DanOliver
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Posts posted by DanOliver
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If you'll (eventually) be working on new software for the 2600, I would strongly recommend checking out Stella too. While the Melody/Harmony is absolutely amazing hardware, and no developer should be without one, there's still a place for software emulation during testing. In particular, when you want fast turnaround times and an in-depth debugger for bug-fixing, nothing beats being able to do it all on your PC. Have a look at the Stella project, particularly the documentation and notes on the debugger.
I was of course drawn to Stella. We'd have gladly given Larry Minor's left nut for one. But Melody features like using the ARM and bus -stuffing I assume Stella can't emulate?
At first I was just thinking, yeah one more VCS game for the road, sounds like fun. But this Melody thing and Wickeycolumbus overclocking has me thinking differently. And I just wrote this to Andrew, you've doing something really different in all of gamedom. All game systems I'm aware of are very balanced, very symmetrical. If it has 8 bit color 640x320 bit map graphics it has a matching CPU. Doesn't do any good to have more bits than the CPU could ever push around or more CPU than you need. They always buy the appropriate sized CPU because even the next size up CPU is going to be hugely expensive.
You guys are making something very asymmetrical. Yeah you're able to maybe double the graphic power of the VCS, but you're still pretty constrained. Yet you still have a ton of horse power. The only use I can see for that unused horse power is game logic. That's different. That's like the Galapagos Islands. To compete I think your developers will be forced to use that unused CPU power. That could generate a whole new kind of game. I think developers would be forced to.
Like putting a Cray chip into an Apple II. I don't know what you're going to get out of that but it sure is going to be something different.
So anyways, that's where my head is right now. I'm kind of looking at what you have as a new platform, a modern platform.
Does anyone have an idea how much the Melody ARM can do? Like some bench mark per vblank?
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Wow, I really have to get Rescue Terra 1, shame it's so rare.
I know a guy in South America...
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Once Frantic is done I'm planning to work on a bus-stuffing driver for the Melody. It'll enable TIA updates in 3 cycles of time and would allow a kernel to be written like this:
OK, thanks. I understand the bus-stuffing thing, at least what I could do in software...the hardware end - no clue. What does it mean to work on a driver? The Melody can do bus-stuffing hardware wise but needs a driver? How hard does that look to be? Bus stuffing can't be done today? Or you're going to write a tweaked driver?
Every time I learn something new about the Melody it amazes me.
It does tear me a bit. The bus stuffing really changes 2600 programming a lot, the kernel is almost gone. On the other hand it would still be nice to kick Demon Attack's butt.
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We've expanded David Crane's DPC into DPC+ to access the additional ROM and RAM found in the Harmony/Melody, as well as to decrease the time it takes to update a TIA register from DPC's 7 to 5 cycles. We've also added the ability to run game logic on the ARM. The code for the ARM is written in the afore mentioned C. The ARM game logic can only run during Vertical Blank and Over Scan as the ARM must relinquish control back to the 6507 when it's time to draw the display. Games like Space Rocks and Frantic are the result.
I wanted to absorb a bit before looking at these games, so I'd have an idea of what I'm seeing. Space Rocks and Frantic look really great. Especially Space Rocks. Sound, graphics, movement, really nice. I'm so itching to play them. Have to get a 2600. Thanks for posting all the info, really helped me.
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Thanks. Always wondered.
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Sensitive? That's beyond sensitive, that's stupidity:
http://en.wikipedia....wiki/River_Raid
And it is stupidity, I mean I'm German myself, but banning games like River Raid. Funnily enough playing Cowboys and Indians is ok with Germans.
Sorry, best not to dwell on it, just makes me mad.
Pretty funny to me. I would have killed to have a game banned in Germany. The guys at Digital Pictures told me that having Night Trap in the Congressional hearings and banned from stores put that game on the map. I got to port it because of the infamy. No such thing as bad publicity.
When I was at Any River they had a game being done outside, an aliens on earth theme that was about to come out when the alien autopsy was still hot in the press. They started getting questions from the press about whether the game was based on the alien autopsy and they had a meeting to discuss what could be done. I was like "Hell yes! The game is absolutely all about the alien coverup. Aliens are real...we need to do a commercial showing how the alien was killed...in our game...yada yada yada Hire some lobbist to make sure the CEO is called before congress". And they were worried about negative press...Are you freakin kidding me! First company I ever worked at where the venture capitalists shutdown the company before the money ran out. Biggest train wreck ever.
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I also see now what you all are talking about icon vs text.
