iesposta

My cart was #297. ALMOST 300! Fantastic! A great many sales in only the first 3 months of availability — for an original idea game as well! I stand corrected! The water does use chroma bleeding. This in no way is meant as a criticism of the graphics. Merely an interesting observation that does not affect the game play. My S-Video bleeds enough I didn’t really notice the solid water was alternating color with black horizontally. Everyone who who owns a 7800 should already know how different they can behave and output. With a video mod, one can choose to add a switch that adds or removes the color signal from the TIA chip, as this is not needed for 7800 games. The following iPhone pictures of a CRT consumer TV show Composite with and then without TIA color signal, and S-Video with and then without TIA color signal. The same machine and game in all 4 shots, the last shot running out of time. Differences in Composite are huge, the TIA causing the “yellowish” water. Differences in S-Video are more subtle, mostly being the red is a bit fuzzy with the TIA signal, and sharper overall without. (Files are unedited except the size reduced 50%.) Composite with TIA signal: Composite without TIA signal: S-Video with TIA signal: S-Video without TIA signal:

Just tried my 7800 copy of Rikki and Vikki I received this week. If you have been delaying getting this game for your 7800, I recommend it as completely as the reviewers have. It is a solid, fun, unique presentation of what the 7800 hardware can do. My 7800 SVideo modded with UAV looks like the original trailer (and the above projector images) - with scan lines - on my Sony WEGA CRT. The Composite signal has the color artifacting, but that doesn’t affect game play at all. The game doesn’t use artifacting for different areas of color, like Tower Toppler does. Some more photos:

Excellent. After that there was the glitch where the tongue was all retracted and the spider was still moving toward the center, but it just died like something touched the tongue. I remember reading about that, and that should be fixed too? Tanya read lots of Anteater and Aardvark facts. The “Aardvark Cucumber” also called “Aardvark Pumpkin” was fascinating. Underground fruit that relies solely on the Aardvark for propagation. Gives the animal water. Aardvark are 130lb, 7ft long with tail, and eat mostly ants andtermites (over 200 locations per day), and Aardvark Cucumber.

I was watching the replay of ZeroPageHomebrew James play for high score. About 1hr into it he cleared a board. He “button skipped” past the “bonus multiplier” screen. His score on the next board was the same as at the finish of the previous. If you let the Bonus Multiplier score play it adds bonus to the score. It seems that if it is skipped the bonus is not added? Is that what happened? Now I went back to re-watch, and I cannot find it. Maybe I was too tired.

I was surprised at how nice the RF Channel 3 output was on the Atari Jr. Schematics show that they put back a chip (4050) used for the video, that they removed after the original Heavy Sixer 1977 1978 (which are said to have nice RF output).

Brown bug in artwork, green in game?

Very nice animations and difficulty progression. Quickly got to the point I cannot use “phone touch screen control” Already uses different sizes and copies (triple) of enemy Player objects. Suggestions? Use lots of colors because the 2600 has them.

Good work. And awesome news about Stella 6 support. I may actually use this device! (Still LOVE Hyperkin’s “Trooper” joysticks. Bought 4 of those.) At first, seeing lots of CPU used for such an old system just seems “wrong”. But emulation of Atari 2600 has always been CPU heavy because of how the original generates things in real time. I’m just glad the community knows RetroN77 can run all old and modern games, and is working to make that happen — along with the support for 2600-daptor-II’s and such that we spent a fair amount on in order use the proper authentic classic controller hardware.

By design. (Hacked bB DPC+ kernel.) Added 8 visible scan lines to separate The Lady at the top from the barrels to cut down on the top flicker. Also to make it taller because the original was "portrait" orientation. Flicker is still heavy. This causes overscan to change, and overscan was also hacked to not over cycle on level 1 during Hammer Time - when the most routines are running at the same time such as music, barrels, scoring, movement, collision, animations, etc. If I remember correctly, the barrels are animated, moved, checked for collisions, over 4 frames - Byte Knight did the game logic code. For those bB programmers going over cycle, splitting tasks over 2 or 4 frames may be the answer. It is designed for CRT display, but I've played it on many different displays without problem, just strange flicker because of the 58 fields per second. Some builds were coming out 270, and some 271. It is good as long as the "How High Title Screen" scan line count matches the game scan line count. It is very similar to Star Castle Arcade in terms of scan lines and less than 60 fps. For those interested, another hack was removal of the vertical scroll routines which returned a bit more than 200 bites back to bank1 for program use. Still irked I had to cut the "stomp the girders" intro as I had programmed and finished that. It was taking around 800 bytes.

