.org/showwiki.php?title=Island:9099

I'm intermittently fuzzy. RT says TGA is really fuzzy.

Custom controllers made by the following people: Smurfs - From Yurkie DK and DK Jr - From DoubleDown I think these will kind of hard to get, as they are extremely limited quantity, bought by collectors.

I would have been nice, I think, if Rogue was multi-level persistent, but it wasn't to be. Here, we are talking about the 2600, so I think it would be too much to assume multi-level persistence would work well. I appreciate the concept of the "storage locker" on each level, but I think it would be too time-consuming for the player. I opt for B. It sounds like you have an interesting plan going, using the pseudo randomization to control a lot of the data.

Each complete dungeon is generated by pseudo random numbers as well as item and monster placement so ROM/RAM space isn't a constraint. Each floor on each maze can be completely retraced. Items stay in the same room until you pick them up. Then EVERY instance of that item gets warped to a different room. Here is the current working (i.e. in the game now) feature set for the dungeon: 16 basic room types (not including rare rooms) 8 room structure styles 16 x 8 = 128 Unique Rooms 256 level dungeon consisting of 256 x 256 screens per level. All in all, my Adventure/Roguelike should have 1,677,7216 screens per gaming session. Each time the game is powered on a game seed is used so really 256 1,677,7216 screen dungeons are possible. Wouldn't you need to use RAM to hold the random values for each room type and location at least for the current level? You'd also need to keep track of what items the player has, health, damage, mana (if that's part of the game), locations of monsters as they move around, with all of their dynamic stats, what items are in each room, etc. That's a lot of data to fit into 128B RAM. What about having the old item drop on the floor when you pick up a new one? Or maybe allow the player to "look" at the item's stats and decide if they want to pick it up. I'm not in any way trying to talk you out of trying to build your game. If you want to give it a go, I say go for it!

The problem with auto-erase of old, and equip of new is that in a roguelike, different potions, weapons, armor, etc. work differently on different creatures or objects. In my opinion, the option to carry multiple pieces of armor or weapons is a must. And if I pick up a new something, and it's worse than what just got erased, I might not be happy. Other than that, I could se the possibilities with your setup. 128b RAM doesn't give you Mich to work with for a solid game, so I'm guessing random rooms would be out of the question.

Didn't get to listen in. Was wondering how it went? Other folks get to listen in? Availability of playing the previous show?

If you think about it, so many of these carts were subject to staticky shag carpet for years before being stored away in paper bags, plastic boxes, and in the hot/cold garage or attic for many more years ... and they've survived.

This thread pushed me to play a bit of Rogue (PC version) the last couple of days. It's been a few years since last time I played. I've managed level 15 so far, and it seems to be getting exponentially harder. I forgot what this game did to engage my imagination when I played it. Awesome!

Mario more than Sonic. Other than Sonic 1, I never really could get into the game series, or whatever shallow story they tossed at it. I have all 3 of the first Genesis Sonic games, and my son has a few of the PS2 versions. Couldn't get into the PS2 ones at all. Mario, on the other hand, seemed to try to have a fair back story, and the games mostly very good.

Yep. And about enough to piss off the Atari 2600 gods. As in, that's probsbly about all the 2600 could handle in a halfway well written game.

Rogue-likes are fun and entertaining, if not frustrating. The text based ones like Rogue and NetHack are great for using your imagination in. I've always found it very daunting to play these versions due to the sheer complexity of the controls.

"Trust" is a very strong word. I know for a fact that the guys at this particular store do at least plug them in to see if they work. But they're not particularly tech-savvy, and they get so much stuff, they can't take time to actually troubleshoot each piece of equipment. From these guys, I've never had a piece of equipment NOT work if they said it did. And most of the equipment they've given me that "didn't work", that I paid discount for, worked after a little bit of cleaning or troubleshooting. I am very comfortable working with this particular store. I do tend to stay away from newer disc-based consoles from any GoodWill, though. I've only bought a GameCube console because it was cheap, well worth the controllers and games it came with. And the GC works fine. In the case of these XBoxes, I'm only out $15 so far, and it appears I have a working box, and a nonworking box (which I haven't worked on yet). Not too bad, in my opinion.

Well, on the outside, the controller looked good. But I opened it up and it appears some sort of liquid (shall we guess Coke?) was spilled into it. I tried to clean it, but as gentle as I was, one of the surface-mounted components came off. My guess is that the solder was corroded by whatever the liquid was. Suppose I'll be looking for a new controller.

The good, the awesome, and the bad: Good: Found an Microsoft original AV cable at the last Goodwill in my area for $5. Awesome: Got home, plugged it all in, and the XBox has been running for about 30 minutes. It's idle at what looks like the main screen. Bad: The controller I have won't even turn on. Fresh batteries, and yes, I put them in correctly. Oh, so close! I put a movie DVD in the drive, and the XBox did not respond as I would have expected it to. Does the 360 generally auto-start DVDs, or do you have to select from the menu?

Have you checker your pants for brown spots yet? Sounds like a very cool find.

Wanna know what's a pain? Just about every time I go to any of my GoodWills, there's a 360 AV cable. Today, I've been to 3, and no AV cable. So, I'm considering getting one from eBay. Most of them there are less than $5-10 with free shipping. Are these good cables, or do I need to go higher? Do you have any specific cable brands to recommend?

Very nice pictures! Yep, and R-Type to boot! My favorite SMS game!

Ok. Will the XBox play games without a hard drive? One of the units came with a cover plate over the hard drive slot, as if they come like that. Neither of them has the external hard drive.

I don't know much about XBoxes, but I know some of them have "external" hard drives. I'm pretty sure these 2 XBoxes don't have the external ones. Do they come with internal drives also? I'm working on obtaining a AV cable from a friend for testing. One of the XBoxes seems to have the RROD problem, but the other is currently showing what I believe is just the "missing AV cable" signal. Can anyone tell me which error supercedes, the AV or the RROD?