I see a video on YouTube from Poland with the icons and AtariProto has text. And all the 5200 screen shots have text. My boxed computer version has text on the box's screen shots.
I assume there were 3 versions sent to production.
1. Computer with text.
2. Computer with icon to international production.
3. 5200 with text.
I must have had a reason why they weren't all icon because they all went out on basically the same day and all icons would have been easier. My guess is selecting the 4 screens Nav, Sea-to-Air, Torpedo, Sae-to-Land could be done in one joy stick move. The icons were too large for the N-S-E-W layout so had to be a horizontal layout requiring more joy stick moves. I remember really liking the one move selection.
,I see "The Legacy" a lot. I only remember "Legacy". That's what I wrote on my focus test cart and is on the splash screen. So I don't know where "The Legacy" came from. Can't say I like "The Legacy" either. Never liked "The" in a title.
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I was looking around to see if I had put any German cities in Final Legacy...didn't know the Germans were so sensitive. And I saw this screen shot on Atraiprotos.
Not really an easter egg, but Kendall is a tiny town in Upstate NY where I grew up. Forgot about that.
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Don't know, Dan.
I only maintain the Atari 2600 section of Atarimania.
I do know The Last Starfighter on the VCS, programmed by Douglas Neubauer:
http://www.atarimani...ter-_14024.html
Which was the prototype of Solaris, one of the most imressive VCS titles ever programmed:
http://www.atarimani...aris_s6941.html
Douglas Neubauer's name seems really familiar too, but probably I just heard his name a lot. I was searching around and he did the POKEY chip AND Star Raider so I think if I'd met him I would have remembered. And I do keep seeing Solaris at the top of people's lists. That way impressive to me. I wish Chris could have gotten him into the group. That would have really been something.
I've been confusing Douglas Neubauer's name with Dave Getreu who I worked with on the ST. Don't ask me why I confused those two names.
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Here's a review from the German magazine Telematch Computer August 1984, thing is, Germans have a problem with 'shooting games', especially Hartmut Huff (He totally ruined Battlezone in a review). In Germany Final Legacy plays on another planet.
Germans, bold enough to start two WWs, but some computer simulation, tail between their legs.
That's completely bizarre on so many levels. Sure never knew this came out in Germany.
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I was just looking around your database, Atarimania, and saw Last Starfighter for the 5200, and also AtariProtos. Gary Stark's name seem really familiar, so does the opening screen. I thought our group was involved with Last Starfighter. Do you know what group he was in?
I don't remember seeing the game play which I just looked at on YouTube. Looks like a great game. Multiple explosions on the big ship is cool, never seen that before. Great idea.
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Don't recall that. I remember we'd put stuff for copyright, but that would be small. And it doesn't sound like my style. Don't generally like junk in my code. If I put it in I used it.
What did you find?
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Dan, first of all, it's really kind of you to come here and share your experiences and memories with us....well, geeks.
A lot of people are even surprised that anyone cares about this stuff, but....it's video game history.My pleasure. All the history you all have preserved have brought back a lot of memories I'd about lost. So I thank you all.
I majored in history in college so I understand all too well the importance of preserving the past, documenting things, and so on.
Hope some historian documents the Harmony project. Hint, hint.
But from everything I've read and heard about that period of the late 70's to the mid 80's, it was a wild, crazy time. Don't think for a second EVERYTHING has changed 30 years later....designers and companies STILL rip off ideas from each other willy-nilly (FPS games, I'm looking at you!).
I'd never expect that to ever change. I think the same stuff goes on in Hollywood. Happened with Painters back in the renaissance where each painter would mix their paints in secret. Creative endeavors seem to always have the highest paranoia. Just part of the fun.
The major difference is that cost and staff has exploded so much they have to make the game for several consoles at once to recoup the costs, and often (unlike the 8 bit days) the ports are very similar to each other.
I kind of hate to call both what we did back in the 80's and what they do today as both being "games". So different. I went back to games in 94 and did some larger games at Digital Pictures and Any River Entertainment, but I didn't really enjoy those kinds of games at all. The programming was great fun.
I also interviewed a few years back at Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment to write tools for Stargate Worlds out here in Phoenix. Huge project. Gigabytes flying everwhere. More artists than I've ever seen. They had a full size Stargate in the lobby and the typical hot are they of age babe receptionists. Seemed like the old days, except everyone was working on the same game.
