Mr SQL

Awesome teleportation scene and space invader boss to defeat at the end of the level! You really packed a lot of fun into this game

DNA, there's probably nothing wrong with the key, the polymer contact layer under the keyboard gets dirty after 30 years, here's how to clean it if you must have that key working: http://www.bjtechserv.com/Magazine/C64/C64_Keyboard_Clean.htm

Awesome game Loon! That was entertaining just to watch the way it kept changing up Ghosts N'Blins and Castlevania themes and then discs of Tron came into the mix - very nicely done video too, the soundtrack was perfect!

Right after you've set it, however you are setting it outside your 192 colour changing loop so also move that block to right after the colour change - everything should happen there so that it occurs with each visible scanline: stx COLUPF lda PATTERN sta PF1 nops.... lda #0 sta PF1

jonmower, very cool you are learning 6502 Asm! The only unnecessary code I see is pretty minor: 1. you can remove notyet bne and ldy #0; this code is superflous because the register "wraps around" to zero after 255. 2. If you dex down x instead of incrementing it a cpx #0 is implicit - you don't need to issue it, can just beq or bne. For the concise explanation you are looking for issue a bunch of nop's (try 10,15 or 20) then lda #0 sta PF1; this will clear the playfield register after it's been written on one side of the screen but before it is written to the other side (later you could replace the nop's with usefull code that takes as many cycles). You might also like to try the Abstract Assembly Development Kit (in my signature) to build games fast with less emphasis on counting cycles and optimising.

You're welcome RevEng, very cool you are going RockBox! I'm loving the Atari SAP collection on my player Not as many tunes as the SID high voltage but there are some awesome Pokey composers; strange that I can't find Yerzmyey's stuff in the SAP collection (but I have them in mp3 format) his Pokey and Speccy chiptunes are fantastic. IMO it feel like chiptunes put the brain in Alpha mode coding. btw the sansa has a microSD slot that helps with the limited space issue.

Excellent point RT; Warshaw even kept a whip on his desk at Atari and walked around the office cracking it - imagine a programmer trying that today? I'm pretty sure Tod can still get away with the wall clinging

RevEng,yes I had to do this recently after finally breaking my iAudio X5 that I had for several years; I wanted a player with built in FM and a mic because rockbox supports encoding MP3's but couldn't find an X5 (except one selling for $200 which was too much for a player) so I picked up a sansa e200 series player that had these same features for $15 and the RockBox experience is just the same as it was on my X5.I'm really digging the Atari pokey .sap collection, that's new since the last build I downloaded FujiSkunk,agree OGG Vorbis is awesome Wish it had an OV encoder but the mp3 encoder is excellent (44 khz/128 sounds good). I like that it plays the abandoned .wma formats too.I did look at rockboxing an ipod but they don't have FM or a mic and I had gotten used to those features. Interesting you can rockbox the Android! The developers have been busy, wonder if they will finish the 2600 emulator.I'm not inclined to watch tiny videos or use my phone as a player but I periodically read text files while listening to music or play a gameboy ROM, it's got a lot of interesting features.

Tom, check this page, I think you can run it on the gmini now: http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/GminiPort If you can't get it to run on the 202 a lot of the legacy players it runs on are practically free on ebay; it's support for SID's and other chiptunes seems pretty exclusive although I think there is a TinySID player out for the Droid.

Found the answer; those are pokey tunes, there's a collection of 4,000 of them here inspired by the High Voltage SID collection: http://asma.atari.org/ I am downloading them to my music player... Rockbox is pretty awesome - no other programmers here use it !?

Loon, that's an awesome idea! I'm going to revise the sprite loader in the ASDK to take an argument to load sprites from the sprite library upside down; they get loaded into high RAM (CBS RAM) anyway so it won't affect anything and will save space for more sprite definitions.

Fair enough RT; arguably racists are practising an extreme form of that too - RevEng seems to have a good point that applies there as well: if you mistakenly call someone a racist you are certainly being offensive and pejorative. Back to Open Source: I like Rockbox (www.rockbox.org); this is an awesome open source platform for music players that plays C64 SID's - great for replacing ipod firmware and many other mp3 player firmwares with. Until I can get a portable sid player or pay Ben Heck thousands of dollars to make one for me this is the music player firmware for me It's gotten better too, I used to have to massage it to get it to go but now it installs automatically, the team even almost got a 2600 emulator working on it. The gameboy colour emulator works and so does the Specy though. About a million open source developers keep adding stuff like ants in a terranium which is pretty cool to watch; they've recently added support for Atari sound formats " .sap, .cmc, .cm3, .cmr, .cms" - anyone have any idea what these are?

