potatohead

I liked Robotron better on the Apple.

When ebay happened, the thrifties all went belly up. That's where most of the stuff goes, I'm sure. Bet they see it as a sort of windfall. The only place I've ever found any thing of real interest, in the last few years, is the main Goodwill collection station. It's moving tons of stuff in bins all day long. It stinks and you gotta fight the vultures hard to get anything that actually matters.

I'm pretty sure you can just save "filename" load "filename", etc... maybe save "d0:filename" Not where the machine is right now. Somebody here is gonna have this down cold. Funny, I'm having trouble remembering the DOS part. I always started with a bootable disk for programming...

Thanks guys!

Put one of these in, as the CPU. It's fast enough to emulate the older CPU's, has it's own 32KB of RAM to execute from, loaded from an EEPROM, at boot time. All of it's pins can be input or output, after the program has loaded, thus making it look like a CPU. There is graphics capability on board, if you want it. http://www.parallax.com (Propeller chip) I've got one of these and am currently learning to program it. It's about $12 in single chip lots. IDE + a lot of programs are free to download.

I think DEFENDER would make an excellent transition to the CoCo3. It's got the color bandwidth (200 or so colors at 160x192 artifacted), and the original DEFENDER arcade was written on a 6809, I believe.

They are talking about Star Raiders for the Atari 800, not 2600. Starship 1 and Starship (2600) came earlier but were far more primitive. Exidy's Star Fire came out around the same time but did not have the resource management/strategy aspect of Star Raiders. Yeah, and that's why I think M.U.L.E. should be on that list! I am happy Star Raiders is getting the attention though. I've hooked up the original 400, I played as a kid. Man, that game is still loads of fun. And I still find it damn tough to get the better ranks too.

Yep. That's a rock solid title. Funny, it must depend somewhat on which one you played first! For me, Star Raiders was the better game. Of course I liked the slowdown. Defender --the arcade version, will do the same thing at times when you hit the bombers with a lot going on. Cool stuff. I bought a SuperCharger right when they arrived in the stores, based on the EG review of the game Phaser Patrol. For the 2600, it's an excellent effort. Graphically, it's really solid.

One thing about the CoCo3, was the high color mode possible when running on an ordinary television. Basically, you could ask for the 640x192 mode, then use artificacting combinations to achieve nearly 256 colors. The resulting pixel resolution was 160x192. All the games I had, used the 16 color modes. Did anybody ever code a game like this? Another good port was RadWarrior...

Cool! Glad you enjoyed it. It's a pretty solid game, as far as I'm concerned. Graphically, it's not the best demonstration of the system, but gameplay wise, it really raised the bar right out of the gate. Long ago, a friends parents bought an 800 for Xmas, and snagged the Star Raiders cart. We played the thing for hours on end. Frankly, it made a lot of other games of the time seem shallow. Does the 5200 version have the slowdowns on explosions?

Not playing Star Raiders is a big mistake. The learning curve is not anywhere near what you think it is. Just put the thing on novice and start doing stuff. After 1 hour, you will either grok the game and really want to play it, or you just won't. Reading the manual can happen after you've had some fun and want more.

For me, it's being able to continue to enjoy experiences I love. It's also about learning and tinkering. Nothing beats older systems and microcontrollers for that total computing experience. These things let you get right down to the bits. That's cool on a whole lotta levels. Finally, it's a pass on. When the kids got old enough to grok the games, we pulled out the 2600 and a bunch of stuff. They had a blast and ask for the thing regularly to this day. Simple twitch games like KABOOM! and WARLORDS are just as great today as they were then. The kids like the experience just as I did. The biggie was Star Raiders though. It's a great game that's got some depth and action. Two people can enjoy it, one running the keyboard, the other running the controller, both planning strategy. I play this with my youngest from time to time. There just isn't anything like it today. Past that, I could care less. All the little variations, etc... are essentially beyond my focus. Same with every little system. Emulation does expand that a bit, but then it's not really worth grabbing the actual games, unless one is really solid. I'll do a cabinet or two some day, with enough flexibility to reproduce some great experiences. Maybe make an entertainment room, with one of those, a table top, nice TV and a favorite console or two. re N64: Who are you kidding? We've played multi-player Perfect Dark and Battletanks tons of times. Totally worth keeping the machine for.

