SpiceWare

Got a Tesla hoodie, Tesla Beanie, and my car on canvas from my folks yesterday. Hoodie will be useful this week, have a cold front coming thru. Beanie will come in handy next month when we go to Wisconsin.

You may find this video with Tod Frye talking about the homebrew Pac-Man 8K interesting as he wrote the 2600 version of Pac-Man port back in the day. A few things mentioned: 0:14 - 0:41 - he'd started on a flicker manager, but ran out of time 0:56 - 1:10 - 2 line kernels were still the norm 1:24 - 1:37 - his maze is simpler, takes less ROM So basically time, still learning the hardware, and ROM were design constraints at the time. As the ROM sizes increased they could make things more arcade accurate - Pac-Man was 4K, Ms. Pac-Man was 8K.

Hooked up my Laserdisc player. Hadn't used it in years as the discs wouldn't spin up; however, if I push the drawer as it closes, it works. Widescreen content doesn't look so good, but is watchable: 4:3 content looks pretty good: Most of my 4:3 content is anime:

Was looking for a ROM of Leprechaun, which I think should be in this blog post, but it's missing (there now, Eric probably fixed it as I pinged him). There's also a bunch of Guest posts for his blog entries dated March 3, 2006 and earlier.

Looks good! Long time ago @EricBall was working on a port called Leprechaun. It was written for the Arcadia Supercharger. Based on this post of mine, there should be a ROM in this blog entry but it's missing. After the forum upgrade I noticed missing attachments with a number of my blog posts as well; the attachments are still there, just not visible. A simple edit of the blog entry brings them back, but it's time consuming so I've only fixed some of mine.

Attract mode is the color cycling that occurs with earlier games when the game is left idle. It was done to alleviate concerns of burn-in. In later games the attract mode is a demonstration of gameplay.

I'm running 6.0.2. If I disable the ball the missile looks like I'd expect it to in both regular and debug mode. Nice, the clouds show off playfield priority over players. Aha! I zoomed in and what's going on is as the balloon moves left/right the missile's getting shifted 1 frame before the ball is. Here's the balloon messed up when it's not in debug mode: and the balloon looking correct in debug mode:

Hadn't looked at Sky Jinks before, wow - most of the stuff is drawn using the ball 🤯 Hmm, looks like something's off with the Missile 0 when Debug Color mode is on....

Figured out how to point out things in succession in Keynote: The 2 dark arrows are joined together as a group. The dotted red line is their path as you advance the presentation, with resulting positions shown by the ghosted arrows. When the slide is first displayed it looks like this: When advanced the arrows show up: and then move with each click: While not really needed for Space Invaders, it should help a lot when I go over Midnight Magic.

Quite clever how they swap player usage depending upon where the skier is in relation to the flags and the trees. player is behind the flag player is in front of the flag Great idea! I've done enough work on this revision that I'm not going to change directions this late in the game, but that would be good for my next presentation update. I'm only doing 4 homebrews for a specific reason. The authors of those games know why 😉 Yep - that's why I used Keystone Kapers.

For this I'm just covering the visuals as that's what Stella's Fixed Debug Color mode is useful for. I probably covered the digital samples to some extent in my blog, but the categories of Draconian, Medieval Mayhem, Space Rocks, etc. all went away with the forum upgrade so it's now difficult to track down stuff. I started an experiment to use tags instead, but abandoned that as the categories are supposedly coming back. Likewise I might have covered it in the homebrew post. Regardless, I will be covering it in detail in the CDFJ forum of the Harmony/Melody Club so you may like to join or follow the club. No ETA for when though as it'll be one of the last things covered.

Great ideas, Midnight Magic and Escape from MindMaster definitely need to to be added. They have so much going on though that I'll need to do a few run-throughs after adding them to see if there's any time left for the others.

