Cafeman

I always get the shimmering too, and I saw the frame shimmer and jumping text on last night's show too. It is usually worse on my Galaxy Tablet (using the Twitch App) than in Chrome on my laptop. "60fps-like". I didn't realize it could be fixed. I thought it was a consequence of losing frames because of the streaming.

Oh boy, I'm looking forward to watching these! Great subject / theme!

At the beginning of a round, press every direction up down left right & diagonals before you start to make progress. Then see if the controls seem to work. Some 5200 games have logic to interpret how far the analog sticks go towards the maximum readable value. I've experienced some weird moments with kangaroo too, but nothing as bad as you described.

It never really appealed to me back in the day, but I did own it for the Sega Saturn. I brought my Saturn to the beach on vacation two years ago and my nephew loved the game and replayed the whole thing that week. It was pretty interesting to watch him play it but I don’t know if I would’ve had the patience.

Aww, that is terrible news. Curt has been one of the OG 21st century Atari pillars of the community with all the stuff he has been involved with. I recall meeting him and discussing various Atari and homebrew things with him a few times but years ago. Condolences to his family.

I haven't emulated 7800 since I rebuilt my laptop with SSD and Win10 ... what emulator are you guys using to play 7800 games?

NEO GEO SNK , NEO Turf Masters 120 minutes Qix, Taito arcade version, 60 mins Cleopatra, Taito arcade version, 30 mins Metal Black, Taito arcade version, 30 mins

Very cool graphics, but is Brutus wearing a Brutus mask? Pretty fast creation, a couple weeks it seems. Didn't play yet though.

I hate that kind of thing! I'd have to think for a while to give a similar concrete example, but one thing that kills the fun is when the difficulty maxes out and the levels keep repeating. I'm sure some enjoy this, because then it becomes an endurance session of how long you can play and how high a score you can get. But I hate endurance sessions!!! No way I am playing a game for 5 hours just to see !!! for example. Another thing I hate is when a game gives the player 'busy work' levels just to pad the experience. Okay I thought of a recent example as I typed this. I've been in a Tomb Raider mood, I played a bunch of TR1 and then started a new game of PS2 Tomb Raider Anniversary. Overall TRA is pretty cool and a bit more fair and easier in most locations, especially because Lara now grabs a ledge automatically, and she doesn't catch fire and die if a flame grazes here in Anniversary. All good right? NO! There is a mechanic where you wall-run with a grappling hook, and sometimes you need to jump off the wall to grab a ledge. The problem is that the camera is constantly changing and the game won't recognize you pressed 'back' to jump back OFF the wall. There were 2 instances I ran into this. The problem is this 1 move needed in the Damocles room almost ruined the game for me, as nothing I did with the stick could get Lara to jump OFF the Wall instead of jumping forward at the end of the swing (and dying each time). I spent hours on this one place. Eventually I realized I needed to try something new, and by jiggling the stick left / right / left again, it recognized the proper direction and I did the jump. But then in a later level, I had to do it again, and it took several tries due to my prior experience, and not a few hours thankfully. BUT then ... at the end, I'm in the final pyramid level trying to climb up the inner chamber and I hit another very poorly designed area. I read some discussion of this series of timed jumps and grapples , tried a few more times, but it defeated me and I quit. Every time you die, you need to battle the same 2 bat creatures first, which will knock you off the shrinking ledge Lara stands on if they hit you with a fireball. So, I simply watched a YT play of the rest of the game instead of wasting more time trying to do the sequence of jumps. In summary, based on various forums, YT video comments, and Reddits, MANY MANY gamers had the same frustrating problems in these grapple controls and in the pyramid chamber. Poor testing pretty much stopped me from playing. 90% of the game may be cool and rewarding fun, but if there are a couple things like that, it ruins it. (nowadays they can push online fixes to modern games, good thing too because every one of them would otherwise have game-ruining problems!). [/Rant off]

Which is more fun? I've played both, but it's been too long and I can't remember the 8-Bit version.

I was surprised to find out this is true after playing Kaboom in a 5200 HSC a while back. I have no problems adjusting to using a analog stick compared to a paddle for Kaboom.

Doesn't look very good without the Blast Processing.

NEO Turf Masters, NEO GEO arcade. (Via compilation on PS2) , 150 minutes.

