Robert M

Both the ideas given above are good. You may be on the wrong channel. Or need a new switchbox. I have found an ideal setup that may or may not help you. I do not have cable TV or a TV antenna on my house. I have a pair of amplified Rabbit Ears for an antenna (from Kmart, but any department store or Radio shack has them). I use an F-connector converter from Radio shack to connect the Atari 2600 to the cable-in jack of the Rabbit ears. I then switch the rabbit ears to cable mode and set the TV to the right channel. The atari picture and sound are crystal clear. I was shocked the first time I did it. There must be some sort of noise filter built into the antenna to strip out the noise in the signal. Cheers!

I recommend trying Escape Velocity by Ambrosia Games. (Link in previous post). I found it very entertaining. Cheers!

I tried to deny it, but I just bought 17 games new in box so I think its time to admit I have an addiction to Lynx.... and its a good thing! As an aside, its sad that Sega owns the rights to Space Harrier. The built in bitmap zoom hardware in the Lynx would have made creating a great port of the game a snap. I suspect that it was never done because Sega favored their own Game Gear handheld. Cheers!

DK Jr for 2600 is nothing special. Here's a quick tip. - To get off a vine you must double tap the joystick in the direction you wish to get off. I had a hell of a time playing the game until I figured that out.

Game of the month, maybe? I have whole weeks where time is not available for gaming. Cheers

Okay I received my copy of Thrust and I played it for the first time last weekend. It is an awsome game. I have a questions though: 1. Is it possible to get the 300 points for fueling from a fuel pod partially, and then 150 points for shooting the partially filled fuel pod? It doesn't seem so to me, but I wanted to double check. 2. If we start with Game #3 then there are 24 planets total to finish the game? 3. To win the contest, do you need to finish the game before anyone else, have the highest score (game finished or not), or finish the game AND have the highest score of all people that finish the game? Thanks!

Sears Johnson Hills - Hey, does anyone else remember when Sears even had full blown video arcades inside their stores. That was truly the peak of the first video game boom. Everyone wanted a piece of the action.

Oh! So that's what the hub bub was about. I missed that little piece of the controversy

RE: Adventure and Pitfall, I think the reputation of these games comes largely from their time of release. I bought both of these games when they were first released, and when I plugged them in I said WoW! They both pushed the 2600 to new limits that had never been seen before. Sure there are games now that make these games look weak, but back then they rocked! - Adventure brought to the table a large world to explore, and randomization to provide more shelf life. - Pitfall had an even larger world (256 unique screens in a 4K cartridge!), and graphics to die for. I mean Pitfall Harry was the very first VCS (and first maybe in consoleland) character to actually animate running beyond the 2 frame twitch walk common to many games, and he had 3 colors! I believe it may have also been one of the first games to use the missle/ball(?) to draw a line on the screen, aka the vine... Not sure on that one. These games raised the bar for games that followed. Many games since have raised the bar higher, but at one time they were the standard benchmark for showcasing the abilities of the VCS. On topic: I don't like VCS Asteroids.

I finally finished the game Crystal Mines II. Its been haunting my freetime for far to long now. It is an awesome game. Has anyone else beaten this game. The only level I didn't finish was Bonus level 28 "Tar Maze". What a nightmare. I was happy to see that the game has an ending. Cheers!

I have been thinking about this some more. I had planned originally to try and devise a sort of DMA controller in the cart to speed writes to the TIA, but then Paul suggested self modifing code. Looking at that possibility I could get 14 register writes per scanline plus an HMOVE. That would be enough for my purposes. Therefore, I propose to put two 4K byte FIFOs into the cartridge. I will give these FIFOs each two 64 byte spaces in the memory map for reads, and writes will be mapped to somewhere in zero page. The program will push a frame worth of custom code into a FIFO. Then pass control to the head of the FIFO address space to draw the screen. The code for a scanline will execute, and then a JMP instruction will put control back at the start of the FIFO memory space for the next scanline. At the last scanline there will be a RTS instruction to pass control back to the main program. Each FIFO has to regions in the memory map. Reading from one region empties the FIFO as each byte is read. Reading from the other 64 byte block will push the read byte back into the FIFO. This will allow the same code to be saved for display the following frame or be thrown away. I figure it will take 2 to 3 frames to render a screen image into a FIFO. So the game would run at 20 or 30 Hz. That's okay since the action in Karateka is paced slower than most other games. cheers!

You are fooled by Activision magic. The dolphin and the octopus are only one single sprite each. Take a careful look again. It's just clever shifting and double/quadruple sized pixels. The only two possible Karateka approaches are either doing exact that (-> Double Dragon) or flicker (-> Fu Kung!) Greetings, Manuel Manuel, I don't understand what you are saying here. I believe I made it clear that I plan to use "just clever shifting and double/quadruple sized pixels.". Also, I don't see any of that technique being used in Double Dragon, but then the only access I have to that title is the screen shots on this website. Fu Kung is an awesome concept, but its not what I am looking for. I need the backgrounds to really capture the feel of the original game. Andrew's mega sprite technique requires a black background. Cheers!

