retrocon

Got some good play in... The only thing I really wish is that for as much as I get eaten, that the sound effect when your fish is gobbled up was a little more dramatic than the normal eating sound. I also think it would be cool if you could do an "activision" type sunset in the sky. Lastly, it would be kinda cool if your fish could jump out of the water... These are just 'oh cool' features though. Think you nailed on the difficulty and the speed of those damn fish! EDIT: best score 1299 - got to be the biggest fish. Is there anything after this or is it just avoid the sharks for as long as possible at this point?

Would it look better if it there was a sunset? Isn't that when the fish go crazy and start to feed?

Coming from the guy that made thrust that really means something... Couldn't you have made that game a little easier? It's so infuriatingly hard

Ok, wow I love this version. I have played a flash version quite a bit and you did a great job making it fun and challenging. I don't remember the 4k version being this fun, but that's probably because I had only tried alpha versions. Nice, nice job. I can't believe you did this so well in just 1k!?! I hope you win the compo with this entry. I would bet on you.

Aaaaaaand that's the sound of my interest suddenly dropping to zero. Hey, I think I'll go start a thread about the development of a super-awesome game that nobody will ever get to play too! I can just make stuff up and nobody will know the difference! 908484[/snapback] Everyone is entitled to their opinion, even you ZylonBane.

Well the 70s game I have decided to do is Head-On. The 2600 has a version called Dodge Em. This simple engine I'm building supports quarter vga (160 x 120) with 8 colors. It supports a single static playfield of 160 x 120 and 64 sprites of 8 x 8. The sprites and playfield can have 8 colors. Sprites support transparency and can rotate to any 90 degree angle. I think this will let me do a bunch of games from the 70s pretty well. There is some loss of resolution but I'm not after perfect recreations. I'm more after taking existing concepts and expanding on them. I want the games to have a bunch of different variations.

It seem like they are just too big compared to the size of the playfield. There would be no place for them to roam...

I don't know if you realize this, but Adventure III is not a 2600 game. It's actually a dedicated piece of hardware. 907972[/snapback] Yes, I am sorry I never made this clear and then so many people made that assumption that I started having a little fun with it. Basically you could think of this as an attempt to recreate the development of an arcade game from the early 70s, ie the Atari Pong / Space Race era; that is, with no cpu, but rather directly with gates, flip-flops and signals. The difference is i'm not wiring them on a board, but rather using vhdl. I really hope to recreate the Atari Adventure experience though, with some of the same limitations, but perhaps different in some ways as well. Also, I did talk with Curt and it seems like it would be way too much of a hassle to ever go through Atari's red tape to release something, so this will probably just be for fun if I ever finish it at all. Maybe if I do finish it I'll make a couple prototypes, not sure. Anyway, this is a big project and I've been thinking about tackling something a little smaller first, so I'm probably going to try to recreate one of those simple one screen late 70's arcade games first. I have one in mind already that should be pretty simple and I have thought of a lot of fun variations. I really want something I can complete in a month. Then maybe with that experience I'll avoid so many of the roadblocks that are killing me right now on this rather ambitious Adventure sequel.

Do the emulators such as Z26 support expanded-RAM? If so, then 80% of the market is covered right there. No reason not to build it knowing that expanded-ram carts will be available in a year or three.

907770[/snapback] Is there a bin of this floating around? What state of completion it is at, 90% or so?

Limited testing, but I like it much better. There's more movement and its tougher to pin him down.

Holy Moley, those are some nice docs

Yes, I think that would work well. A level could just be X amount of ooze, moving in at a rate of Y, with Z seconds between waves. A simple background color change would be a nice indicator of a new level. This reminds me of how that PSP game Lumines works. I think that would be a lot of fun.

What is the objective of this game exactly? Is it just kill as much of the ooze as possible? I really think it would be better if you could clear the ooze in a level and then it would go on to the next level with more ooze/faster growing ooze/etc. Did you consider doing something like this? I get this hopeless feeling when I play it now... You know what I mean?

Curt Vendel did.

Amen to that. 904892[/snapback] Is that what that Saba chess cart that is always mentioned fixed? Did tetris use that as well? Was this a case of hardware that might have been decent in some respects but was held back by a severe design flaw that programmers couldn't overcome easily? Can you give an example of why it is so terrible? I'm just curious because channel f was my very first system and I have sweet memories of it even though the games were awful. I must have played Cart 10 (Maze) a thousand times with my sister.

Here is a description and screenshot of the game: http://nitros9.stg.net/doubleback.html

Hmm, never noticed the score before. Just tried it and got 195, is that good? I think I could do 300 with a little practice. I just go for the tank. I don't go for shields or cars. Don't know what the best strategy is though. This is fun though. I think I love these simple games the best, so pure.

I enjoyed playing this. I just vaguely recall maybe playing this once in the arcade. Don't think it was out there very much was it? Anyway, I think I found a sure-fire way to kill the opposing tank every time. I just go up to the top and shoot the top three pieces of his shield. Then I wait with my tank about one down from the top. Inevitable he moves up to the very top and stops. He's just a fish trapped in a barrel there and I can usually kill him in one or two tries unless he's very lucky.

As bB is now? I doubt it. Reread the thread; the sprite/room data was projected to take upwards of 8K all by itself. 904072[/snapback] Yeah, I see that this will be quite a project. I was just thinking that it would be cool if bB could be used for some of the projects that none of the "first string" developers were interested in

Hey did you do the animation and graphics for that lady in the beginning of hunchy II? Is that Esmeralda? If so that was a seriously nice job you did. I could really imagine her flowing gown.

Hey is this something that could be done in Batari Basic if TJ's kernel was integrated into bB?

Did you ever see that homebrew tetris game for the channel f? That seemed pretty impressive. Channel F actually has a frame buffer doesn't it? It's incredible how bad the games were that came out for it, but maybe it was just bad programming or lack of tools or time. In any case, Channel F will probably go down in history as the most under-utilized console ever.. but it will always be the first

I just realized the 3rd of everything sucks. Remember Porky's 3? Anyway, forgive me cause I'm a little drunk. I have been rewriting vhdl for three days and finally fixed the bug that was killing me. I don't actually know if you can call it a bug because when you have to continually rewrite everything is actually a bug?? Anyway, I don't know if this is good to admit but I was getting so frustrated from the past couple days that this evening I started out before sitting down in front of the monitor with a nice bottle of pinot noir, Saintsbury actually 2003. And within like one hour I had rewritten it again but this time correctly! and the damn thing worked. All four sprites scrolled perfectly left to right. Oh the joy. Here is the demo video: Four Playas A Movin'

I just picked up one of these in good condition at the Orange Coast College fair about 2 months ago for 5 dollars. I walked by the thing three times before it sunk it that I was looking at a vectrex system. I casually asked how much and when he said 5 bucks I couldn't open my wallet fast enough. So far all I have is the included game Mindstorm, but all I can say is 'Wow'. If you take the console as a whole package including style, monitor, controller, the fun of playing and the closeness to an arcade experience, I would say hands down this is best console ever. I mean seriously, it plays so much better than the other consoles (2600, intellivision, etc) of that era. The controls are tight, and heck how many objects can this thing display at once? How many mines are on the screen in Mindstorm? It seems like it totally bypassed the limitations of normal home consoles. And the music is cool too. This thing was really ahead of its time. Wow, how did it possibly fail? It was built like a tank too. I mean really they don't build things like this anymore, not for $200 or whatever it retailed for. Anyone know where I can get one of those multicart for a reasonable price by the way?