All I could think of is "why is this all in Phoenix?" Tons of people, sharp engineers, and I love Stargate so I thought that was a super license. They really seemed to know their stuff in every way. I would have liked making tools for them but the headhunter made a total mess of it plus the offer was pretty low which told me why they were in Phoenix. Looking for cheap labor. That's a red flag to me so I passed. I've ridden a lot of companies into the beach, I can almost smell death being right around the corner.
Companies like Digital Pictures got it. Boss would pop his head in "need anything?" "yeah bigger monitor" 20 minutes later "where do you want it". Meals every night, anything you wanted. Anything that would take you away from programming they eliminated. And we loved that. Really great game designers, great management, wrong medium. Which I guess is a management fault. Loved working there.
I have played Final Legacy and it's a really fun game, a nice blending of game ideas from other games. Reminds me of Gorf a bit in that sence.
That was my style, throw a lot of different stuff in and hope something sticks. When I started at Apollo I'd never seen an Atari game and they had me play some and I noticed some of the boxes had "30 different games!" and they were just changing the background color. I thought that seems to be important and Space Cavern had some absurd number of "games". That kind of "lots of stuff" stuck with me. A crutch though.
BTW, if you like post-nuclear games, you should check out the Fallout games.
I checked out some videos...not for me. Doom with great graphics. It's amazing stuff, just not for me.
Do you still game at all these days?
I liked FreeCell and would play it 12, 15 hours at a time. FreeCell! That's not healthy. I had to block it from my browser. So Catch-22, if I liked a game I'd have to stop playing it. I go out of my way to not play games for fear of addiction. I won't play golf or try Altoids either. My addiction to programming at least pays the rent...some months. Typing in forums is another addiction I have a problem with, obviously.
Did you have anything besides the Apple and 2600 for consoles and computers?
I don't even have my 2600 any more. Sold it like 10 years ago at a yard sale. The guy who bought it really lit up seeing the 2600, Brought back memories for him. His wife didn't seem as thrilled. I had what I thought was a high price, maybe $50, because I just as soon keep it. I probably should have told him I programmed games for it, maybe he would have paid full price.
Got rid of all my Apples probably. I had a Woz machine, might still have that. Trying to be more of minimalist. If I kept everything I'd worked on I'd be buried.
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Oh, I see. I thought you had to bring up the TIA speed. That's way cool. Would sure make changing all sprites on every scanline easy. And you have a ton more CPU time for game logic because to me 3x wouldn't do it justice. Because say on a regular machine maybe 50% of your CPU time is doing required housekeeping; collision detection, scoring, setting up sprites for the next frame. Stuff you always just have to do. So maybe your left with 50%, maybe 20% for logic, how the sprites should move, etc. At 3x you wouldn't have just 3x more logic time but 300-600% more.
Because it sounds like graphics could be improved but it doesn't sound like that would consume that much more CPU time than it does on a normal machine. At least no time consuming tricks come to mind. But logic bandwidth improvement could make a very different type of VCS game.
Do you think Melody would have any trouble?
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Cool, Curt and Marty are doing Atari Corp. - Business Is War. That will really be interesting to me. Find out what really was going on and what happened after I left.
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Maybe that's the "real" loot that got buried at the Alamogordo, New Mexico landfill.
No way. That's not how the Tramiels operated. They sold everything. Warner yeah, they didn't seem to have a clue. The Tramiels were serious business people. That's good and bad. You also need to create great products.
Kind of funny, I have read Curt and Marty's Atari: Business if Fun book, and the more stuff I read about the old Atari days, the more it sounds like the Wild, Wild, West in terms of the stuff people got away with. (I wish you could have been on the scene a couple years back when they were doing interviews and research for the book).
I have to read that. I was so at the tail end. I saw only a little bit of the old Atari. The best stories I ever heard were from Dave Staugas. He had some beauties. Funny as hell.
When the NES finally came out in 1985, it was like Nintendo was the new sheriff in town, putting an end to the lawlessness of the new frontier that was video gaming.
A month or two, I think, post Tramiel some of us at Atari were called into a fancy conference room where a game console was set and I think they told us the specs which were impressive. I assume they wanted Atari to port games to it. We were just asked real fast what we thought and no one was excited. The mushroom clouds were just starting to dissipate, we were surrounded by abandoned office buildings. "Why would anyone want to put out a new platform?" was the thinking. I don't know but I think that machine was NES. Looked like it.
At that time the Tramiels had kept a dozen or so programmers specifically to do games, but word was he was charging them rent on their cubes, phones, etc. They were kept separate from the ST project, I never even met them. I don't know why the Tramiels did that.