That's interesting thoughts. Maybe the opposite would work as well? I mean instead of finding a pro to babysit me, rather find (an)other noob(s) interested in the game and try getting there together? Yeah, that will totally work the same way! The idea being you need to be able to share the experience and get the energy for that in order for it to actually be worth something. A co-worker and I did this with an older Ultima RPG for the Apple. We setup the emulators originally to play the Oregon Trail. I had talked about how cool Ultima II was, he was younger and had never played. He was into things like Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy, etc... So, we dug into those games, enjoying the genre. Good fun for about a year or so.

One thing that really helps is to know somebody who is into the game! At least that way, you've somebody to share with and get some energy from! Back when the games were released, this was an important dynamic. Without it, it's a much tougher experience. Maybe someobdy can jump on IRC or something to get you into one you feel is worth the trouble?

No kidding! I'm in the same boat. IRIX was very, very good to me. I've had the chance to scale the OS up pretty big. Start with a few users and a LAN, end up with several Origin class machines all serving an application and it's data to 30 or so X window users on PC's of various kinds. The O2 is the slower of the two machines, but it's my fave. Mostly the UMA design allows for some impressive video effects. It's a one of a kind workstation for sure. The Octane is just nice and reliable. Bit power hungry though... To this day, I find the window manager highly productive. It's a bit no frills, but it has it where it counts, particularly on the O2 with it's large graphics memory capacity. Best computers ever made, IMHO. I grew up on Apple ][, Atari 400/800 and CoCo 2 systems. (Really miss the 6809, but I've got a new Propeller chip with some wicked cool assembly to hack on, so I'm largely happy!) I owned a 400, which I still keep and use regularly. Good friend had the CoCo, and the school had the Apples. (The expansion capability of those things really made for some fine machines!) I'm here today, watching and occasionally doing, the Atari thing, just as I did long ago. It simply amazes me how much flexibility Jay Miner built into his chip sets. Here we are, way too many years later, still inventing new ways to create displays on very old hardware. Damn cool stuff. This is why the O2 is my fave as well. It's got that same software driven mindset. It's not seen any serious tinkering, beyond the seriously great Pegamento application that made solid use of the ICE accellerator chip and some heavy texture stuff written by college kids... Maybe it needs to age some more, before we see that happening! The prop chip I'm tinkering with right now is another software driven design. It's got a lot of hacking room there for much fun to be had as well. Love these kinds of machines.

One, I think was significant, was "Madness and the Minoutar" for the CoCo. Unlike most text adventures, it was a real time game. Things happened while you were reading!

Nice starter list. There is a lot more to be done, and I'm sure will be. Star Raiders is an excellent game. I've kept my old 400, just for this reason. I did some reading and the author was worried about the slowdown when explosions were present. This is a feature, not a bug! Makes for a great experience. Getting right in the thick of it, the slowdown simply adds to the already solid visual effects. Glad he never worked it out.

I think so. It was an Indigo R3000, running IRIX 6.5.9, I think. Pretty sure it was 6.5, just can't remember the version number. The program was mp3play(er)... Command line, no GUI, files played from local disk. I've an O2 that barely registers on a program called amp. Probably similar numbers to what you are seeing. Excellent decodes too, very little of the slurring some decoders introduce into the process. Always wondered about that. I no longer have the box. Gave it to somebody who really liked the system. These days, I've an O2, R12 and an Octane R12. Both run at ~300 something Mhz.

Seems to me, storage is the biggest limitation. The computers are perfectly capable of decoding the file --just not in real time, IMHO. By way of comparison, a 30Mhz MIPS CPU can decode a 256kbps mp3 file in real time, with about 90 percent utilization. (That's under IRIX) So, the mp3 is pre-processed to distill the audio down to whatever makes sense, given the hardware at hand.

It is! If you are a poor defender player, the all in one row thing actually helps the game out quite a bit. The player can then focus on the enemy shots and droppings. If, however, you are a solid player, the more intense dynamic that happens when shots expire on one enemy, helps with an overall rhythm. Lots of ship movement, mixed with repeated requests for shots keeps the player moving. That's where the challenge (and the trance state, many early gamers crave) is. IMHO, it's two completely different games. Wonder if that would not make for an interesting hack? If possible, it would significantly improve the Atari 8bit ports of this game. Might need to make a play pad of sorts though. Triggering shots on both trigger up and down helps, but would not be enough, if the one shot per enemy rule were actually in force.

