Mr SQL

save2600, Thanks, glad you like the game! I liked your description of the elastic leash/magnetic paddle effect How bad is the brief screen jump and flash on the real hardware? Does it break playability? I wish I could see it - on stella the brief flash only kicks in when you are using the laser cannon to blast the last row of bricks which made it a cool effect but it's rock solid otherwise; I will tune it so the hardware more closely matches the emulators performance.

Thank you everyone for the great feedback! I've added the requested feature to Breakanoid: When you lose all of your lives the game ends and you can press select to continue or reset to start over. I've also limited the continues to 3 but let me know and I can change this if it's too few (The new demo binary is in the opening post).

LOL! Here are some screenshots of level designs for inspiration

disjaukifa, looking forward to hearing how it behaves on the real hardware! - fingers crossed The elastic leash on the ball is what lets you bend the physics a bit, helps you aim and do some interesting things once you get used to it. Changes a bit too once it turns into speedball.

Thanks Brian! Excellent points; what do you think of a difficulty switch selectable option to toggle between endless lives demo mode and ending the game when the lives are exhausted for competitive play?

How do you die in this game? rmaerz, that shouldn't happen, I'm thinking maybe you had the button pressed down and just launched another ball after your paddle missed it? You only have four lives, but you have the option to keep on playing forever after you lose them. I was going to turn this off but the beta testers said keep it. Curious if anyone can make it to the third screen without losing all 4 lives?

Ian, I'm glad you like the game, thanks for the feedback! Judging from your username it looks like you are a fellow fan of this genre? I am planning to create a label design from the contest thread (for the alternate level set) but right now have no plans to ship it directly on cart though that may change; AtariAge currently offers a service to take the label and the binary and produce a cart for $20 or $25.

Yes, this is the elastic leash! You can use it to whip the ball aroud and change the angle slightly. It lets you bend the physics a bit - try playing through the three levels and using all the items and let me know what you think of the effect; my beta testers thought it was wierd at first but loved the effect after a couple of games once they'd learned how to use it.

Cool thread! I really liked Arkanoid and always wished a version or sequel to the genre would come out for the 2600. Anyone who feels similarly may like my new release: http://www.atariage....reorder-thread/ Playable demo on the thread

Level Design Contest for Breakanoid: Breakanoid is a fast paced arcade style action packed fun game for the 2600 available for preorder right now in marketplace! You can download the fully functional playable demo from the thread here: http://www.atariage....reorder-thread/ Breakanoid was tremendous fun to write, particularly when it came to designing the levels. There are so many creative contributors on the forum with excellent designs I thought I would host a design contest for an alternate level set to ship along with the release. I'm also planning to include a level editor, but for this contest any design idea can be shared from graph paper to drawing programs. I will post a few screenshots of the levels for inspiration. Everyone who participates in this contest is a winner and can have the game for half off! Looking forward to collaborating on the new level set!