I was surprised when Atari got back into games. They'd called me do some debugging work on the 7800 Desert Falcon after I left. Bitch of a bug. Locked up after running in demo mode for like 10 hours. I got it down to running for 40 hours but never found the bug. But I wasn't really that interested either. Don't know who the original programmer was or why them didn't finish it. Not even sure I had the source code.
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This may be a long shot, but do you recall a Paul Donaldson at Atari, who also worked on the Mindlink project? He supposedly got pulled from it to work on a CCW (sesame street) game?
Sorry, I don't. To give you an idea of how much I know I had to Google Mindlink. I thought it was called Mind Controller.
I didn't meet anyone who worked on the Mindlink, just the Product Manager who asked me to do something in a rush. He dumped a bunch of stuff on my desk. He hung around a lot and offered encouragement which helped. I think I had a reputation for getting something done fast. Might not be the best, but at least you'd get something. I'd just finished the instant assembler and that was like a secret weapon.
On Wikipedia it says 2 games were developed Bionic Breakthrough & Mind Maze. Looking now at what I think Atari Proto probably has it right that Bionic Breakthrough would have been just to user test the Minlink. And it looks like the programmer spent too much time on the splash screen. A classic mistake I've seen made a few times on different projects. Splash screens, about boxes, easter egg initials should all be added toward the end if there's time imo.
It is unfortunate the Mindlink was known for making faces sore...it's true but unfortunate. I did have to force myself to make smaller and smaller movements. After that it was comfortable and kind of fun. I think we strapped controllers around our legs and arms, so you'd have 4 controllers on you. I forget how that went, might have been just screwing around.
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Laser Gates is a great game. I love the detailed graphics in it, and the especially the explosion. I never got a good high score as I'm no great gamer, but as soon as I played it I knew it was a game I had to have.
An Inner Space proto rom is on the web, so the changes Imagic did to the rom could be determined, assuming it is not a really early prototype.
Thanks. I'm now learning Imagic may have redone more graphics than I realized. The explosion is probably the thing I'm most proud of in any game. One of the few things I can say was all mine. Not stolen from another game.
If I did another VCS game it would have lots and lots of explosions.
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BTW I always thought The Final Legacy was a great name. It makes the game so much more 'epic', like a "This is it, you're the last hope" kind of a thing.
I love post apocalyptic new beginning themes. Always have. It was fun being able to be in that story for the 7-12 months Final Legacy took. It's may fav theme by far.
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I just got an email from Scott Stilphen, not sure if he's posting here...sorry I have the social skills of a rock except rocks have the advantage of not talking...or typing...and he brought this up. Here's my reply:
OK, I'm glad you mentioned Brad Fuller. I almost wrote that "Rob Fuller" did some sound effects on Final Legacy, but yes Brad Fuller. I remember being in his office, very cool digs, and maybe begging him to help with the audio on Final Legacy. I don't remember him wanting to. So yes, I think Brad doing at least the sound effects would be right. And it follows if he did the sound effects he also did the score. But I still have Robert Weatherby stuck in my head, being in my office, and coming up with the music. But they would know better than me.I do have Robert Weatherby stuck clearly in my head talking, in my office, looking at the game, pad in hand taking notes, discussing a theme song. But I'm well aware of how memory works and I may have just replaced Brad with Robert. Hope not. Up until yesterday I'd forgotten Robert worked at Atari until I saw his LinkIn page and the memory got jogged. My brain is rebuilding these memories on the fly. Going to be mistakes. Hope you guys can track down the real deal.
All these years I think the theme song to Star Trek NG sounds like Final Legacy and I always think of Robert.
However, like I told Steve, the impression I have is Brad wasn't interested in Final Legacy for whatever reason. I don't think I had a lot of interaction with him. So maybe he just sent me some audio? Maybe only had time for some effects?
I'm less than 99.9% sure now who did the music. I'm 100% sure I had nothing to do with the composition in any way. And I sure would have liked Brad to do the audio that's for sure. He was very highly respected as I remember.
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1. I think that EMI game Chris was talking about must have been Submarine Commander: http://www.atarimani...ander_5129.html
Yes, that's it. I couldn'd find it, thanks.
OK, so those screens are a lot closer to Final Legacy than I remember. So maybe Chris had a lot more input on the design than I remember which sounds like me. The map screen and the scope screen, very similar. For sure Chris showed me the game and must have had a lot of ideas about what game I should do at least initially.
