Robert M

A little better: 87,470

51,910 so far

Thanks for the information!

I have a question for people with more experience with arcade machines. What is the output from a board like that? Could it be hooked up to a standard TV (turned on its side) or does it require a special monitor or another circuit to convert the signal to a TV compatible format? I am just wondering if I could buy the board, put it in a box with a power supply and a jack to connect a controller and then attach it to my TV? Would that work? Cheers!

4,815 is my best so far

I received this email today: Its too bad. I was enjoying the magazine. I do have the dubious distinction of appearing in picture ads in both issues. Ah well, I wish them the best in there future plans.

I suspect some of the contacts on the carts giving you trouble have been worn almost completely away. The heavy sixer may have a slightly deeper slot reaching farther up the worn contacts to where they are not so badly worn. So they are able to make electrical contact and work properly. Do the carts fail if you wiggle them in the slot with the power turned on? Cheers!

The DK mockups are great, but... Mario is such an active property l don't think that Nintendo would allow a remake of DK for 2600. It would be a bitch to put in the work and then receive a cease and desist nasty gram in the mail. Cheers!

148,340

I'm confused. So are you saying that you have to pick up the gun before you can shoot any of the enemies? This would be a cool dificulty feature, if it isn't too hard to include. I can't remember if the original Wolfenstein games did this or not. Whether or not that can be added, this is turning into a really exciting hack! You start the game with only a knife, which has a very short range of about 8 pixels. On the first level you can find a gun which gives you more range for a limited number of shots (i.e. bullets) You can find more bullets and guns on later levels to get more long range shots. Whenever you run out of ammo, your weapon automatically reverts to the knife until you find more ammo. I would like to add some random item placement so that the items are not always in the same locations. I feel it would make the game more interesting and less repetative. As of right now, I have about 60 bytes of free ROM and 2 bytes of free RAM to play with, so we will see. Cheers!

Oh, I forgot one: The collision detection for the player is too sensitive mainly because the original player icon from Venture was 8 pixels wide and the new one is 6 pixels wide, so that needs to be fixed as well. Cheers!

Hi, I was at the MWC and it was fun to watch people try out the hack. There was a lot of great feedback from the people playing it. I plan to have the coding changes done within 3 weeks, then it goes to neo for any remaining graphics changes. Here is some of the feedback from MWC: - Make the ammo bar easier to see. - Make the player able to pass through corpses. Currently, they kill the player. It was generally agreed to be an annoying feature of the original game, so I plan to remove it. - Add some way to earn extra lives either through points or completing levels. - The score color is kind of dark and needs to be lighter. It looks fine on an emulator, but its hard to see on a TV. You can see that in the images above when you compare the MWC shots to the emulator shots. - Recommendation: Enemies move randomly until the player picks up the item or shoots his gun, then they aggressively attack the player. Here are some things left to add from before the show: - One of the items on the second level is a key, so it will be neeed to unlock something. Namely rooms. - End of game bonuses for extra lives. - Tweak the difficulty levels. - Possible level map changes. - Random item scrambling in rooms to make it harder to find the gun, bullets and keys. - Fix the bug where big room badies can partially wrap from right to left on the screen. - Change the sound effects for player attacks to sound more like a knife and gun. Cheers!

That' very nice! Thanks for putting it together. Cheers!

I do not believe any commercial games use interlacing. It was only recently (a few years ago) that it was proven to work. Its hard to use in a real game because you would need to implement what is known as a single line kernel to really get any advantage out of it, and a single line kernel limits what can be done in a game since more CPU time is spent drawing the screen vertically rather than horizontally where CPU is at a premium. The long and short of it is that it is hard to see it be worth all the work to increase the vertical resolution because the horizontal resolution would suffer in terms of how much can be on a given scanline. Cheers!

Best so far: 53,220. TIPS: 1. Smart bombs never miss. They will always hit one of the 7 targets you are defending. Unlike missles which can miss. 2. Sometimes its better to let your launch pad get hit if you have only 1 or 2 missles left in the current load. Especially if it means saving a city. 3. You can only have 3 interceptors active at one time. Always try to keep one in reserve. Fire at regular intervals so that just as you fire the 3rd missle the 1st is finishing exploding making another shot available. Cheers!

Oh man! That is suh-weet! Why did you do this to me CPUWIZ? I am saving my pennies for MWC and you pull out a tempting nugget like this

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewI...8104997892&rd=1 Damn! If I lived near L.A. I would snap this up in a heartbeat.

My best so far: 1572

True, but I really need them to draw the player and enemy shots which my mockups do not show. I also would be using 1 of the missles draw the far right vertical line of the web. So that leaves a single missle to draw all of the active shots in the game. a.k.a. flicker-city. I would probably face lawsuits for causing seizures if the spikes flickered that much. Thanks for the feedback all. I am leaning toward this as my next big project. Cheers! Rob

If you have the skills to put together a convincing prototype, then you have the skills to earn money at a REAL programming job which will earn you a hell of a lot more money than a fake protoype ever will. It would be one of the most unproductive scams in human history. Plus in a way, what you are selling IS a prototype, you just are faking the date it was made, and taking no credit for the several hundred hours of work it took to produce it. What's the point? Cheers!

The secret to the digit display is in the gap between the sets of numbers. It is exactly 5 pixels. The 2 digits together in each pair are 11 pixels wide. So I suspect the code is doing somehting like this: ; Set both sprites to 3 copies close. .loop STA WSYNC ; Sync to start of scanline. LDX #11 TXS ; Point the SP at the RESP1 register. LDA digit1gfx STA GRP1 LDA digit2gfx STA GRP0 LDA digit3gfx LDY digit4gfx ; delay to desired horizontal position for 4 digit display. JSR .resetP1P0 .resetP1P0 ; No real subroutine call just a quick write to RESP0 ; and RESP1. This positions the sprites 3 pixels off ; from each other forming a 11 pixels (digits 1 and2) of ; gfx 5 pixels(gap) 11 pixels (digits 3 and 4) STA GRP1 ; Note P1 is reset before P0! STY GRP0 ; Perform again in same scanline to produce 8 digits. DEC LoopCounter BPL .loop Sorry I don't have time to make a working example, but I am sure this is what is being done in this proto based on the pixel spacings. There is no flicker necessary. Cheers!

Contra Hard Corps. It was such a great concept, ruined by being too hard. 3 lives, no continues allowed.

Here's one more mockup with a "V" shaped web. All the webs are based off the same set of horizontal lines made from playfield graphics. The second attached image shows the base web from which all playable webs are derived by subtraction. Enjoy!

Maybe... Its really just an idea. I need to do a bunch of timing analysis to see if its possible. Strangely enough, the enemies are not nearly as tough to draw on a real VCS as the grid would be. Those damn spikes being a differenent color makes drawing such a construct very hard on a VCS. I am convinced extra RAM would be needed in the cart. Would it be enough? That remains to be seen. I have attached a more pixel perfect mockup. Cheers!