Maybe be able to kill him with bullets found along the way? I know, that's a significant change to what is an interesting game right now. It just sorta popped in there --like the Pillsbury Dough Boy... Great work on this one BTW!

The version created for the 8bitters has one fatal flaw... One shot eliminates all enemies on the same vertical row. Why is this? It completely changes the intense gameplay dynamic. Does the 5200 version also do this? I've often wondered. Other than that, the rest of the game is solid and enjoyable.

Yep, you do get mounds with the quickie and method. Never thought about it though. Seemed to work well enough for me. It might explain needing to move the random requests around in code though... Never thought about that aspect of things. If the gameplay reaches a state where this kind of stuff actually matters that much, there is a strong case for some reconsideration. --or make it an element of the game, sharp players can pick up on! Whatever works! I am liking this thread, btw.

Well, we are getting there. Two surgeries so far. All should be quiet for a while. Once some real healing has taken place, there is one more to get out of the woods. From there, things should be looking up! Thanks to those who sent me some happy thoughts!

Re: Lack of randomness. Ran into this with Ooze! Essentially, I found that asking for lots of random numbers, in rapid sequence did not generate a solid pool of random numbers. You might consider generating your numbers at different times in your code, to be used later on. Then, move your random requests around a little bit, until you are largely happy with the resulting randomness. This was on an earlier version of bB. All might have changed and I've not had time to explore it just yet. It was also with the 8bit random number generator too. I suspect getting harmonics, for lack of a better word, where the same series of numbers happens is fairly easy. Picking points in the code where timing was less predictable (user input, game logic branch varies, etc...) helped considerably with this issue. I noted the emulators were very consistant about their seeds. At least that's the behavior I observed. Asking the user to start the game, with their input will almost completely mitigate this. For me, it was enough to just have them press the trigger when they were ready to go. However, measuring how long they press it, or having them press it twice, etc... would up the variance on this by quite a bit. For the 8 bit generator, this is probably too much. I believe it would be significant with a 16 bitter. There is an alternative to a divide as well. Simply ask for two random numbers, and them then add them to get the result you are looking for right? 0-159 horizontal and 0-88 vertical So, 159 minus 127, leaves 32! This is close enough to just do the following: x=rand&127 : x = x + (rand&31) That puts your random number from 0 to 158! Pretty darn close. One advantage is that it always takes the same amount of time, and it runs nice and fast. (Well maybe the same amount of time. I can't remember if the random number generator branches or not...) Might take more space than other methods though. Not sure that is a significant worry now with the bankswitching. I'm pretty sure this takes less time than a divide overall, unless you are wanting to divide by a power of 2. That's just a shift and is as fast as an and would be, essentially. The '&' is a logical 'and'. Essentially, both bits must be a 1, for the result to be a 1. An 8 bit random number, in binary looks like: %11111111. If this is anded with %01111111, then that max result will be 0-127 without any division, etc... For a lot of numbers, a couple of these added together get you plenty close enough to work with. That upper '0' essentially turns the 8 bit random number into a 7 bit one! And that's the trick right there. Just work close to your powers of two where possible, do an add to tweak and move on. So, your possible quickie random number ranges are from 0 to: %00001111 = 15 -----4 bit random number %00011111 = 31 -----5 bitter %00111111 = 63 -----6 bitter %01111111 = 127 --- 7 bitter ...etc. For the 88, call it 80, this leaves you with: x=rand & 63 : x = x + (rand & 15) Your random number then is 0-78. So you do an add, or maybe this is not so good for game reasons. Another option would be: x=rand & 63 : x = x + (rand & 31) This puts you to 94. Only 6 numbers off! Maybe just subtract 6, then ignore numbers greater than your 88. This works because of wrap around. Take 4, subtract 6 and you get 254. Right? Works like this: 4 - 1 = 3 3 - 1 = 2 2 - 1 = 1 1 - 1 = 0 0 - 1 = 255 <--- The wraparound! 255 - 1 = 254 Finally, tweak the game to fit closer to one of the easier numbers. Maybe divide the 88 by two to work with 44. Placement is more coarse, but it's maybe easier to compute. This gives you: x = rand & 31 : x = x + (rand & 15) A range of 0-46! Plenty close enough to work with, hopefully. Sorry this is long. I just wanted to point out some of the power the simple bit operators have. They are native to the 6502, run fast and can do interesting things! Hope it helps more than hinders. If you catch errors in this, good! That means you understand it and I don't have to worry about fixing it when it's late!