I'm sure I came up with the post apocalyptic angle, which to me was the design. I think Chris wanted Submarine Commander but with more action. That's my impression. But when brainstorming a person isn't always aware where an idea actually came from. All ideas you like become your ideas and all rejected ideas must have been someone else's. It's not a fair process.
2. Interesting about the serial number in the Final Legacy carts. I wonder how many other prototypes had that feature and we just didn't know it? At least one other copy escaped from your group (it was still called The Legacy at this point): http://www.atarimani...acy-_20787.html
I did think it strange my cart only said "Legacy". I thought "Final Legacy" was used earlier. I think I came up with "Legacy" pretty much right off, but remember distinctly who came up with "Final Legacy". Myself, Chirs and his friend and Product Manager who I can't remember his name, were talking about the name. Maybe the PM and Chris had already been talking about this, but there was some issue with Legacy...already used, too general to clear legal...anyway the PM came up with Final Legacy. Chris and I instantly liked it. Guess that happened later than I remember, after focus test.
This was the same PM that asked me to do Telepathy.
So it does make sense that a screen with Legacy would indeed be prerelease. That's weird. HOW DO YOU PEOPLE FIND THESE THINGS! Of cource as good as my memory is I probably gave someone my cart to down load? Seems like a few years back I ran into the collector thing and talked to some people about this.
But in the database where Chris gets credit for programming and graphics...I don't think so. I don't remember Chris doing any programming at all on anything. Maybe I remember seeing him trying to program for a day or two on something and asking a lot of questions where we were in the warehouse. I kind of thought he was trying to learn programming because Atari was falling apart at that time. He really looked stressed at the keyboard. Pretty quick, like a day or two, he put his suit back on and went back to whatever VPs do. He must have been very good at it because he saved our butts many times. Certainly Final Legacy wouldn't have ever been done without Chris doing all those VP things. But I sure don't remember him working on Final Legacy. And no graphics. Sure hope I'm not mistaken, but I'm 99.9% sure.
Robert Weatherby did the music score I believe.
3. This is the Icon version I was talking about. Can you fill us in on why there was an Icon version? http://www.atarimani...gacy_20786.html
I'm not sure. It certainly was a standard thing to use icons to internationalize products at least in my little world. It was preferred to localizing text.
4. Yes that picture on my 2600 page IS from the Final Legacy. I always loved that picture so I decided to use it. You have a framed version? Very nice! Was that something Atari was planning on selling or is yours the original art print? That scan is from the manual, is there an actual poster?
Yes a poster. I'll try to take a pic and post. I assumed you'd gotten the image from the poster but have since seen that was the picture on a box. It's a cropped part of the poster.
The poster would have been a give away to retailers. The one I have looks like from a production run. I assume Atari printed a bunch of them.
I was very proud of the poster when they gave it to me. To think such a good artist created that for my game was very flattering. Probably my must prized game related possession because I've kept it and have never considered getting rid of it.
But the production run may have been stuck in a warehouse when the Tramiels took over. Weird it never occurred to me to go to the warehouse, wherever the hell that was, and grab as much of the Final Legacy stuff as I could. Whoever gave me a copy may have gotten it from a warehouse, can't remember. Instead we were going thru 40 yard dumpsters pulling out office supplies and piling up $100k computer systems in our offices like packrats. I got so many staplers that in the past 30 years I've never had to reload a stapler. I just toss an empty stapler and use the next one. I don't do a lot of stapling, but geez. Staplers I save, games I leave. Weird. Freakin good staplers though, never jam. Warner may not have known disk about games but they knew their office supplies. I also still have boxes of staples just in case I run out of staplers.
When the Tramiels took over it was a post apocalyptic world. Empty multi-story office buildings, warehouses with absolutely not a single person. The people just left. Then they just put everything into dumpsters. Millions of dollars of computer systems all sitting there still on. The dozen or so programmers left carried away as much as we could and stacked it like cord wood in our "new offices" and in the hallway. But the Tramiels pretty quickly got a handle on that.
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So there's a bunch of Rescue Terra 1 in SA warehouses. Time to get on to our friend in Venezuela and see if there's something to find out.
Good luck with that. My guess is they ripped out the boards and stuffed the carts with cash to smuggle it back to SA. Just seemed really shady. They never wanted to even look at the game as I remember.
Love The Final Legacy, btw, one of my Top 5 A8 games, it's an absolute classic.
Made my day.
