Robert M

Definitely the square from Adventure.

I would vote for video chess.

What do you think? It might be doable with my idea for including FIFO RAMs in the cartridge. Imagine the blue and green lines are made with playfield graphics. The player is the ball repeated skewed over several lines. there are 4 columns of enemies active at the same time on the grid flickering at 30 Hz. Shots are not shown, expect they would be flickering heavily, but flicker on shots is not as noticeable IMO. Yes I know the lines don't match playfield pixels. I stretched the original drawing to more closely resemble a TV screen in proportions. Cheers!

The ships might look better with double high pixels. The pixels are more square in my opinion when they are 2 scanlines high. Just a thought. Glad to hear you are making progress.

Definitely, that's plenty of computing power. Now you just need to load a DOS version of DASM and the Z26 emulator on the machine and you are good to go. Cheers!

Many 2600 games have a bug in the player controls that can be exploited. You see the joystick has 4 switches which leads to 16 combinations. Only 9 of those 16 combinations are valid joystick positions. The other 7 positions are impossible for a normal joystick to ever produce. If the code uses a lookup table to translate joystick values to actions/movement then 7 bytes of the table are never used by the joystick. Space is at a premium in Atari ROMS, so often the 7 unused bytes in the joystick table are used for something else. The result of all this is that illegal joystick positions can often be exploited to the player's advantage. I know that this works on Ms. Pac-Man and Venture for instance. Pressing Right and Left at the same time will move the player up to the right in Venture and allow the player to pass through walls! You have to experiment with games to see what happens with illegal joystick positions. Some games properly filter them out and so they have no effect. Other games desperate for space may yield useful results. If you open a joystick, you can press the buttons in any combination you want to see what happens in the game. Cheers!

69470

I finally broke 100,000 points! 102200

76,400 Thanks!

Just a quick tip on the controls: You have to double tap to get off of a vine. Once I figured that out, the game wasn't too bad. Screen 2 with the locks on ropes is too easy though, and screen 3 is too hard. IMO.

Damn that's a nice item. I wish I had money.

This is limited to the titles I own: 1. Dirty Larry - This is not fun. You can not dodge enemy gunfire. You can not duck, and if you jump they will fire a second shot that will hit you. Trying to kill an enemy with punches can never be done without taking some damage yourself. 2. Batman Returns - This game suffers from similar problems. Unlike Dirty Larry which forces you to kill every enemy, your only chance with Batman is to run away from enemies. Since when is Batman a coward, since when is vials of acid Batman weapon of choice? Very lame. 3. Bill and Ted's Excellent adventure - This game has real potential, and its cool that they never fight anybody just like in the movie. The problem is the story gets soooo crazy its not fun anymore. I lost interest in 'ole England when I was being chased across lava pits by animated furniture. WTF! 4. Kung Food - The enemies have a no-AI. Completely zero. They have no idea where the player is. They simply walk in a direction and attack, walk in another direction and attack. The only reason they hit you is because you have to step in front of them to hit them, and sometimes they hit you before they die. Very Lame! 5. Turbo Sub - I just don't enjoy this game.

Hi, Sorry I didn't see this thread earlier. Thanks, Andrew for highlighting my code. Here are some comments corrections. First, regarding the correlation between the value in A and the resulting position of the object on screen. It is true that assuming the pixels on screen are numbered 0 to 159, then placing the corresponding value in A and calling this routine will not position object at the expected pixel. This is one of the quirks of horizontal positioning on the 2600. The resulting position is: Xreal = K + Xdesired. The value of K will vary in different implementations of the horizontal positioning algorithm. K is the extra overhead of the routine after the write to WSYNC on top of the division by 15 of Xdesired. By varying K in your code you can control the mapping of Xdesired to Xreal in your program. There is some entertaining math related to this problem, and if I ever get a free hour or two I will write it up and post it here. Errata: The range of values in X is 0-4 not 0-5, sorry thats a typo. Good catch!

Yes, I will be there. I will be bringing my Lynx with BattleWheels, and I hope others will too. It would be great to get some 6 player linked Battlewheels action going. See you there!

Yes that is a clever idea, but neo is right in that this cartridge will have a completely unique label. The Wolfenstein logo you based your label design on has a live trademark. If we used it, we could be sued. Cheers!

Here are some screenshots: titlescreen.tiff

Well as you said, a 4K game has twice as much code to decipher. Also by doing a 2K game you always have 2K bytes of free space to play with without having to resort to bank switching.

Since you are just starting, let me recommend something that I think will make your experience more enjoyable. Pick an existing game you like, preferably a 2K byte game, but 4K is doable just harder. Run it through Distella to convert the ROM image to a source listing. Now the "fun" part. document the assembly code, take the time to understand each instruction and what it is doing. You will learn a great deal by doing this. Once you understand the code, or at least part of the code, you can begin to make experimental changes compile the file and see the results in an emulator window. I believe this is the best way to quickly learn how to program the Atari 2600. If you pick a 2K ROM to start with you will have an additional 2K of ROM available to add your own routines and change the game. cheers!

Try out the new and improved moving walls room, and watch out for those Hall Monsters coming to get you from unexpected places Enjoy! third.bin.gz

Please sign me up.

Okay, I have added the title screen. Hit reset to begin the game. You can set the difficulty to one of 4 levels with the difficulty switches. The end screen is next... Enjoy! title.bin.zip

Damn! http:www.lemon64.com This sucks! Is AtariAge going to get bothered by these bastards next?

xfriction lda xspeed+1 bmi .doNegFrict lda xspeed bmi .doNegFrict if xspeed and xspeed+1 form a 16-bit integer, then your should only test the high byte for the sign of the 16-bit integer not both bytes. Cheers!

The Cuttle Cart is just that. edit: beat me to it. -paul Yes, but you still have to load it into the Cuttle cart. Worse, you have to be one of the lucky bastards that actually own a Cuttle cart What if it was just a plain old mass producable cart. I figure it would need 8K RAM on board (probably cheaper than a 4K and 2K chip combined), A ROM of the necessary size to hold all the loads for a game, and some extra code to load it into the RAM as needed. So some slight hacking of the orginal code would be needed, but it seems doable.

Hmmm.. You know that might be a fun project to come up with a cartridge architecture that would support Starpath games. Thanks for the idea!