Robert M

Are you playing the beginner level? It ends after 6 rounds. To get 12 rounds you need to select intermediate or tournament level.

Yeah, that toy was great. Another toy I miss and is hard to find is Ricochet Racers. It was a gun that would shoot out toy cars. Very fun to play with. Cheers!

Neo and Nukey are free to hack my hack all they want. Wolfenstein would not exist if the original programmer had not written it. I am just a link in a chain of creators. Do as you will! Good! When I saw how dark it was on my home TV I was bothered myself. Cheers!

Grand Puzzle III Greetings, Manuel Ah! thanks!

GP-III doesn't change it's structure at all. It just switches to the secret level, when you disarm the right bombs and then let yourself hit by the moving square Greetings, Manuel Alright, I feel dumb. What does GP-III stand for? Thanks!

Well, best of luck to you. What's your target cartridge size and number of levels? I am projecting 3 to 4 levels for each 4K block of ROM. So depending on how creative I am feeling it will be a 16K or 32K cart with 12 to 32 levels. Cheers!

Extra RAM would make it too easy!

Sorry, its not very clear I wrote that in a hurry this morning. The game screen is made up of tiles consisting of a pair of PF pixels stacked on top of each other. The top pixel is blue. The bottom pixel is gold. Since their are 2 pixels in a tile, there are 4 possible tiles: empty, gold, ladder(blue only), and platform (both on). The tiles are arranged in 84 rows of 32 tiles each. On top of that I superimpose another grid of bit masks. That grid is 32 pixels wide just like the game board, but is limited in height to 16 rows. I can set the height of each masking row as needed to create bit masks to cover the raw level tile data and make things disappear. In the newest binary I am using only 2 rows in the bit mask for covering the raw tile data. Under the gameboard I display the results of the new subroutine that reads the tile information under the player sprite into 2 bytes. All the blue tile bits are shifted into one byte and all the corresponding gold tile bits are shift into another byte. If you move the player around the board you will see the tile data shown in the strip at the bottom of the screen matches what is under the player sprite. Further, when the scrolling bit mask masks out the tiles under the player that masking is reflected in the tile strip at the bottom of the screen. Is that a better description? Cheers,

Thank YOU very very much!!

It looks very good. Do you plan to have all the enemies from the orignal or just the fighters? Cheers!

This is a great game! 64,350!

I have a homemade adapter that I can use to plug an Atari 5200 joystick into a 2600. I use it to play Marble Craze with a joystick. The only problem it has right now is that I have to hold the joystick rotated 90 degrees to get the joystick motions to match the movement of the ball on the screen. I need to come up with a circuit that will invert the analog signal along one axis so I can hold the stick the right way. Its just been "good enough" for me not to bother with it so far. Cheers!

I like your diagram. I like seeing the tools and techniques other people come up with to solve similar problems. Its a great way to see a problem from a new angle. For comparison, I posted my own timing diagram on the stella mailing list a while ago. Here's the link: http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archiv...2/msg00180.html Cheers!

That's very cool, but doesn't it need to support double digit scoring for both players? The screenshots on KLOV.com show double digit scores. Cheers!

That's an interesting solution. Much easier on the 2600's side. Though it would probably require much more than just passive components as some parts of my solution would (i.e. mine could be done with just resistors and caps.) So in that sense, it's a compromise. 940691[/snapback] I recommend that you use a MUX chip. Run the 4 direction lines from each stick into the MUX. Use the fire line as an output to select the set of lines you want output from the MUX into the 2600. Then reroute the Fire buttons into the paddle inputs. In software you clear the paddle timers, then set the output low and read the 1st joystick. Set the output high and read the second joystick. wait the min time for a the paddle lines to charge if the fire button is pressed and go from their. It should be quite doable and not too processor or external hardware intensive. Cheers!

I am going to take the easy way out and put a blank strip at the top and bottom of the screen Cheers!

Yes, I can change their color or even make them flash. I will make that change in the future. Thanks for the feedback,

What I don't like about using the select switch during a game is that I tend to push the reset button by mistake in the heat of the moment.

30 Hz flicker is really no big deal as long as its a high contrast from foreground to background and the background is monochrome. I used to think it mattered, but then I worked on Wolfenstein which is a hack of Venture. Venture uses 30 Hz flicker for the sprites to get 6 on the screen with limitations on horizontal overlap. On a real TV I can't see the sprites flickering. Cheers!

Yeah, that's a limitation to the system, but a fair number of games all use sprites about the same height. Little Man for example That's the real power of the online homebrew community, all our shared knowledge and techniques leading to great new games. I like the Colony 7 demo you have posted. How do you plan to implement the secondary "Destroy all Enemies" weapon with a one button joystick? Cheers!

That would be nice if I could do a single load of the mask for both objects, but it would only work if the player sprite and missle are at the same vertical position. As for SwitchDraw, its quick but I NEED those 2 extra cycles. Plus, for a 32K or 64K cart like this is going to be, having a single instance of the masking table is not a big deal. In the grand scheme of things. Cheers!

Thanks for trying it out. I didn't see your Jumpman work until today. Your design looks very good. It seems we have taken different approaches to solving the the timing hurdles in rendering such a game. I will post my source soon so you can see I what I am doing differently. I am finding like you did that each level is going to require its own modified version of a core kernel. I really am not looking to clone Jumpman. I actually never played Jumpman (blasphemy!), only Jumpman Jr. I want to make my own creation in the same genre. Cheers!

Thanks for trying it on Z26. I work on a Mac so don't have access to it. I am pretty confident too, that the emulators do the PF emulation spot on. There is just that little 1% piece of doubt.

Actually, Impossible Mission is very doable for the 2600. The game play is stratified into horizontal zones which is very 2600 friendly. Just look at Keystone Capers to see what I am talking about. Cheers!

Game #4 is not bad in my opinion. It has just the right balance of speed an control. You need to decide in a split second to go for the shot or swerve out of the way.