Is this due to climbing the ladder off-center on the blue Rivets level? (Thanks)

March 19, 2019 news. Release Candidate 1 See the top of the first post in this thread for binary file. I've decided to share "DK Arcade 2600", and post the Release Candidate. This has sound, item, color differences, along with a fixed Kernel that should eliminate any "flashing ghost playfield pixels" that appear when nearly cycle maximum and that some machines were displaying. The "latest batari Basic" version from RevEng's thread has this fixed kernel. Reply in this thread any comments and suggestions - they are all considered, no matter good or bad, or not possible to include! Thank you. It is also decided by me, the author, that any "Release" will be through this "batari Basic Forum Thread". If you expressed desire for a real cartridge in this thread, no need to post again. You will be contacted when I have finished cartridges available later in 2019 or next year 2020. Payment will only be taken when finish cartridges are available - made with AtariAge hardware. This was my first designed game, both because I liked the game, I liked the challenge, and I wanted to show that very good games can be made with the "batari Basic" DPC+ kernel. - iesposta

The 5200 being a game console near exact to the Atari 8-bit Home Computer designed 5 years before Atari 7800. Always opted for the 800XL or XEGS over the 5200 due to the fact that nearly every 5200 title is covered on the Home Computer, plus so many more games, software loaded from SIO devices from original Disk Drives to SIO Flash Card devices. Atari 7800 is the evolution of the 2600 with a Sprite Engine, more RAM, and designed to have external hardware I/O (in cart, high score - which are finally realized with the XM's Pokey, Yamaha, High Score, etc. hardware).

Thanks to everyone who worked on this! AtariMax 8mega cartridge running on 64K 800XL NTSC plays great! Many amazing things going on here: Space Harrier working on both NTSC and PAL, playing SEGA game with large sprites on the 1979 home computer hardware, the extra colours technique, speech during gameplay, etc.

I made sure to ask that SpiceWare program the score to continue into the millions digit and not to "roll" when I saw there was room for "millions" in the way this game displays the score. He assures me it will display into the hundreds(?) of millions. Cool?

Happy birthday Johnny! Now we are the same age : )

If your Android device has a very new, fast ARM, you can put the Mappy .bin file on a cloud drive, then try this browser 2600 Emulator. https://6502ts.github.io/stellerator/#/cartridge-manager Yes it has rudimentary (crappy) touch screen controls, but at least you can experience it a little as a last option ( before using a PC MAC or Linux with Stella 5.0.2 or later), or buying the real cart or Harmony Flash cart or Uno Flash Cart and real 2600. Double tapping upper left goes full screen. The button area is bottom left, joystick area right side. Hope this was helpful.

I would like to formally thank ZeroPageHomebrew for the awards show idea. ZeroPageHomebrew Twitch stream has so far only done Atari 2600 Homebrew games. So for that reason it makes sense this only awarded Atari 2600 homebrew games. For the music sound in Mappy, I need to thank a few more people: David P. Crane for the Pitfall II “DPC” hardware that allows 1 sound channel to make 3 in-tune sounds. Chris Walton, Darrel Spice, Jr., Supercat, batari (Fred), any anyone else involved with the evolution of the DPC chip into DPC+ and currently the CDF method of sound and music (which has barely been utilized yet!). SpiceWare for teaching me how to get the note data into the Stay Frosty 2 and Mappy programs! As well as how to create different “sound envelopes” that make the 3-channel music sound like different instruments and/or like the arcade game sounds. For the game sound effects, I must thank Dintar816 (although I have only messaged him a few times, and don’t know much more about him). I had inquired as to how he made Pac-Man 4K and Pac-Man 8K sound so close to the arcade, and how it seemed not possible. His reply was that in a sound program, selecting one “Atari 2600 frame time” duration of sound, then matching that tiny slice of sound to what the TIA can do, and it builds up a sound in a frame-by-frame way. Much easier explained than to actually get something that sounds correct, it took about a year of trying until I started getting good results. For the trampoline “bounce” sound, that method completely failed, partly because there are 2-channels in that sound and I only had 1-channel to use. So I came up with that “boing” trampoline bounce on my own - which sounds nothing like the arcade Mappy trampoline, but worked out very well. (Thank goodness it came out well because to change such a main “nostalgic sound” could have been a disaster!) Thanks again for voting, and I look forward to next years Award Show! I know ZeroPageHomebrew has plans this year to add ColecoVision. Hopefully 8-bit Atari Home Computers (I’m sending him AtariBlast! on cart.) Additionally he has a Vectrex. Those could all possibly go into next year’s awards show. Michael

