Robert M

Hello, I have received PMs from 3 people. As I told them, I will be out of town for work for a week. I will be back on the 10th and I will determine if any of them are working. At that point I will offer a working unit (if any) to those who have asked in the order they have asked. I am glad to save these computers from the scrap pile. Cheers!

Hello, My workplace is closing down. In the back storage area there are 3 or 4 PET CBM 4032 computers. I do not know if they are in working order. I would certainly clean them up some and plug them in an see if they work if anyone is interested. They are slated to be scrapped. I will send one or more to you for the price of shipping. Let me know. Cheers!

Hi Al, Is Atari Age going to be at CinciClassic? If you are, then I will do my shopping there. Cheers!

I have 2 little girls. Besides the titles already mentioned you might try: Bowling Adventure Haunted House Indy 500 Cheers!

Thanks for the supportive comments. On the bright side I have my first interview next week. I know somebody that works at the company, and they have helped me to land a quick interview. Cheers! Rob

If we are limiting the discussion to titles released by Atari, then the award should go to the entire Swordquest series. If we are talking about all the releases for the Atari 2600, then I would have to vote for Skeet Shoot. I think the Mcdonalds prototype is more fun than that game. People voting for average games like E.T., Pac-Man or Galaxian need to get out and experience the true depth and breadth of crappy titles available for the 2600. Cheers!

We had a visit from corporate central. They have decided to shut down the group I am with. They are calling it site consolidation since we are a remote engineering group, but I doubt anyone at the office has any desire to move to the HQ in Ohio. I know I don't because I just moved cross state last June, and that was hard enough on my family. I am really not worried about finding new work (yet). There is a lot of high tech stuff around here. I am going to be surprised if I like my new work as much though. It was a nice small group of engineers that all got along really well. Its going to be a shame to see it broken apart. It was inevitable though. Our jobs are collateral damage for the layoffs and troubles at GM and Ford. With job hunting in my near future I doubt I will be able to make an entry for the 2006 minigame competition. I was really hoping to have an entry this year. Oh well. Cheers!

Many, many years ago (late 90's) I spent some time trying to develop a wolfenstein 3D engine for the C64. I never got far past the design stages, but one thing I came up with was what I called a Square lens. It was like a fresnel lens made of binary 1's and 0's arranged in a square array. Traveling along a row or column of the table you would add 1 to one of axis of travel, and the result was a reasonable aproximation a ray casting at the angle corresponding to the row or column you are traversing in the lens table. I am not explaining it well. I need to dig out my old notes. The big advantage it had was it was optimized for the instruction set of the 6502. I think it would be possible to do say a 128x64 pixel Wolfenstien 3D style game engine for the 7800. If the display was just the 128x64 3D window plus a status bar below. There could be many blank lines on the screen to free up processor time. If I can find those old notes I will post the details in my blog. Cheers!

It might be possible to do a pseudo-3d game using wireframe graphics. I don't think texture mapping would be practical, though. I agree, texture mapping would not be practical, but I think solid colored walls limited to being vertical in orientation combined with prescaled 2D sprites for enemies could be done.

Are there any screenshots on the web?

I played Doom for the first time this weekend. I know, I know, where the hel have I been. I have played many FPS games, but I was so busy at college when Doom came out I missed it. I rememeber people mentioning it and talking about how awesome it was, but I never played it. I must say now that I have played it, I am very impressed. The game plays very well. Control is smooth and responsive. The level designs are exquisite considering the limitations of the game engine. Unlike a modern FPS no 2 areas of a DOOM map can overlap, so there are no over and under design options. Despite this, I found all the levels to be laid out with great attention to what makes a FPS game fun. Lots of places to shoot at enemies with cover. Lots of secrets to root out. It was all very enjoyable. Truly Doom was a banner game that spawned a lasting genre. Many modern FPSs are not as good as Doom, IMO. Looking at the engine, I can't help but wonder is a primitive FPS would be possible on the 7800. I know that it does not have sprite scaling built in, so that would mean lots of sprites need to be stored in the ROM at all the necessary scales. The walls could be monochrome to minimize CPU time, and lighting effects would not exist. Sort of a Tunnel Runner on Steriods. The end result would probably be more akin to Wolfenstien 3D than to Doom. It seems to me that hte Lynx, which was able to do an excellent port of Stun Runner, should be able to run Doom considering it has the sprite scalling hardware support. The main obstacle to overcome would be the limit of 16 colors per scanline. Lighting options would probably be defeated by the limit in colors, although blackouts would be simple enough to accomplish. Cheers, Rob

35,580 for me.

