SpiceWare

I would be very surprised if they ran on the Retron77

BUS is a work in progress and we made a change that broke backwards compatibility in Stella. As such the demos would work on Stella 5.0.0-Pre6 and Pre7, but not on anything after that. I've updated the RPG demo for the new spec, as well as the new C compiler we're using, so it can now be run in Pre8 or Pre9. I'll update the other demos to the current BUS driver over the next week. rpg_20170616_NTSC.bin rpg_20170616_PAL.bin

Work is progressing slowly but surely on the station missile rewrite. The routines up until now would in 1 of 8 directions. New routines support 32 directions. They detect closest pod, then which angle to fire from that pod. I still have some fine-tuning to do on the angle-to-fire logic, should have that done this weekend.

This makes it sound like you're switching from PAL50 to NTSC60 after the game's already been loaded and running in Stella. Stella's detection for NTSC/PAL occurs when the game is very first started. Once its been determined it does not change during the program run. You can manually change it using CONTROL-F If your toggle is done via the TV Type or a Difficulty Switch then you can preset the switch when you load your game and Stella should detect it correctly at that point. In Stella's file browser, right click on your file and select POWER-ON OPTIONS.

That would be nice because I know Stella's support for CDF will most likely require a revision once we figure out the problem we're having with my Evil 7800.

No rewiring required for these

There used to be a Head-in-a-Jar app

If it works on a 2600 then the problem is not on you, it's on the sloppy emulation in the portable.

Yeah, that's doesn't look right. Maybe it was from Galaga, I seem to recall it had an unused sprite that was similar to the Enterprise.

Thank you! That chart's probably the one Andrew posted in his tutorial.

From StrategyWiki:

SampleFrequency's in sfx.asm, after the ORG $6600 and above the SampleTable. At the moment there's a single frequency for all samples. If you'd like I could change that so each sample has its own frequency setting(which would make it easier to compare changes). ;=============================================================================== ; 6600-66FF ;------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ; Sample Table ; each pair of word values points to a sample and its size ;=============================================================================== ORG $6600 RORG $6600 SampleFrequency: ; freq / 256 so value fits in 16 bit value ; C code will do a * 256 when it uses value ;.word 100000 / 256 .word 200000 / 256 ;.word 300000 / 256 SampleTable: ; sample size .word sample_alert, sample_alert_size .word sample_battlestations, sample_battlestations_size .word sample_blastoff, sample_blastoff_size .word sample_conditionred, sample_conditionred_size .word sample_spyship, sample_spyship_size ; 0, 0 denotes END OF TABLE .word 0, 0

As Nathan says, there's still a lot to be done. My goal is to release it at PRGE in October, which would put it in the AtariAge store sometime in November.

If the player moves in such a way that a missile moves offscreen, the missile is removed from play (no points are earned). If a station's showing an E-Type missile that gets moved just offscreen, the energy field will be shown instead if the player changes direction and moves the core back onscreen. The offscreen removal does not occur for a formation with a leader. Added as comment because editing the blog entry on the iPad tends to screw up the formatting.

Changing the frequency value should prove useful in balancing between quality and size. I haven't done any experimenting with it, I just used the 200,000 value that cd-w used in an early speech demo from creating the BUS driver. If you where, for example, to change it to 180,000 then a 20% smaller sample would play back with the same duration.

I don't really consider the rules to be a "To Do" list. I've been leaning towards green due to legibility - all those Es end up looking like Cs to me.

Haven't decided yet. I wasn't originally planning on digitized speech, so might not have as many options so we can allocation more space for better quality samples. iesposta's done some experiments with "Blast Off". Sounds great, but the sample was twice the size I was expecting - closer to 2K packed (2 samples per byte, so 4K of sample data) rather than 1K packed I'd been experimenting with. I plan to hit you up in a month or so for optimization help, not ready for it at the moment as things are still in flux

I got to play a Channel F in the mid 70s when we were visiting my grandparents, their neighbors had one. Don't remember much about it beyond the bright yellow cartridges and odd controllers.

Kind of - you can specify the difficulty via existing menu option Level: Kids, Easy, Normal, or Hard. At the moment it only controls how many inert objects are drawn. There's 32 vertical zones. The selected level specifies how many objects per zone (1-4) so there's 32, 64, 96, or 128 asteroids/mines when you start a round. Eventually it'll also control speed of missiles, frequency of attack, etc.

Not yet, they're just flying around in a test pattern so Nathan could confirm the graphics were converted correctly. Right-Difficulty A freezes all movement, but still lets the formation turn in place and rearrange for each formation shape. Do note that they're deadly to collide with. That's part of why I decided I should mark this post up with what's finished and yet to be done.

I'm thinking about marking up Rules of the Game to keep track of what's been implemented. Any preference between these? this has been implemented this has not been implemented this has been implemented this has not been implemented

I knew I shouldn't have clicked "view it anyway" I didn't talk to Dave about Space Rocks before he reviewed it, as I didn't know he was going to. As such, there's no way I could have "forgotten to tell him". (ie: you're making shit up again) The fact that Space Rocks utilizes an ARM chip is well publicized. Your words: "Dave liked the gameplay action but wanted me to add option menus and bells and whistle polish like SpaceRocks" - so nothing at all about requiring the use of ARM, Dave just felt your game needed more polish. (ie: you're making shit up again) As far as the "picking on the 12 year old", the kid was rude and didn't even bother to look at the info I provided, so I called him out on both while continuing to provide help by explaining terminology and even creating an index to my tutorial to make it easier for him to find the information he was looking for. I do agree there were some other comments made that went a bit to far, though not surprisingly they were by another person I've long had on my ignore list.

Ignore him, once he gets his mind set on something there's just no reasoning with him. If you try, he'll start making snide remarks about you whenever he can. I'm sure he still believes VGC's view that new Atari games must have big memory and run on the ARM before VGC will review them in spite of all the evidence to the contrary.

Is that 1550 a typo? Or is the core worth 50 points?

There's 3 types of asteroids - Nathan modeled them after the arcade. I'll probably set it up so the pod closest to you, and the two adjacent to it, can shoot. I'll need to work out how to tell which pod's closest, as well as which directions each pod can shoot without it passing through the station.