Introducing BREAKANOID! 2020 UPDATE after the Zeropage review: Here is the HotFix version with the screen rolling fixed and all the levels: BRKANOID_HotFix.bin This Arkanoid style sequel turns up the action with a magnetic paddle to bring a new level of fast paced fun to the Pong genre! The ball still follows the laws of physics, but you can put English on it; throw a curve ball or whip it around the corner or over a ledge - it's like having an elastic leash on the ball! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csaXq8S7LB8 Here is a clip of BREAKANOID playing on a real 2600! The sound and gameplay are captured well enough to see the difference from the emulator but the animation and phosphor trails can't be filmed properly off of the CRT television - at 15 seconds the action gets so fast the camera is unable to track the ball and drops frames instead of showing the fluid animation. Try the BREAKANOID Playable Demo: The demo includes the first three levels from the game, download it to play BREAKANOID anywhere - in an emulator on your phone, your PC or on a real Atari 2600 via a Harmony cart! How to Order BREAKANOID: PM me, or post that you are interested on this thread and I will PM you with payment instructions. The BREAKANOID release package costs $20 and includes the following items: 1. The full version of BREAKANOID with all 15 levels unlocked! 2. The alternate levels version of BREAKANOID! The alternate levels version features three winning level designs from the AtariAge community (thank you tremoloman!) and several levels designed by the BREAKANOID beta testers. 3. The BREAKANOID Construction Kit: The BREAKANOID Construction kit runs on the windows platform and outputs a new BREAKANOID binary - it lets you edit the level designs right inside the BREAKANOID ROM image to construct entirely new and unique BREAKANOID games! In addition to letting you design your own levels for BREAKANOID you can edit BREAKANOID's huge 160 entry colour table; BREAKANOID is a colourful game and can display up to 35 colours on screen at once and stores different colour themes in it's colour table. Pixel artists will be able to create pleasing fades, mosaic and rainbow patterns with the BREAKANOID Construction Kit to go along with their artistic level designs. 4. Rights to put BREAKANOID on one cart: . . . but which BREAKANOID? I've been asked about offering BREAKANOID on cart directly but AtariAge currently performs this service for $25 and this gives Atari fans a lot more flexability to choose which BREAKANOIDto put on cart - you can decide to put the Alternate Levels version on cart or select one of your own custom versions that you've built with the construction kit - pixel artists may create special one-off carts that become collector items! 5. Instructions and cart Labels: BREAKANOID comes with instructions that can be used as a colourful cart label (great reference to have right on the cart), a control sheet and instructions for the BREAKANOID Construction Kit. *** --- Introduction and older stuff: About BREAKANOID! BREAKANOID is a fast paced arcade style action packed fun game for the Atari 2600 that I've been wanting to play since the 80's, but this type of game only appeared on other systems. During the 80's I wrote video games under my own label and for many software houses. I loved playing the games as well as writing them and was a big fan of the 2600 because on it's good games, the action was unrivaled - the games were fast, colourful and had great arcade sound effects. Arkanoid was one of my favourite games of the 80's and I would have loved to have played it on the 2600; other developers have told me the 2600 simply wasn't powerful enough but it seems to me that the 2600's unique hardware makes it the ultimate king of pong for building this kind of game This sequel changes the rules adding tilt like in pinball, bringing a new level of fast paced action to the genre. The ball still follows the laws of physics, but you can put English on it provided your paddle has room to move; this is great for throwing a curve ball up into the upper reaches of the board to hit those last stubborn bricks or to whip the ball around a corner or over an edge into a structure where it can get stuck bouncing around so you can have fun watching it break out! It's like having an elastic leash on the ball. In BREAKANOID you have 4 lives but you are in control of the ending; after you lose your last life you can either start a new game or keep playing through as long as you like Preorder BREAKANOID now: BREAKANOID is $20 and will start shipping on January 8th. If you preorder I will send you the full binary right away so you can start playing now! The release package will also contain these goodies: 1. The BREAKANOID binary, full version with 15 levels. 1. Rights to have BREAKANOID put on one cart. 2. A level editor to create new BREAKANOID levels! 3. A second BREAKANOID binary containing an alternate set of levels created here on the AtariAge forums; I am holding a design contest - please see the homebrew discussion forum thread for details! Try the BREAKANOID Playable Demo: The playable demo is a fully functional preview containing the first three levels of the game, I hope everyone enjoys the action as much as my beta testers did! This game was tremendous fun to build and I'm looking forward to everyones feedback! Updates: Saturday December 17, 2011: Added the option to continue up to 3 times (via the select switch) after the game ends or start a new game. Monday December 19, 2011: Added the following enhancements and requested changes: 1. Made the magnetic paddle optional - you can toggle it on and off during play (colour/b&w switch). 2. Losing a life now freezes the game briefly so that a new ball cannot immediately be launched. 3. Screen roll shake and shimmer should be vastly improved on the real hardware! 4. The super speed power up is now reduced to medium speed when you lose a life (staying in speedball mode was too hard). Thursday December 22, 2011: adding the following enhancements: 1. Added special yellow power-up's for extra life (rare). 2. Added BREAKANOID instructions: Brkanoid_Demo.bin

Plasma looks great with the 2600's extensive colour set; the hues look particularly vibrant in comparison to LCD. Differences aren't as noticeable with the less colourful retro systems. CRT's glow almost like plasma, have to agree they are best for retro gaming.

