Cafeman

I tend to save information forever. I've had various notebooks and folders in my garage's filing cabinet , the info is all from 2001 through 2011. Today I decided to dig out the folders , keep what might still be useful, and pitch the rest. All of the paper had a slight musty smell. All these were in the top drawer of the file cabinet; the bottom draw has all my guitar tablature magazines, some from the 80's (remember Guitar for the Practicing Musician anybody?). I'll be going through those mags next to see if I can de-clutter. ANYWAY ... I pitched all my work-in-progress notes for 2002's Koffi: Yellow Kopter, plus work-in-progress notes and folders about 2007's Adventure II. I kept the notes of various other homebrew ideas I had. Who knows? Look at all the work I had to do to code Raccoon Lad's sprites! 1's and 0's, yes indeedy. Then I found these notes ... I remember an original idea for Adventure II when it was just Alan and myself, was to have different colors of Armor. The Bat turned into our Troll. Some wanted to see the Wizard, but frankly I vetoed that idea for a few reasons, primarily that Robinette didn't have a Wizard in 2600 Adventure! It was an invention of the manual writers. Plus I had my hands full with the rest of the programming. If you want a Wizard, there are 2600 homebrews where the author put him in. And homebrew games where the wizard returned! Yeah though, I remember our idea to find Blue Armor to help you cross over water. Adventure II changed that idea, instead you can build bridges from wood planks, over the water. Or fly across the water if you get that power-up. I see that we also intended there to be an Inventory system , but that was simplified to be more Adventure 2600-ish - carry 1 thing at a time, bub. These hand-written notes are from 2001 or so. I took a picture, then pitched them. I don't know what this simple maze design was for - but it was never used. You want it? Finally, I also pitched my work-in-progress Koffi notes, I don't want to see those any more, after all the code itself explains how the game works better than those notebooks. But I found this doodle of a Homebrew Patch idea or two ... I like the idea for patches. I'm not sure if anybody has done them for an AA homebrew? I think I did see something on ZPH about earning a patch but I can't remember which game(s). That's all. I filled an entire large-size garbage bag with notebooks , manilla folders, and pages. Next I have to go through those guitar tab magazines.

I didn't buy MASH, but I remember seeing them for sale and theyre were a pile of t-shirts next to them at the counter. This was at a department store called Big Wheel in the early 80s. So I assumed you would pick from what they physically had at that store, good luck!

The inflation calculator says $40 in 1977 = $169 in 2020! And $45 in 1984 = $111 in 2020. Pretty steep.

I've been stuck on level 6 Hard difficulty, trying to finish it with Axel. It starts off pretty easy with useful weapons like the boomerang , then the meat cleaver. But then several mobs start to take my health and lives away. When it starts to go bad, it can be very bad. I checked, on PS4 the latest update for me is still 1.2. When are the 1.3 adjustments getting pushed out? Those weapon carrying walking guys are near impossible to escape!

@roadrunner Yes, now it is working for me. 73,270.

You know what, I cannot get Popeye.bin from the OP post to work on either Altirra or Win800. I'm using the newest non-beta version of Atirra. Other games work. Can somebody post a ROM of 5200 popeye that works in Altirra ?

Dreamcast, Skies of Arcadia. 8 hours. Finished the game.

I remembered the site you were referring to, but for the life of me I also could not remember its name. It's bugged me since this thread was posted so I too am glad to remember The Retrogaming Times.

Favorite: - racing games of all types, although I enjoy arcade style racers the most. - I dont know if its a genre, but I enjoy science fiction adventures of various style of gameplay. Compare Genesis Flashback with Metroid Prime, Star wars Fallen Order, and Horizon Zero Dawn. - 2D vertical and horizontal shooters. From Space Invaders and River Raid to Darius Gaiden and Giga Wing, etc. Least: - first person shooters, and online competitive frag fests. - Horror survival games don't interest me. - Basketball games - the appeal has eluded me, strange because I've loved some other sports games.

The bigger enemies have “invincible” frames of animation. If you start a combo during these, you will get clobbered. Lots of tips are out there online to help a new player recognize some patterns. Personally I really enjoy SOR4.