RT, I like that much better than the other terms you suggested! I think the examples I used are more than just feigning ignorance though; consider: In making offer after offer for a technology they wanted and being subsequently turned down, can Microsoft be construed as feigning ignorance when they decide to help themselves and just copy the technology? When they get caught doing this they pretend they didn't understand, which to me denotes a lack of cognitive function because it seemed clear. Similarly when a MySQL development team orders the "for personal use" edition of my tools and begins to use them in the enterprise along with SQL Server their argument is always that they didn't understand, ie it wasn't clear that ordering "For personal use" free tools required the purchase of a license for the enterprise (the other order choice) and they thought they just needed to buy a service contract for support. Or how about when SONY pretended they thought it was OK to help themselves to everyones files because they insterted a music CD? Can you think of a descriptive term for people or corporations pretending to have a lack of cognitive function?

Loon, you have good perspective here; I don't mind people using free copies of my software and didn't have a problem with "pirating" in the 80's even - it was a double edged sword then and know both helping and hurting. Market awareness was increased which helped sales but market saturation also increased which reduced the $ lifespan of the product. Users are what computers are for! - Dr Walter Gibbs Doing our Business is what computers are for! - Dillinger/Microsoft OTOH I also find Microsoft personally offensive - for having advanced two offers on my database technology which I rejected (since they wanted to tie it to Visual Studio "we don't like that it pits SQL Server against our Visual Studio product line") and then outright copied in the way they wanted afterwards so they could have it anyway. IMO they are the biggest freetard and I have trouble not calling them that in the same way I would have trouble not calling a racist a racist so as not to offend the racist - Microsoft clearly reviewed intimate design details and made offers on my technology for the purpose of aquiring it legitimately. They are notorious for this kind of thing and for pretending not to be; in their defense they do make offers before stealing but it's clear the stealing is always done on the premise of being retarded "oh we didn't understand we weren't supposed to get that for free." I don't use the terms Master and Slave to talk about drives anymore; have replaced them with Primary and Secondary because those other terms are hurtful to people. But just like racists, I think freetards are offensive and don't deserve special treatment so as not to be offended: Someone (or even a corporate policy of) pretending not to understand something for personal gain = freetard. I think someone cannot feign diminished cognitive function without being immensly offensive, particularly so to retarded people because retarded people aren't pretending. What better term could more accurately portray someone who is pretending to be a retarded person for personal gain without losing it's meaning? IMO this actor deserves an academy award like Archy Bunker.

These are all good points; I responded to repeated theft by MySQL development teams by completely dropping the MySQL IDE from my product line - note how my signature only says "free SQL Server IDE". This is because SQL Server development teams don't pretend not to understand they can't use it in production without paying for it (it's easy for them, they pay for SQL Server in production and only use the free version in development). I still have Database Compare tools and other stuff for MySQL but I've tied them specifically to SQL Server as well. I don't have a problem when a company wants my team to work on MySQL projects because we charge them for the hour and there is no pretending not to know they have to pay for services (well, usually ).

Sam, freeloader's and Pirates are more genuine and less offensive by virtue of actually being Freeloaders and Pirates; we see freetards all over though beyond those just pretending to be retarded so as to help themselves to free software, that isn't free. Look at the Olympic athlete with the graphite legs - he has a different type of disability alltogether but having shot his girlfriend repeatedly through the bathroom door he's mounted a freetard defense, seems to be claiming to have the disability of being retarded so as to get away with that for free. This isn't an isolated phennomena it's just a matter of degree.

Like Dvorak I have a different perspective on this RT; freetard is a euphamism for someone who has nothing wrong with them, no disability at all but pretends to be retarded so as to steal software they really very well know they have no right to. My database kit comes with a disclaimer and can only be ordered that way! Do you expect me to believe the SQL Server users know it's not free but MySQL users really become truly and genuinely confused? I really don't think so, they are making pretend. This might be funny in a movie but it's morally wrong to pretend to be a retarded person weather it's to compete in the special oplympics or to help yourself to software you clearly know isn't free. IMO freetards are offensive to everyone and particularly offensive to retarded people.

All good points Sam; I would point out that I have these tools available for both SQL Server and MySQL and the confusion occurs only with commercial use for MySQL - the idea and mindset that anything that connects to an open source product is free is clearly infectious if completely inaccurate. Compounding the problem, while there are competing tools from RedGate avaiable for SQL Server, there is no comparative tool that I know of that allows you to analyse two MySQL databases anywhere in the enterprise and pinpoint all the schema breaks and code breaks between them and this kind of thing is invaluable when maintaining production, development and staging copies of a DB that are supposed to be identical except for a specific set of intentional differences - this of course brings us back to the commercial dev kits you pointed out for Linux helping make it a success. I don't want to contribute to the success of MySQL unless my tools are paid for - they are not free and my mindset is: go and do schema compares by hand and put out fires in production while losing productivity and paying your developers for their time or, buy my tools. There is no middle ground for freetards where connecting my kit to a MySQL database somehow makes it free.

