Grevle

With the assistance of TherealBountyBob i as able to free up more memory, so now i have added 2 new title screens, with a simple musical tune and also a new takeoff Scene when the rocket is leaving earth,and also some color adjustments and some minor improvements to the game. its here at my page www.grevle.net

The Realbountybob was able to squeeze more memory of my Basic code, and now it would be possible to add a more proper title screen to Rocket rescue. Do you think its worth doing a update only to add a better title screen ? thanks. Jan.

You mean The Atari XE Game System ? the one with detachable Keyboard ?.. that one is mostly a ok machine. It has composite video output and audio output in addition to the RF output. The quality of the pcb can be weak on some examples, so it may be smart to do a little resoldering on spots with little or cracked solder. I have 2 of those myself and they seems to work pretty good. No its not compitabel with 2600 games.. But the Atari 7800 console is Compitabel with atari 2600 and Atari 7800 games. Regards. Jan.

To get Player missile to move at a usable speed In Basic when moving vertically (up and down) its best to store player data in strings because string handling is fast in atari basic or Turbo Basic Xl. The book "player missile graphics in basic" has information on how to use strings for player missile data. The book can be downloaded in Pdf file from www.Atarimania.com Regards. Jan.

Wow. Great collection..Great to see the Atari 400 and Atari 410 in the glass cabinet . The Atari 400 was my first Atari computer back in the 80's. I have some Atari computers and stuff but no where near your collection, I hop to get a Atari 400 again, since my old one did break down at some point and it just sort of dissapeared somehow..

7 ufo hits during any of the ufo shootings gives extra rocket and more ufo hits in general improves ranking when game is over. Dracula lives 1.73 was mainly the final touch up. som bug fix .. i noticed the bullet of the gunner was showing in the overscan area, and since v.170 the ending of the game is improved (when game is played all way trough) and the coming of dayligt is a bit more challenging. These 2 Games was my first programming on the atari 8-bit since 20 years ago and the games is also som training exersize to learn to programm better. Dracula lives is using Graphics 1+2 mixed mode with custom charahter set and pm graphics,,and Rocket Rescue is Graphics 7+16 using mainly simple plot and drawto and text commands do draw backround graphics and pm graphics for rocket etc.. the rocktes flame is actually a missile size 2 , so my next game will be a evolvment to using graphics from pictures and using graphtofont to convert to micropaint images and load images in the game program it selft and also using tracker music files to have music in the game thanks a machine language routine called from basic. Regards. Jan.

Atari800win plus has a very good savestate support, Altirra has better support for full screen resoultions . Theyre booth good in their own way. Altirra is the newest emulator and it has VBXE support as far as i know. Compability for games and demos and programs are good on both, but some rare occasion a particular game or program or demo will only run on one of the emulators.

Fixed a bug, Sometime when carrying men in rocket and going into the teleport circle a bit of the rockets flame would get stuck on the screen. did anyone see this bug ? Should be fixed in this version: http://www.grevle.net/Rocket_Rescue_1.2.zip

If you load in the basic code and look at free memory it will say about 5310 bytes but all that is used for Strings and defining of player missiles when the game runs so its realy not possible to use maybe 15 more bytes and the game wont work... I hope to make some new games in the future, some small games just for learning even more about atari computer and Turbo basic xl. Regards.

Thanks for your comments. I consider the game to be finished, Theres isnt any more memory to do anything since graphics 7 alone witch this game uses takes up 8 k of memory and the basic code is not possible to squeeze any more memory off, well maybe a few bytes but not enough to add any new stuff... Its actually not compiled basic, but clean turbo basic xl running the game, my programming style i think its impossible to compile because of the tricky way to use sub routines, the sub routines are going arond itself in a way the compiler dont like. the compiler need a more Sensible way of programming, hehe. Extra fuel pods, hmm i see what you mean, there is some sort of logic to the fuel system, if you pickup fuel then you get the tank full, even if you crash the rocket the next rocket keeps the fuel you picked up, and if you crash when fuel is below ca 65% then the fuel bar always fills up to 65% again. The game is possible to complete with some good skill, heres a tip for the game, everytime you kan kill at least 8 ufos during any of the space shooting levels then you can get 1 extra life if you dont have all 5 lives when the scores are shown after each teleport. And when the first mission start when you arrive at the first planet then the fuel is full so you save the pod until you have picked up the men and then carefully fly up again and pickup the fuel pod then this way you have full fuel ready for next level. Regards.

Hello. I did add a feature that seemed to be missing from the game. Now its possible to have some control of the speed of the rocket traveling upwards in the space shooting scene. Pull back joystick for a little slower speed and push up joystick to shift into a little faster speed. This makes it more fair when navigating the obstacles when ufos comes towards the rocket. http://www.grevle.net/Rocket_Rescue_1.1.zip

Wow.. Great Version . So mutch better than the orginal one for Atari 8-Bits. Maybe the Ghosts needs to be a little smarter, i think its a little to easy. About MS Pacman on Atari 8-bits, Yes the orginal one is a good version but its not speed adjusted so runs slower on Pal Ataris, a bit to slow on Pal Ataris in my opinion, otherwise a very good verision of Ms Pacman. I have Both Pal and NTSC Ataris, The ntsc i can only connect to flat screen since my CRT Pal tv wont show colors with the NTSC version. But i could hook up The Pal and the NTSC version to my flat screen tv and take picture of Pacman arcade v8 for atari to show if the colors are the same for Pal and NTSC. Cheers.