Having the different sizes staggered over the year got me thinking. It might be interesting to have a sub category where you enter a game at 1K, then again at 4K and again at 8K each time using the additional memory to add or improve features to the orignal 1K concept. Kind of an evolution of game design thing.

If the ghosts in A were more centered under the logo (2 pixels to the right maybe) I would vote for A. Otherwise I vote for B.

Shouldn't that be: Xpos = Xpos + carry from previous addition? Sorry Thomas, I edited that mistake. It should be: Xfraction = Xfraction + Xvelocity Xpos = Xpos + Xadjust + Carry from previous addition. Sorry for the confusion.

I don't get this part. Negative velocity works exactly like positive one. I was skimping in my example, probably a bad idea to teach the concept, but my urge to save a byte of RAM won out. In the example, I am using only 8 bits to hold the velocity rather than 16. Since the velocity is a signed value I need to extend the sign bit of the 8-bit velocity make a 16-bit value before I can add it to the 16-bit position. EDIT: A better name than Xadjust would have been Xsignextend Cheers!

I think what Thomas is referring to is better described as fixed-point math. For fixed point math you do all math as integer math and then slap a decimal point in at a fixed bit position every thing to the right of the decimal magically becomes a fraction, and the left side is the integer you use to draw the object on the screen. Let's keep things simple and assume you are using a 16-bit X-position value. The decimal point will be conveniently placed between the 2 bytes. Xwhole = [Xpos]:[Xfraction] Now you need to declare an X velocity as a single byte holding a signed byte value. Each time you are going to add the velocity to the you must do this: Xadjust = 0 If Xvelocity is negative THEN // The MSB is set. Xadjust = $FF // for a negative velocity you must extend the sign to 16-bits. ENDIF Xfraction = Xfraction + Xvelocity Xpos = Xpos + Xadjust + carry from previous addition. Then use the XPos byte to position the object on screen. NOTE: it will take at least 2 updates to change Xpos by 1 pixel. To get a higher velocity for the object you need to either add Xvelocity multiple times each display frame, or extend it to 16 bits just like Xwhole. Repeat this technique for the Y axis. Doing gravity is another problem entirely, and I will have to think about it and propose a solution later. Basically you need to find a quick way to calculate the distance from the gravity source to the object = SQRT(Xdiff^2 +Ydiff ^2) = nasty , and then mulitply that times some gravitational factor for the object yielding an acceleration that you must proportionally divide between Xvelocity and Yvelocity based on the angle of the object to the source. The real question is, how realistic does this need to be? Are you willing to go with an approximation of gravity or do you need a NASA grade simulation? Cheers!

Yes, that one was shown in movie theaters. I remember seeing it.

No updates. I haven't completely abandoned it, but since there was a Lunar Lander game on the Flashback 2, I have lost some of my interest in this project. I don't need Atari breathing down my neck because I made a better lander game than they did. It not dead, just hibernating.

I like to play using a joytick and the pedal controller. I put the pedal controller in the right side port and set up one button to fire left and another to fire right. I use the joystick most of the time, but I can strafe firing left or right with the foot pedals. I find it helps with those later levels when there are lots of fast moving grunts.

Hi, There was a release through Packrat VG, but there have been shipping problems. It seems only about 30 copies have made it out the door in the past year. There is a new updated release with some improvements that is going to be sold through AA some time soon. Perhaps in time for the CinciClassic. I am not sure how the timing is looking. There is some work remaining on the manual and box. Definitely in the 1st half of this year though.

Holy Crap! I'm supposed to be in Ohio for job training the week of April 3rd. Hopefully it will happen and I can manage to scoot over to Cincinatti for the show Cheers!

Yes, but there are side scrolling platformers, like the Super Mario Bros. Then there are vertically scrolling platformers like Tower Toppler. And there are single screen non-scrolling platformers like Jumpman. And there are non-scrolling .... Aw hell, I give up.

No! No! NO! Pitfall and smurfs are not scrolling games. Scrolling ALWAYS refers to the background, not the sprites of a game. Otherwise nearly ALL games are scrolling games. Pitfall and smurfs are non-scrolling multi-screen platform games. Cheers!

I'm sorry it never came. It seemed like Packrat VG was going to deliver on many occasions over the past year, but then they never did. Would you like to borrow my copy? Regards,