I'm working on my presentation for next weekend's Houston Arcade Expo. In part of it I'm showing how to utilize Stella's Fixed Debug Color mode to figure out how games are created using TIA's limited abilities. I'd like to do a few more of the games from back in the day and am looking for suggestions of games with graphics which at first don't look like they should be possible. The ones I've already included: Space Invaders Keystone Kapers Dolphin Battlezone Solaris Hunchy II Draconian Gingerbread Man Mappy Example analysis:

I've added a reminder to my calendar to work on it the week after the expo.

Nope, been busy of late working on my presentation for the Houston Arcade Expo. I like to revise it each year based on how the prior year went, which was way too long with 79 slides. I'll be speaking at 7pm on Friday the 15th, so want to have it finished by this weekend which would give me next week to practice it. Thanks for the reminder though, I'd also been sidetracked with setting up my new TV and the Harmony/Melody Club where I've finished the setup instructions and started the CDFJ forum. I'm hopeful we'll see others besides Chris, John, and myself taking advantage of the Melody Board.

I posted photos of the demo in this reply, which also has a link to Glenn Saunder's Stella list post which contains the ROM. Doesn't look like Stella or z26 support interlaced so you'll have to run it on real hardware. Though based on this AtariAge News article about it z26 had been updated to support it. Maybe @John Saeger dropped support for it at some point, or maybe it was a one-off build. Edit: from the z26 faq:

Ah, from that announcement the ARM one came out over a year after we'd made the move to Linaro. Think I'll stick with Linaro, for now, as getting the Club going has already taken much longer than I would have liked. In fact I'm taking another break from the Club as earlier in the week I was invited back to the Houston Arcade Expo. My 2600 Homebrew presentation's 2 weeks from today, so I need to finish reviewing and revising it before then. A lot of it will remain the same, but I need to pare it back quite a bit from its current 79 slides.

Clicked on the Supercharger map at Tesla to get a closer look, but triggered a 404.

Bummer on not going, congrats on the job!

Awesome, can't wait to see what you do with it! Yep - that's a typo, looks like it's been around for quite some time. Main difference is DPC+ was designed to work with 6507 code, just like DPC as used in Pitfall 2. Running ARM code was added as an afterthought, so it's a bit rough around the edges and some things are very inefficient such as the datastreams are only configured via 6507 code, which takes scanlines worth of processing time. CDFJ was designed from the ground up to run ARM code. DPC+ blog posts are still valid, though they were never finished. Also with the forum update the blog entries were messed up a bit (check the code blocks in part 8)and it's difficult to find them all, though it looks like you took care of that - thanks! For the Collect tutorial I have an index and went thru and fixed every entry. I'd started to fix the DPC+ tutorial (the code blocks are OK in part 7) but haven't finished because I decided to redo them for the Harmony/Melody club instead. It used to be CDF, J was added when John put in an enhancement request for one of his games. The letters are in alphabetical order to help remember them.

That's cool, maybe John will post instructions at some point on how to set that up. It's probably possible to build Linaro for macOS, I just never looked into it as I've always had VMs handy. I've always used the tools the others used for Harmony development, never looked into others. Back in March 2017 @cd-w contacted me that he wanted to replace Codesourcery G++ Lite with Linaro. Codesourcery was quite old at the time, plus Linaro built smaller binaries. I don't know if he reviewed the GNU Embedded one when he made that decision.

5,000 Tesla Owners Told Us What Elon Musk Got Right and Wrong I'm one of the 5000, participated in the survey back in May. They asked me some followup questions at the end of August about the body work I had done, and a few more at the start of October about V10. Even though I had some issues, this quote sums up my feelings - "The car feels like the future, I can never go back."

Yep, just like the 2600's RAM and stack. I plan to cover that in more detail when I cover how to allocate part of Display Data to the C Variables and Stack space.

https://www.arcadecenter.com Same place as last year on the west side of Houston: Houston Marriott Westchase 2900 Briarpark Dr Houston, TX 77042 My presentation will be Friday the 15th at 7pm.

With the onset of cooler weather I'm getting closer to my first month with a credit on my electric bill. Yesterday: Solar produced 36.2, home used 22.5 Last week: Solar 193, used 181 Month: Solar 891, used 1048