CDS Games

Very nice...great organization for all that stuff!! Love your attitude John and that I can watch your videos with the kids around.

And on the flip side the 2600 was my last console. We transitioned right to the C64 and from then on all our games were on personal computers. I had no interest in a Nintendo. Still don't.

This is so spot on Keatah. I don't have loads of time anymore...I can't devote hours and hours or stay up all night playing intricate strategy or exploring games. I want to go in, unwind for a few short games, and get out. Atari fills that niche perfectly. And the timing issue...man ain't that the truth. I've felt it's been a problem since the mid-80s without ever knowing exactly why. You couldn't deny that the C64 was a better machine, but man could those games get choppy at times. I would try to write my own (bad) BASIC games and was completely frustrated why they didn't have the speed of the Atari games! And as computers continued to get better, that lag never went away if (like me) you always lagged years behind in computer tech.

I haven't worked on that or really anything Atari related lately. Four kids and two jobs.

You're very welcome! Glad you enjoyed them!

Yep! You can also set a trap for anytime the program writes to a register--sound, graphics, etc.

Been a while since I've used Hackomatic--it's just a string of hex codes with a graphics editor right? You are going to need something more elaborate unless you want to pull your hair out. For serious hacking like you're talking about I recommend Stella. It has its drawbacks, but you can change code and save files, so it works pretty well as a hacking platform. It has so many tools you can use to easily find things like color tables...you step by step through the screen until it draws your color and then you just look up where it's pulling the value from. Bang. There's your color table. Plus it compiles on the fly so you can tell data from code instantly. Super useful. 4k is the highest you can get without bankswitching. Anything 8k and up will have to be bankswitched. It's not super hard to add the bank in and have Stella recognize it but making the banks work well together is another story. It takes a bit of programming experience. There are really good music resources out there...I don't have the refs handy but you can probably find them with a bit of searching. Bottom line, if you hack in Stella or a disassembler you'll be able to do everything you want.

Superior and 4k don't really go together. The playfield graphics for the elevator and pie factory screens would need a large chunk of memory that 4k doesn't have to spare. You could squeeze in some graphic improvements, but that's about it. As far as "butchered", I'll stick up for Coleco DK all day long. Garry Kitchen did a phenomenal job, despite requesting 8k and not getting it. The only thing that bothered me personally about the cart was the missing levels, which is why I did this: https://atariage.com/forums/topic/229931-donkey-kong-2-lost-levels/

Sorry for the late reply, I've been super busy with work lately. I haven't made any progress on this since my last post, and I'd definitely love to get back to it at some point, time permitting. Usually wintertime is better for Atari shenanigans, so we'll see. Shouldn't actually take super long once I get the color switching bug ironed out.

Bankswitching per each missile, you mean? That hack's starting to close in on 1943.

Normally speaking you could just double the game to do this. Open Pitfall 2 as is. Hack the entire Level 1 into Level 2. Then you combine the original and your hack to get two levels, assuming you can find a bankswitching scheme that fits. Whether you could get it to work right with the extra chips though I don't know. And by the way, that would be a pretty involved hack. I don't think there's a disassembly, so it would involve lots of tracking down variables and graphics and then changing the values one by one.

Is the pdf link supposed to be above? Not seeing it.

For sure. Like where the color is set to black after a whole bunch of other stuff zeroed out at the same time: LDA #00 STA NUSIZ0 STA NUSIZ1 STA COLUBK

Sounds like Nukey has detailed instructions to post, so I'll just cover some general basics in the meantime. Open the ROM in Stella and switch to "debugger" mode (on my Mac it's the tilde key). Select the TIA tab so you can watch all the graphics registers, and use the Scan button on the top right to advance through the screen. Basically, you are going to advance through the screen and keep an eye on the color registers (COLUP0, COLUP1, COLUPF, COLUBK). Those tell you what the registers are currently set to. When you get close to the color you want to change, watch those registers carefully for when it shows up. Back up one scanline, and then use the Step key to slowly work your way through the code and find out what is changing the color. The register itself will be set by the corresponding COLU command, but then you have to figure where that value came from to begin with. It gets a little complicated depending on the programming tricks used, but generally there's a data table with the color values in it. Once you find that table then you can change the values however you like.

For me, Stella is the easiest hacking platform, but plenty of others may disagree. If you want to have at a go at hacking it yourself, download Stella and have the game file ready and I'll show you how to find where the colors are set and change them to whatever you want.

As iesposta said, there's some work that needs to be done on the AtariVox end. There are definitely enough speech strings written, but they all have to be set up to be called by the program. It's a lot of work and beyond my ability. I thought maybe I could figure it all out, but my free time is limited lately and what little I have for Atari hacking I'd rather play around with sprites and light stuff rather than figure out AtariVox from scratch. It's been a while since I've played around with the various versions of this, but are there any previous ones that we could just call the final one, without AtariVox support? At least then we'd have something....though It would be a shame because iesposta put so much work into the speech strings.

Shouldn't be too hard. Are you running the game in Stella?

I'm pretty sure it's not that old of a version....all the game play should be correct. In the latest revisions I totally changed the layout to a 2-up booklet format for printing. If I try to pdf that, the pages will be all out of whack and it'll be unusable.

Programming-wise, they could have made the layout almost anything, but yeah, I think you're right in the sense that multi-screen games were in their infancy and world building was still pretty much an experiment. And this world has to wrap, unlike Adventure. The vertical bit was always what threw me, because when I noticed that Superman went through screens much faster up and down because of the aspect ratio, I would always fly vertically. Even today, I have to force myself to take the extra time and fly horizontally.

I did a ton of work on this game a few years ago for an unreleased hack. I don't remember everything off the top of my head, but I can look back at my notes if you need more specific info (I hope I made notes!!!). You nailed the screen layout. There's a table of sets of 4 pointers per room: each pointer links to a new screen from each direction. So the world layout is easily hackable once you know how the table works and which hex values go with which room. The subways always annoyed me as well. I think those big square blocks are supposed to be parallel tubes/tracks like the ones that led to Luthor's hideout in the movie. But...yeah....the coloring is weird and it's a stretch.

Sorry that I've been slow getting things uploaded--I haven't had much time for Atari shenanigans. Yes, there is an instruction manual. Here's a pdf (not the latest revision) GAUNTLET manual.pdf And actually, I now have a color laser printer. Anyone interested in a hard copy? And what would be fair for something like that? I'd need to cover postage and materials at the very least.

Nice! Good hack idea!

Tod Frye said a couple of years ago that he might just take a crack at it.

Right. That's always the best policy. You'll grow old on here waiting for someone else to do the heavy lifting on your idea. Good luck!

This can't be said enough. When we got a C64, I was genuinely puzzled why the games on it didn't have the speed and responsiveness of the Atari. Compare, say, Gauntlet C64 with Dark Chambers. Or C64 Double Dragon with Activision's. Atari had no noticeable lag ever.