Robert M

Please consider for the queues the ability to auto reload. So for each queue there are 2 addresses you can read from in the kernel. The first location reads the next byte and removes it from the queue. The second address reads the byte and requeues it at the same time. That way if you have something like a static background you don't need to restuff the queues every frame. Note: This only matters if you are implementing the queues as a separate memory space only accessable with pushes and pops. If they are just ranges of regular RAM that can be alternately accessed via self incrementing pointers, then this is not a problem. Cheers!

I'm missing Henry!. I believe that is the only one I don't have. I even have the internet connection kit.

Adventure is great because... 1. It has random item placement for game mode 3. 2. The enemies are free agents. They go about their business even when you are not around. Absolutely revolutionary! Many modern games still don't do this simple concept. Instead we are forced to endure scripted encounters. Nothing is scripted in adventure. Adventure is an environment, a system if you will. The objects, agents (dragons and bat), and you are all thrown in together and stuff just happens. Its great! 3. The magnet: - It gets things out of walls. An absolutely brilliant solution to a problem changing the annoying dropping habits of the bat into a quest objective: Bat drops the key in the wall, now you need to find the magnet first. - Use it with the bridge to pass through "impassable" walls. There are some weird transdimesional passageways just begging to be found. - Use it with the sword to fight dragons in a new way. (Predates the Half-life gravity gun by what 25 years!) Freaking revolutionary! - Use it to lock a key inside a castle of the same color trapping anything that happens to be inside at the time. 4. The Easter Egg! I remember my brother found the magic dot, and we were all "WTF?" and then we received the issue of AA magazine that showed us what to do with it. Awesome! 5. The catacombs. 6. Take a ride in a dragon stomach and see the world.

Its an alright system. They really should have put a backlight in it. I am constantly struggling to get just the right lighting level and angle. I have almost every title for it and here are the ones that a pretty damn good in my opinion: Monopoly Scrabble Resident Evil Solitaire Lights Out (Same thing as Okie Dokie on the 2600) Wheel of Fortune Jeopardy! As you might sumise the titles with minimal movement on screen and which use the touch screen are the best of the bunch. All of arcade conversion titles are complete garbage because the screeen can't display them without heavy blurring. The port of Sonic the hedge hog is impressive. Its really the complete game at full speed in blurry greyscale. Jurassic Park is probably the worst video game ever created for any system in all of history past present and future. The name Tiger Game.com is probably the worst name choice in Video Game history. How the hell are you supposed to search for that on the internet? Sheesh! There is not a unique word in the bunch. I suspect it helped the demise of the system. Cheers!

There is a notice posted on the packratvg website that says they are closed until Sept 1st while moving to a new location.

Man that is shameless. Even the vein patterns on the backs of the hands match exactly. Any differences between the two images are only there because the artist lacked the skill to steal the image more effectively.

That's a cool possibility for a hack. If picking up an object made the player bigger or smaller, then you could have passageways that could or could not be passed when the player carried particular objects. That would take more bit hack though.

That formula does not seem right to me. Shouldn't it be: tile_num = xpos/TILE_WIDTH + NUM_TILES_ACROSS * (ypos/TILE HEIGHT) IF you make TILE_WIDTH and TILE_HEIGHT powers of 2 then you can do quick divide by shift operations. GIVEN: TILE_WIDTH = TILE_HEIGHT = 16 X = xpos and Y = ypos THEN CalcTile TYA AND #%11110000; Mask out fractional bits to optimize *10 LSR STA temp; Save (ypos/width) * 8 LSR LSR ;; CLC ; CLC not needed ADC temp; (ypos/height) * 8 + (ypos/height)*2 = 10 * (ypos/height) STA temp TXA LSR LSR LSR LSR ; xpos /16 CLC ADC temp; tile_num = (xpos/width) + 10 * (ypos/height) Also if you invert the matrix storage in memory so that its like this: tile_num = ypos/TILE_HEIGHT + NUM_TILES_DOWN * (xpos/TILE_WIDTH) then you can set NUM_TILES_DOWN to 8 and simply use 6 entries in each column of tile_buffer to hold the game board, but use 2 entires to hold something else and optimize the code like this: GIVEN: tile_num = ypos/TILE_HEIGHT + NUM_TILES_DOWN * (xpos/TILE_WIDTH) TILE_HEIGHT = 16 TILE_WIDTH = 16 NUM_TILES_DOWN = 8; really 6, but we are going to not use 2 rows Y = ypos, X = xpos THEN calctile TXA AND #%11110000 LSR ; NUM_TILES_DOWN * (xpos/TILE_WIDTH), where TILE_WIDTH = 16 STA temp TYA LSR ; divide by tile height LSR LSR LSR ORA temp ; tile_num = ypos/TILE_HEIGHT + NUM_TILES_DOWN * (xpos/TILE_WIDTH) ; Also the tile_buffer is arranges in memory as tile_buffer column0 DS.b 6; Allocate 6 bytes for the first column. DS.b 2; These 2 bytes are free to be used for anything else. column1 DS.b 6; Allocate 6 bytes for the second column. DS.b 2; These 2 bytes are free to be used for anything else. column2 DS.b 6; Allocate 6 bytes for the third column. DS.b 2; These 2 bytes are free to be used for anything else. column3 DS.b 6; Allocate 6 bytes for the fourth column. DS.b 2; These 2 bytes are free to be used for anything else. column4 DS.b 6; Allocate 6 bytes for the fifth column. DS.b 2; These 2 bytes are free to be used for anything else. column5 DS.b 6; Allocate 6 bytes for the sixth column. DS.b 2; These 2 bytes are free to be used for anything else. column6 DS.b 6; Allocate 6 bytes for the seventh column. DS.b 2; These 2 bytes are free to be used for anything else. column7 DS.b 6; Allocate 6 bytes for the eigth column. DS.b 2; These 2 bytes are free to be used for anything else column8 DS.b 6; Allocate 6 bytes for the ninth column. DS.b 2; These 2 bytes are free to be used for anything else. column9 DS.b 6; Allocate 6 bytes for the tenth column. DS.b 2; These 2 bytes are free to be used for anything else.