This was the hardest to choose. Many deserve mentioning for different reasons!

PacManPlus, Very nice manual. Thanks for mentioning me! I only offered suggestions. Now that the completion of this baby is in sight, I lovingly joke, “We now have reports of the successful birth of 7800 Baby Pac-Man! All involved are well, despite delivery nearly killing the parent.” We’re all proud of your beautiful new baby! -iesposta

I couldn't convert a simple type-in Atari 800 basic program of a "bouncing ball" to batari Basic. That's was / will be my starting point. Control over Gravity, Time, Velocity, Rebound, Decay, etc. Maybe along with some kind of table area location map data that would influence movement such as needed for going up or down a ramp.

Something I always wanted to do. I had my hopes up recently because of development on the pinball part of Bob’s 7800 port of Baby Pac-Man. Then the pinball physics frustration caused the project to be stopped many times. I was hoping for simple fast 6507 code. Kurt not only stepped up and wrote the Baby Pac-Man pinball code, it turned out so great that I’m sure it must be way beyond simple. Future Pinball, a 3D PC pinball simulator, even used an already coded “physics library”, and THAT great program never played like a real pinball machine! It is still fun and at there are at least 2 different “physics fixes”, but I never bothered trying fixes. I’m hoping the 7800 Baby Pac-Man will lead to other 7800 pinball video games. But I’d still like to make pinball for the 2600 — with any physics (real or fake), from pong style, to “movement map” style, etc. Blocky graphics would be good if the table covered many “screens” tall, wide, or both. Nicer graphics like Midnight Magic and Bumper Bash need player sprite re-use, and player, Missile, ball skewing / offsets as the screen draws down, some things currently beyond batari Basic (unless a custom kernel of pinball construction objects were made).

“Burger Diner” All our chefs make are burgers. So popular, they say they dream of making burgers! Self-serve soda, ice cream, pepper, etc. New this year! Self serve instant fries made the way you choose - always hot (also includes salt & pepper packets).

Also, I would like to see the newest Xevious Prototype (fixed) released with and without Box. That was found and shared in 2015. Was it forgotten, or is there just no demand? The official Atari box can be seen in the background of an Atari commercial. Those 1984 games were really pushing the system. I just wish the Xevious tune was as good as the 7800 Xevious, because it’s using the same sound chip.

The second assembly, when compiling a file, called bB.asm Has more native code than the first one. Is this for bB or pure assembly game? Im not clear what you need to do, but it is probably awesome! The Titlescreen Kernel is an example of an independent Kernel. Any shared variables restored when returning to bB. It doesnt use data and graphics from the bB code. In bB when you call drawscreen the compiled code chooses from around 12 canned kernels depending on what has been set and programmed. These canned kernels are include from bBs includes folder. Study those text files to find the kernels.

In batari Basic just write code using playfield, playfieldcolor and backgroundcolor. If using VisualbB uncheck "clean up" or remove temporary files. bB outputs 2 .asm files you can study, along with .sym and .lst text files. Lots of bB DPC+ use a 2 line kernel, however the Players are 1 line kernel, playfield is 1 line kernel. color is every other line change for playfield and background I am not sure if that is due to the 2 line kernel parts or not?