Agree the monitor is important; my setup has a 21 inch LCD set to 800x600. It's native resolution is 1600x1200 which makes 800x600 possible with real pixels.

I edit in one shell and in another I toggle between running the makefile and launching the game under Stella. I don't see much advantage using an IDE for coding in Assembly or Batari Basic; graphics and sound designers that create blocks of usable code are great tools but they don't have to be part of the IDE; my favourite sound utility for the TIA (conceptwise at least) sports just such a design for grabbing two voices from any SID file and generating the code blocks for a TIA rendition. The playfield and sprite editors are cool but I'd prefer stand alone utilities rather than having them bundled into an IDE. IMO many parts of the IDE we consider standard today weren't always so; back when autoformat wasn't a defacto component of an IDE other programmers would sometimes get sore at my left aligned code so I wrote a stand alone reformatting utility that would strip the indentation from any selected block of code and reapply it; eventually the next generation of the IDE they were using had this feature built in while paradoxically crippling the debugger which is pretty much the only performance advantage I expect to be able to rely on from an IDE because you can keep track of everything else in your head to save time

Ye jaybird3rd, yes your Avatar is a perfect example; the connections are very fragile compared to a socketed chip and notorious for breaking. The epoxy glob design offers better protection than a plastic cap because it absorbs shock when the cart is dropped.

syntaxerror999, GroovyBee's description is right on and so are your programming questions about clock cycles and timing; you could write a low level routine to do this in assembly and then call it from Batari Basic but the architecture of such a routine always comes down to judicious use of NOP's - this mnemonic literally stands for no operation but it does something very important, in fact it's invaluable in creating a software driven bit banger port to spec because you can pad the timing just so in your loops - instructing the CPU to do nothing takes time

Ah, I see you have this implemented already in the version with the tune, I just had to make the character back up a bit for it to kick in - nice game, the tune adds to the playability too!

Atari2600Land, Nice side scroller! I think it would be cool to add the ability to let the player move left and right a bit before the scrolling kicks in.

Glad to hear it RT, supplements and food - are you an athlete or in training?

The soft collision dection routine from CityScape works similarly: rem piggyback: seed d with a non zero value if opponent gets hit (frozen delay) rem h is the playfield x b=(player1x-10)/4:if b=h && d=0 then d=25 b=b+1:if b=h && d=0 then d=45 b=b-2:if b=h && d=0 then d=35 Description: In the routine I'm using playfield pixels as missile sprites and need to detect collision with a hardware sprite but other playfield pixels exist so I couldn't use hardware collision; I'm also translating between playfield pixels and real pixels (/4) and use a range so that an exact hit is not required (it can be just behind or just in front).

ComputerSpaceFan, excellent topic - you have indeed found the hidden homebrew section I agree it is good idea to make the games from this section more accessible - there are a lot of high quality games. Glad you liked CityScape!

I was thinking of trying to build on myself so that I could get more objects on the screen at once, that limitation really bothers me, I know you can use registers to get more, but I want to be able to have more unique objects on the screen at once. Also I feel that if I'm going to truly learn 6502 Machine Language, it will be best if I do everything from scratch! Very inspiring disjaukifa! I hope you will post about your adventures as you go along, it will also be a great way to learn to write to that unique line by line video hardware. I'd really like to learn that too.

disjaukifa, very cool; will you still use batari's libraries to abstract the graphics hardware or are you going to build your own display routines?

x2! Great game disjaukifa, clearly you've written video games before if not some related kind of programming. It reminded me of popcorn, trying to catch everything until this little Berserker robot dude came out and attacked me, unexpected and made the game even more interesting - very cool

Fantastic game SpiceWare! It feels like Bezerk for the Intellivision. How did you get a stock 2600 to output digitized sound? Is the Harmony carts chip emulating a voice expansion module/DA converter??