I'm changing subject a bit, but I enjoyed the interview with spiceware ast night. I couldn't watch it all so I'll have to catch the rest on YouTube. But we all noticed an echo of Daryl's voice. For future interviews, it might be good for the interviewee to wear headphones or earbuds which would probably stop that Echo.

That would be an exciting project. My guess, a more authentic Defender?

TIX, thanks for being the sole contributer of some images. It may seem like an easy addition, but it turned out to be a bad idea of mine, to try and add this to the already completed game. It was becoming too much of a hassle to get it to work and endangering the completion of the project. That and significant life change, and I decided to cancel that idea and call the game finished. Your new key images are in the game however, thanks for those as well!

The artwork and the charcoal cartridge shell really complement each other! I loved how the original 5200 version turned out with Dave G's cartoon style back in 2007, but it's also awesome to see a change for the expanded XE version! I wondered how it would turn out, given the Atari 8bit line's much smaller carts compared to the 5200 carts. It turned out great! Great job Albert and David!

PS2, Tomb Raider Anniversary, 240 minutes.

Atari 5200 Jr. Pac-Man, 90 minutes.

Today the company lays you off, says "enjoy your vacation!".

In July 2020 I and sat down at my home-brewing desk and started to play around with tweaking my 2002 Atari 5200 homebrew, Koffi: Yellow Kopter. I have had notes about doing a 2nd Koffi game since 2002 when I finished the first one, but it seems ever more unlikely I'll devote time to do a whole new sequel with all the ideas I'd planned. So, I decided to play around with the original, add a few game play tweaks, some new visual details, fix a few bugs, and add a new 2-Player co-op mode. Some of my first changes are listed at an earlier blog entry: https://atariage.com/forums/blogs/entry/16763-koffi-2020/ As I started to experiment and add fruits, more colors, 2-Player code and other things, what it turned into was a serious need to reclaim some more ROM memory. And OH THE HORROR of some of my old code! Koffi was a 32K game, which seems like plenty of ROM for a game like this, but it fills up. And in 2002 I was new at 6502 ASM codeing and learning, so I did several routines burning more ROM memory than I needed. And I had tried to fill in all the 32K memory just for the principle of using it all, thus the original game had a lengthy Credits with people's names at Game Over. For this version, I axed all that. I reviewed several screen-drawing routines that were basically the same code, so I consolidated most of these to use tables and parameters and to call a common subroutine. Same deal with the BuildRainDrops / EraseRainDrops (which use the 5200s' missiles) - I consolidated 6 of these subroutine to be consolidated table-driven loops rather than 6 lengthy individual subroutines which all basically did 90% the same thing. Between these two categories I freed up about 700 more bytes in the past week, so that should be enough to finish 2-player mode and add some more interrupts and colors. Here are some WIP pictures. I hope to accomplish a few more dramatic visual changes, but it depends on free memory and if adding too much logic affects the gameplay. For this version, I kept Koffi's "Koloring Book" mode, where you press the #5 key and then can use *, 0, and # keys (at the bottom of the 5200 controller) to change the colors of 16 different categories on screen. And I added 3-character text descriptions to each of the 'categories', for example CL1 is Cloud Color 1, Tr1 / Tr2/ Tr3 are Tree colors 1/2/3, and so on. In the 5200 original, it just showed the hex value 0 through F. 2 Player Mode is starting to work. You toggle it on the Title Screen by pressing the #0 key. It is understandably glitchy for now, until I modify ALL the collision and Points logic to handle 2 players. To get 2 Kopters on-screen, I took Koffi's original Player0 and Player 1 (which gave him multi colors) and devoted Player0 to the first kopter, Player1 to the 2nd. If the first Kopter is named Koffi, then I guess the second Kopter will be named Toffi.

Ok. I don't like that mechanic of the prize destroying an energizer, but I guess it just adds the need to eat them more quickly.

never heard of the bug!

PS2 Tomb Raider Anniversary, 300 minutes.

I have to chime in, I was startled to see the miles of 4387.6 and day 22! And it was recorded, so I watched sections of that. Great job, keilbaca! You make it look so easy. I've got to day 13 or so in the past, but I'm thinking my reflexes need some tuning up before I'll ever get there again. What was the world record? Is it via Twin Galaxies ? It was interesting to hear you label those unpassable formations ... what did you call them, triple formations? Those things really slow me down. I used to brake until they disappeared in the horizon, but your method is quicker. Enduro is one of my top 3 Atari 2600 games and I had a blast playing it again.