I devoted much of June to playing through SOA for the first time, the DC original version. Over 40 hours of game later, I finished it today. Now I remember why I'm not an RPG fan! These games are too long! SOA has great characters and a long epic story about the Air Pirates and various nations of Arcadia. Great colors and art, good music, and I see why some people fondly remember it. I'd rate it 8 out of 10. I'm glad I finally got to experience it, but I will never play it through again! Some of it is near perfect, but 2 things really came to annoy me and bring the experience down. First, the oft-mentioned frequency of random battles is enough to drive me batty! I had more than usual free time this month so I came to accept it, and I did select the RUN option more and more frequently towards the end to avoid some battles. The other negative is the game makes you go through some long stretches between save points. The final battle is actually 3 back to back boss battles. I really didn't want to play 3 hours straight, but I had to, to finish it. This happened a couple of times in the game, it was getting late but I had to keep playing so as not to waste my progress and save the game! The fighting role playing strategies/gameplay seemed to have some flaws. In the end I came to ignore many otherwise cool powers and attacks, because it so much more effective to use a certain 2 or 3 moves repeatedly among the characters. At first the boss battles seemed impossible and daunting to me, such as the 1st Gigas battle . But once my party and ship got leveled up enough all the challenge was gone, until the final bosses. But I don't want to speak of only negatives, much of the game was fun, exciting , filled with surprises, and with an unusually optimistic tone. Post your thoughts of Skies of Arcadia in this post!

@Tanooki you weren't playing as Axel, were you? He isnt too fast and is a bit nerfed, not easy to finish the game with him until you learn some patterns. If so , try again with Blaze. Or check out some strategy vids on YT. The commissioner isn't as hard when you figure out how to avoid getting charged and thrown by him. Anyway, SOR4 is pretty hard, but at least you can continue next time from the stage you left off.

DC Skies of Arcadia, 12 hours. For those who know the game, I've found all the moonstones now, the most recent being the Purple in the Ice area, and Yellow from the Valuan Maw. Battles, even against Giga bosses, are not much trouble for my party now. Random encounters are still too frequent, but I started to use Run and it often is successful.

Trying to refresh my skills using DASM , I started to make little tweaks to 2002's Koffi: Yellow Kopter. So far, did these things: removed y2k-compliant bootup code (the Atari fuji symbol w/multicolors). Freed up some ROM and the game boots immediately to Koffi's title screen now. modified the hues of the raindrops to a more blue hue. Using hues $B4/$B8, the raindrops looked green on emulators although looked bluish on my orig 5200 and on ancient emulator VSS. NTSC color values weren't what I orig thought they were. Well the raindrops are blue now. Fixed a bug with Koffi's water tank level. It was challenging to find the reason why the yellow water meter would display as though it were full, but internally the water value would wrap around to $00 value (thus no water untl you catch more!). It could happen (usually on Easy mode) when you had a full meter, after Pyro the cloud was defeated and the final countdown was going on to put out the fire. Well, I found the cause. Fixed. You can start the game with a Joystick button press now. Fixed another bug on Pyro's Mom (the 4th stage which is a boss fight). If the fire Chaser gets hit by Mom's lighting, he shoots up and hits her, stunning her and giving you some time to safely go hit her right in the clouds. (ow!) The bug , which I knew about but decided back then to call a feature, is the Chaser can get stuck in this sequence in an infinite loop. Solved, fixed. Tweaked the graphics for Mom's eyes after she is defeated to be more centered as I originally intended. Tweaked the Tree Bonus logic . It is easier to get the 500 point max bonus now, and I added some more granularity to the points levels. Tweaked the settings as the levels increase. You can defeat Pyro a bit quicker on each level now, speeding up the pace of the game a bit. Reviewing the code, I believe I can free up some ROM space and make some more gameplay and graphics tweaks for Koffi 2020. What I'd like to try is to have a 2-player simultaneous mode. I always wanted that (like in the Williams game Joust), but it was beyond my abilities back in 2002. We'll see.

Ah! Okay , that makes sense. Thanks for the explanation. I'm sure I have the correct bios roms on my drive, I actually wasn't aware that Altirra has its own internal one, and that it is different.

I only have so much time and mental energy so I have come to avoid new versions of things. But it must be time to upgrade. I hope there are more debugging features, although I have likely not learned how to use fully the old Altirra version. I just downloaded V3.20 . It also does not load the Koffi homebrew ROM (or 5200 Adventure II , I just double-checked) , likely due to the y2k compliant code which copies the 5200 startup into RAM and changes the century , as explained above. I've removed that code and the game plays fine, as expected. If you want to play with it, the ROM is here: https://atariage.com/software_list.php?SystemID=5200&searchValue=koff&Submit2=Begin+Search&searchCompanyID=ALL&searchRegion=ALL&searchTvFormat=ALL&searchRarity=ALL&searchLabel=&orderByValue=Ascending&recordsPerPage=100&searchType=NORMAL

How old is it? It's worked fine for me, so I never investigated I'd there was a newer version. Edit - I see it is from 2015, which is probably when I bought my latest laptop. But again, I didn't see a need to upgrade.