Also, we had a successful Atari VCS fanzine during early 90s - 2009, maybe you are willing to give an interview for Scott Stilphen at Digital Press:
http://atariage.com/...ion-newsletter/
look under Library, Interviews
Thanks for the links. I just read the interview with Ernie Runyon which was great. Funny how these things jog my memory. I wasn't sure about the room for reverse engineering games, but seems right. I did take listing back to my desk and studied them.
And the picture of Ernie...William Shatner? Has anyone here ever seen Ernie and William Shatner in the same room together? I haven't.
Ernie said "I remember Dan had it roughest. I think he may have had a new-born at home" which made me laugh. I didn't have a new-born at home, but sounds like something I would say. I did have a fairly new wife who was freaking out at all the hours. And I lived 55 miles away so travel time didn't help. I remember talking to her on the phone one night, I was at Apollo, and she was really upset. This computer stuff was so new then people just had no frame of reference. She kind of gave me an ultimatum. I remember looking at my computer screen and had to make a choice. What I learned was never give a person an ultimatum, which I found useful in my next marriage which has been great.
Ernie also said "I also remember coming in late one night to do some coding and happened upon a co-worker chasing a scantily-clad young lady around the production line. I was sworn to secrecy." HAD TO BE LARRY! Chasing, not catching, sounds like Larry.
Ernie is right about not being a tight group. We were all in one large room, no walls, working 80 hours a week or more, and hardly knew anything about each other. Just total focus on the game. Not just the code, but the game. You lived in there. Everyone liked everyone, and I certainly enjoyed their company, but we just rarely had time. After Space Cavern and after reading the Forbes article about how other game programmers were being treated I did get to talk to people a bit more. And when I gave my 2 weeks notice Apollo made me stay so I basically sat around, so that was nice.
But it's a weird thing programming. A very individual task.
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I've said this in other homebrew topics but it is an amazing time to be a 2600 gamer right now. Some of the work that guys like Darrell are doing is incredible and some of the tools we have like the harmony cartridge make playing those games a breeze. If you get yourself setup with a working Stella emulator on your PC, there's a lot of good freebies just sitting around on the boards or in the AtariAge archives and some of the new cartridges in the store are terrific. Actually, it was the active homebrew community that attracted me to 2600 gaming in the first place. I'm 27 so I wasn't even alive in the glory days lol.
Finding time is the only issue. I'm kind of obsessive so I can't really just dip my toe in. What I'm going to do is see if I could work a game into future projects. I was thinking of trying to track down Bob Hesler, my partner at VentureVision, and see if I can use the name. And then maybe do an Inner Space sequel. The Melody board is really mind blowing, I'm kind of thinking about the possibilities.
BTW, I was 26 when I started at Apollo.
IMO some of the label and cart designs are looking better now than they ever did back in the day. Dungeon in particular is gorgeous. It also comes with a full-color poster and manual (well, and box...but mine hasn't arrived yet) so it isn't just the games that are high quality but the production values on the packaging that goes with the games.
I would have given my left nut to have any of these people do the packaging for Rescue Terra I. We found a guy who painted really great oil paintings of space nebula type stuff. But packaging is a different thing and we probably didn't pay him much. Of course in the end it didn't matter.
The difference, which to me is kind of amazing, is the internet. Finding an artist in Dallas - Forth Worth was really hard. Finding one who could do packaging was just about impossible. Today, click, click, type, type, pages of great artists found around the world.
Video Game Critic has reviewed many different homebrew games. Unfortunately there is no way to filter by system, but as you'll see many of the homebrews he has reviewed are for the 2600 or other classic game systems. So if you're curious about what some people have been doing with these old consoles in the last 15 years or so, it's a good site to check out!
I saw the reviews of my games. The Video Game Critic can eat my shorts. I hate honest reviews.
Anyway, welcome to AA Dan. You've got at least a few fans here and I'm sure we'd be very excited if you got back into programming 2600 games!
It's been very nice to hear all the kind words, Makes me happy that people are getting some entertainment from what we did so long ago.
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That's pretty cool. I don't know anything about hardware so it's all magic to me. Would the sprites be 1/3 as wide? Sounds like they would.
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Is Laser Gates really Inner Space?
in Atari 2600
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Just to let you know where I am on the curve...WTF...you're using what I would have called invalid opcodes which I just Googled and found are just happenstance opcodes that we never would have used for obvious reason but you all can use because chances of Atari changing the CPU is kind of low.
DCP I have figured out, but ".byte $2C"? No assembler mnemonic? It's a BIT I assume with no operand?
Any Red Dwarf fans? I feel like Lister and you all are Cat.