Alright, I just ordered Thrust Platinum, so count me in on this contest. I have some time off from work coming up in October. That's when I plan to dedicate my life to winning this contest Cheers!

Your numbers are correct, so that leaves 3 options: 1. Reduce the horizontal resolution. (Reflected asymetrical playfield with PF0 never used saves 14 cycles per line.) 2. Reduce the vertical resolution (2 line kernal) 3. Hardware acceleration [ Work in progress ] Cheers!

Paul, that's a fair question. I am doing something kinda new here, but I was inspired by the game Dolphin. The character images are a combination of playfield (orange) and a single sprite (white). This technique requires a relaxation of the idea that a sprite needs to have the same resolution and horizontal position or each visible scanline. There is no such requirement on the 2600 since each scanline is rendered largely independently from the previous line (as allowed by HMOVE -7 to +8 color clocks). So when you look at the sprites in the mockups the question for each scanline is: can I shift the sprite via HMOVE from the previous line position to the leftmost visible pixel (usually but could possibly overshoot to allow further movement for next scanline) and what is the width of each sprite pixel 1, 2, 4 or 8 clocks. For example in the second mockup the player sprite is 1 color clock wide for the hair, 2 color clocks wide for the torso and lower leg, and 4 color clocks wide where the leg is kicking out. I am restrained by the use of playfield graphics for skin, as I stated in thte first post. This would restrict players to 40 horizontal positions on the screen. which may or may not work for this game. Investigation is required. I may be able to share the Ball between the players to generate (with some flicker) skin between the rigid playfield resolution. As stated earlier I think I will need to include RAM (256 or 512 bytes) in the cart to buffer a frame for display because to get the image above the players cast shadows and such would require to much calculation to do in frame. I need to come up with a Java utility for editing these sprites with variant width and position. That will make the concept easier to see and implement. Look at Dolphin for proof of concept. How did the programmer generate the Dolphin, Octopus, and Sea Weed without flicker? Cheers!

What part of the first image (besides the mountain which is too wide, but fixable) don't you believe. There may be a couple pixel level errors in the updated mockup for screen one but nothing critical. Notice that there are only 3 colors per line at the top which is doable because the playfield is blue and orange/black alternating with sprites and missles for all the white and some of the black details. The bottom half has only black/orange (playfield) and white (sprites/missles) All of the pixel widths are valid (I think). Take a look at the sprites in Dolphin and then come look at these again. The display is nicely banded into horizontal strips of detail. The players never leave the ground so in the upper screen space the sprites are free to draw other things.

Actually its not that demanding of an image. It uses a technique similar to the one used in Dolphin to create the Dolphin and Octopus images to make the characters. The Arch is sprites at the top, and missles and playfield in the columns. The mountain will need to be retouched, but will most likely be a 48 pixel sprite, which is known technology. The characters are demanding, I am expecting I would need to include 512 bytes of RAM on the cart to make it possible by buffering the character images in RAM for each frame. Cheers!

Here's another one. (minus mountain, the mountain is just a 48 pixel sprite always in the same place, so I am assuming its a done deal and leaving out of the images for now). I converted the water to land/desert because its the easiest to be monochrome. It might be possible to put the water in as a sprite if the enemy never appears on the screen at the same time. Which would preclude the joy of being pushed off the cliff :wink: This image is important because it stretches the TIA to its limits to draw the player. The player sprite is moving horizontally and varying in pixel width from 1 to 4 color clocks every scanline. The image is such that it could be drawn in reverse for the enemy sprite as well. Enjoy

Hi, I have always loved the game Karateka, and so I hve been dabbling with the possibility of a 2600 version. Below is my first attempt at a mockup of a 2600 screen. I am 99% confident I could get that screen on an actual 2600. I know the Mountain looks like crap, but I was getting tired. I will improve it in later mockups. To get the screen below to work on thte 2600, I had to raise the height of the arch and remove the middle cross beam. I also had to restrict the faces, hands, and feet to playfield graphic positions. It remains to be seen if that last restriction is fatal to the whole concept of a 2600 port with this graphic quality. I will update this thread as I complete more mockups. Comments/critcism is welcome. I am attaching screenshots from the C64 version for comparison. (edit) Whoops! I can see I forgot to put orange stripes inside the mountain, as I would have to do because of the 2 color per line restriction for playfield graphics. I told you I was tired (/edit) (edit2) Image updated to be more correct. (/edit2) Cheers!

Nice game. Anyone else stumble across huts you could enter and collect bags of gold. I had this happen once on level 7, but never since.

Sounds like Dragon Stomper. :wink:

Is it just me or is the map shown at the start of the level sometimes a mirror image of the track you actually drive through? Level 6 for example...

I just received a copy of Stun Runner. Wow. What an excellent port of the arcade game. It really captures the feel of the arcade. I can't imagine it being done any better. I always enjoyed Stun Runner in the Arcade. Does anyone know if Stun Runner was ported to any other home consoles? Cheers!

Super sweeeeeeet!

Crystal Mines II for Atari Lynx. I am quickly becoming a big fan of the Lynx since I picked one up at the Video Game Summit.