Thanks for Altirra, Phaeron. I just noticed that my 2002 Atari 5200 homebrew, Koffi: Yellow Kopter, does not boot in Altirra . After playing around with different ROMs I believe the reason is that I have Y2K-compliant code for the 5200 boot-up Atari splash screen, and Altirra doesn't like it. I has always run ok in other emulators like Atari800Win . Here are the memory locations and code I used, compiled using a version of DASM. I'm curious why Altirra doesn't like this. I am running Altirra Version 2.60 [March 21, 2015]: BIOSCOPYLOCATIONHIGH = $FD COPYLOCATION2PORTLOW = $58 COPYLOCATION4PORTLOW = $42 INXINSTRUCTION = $E8 NOPINSTRUCTION = $EA RTSINSTRUCTION = $60 CODESTART = $4000 ; DisplayStartupScreen ; ; Copy the startup code for the 5200 BIOS into RAM. This is done so the ; copyright date can be Y2K complient. We store this data into RAM because ; this routine will only be called once (during game start up) and this saves ; precious ROM space. This RAM will be reused later in the program too. ; ; I chose to use page 6 and 7 to store my routine. You can place it anywhere ; in RAM you like as long as the BIOS doesn't touch it ; DisplayStartupScreen rts ; RWLTST 06/25/2020 - is this why Altirra won't run Koffi? ldy #$00 lda #BIOSCOPYLOCATIONHIGH sta tempHigh ; ; here is where we check to see if this a 2-port or 4-port system ; a 4-port system will have an inx instruction ($E8) in location $FD32 ; a 2-port system will have a lda instruction ($AD) in location $FD32 ; lda $FD32 cmp #INXINSTRUCTION ; if there is no inx instruction here then this is a bne TwoPortSystem ; 2-port system FourPortSystem lda #COPYLOCATION4PORTLOW sta tempLow jmp CopyBIOSLoop1 TwoPortSystem lda #COPYLOCATION2PORTLOW sta tempLow CopyBIOSLoop1 lda (tempLow),y sta $0600,y ; I chose to use page 6 but you can move it iny bne CopyBIOSLoop1 ldy #$50 inc tempHigh CopyBIOSLoop2 lda (tempLow),y sta $0700,y dey bpl CopyBIOSLoop2 lda #<CopyrightMessage ; Point the copyright read to our ROM sta $0724 ; address. lda #>CopyrightMessage sta $0725 ldx #$0B lda #NOPINSTRUCTION ; ; here we place NOP instructions in the routine. It was easier than removing ; the unwanted instructions. ; NOPLoop sta $0732,x dex bpl NOPLoop lda #RTSINSTRUCTION ; Place a rts to return from the subroutine sta $0750 ; This replaces the jmp instruction jsr $0600 rts

Executing DASM directly in the editor and jumping to the error line is a pretty awesome upgrade from what I'm used to.

Looks very nice , but strange to see the port authors and not the OG author on the label.

So I'm starting a new project. Koffi:Yellow Kopter (2002) was programmed using old DASM V2.0 , I believe. Adventure II 5200 and XE were started using TASM by Alan Davis, so I kept using that assembler. Didn't seem to cause any problems vs DASM. And I used the simple original Notepad. But for my new project, I've been investigating newer tools. I want to keep concurrent 5200 and A8 versions of the game, which is something new to me as others like Tep392 and Debro have helped me with the 5200-to-A8 conversions in the past. I downloaded DASM V2.20.13 which seems to be the newest. I see that there are several other windows tools out there, but I think I'll stay old-school for now and just code in text file using Notepad or Notepad++. Any suggestions to make development quicker or simpler by using another dev tool along with DASM? I'm actually fine coding just using the text file, then compile in a command prompt, then run it in Altirra to test, but maybe there is a better way.

It will be through the AtariAge store. Now discussing the finishing touches on the manual, art, label, manufacturing.

In addition to the need to clean the contacts of old carts, I have found especially with Activision cartridges that I need to stuff a little wedge of folded paper behind the cartridge for it to properly make a good connection in my 5200. Otherwise the cart tends to wobble a little bit.

Dreamcast, Skies of Arcadia. 9 hours = 540 minutes. I made it through the Dark Rift, trudged through Mount Fuji dungeon, beat it's boss and got the Blue Moonstone. Battles still happen too frequently but are not difficult. My party has no trouble wiping the floor with the assorted soldiers or Monsters. Same thing for the ship-to-ship battles, it may take some time, but the Moonstone Cannon on my ship takes down enemies eventually. I made sure that my ship and my party has enough repairs or health for when I get hit badly.

Chalk it up to similar distortion settings for TIA on Circus and POKEY on 5200 Galaxian? 2600 Circus programmer was Mike Lorenzo. 5200 Galaxian programmer was Joseph Tung. So, not the same person. Maybe RandomTerrain has a comment.