Loon, I think choice C is awesome because it allows programmers to have a discussion made safe from unpleasant moderation by obfuscation stephena, I'm more interested in hearing your thoughts on OS, and Thorn's too than seeing you withdraw from the conversation; I certainly like and use DASM and that's become OS now too as I understand it, but I think "freetard" is an acceptable term if that Dvorak liberally tosses it about for no other reason (and he's not about insulting anyone, he just offers insightful views on technology and culture since forever). Maybe either of you (or FujiSkunk) can explain to me how a bevy of OS licensing methodologies aren't involved in cultivating the mindset I experience regularly here: People explain to me it's OK to use my not open source Database Compare tools and dev kits in production because we're using them against a MySQL database. This to me, epitomises the freetard mindset and it costs me money especially when I hear "Oh we've been using it for years, it's wonderful and we didn't need support until this issue came up just now so we thought it was time to purchase a support contract". Seems to me someone else's model of pay just for support is influencing them since it's what they keep telling me.

Sam, very insightful observations, that was awesome! I find this mentality that everything should be free an anethma to my business particularly when it extends to programmers and mangement working in a corporate setting - I give away free versions of my database tools for SQL Server and the MySQL open source db yet I get requests (and demands!) for support from businesses using the tools in a corporate setting with MySQL; since my tools are only free for developers and require a license for business use it becomes an odd conversation (and it shouldn't be!) where I have to explain the tools aren't open source - ie, it's not about purchasing a support contract from me but about purchasing a license to use the tools in a corporate setting in the first place! To make matters worse, the open source "pay for support model" isn't my model so my tools and development kits have a higher quality that generally doesn't require any support - and businesses just use them for free with the freetarded mindset they're entitled to a freetard license! Regarding piracy, I started my software company in the 80's writing video games and never considered piracy the exaggerated problem it was made out to be - it just hastened market saturation whereas today's freetard mentality is 1000x worse: people copied games at computer user groups sure, but businesses that bought my software back then (I didn't just write games) actually had the idea they were supposed to pay for the software rather than imagining they were entitled to a free license. By far some of the most bizarre ideas I've heard about OS come from enthusiastic evangalists pushing the idea that open source means green peace and solar energy and giving back to the environment

Dan, that sounds pretty cool, I'd like to hear more about it! Is the 3D modeling engine for a game, a CAD program or something else? Does it have to be open source too since you used OS to create it or did the OS code or OS development tools just influence your design? Working in Databases I frequently see scenarios where OS causes considerable loss of productivity for corporate: developer builds a homegrown MySQL (ISAM) database when the project required something more robust and reliable simply because they have familiarity with the free db. Inferior OS development tools can also cost more than paying premium for quality dev tools upfront. I think open source is interesting and eduational though - I'm always learning and I like non restrictive OS tools and ideas. I even built a database compare tool like RedGate's specifically for open source MySQL db's - you need SQL Server to run it though!

Great posts Dan and samiam! I don't get open source either; On the one hand I write code for a living so I actually like to make money coding instead of doing it for free! And on the other hand, when I want to give something away free (development kits, software, free versions, etc) I like it to actually be free so that other programmers can be free to use it without being forced to in turn work for free and give their stuff away! Open source licenses don't work anyway; SONY pretty much proved that with their open source based root kit - they somehow reworked the open source license so that all the open source (and all of everyones personal content too) belonged to SONY instead of the other way around. Corporations objected to giving up all their base to SONY just because someone had inserted a music CD but it seems they were the only ones with a voice.

This is awesome! Fantastic retro machine recreated; nothing beats throwing switches on the console A Dasiy Wheel reproduction of this letter would complete the kit: http://www.blinkenlights.com/classiccmp/gateswhine.html

Thanks Loon! I'm looking forward to seeing Ed's games Spice, the ASDK Assembly Framework is a free tool for developers that was inspired by bAtari BASIC and BoulderDash BoulderDash is the only game I've seen on the 2600 that provides a malleable four way scrolling virtual world; the ASDK lets the programmer define the virtual worlds much like bB playfields, as straightforward (WYSIWYG) bitmaps. By providing phantom hardware not present on the 2600 (playfield, virtual world, virtual camera objects and x,y addressable sprites and pixels) the environment for the Assembly developer becomes much closer to that of the C64

samiam, this is awesome! Just had a chance to read your 4096 byte Jungle and Pitfall's Polynomial articles; very cool! btw Tom Baker is my favourite Dr Who