Aaron

Hrm, do people actually care about a score in a game like this? I didn't think it would be meaningful.

For the Mini-Game compo this year I thought I'd do a version of an old calculator game called DStar. The idea is to collect all the blue rings, but the trick is that you always move in a straight line until you hit something. Also you can alternately control a block to help get around the level. Anyway, play it, it's not that hard to figure out. Fire switches between controlling pac man and the blocker, which you'll need to finish the level (not detected yet). astar.zip

Speedball?

IIRC the 1200 was TV-compatible without the adapter, wasn't it? Somebody should double check that though. Mostly, yes. A lot of games do need a patch to run 100% correctly, but they're pretty easy to get and install. Check out WHDLoad. You'll want a good sized hard drive and probably some fast ram to get the most out it. There's also the problem of needing to get the Amiga on the internet to download it... You can connect them with a serial cable or something I think, though I've never done it. Also the Amiga can read PC disks (but you might need to download something).

Hey, I like it. I was almost considering writing a clone myself, but you beat me to it I guess... Anyway, it would be nice if there was some way to tell the unbreakable bricks from the others. I think someone once suggested making special bricks flicker, with the normal ones being solid... though I forget whose game they were talking about at the time. Also, with the borders, could you just remove them? Or if they're needed for collisions, make them black? Or um, maybe only display them right when the ball hits and then have them fade away? That might look cool... I do realize the irony in my suggesting that you add flicker in one place and take it out from another.

Another editor: ConTEXT It's nearly as good as UltraEdit, but it's free. I found it fairly easy to set it up to compile with DASM, plus I've created a syntax highlighter for 6502 assembly. Edit: added Atari-specific stuff to the highlighter 6502_Assembly.zip

Ok...... I put in a failure counter, which also nicely takes care of the Z26 problems. I really should have done this earlier. Thanks guys. So yeah... I really hope this is the last version. fd_really_final.zip

That's really cool :!: I'd guess that you're taking advantage of the blank areas between the zig-zags on every line... though I'm sure the specifics must involve some good hackery.

Yeah, you're right of course. I just don't feel like taking the time to work on it... That probably is the best way to go... will have a fixed version in a bit.

Yeah, when the game detects the AtariVox it checks for a signature word. If it's not there, it writes it in, wipes the high scores, and checks again. So I imagine it never manages to write correctly on your machine. This is similar to what happens in Z26... Should I be worried about this? Did you ever get your game to work?

There were a lot of Amiga games with great music. Hired Guns and The Killing Game Show are probably my favorites. Leander, Blood Money, and SotB were mentioned already... The title music in Populous is good also.

Sure, here's the entire source, and binaries for the rest of you. The file you want is macro_scores.asm (I was on a macro kick for a while) - it's actually one of the few that I commented. All the code is really just taken straight out of the AtariVox manual. Anyway, this is the game in pretty much final form. I'm going to start on something new in a bit. fd_final.zip fd_src_final.zip

Old Amiga beat 'em up by Team 17 (not sure if it was ever ported). IMO it kind of sucked. Personally I would have voted for Killer Instinct...

Because... that's how the game works. You keep respawning until both players are dead at the same time - that way you can maybe catch up even if you made mistakes early on. It would suck if you died and had to just wait until the other guy finished. Well, it's not my fault if you can't get a better high score than the AI. Or do you just mean the score from the last game you played? I can see how maybe that should be retained... Aside to Albert: the attract mode high score should be stored on the AtariVox, but it shouldn't actually show up anywhere. Can you check this? The attract mode uses all the same code as the regular game, so you can probably tell that I forgot about that part. Yeah, that's always been kind of a problem. As Nathan pointed out, I haven't really been able to come up with a solution that keeps the feel of the rest of the game intact. Thanks

Awesome. Not really - the platforms aren't fully determined until they show up on screen. The AI does have access to the platform data before then and will respond to it, but it's largely random.

Beats me. But soon, I hope.

It took a while, but I have a new version for you guys. It might even work. Dennis Debro figured out the rolling problem (it was weird), although he's only tested the (theoretically) fixed version on a 7800. It ought to be fine though, I think. Nathan, your sprites are in, and they work pretty well, imo. Good job. Also I've written in some code that I hope will fix the AtariVox high score saving (where the score shows up as blocks) - the game will check for a signature word in the eeprom and reset all the scores if it's not there. I've included a special version that removes all the high score code, since unfortunately it goes into an infinite loop in Z26 (Stella's fine though) - it always thinks the AtariVox is present, but can't write any data to it. This stuff is completely untested on a real machine, so er, yeah... Albert, thanks for all the help testing, even if we didn't really get anywhere... fd_19apr05.zip

Anyone played Blood Money on the Amiga? I got it back '91 and have been getting killed by it ever since... At one point I had played it every day for 2-3 months and could reliably beat 3 of the 4 worlds, but the thought of taking that much more time to train for world 4 was a bit too much. So now if I ever want to beat it I'll have to start re-memorizing attack patterns, all the way from the beginning. It's a good game though - I almost think I might actually do it some day...

Largely the same, the big sites don't care what you upload. You won't get advertising for freeware, but it's not like you get it for free with shareware... This might be different in the cell phone world, I don't know. There's also http://www.freewarepalm.com, which is fairly popular.

So true. I self-published my second Palm game and it brought in a few hundred dollars... but it really wasn't worth the time invested (and I wasn't enjoying the work, as from my previous post). I imagine a lot of people find that out the same way - once it becomes apparent you're not going to get rich quick, there's not a lot of reason to stay on the platform. OTOH if you write some halfway decent freeware, it'll be extrememly popular. There's demand for it and not much supply...

I've done some programming for Palm, which is I guess a similar situation... The platform doesn't attract homebrewers simply because it isn't much fun to program. The hardware isn't very standardized so you're stuck behind an API, and then you also have much less power to work with compared to e.g. a PC. Then add the fact that these things aren't generally designed to play games... That's not to say there isn't a demand for games on these types of systems, but IMO you'll mostly only ever find (low-end) commercial projects.

Nathan, both of those look awesome. I will definitely put them in. I do think the bouncing one would look better while running on a platform, but I'd probably need to tweak the code to remove the bounce in mid-air. It shouldn't be a big deal though, even it means using two separate animations. There's plently of room now...

How about... The Non-Infringing Ball and Paddle Game(s) Kobutera maybe?

One more: Atlantic Challenge

And here it is... If I've done everything right, this version should save high scores to the AtariVox. Each mode has its own entry, so you should see the scores change when flipping through the different modes. This also means the high scores reset to zero in Z26, since it apparently detects a non-existent unit. You can see a momentary black frame when the game tries to write to the eeprom. Stella works correctly, in that nothing happens. I also threw a brain-melting easter egg into this version. See if you can find it. fd_02mar05.zip