Glad to know I am not insane, and it really does happen. It is such a surprise and the text flashes by so quick I don't doubt I have misread it. It appears behind everything else on the screen which makes it harder to read as well. Cheers!

Okay, this is really weird. I was playing Food Fight. I set the game to expert and started on level 16. I took my time getting to the icecream cone on level 16, and the game decided to do an instant replay. Great, fine. However, the instant replay was WRONG! As my player went for the cone, a chef threw a piece of food and hit me. I was killed (I even lost a life) and the message "Didn't quite make it!" was flashed on the screen. Has anyone else ever seen this happen? Is it a bug or part of an Easter egg? It was really weird. I have been trying to reproduce it, but haven't been able to so far.

Got on a roll: 26,800 !

Hooray! A game I own and like. 8100 for my first high score TIPS: In the soldier section there are 2 key tactics. 1. Line the enemies up vertically with your player and slightly to the right so you can hit them, but they miss you. 2. Wait for the enemy coming down to get his gun level in line with a tree, but with his head or feet sticking out. Hit the end sticking out of the trees. In the tank sections, the shots come from the center and not the right side of the sprites so you need to change tactics. 1. When a tank first enters the screen you have about 2 seconds of safety when the tank can't shoot. So plow ahead at full speed and pop the enemy tanks off as they enter on the top. 2. Let the tanks come to you, they have to enter your field of fire to shoot at you. Set up your shot so it crosses the path of the approaching tank, and time your shot so it gets there when the enemy tank arrives to meet it. Cheers!

Atari 7800 kicks butt in that matchup. 894964[/snapback] I got quite the opposite... what is this thing? 894994[/snapback] Well I put the names in quotes like this: "Nintendo Entertainment System" vs "Atari 7800" That way the page must contain those words in that order and position relative to each other to be counted.

Atari 7800 kicks butt in that matchup.

If they were going to use Red/Blue glasses I suspect that the program would alternate drawing Red and Blue frames.

No, you would need a modded supercharger to play the ROM.

Hello, Since Wolfenstein is finally shipping (thanks Packrat VG!), I have decided its time to provide a hint on finding the secret level mentioned in the rule book. If you don't want a hint then don't read. I have encoded the hint into a poem. Here is the first hint I am giving for finding the secret level: Bold soldier, if your quest is to enter the ninth level. take heed of my words, and you will soon be there. entrances hidden, and exits all closed. now that the game is Won, you can be told. as you dwell on your victory, nearby lies the door, rise and Enter if you dare. Let me know if you can find it. If you don't go for this cryptic riddle stuff. Complete the game, and send me a PM that tells me the text shown on the screen when you complete the game. I will provide you with detailed instructions for reaching the hidden level. Cheers!

My family had a dedicated Atari video pinball/breakout console with 7 games in it before we bought the 2600. I am not sure which option I should pick from the list. We got the 2600 right when it came out, but it wasn't our first console. IT was our first cartridge based console

Hello, Without understanding the relationship of the loopa and loopb labels to the flow of the kernel code its hard to recommend an optimization. Can you post the complete loop? Also is the BlockChange table stored in RAM or ROM? Cheers!

Thanks for all the hard work you guys. I am really glad this game is getting out the door. Three cheers for Packrat VG!

Okay, I spoke to Jarett on the phone today. He says that he will definitely ship the first run this week. I really hope he does. If he still can't seem to get it out the door, then Scott and I will talk with Al about making it available through AA. If we do a run with AA, should we change the maps so as to differentiate the 2 releases? Cheers!

Current Best: 5828

I do not know what the ongoing delay is about. The last thing I heard from Jarett was that the 1st run was assembled and ready to ship. That was 12 days ago. I have not heard anything or received my copy yet. I plan to call Jarett within the next week and ask him what is going on. I will share my findings. Thanks to all for their patience. |

I have read that you can move sprites and avoid the black lines by calling HMOVE 2 cycles early, but the effect is that it moves 0-15 pixels instead of -7 to 8. I imagine this has something to do with the above 882203[/snapback] That is true. There is a very well done analysis on the Stella mailing list. I can't find it right now. The author hit the HMOVE function on each clock cycle and measured what happened for all possible movement values. IIRC hitting HMOVE on cycle 74 or 75 will move the object from 0 to 15 pixels to the right from its current position without drawing the comb. So with some planning you can get rid of the comb. The biggest trick would be placing a sprite on the left most side of the screen. Doing so becomes a special case if you can't HMOVE to the left. You would have to rough position on the right side and shift off the right side onto the left. There is another HMOVE trick that was first used in Cosmic Ark and I believe again in Rabbit Transit. The star field in Cosmic Ark is made by hitting HMOVE normally at the start of the first line, then writting one of a few special values to the target object's HMxx register on cycle 18 (IIRC). The result is the HMOVE function gets stuck turned on, and the object moves 15 pixels to the left (I think) every scanline until HMOVE is hit again. That is how the star field is generated in Cosmic Ark. Its the ball object smeared over the whole screen with an color wave on top to make it extra nice. Cheers!

Hi, The score counter rolls at 9999. Should we just stop when we reach 9999, or do we keep track of rollovers? Cheers!