Aaron

Re: Speech in game It probably isn't going to happen. I've found enough ram for it, but it still needs ~8 scan lines of processing time that I don't have. While it might work with enough tearing down and rebuilding of code, I'm not really willing to go that far for a "frilly" feature. That said... ...would be hilarious. I'll agree with that, except the thing is... the game play is done. Has been for some time now. That I do not, unfortunately. I might have to take you up on the testing though.... (actually, wasn't there some talk of adding eeprom support to Z26?) Anyway... Now that I've spoiled everyone's fun, I do have some good news... I had the day off due to snow, so I was able to get most of the high-score saving code done. It's really a hacked-up mess, since the game wasn't at all designed for it, but I think it should work... A new .bin should be arriving soon.

Hrm, I see Fish of Fury was said already... How about... Fins of Fury? Gil's Quest (I'm supposing the main fish is named Gil, see?) Iron Gill 2600 Leagues Under the Sea Swim Down

Another update, this one's a little bigger... Several bugs fixed. I won't go into the details. More speech - "tie" and "new high score". That'll probably be all, though it's really tempting to try to add support for the eeprom... New advanced game mode (down arrow). What it does is start you ~20 lines into the game, since the opening stages can get a little dull when you've played the game a zillion times. Slightly improved sound effects. They now play on both channels, so they shouldn't cut each other off as much. And the part I put the most work into... new music on the title screen. I think it turned out pretty well, considering I've never written any before. It does sound a little weird in the PAL50 version though. fd_28feb05.zip

I just tried the latest version, looks like it's steadily improving. One thought I had was that the jellyfish's animation speed should be constant, since it doesn't really push itself forward like the other fish. Besides, it looks good when animating at a decent speed.

You know, a good idea for a hack would be to replace Robotron's control scheme with the one from say, Llamatron. The way that worked, you would always be firing, and the fire button would let you move without changing the direction of your fire. Or since there are two buttons, one could fire normally and the other could fire in a constant direction. Anything would be better than the existing controls...

Awesome! Albert, you are the man. Adding a few more phrases on the title screen shouldn't be too hard, but I'm not sure if I'll go beyond that. Saving of high scores would be nice, but the code for it looks more complicated and would likely need a lot more testing...

Here's an update... The controls are changed a bit in this one. Firstly the game will try to detect the 7800 (thanks to Nukey Shay and batari for the idea), so now you only need to flip the B&W/Color switch once to pause on the 2600. Also, Reset and Select now work like in most other games - Select goes back to the title screen and Reset restarts the game in the current mode. On the title screen, left and right now change the game mode. Most of the other changes have been internal. I've freed up a couple bytes of ram in-game, but I haven't really decided what to do with them yet. Possibly I'll try to improve the sound effects... I still have no idea if the AtariVox stuff works... I did actually try to work in something like that by changing the player's mass in the collision code. It didn't quite work though... if you hit the other guy too hard, his velocity would overflow (it's only 8-bit) and do weird things... fd_15feb05.zip

I wouldn't really call it a tutorial, but if you haven't already read it, http://www.qotile.net/minidig/docs/sizes.txt explains things pretty nicely. It doesn't tell how to set up the org/rorg stuff in DASM, but Nukey has outlined that well enough...

So have you found this technique to work reliably? I was interested in trying to detect the 7800 a while back, so I might have to steal it...

I've just now got around to trying this, and it's pretty good. I really like the inertia. Anyway, some suggestions... the impractical one first: maybe you could have the fish move up and down, if only within their individual "lanes", like in sine waves or something? It would add a little to the difficulty... Also, it might look nice if you made the water get darker as it gets deeper. And it could turn red when the shark eats you.

Ok, so Fall Down is now 8k. What I've done is put the title screen and the game on separate banks, so right now there aren't any sound effects on the title screen, since that part of the code is in the other bank. Otherwise it seems to be working fine. I've also added some preliminary AtariVox code to the title screen (there's not enough cpu time or ram for it in-game). It should announce "red wins" or "blue wins" at the end of a game, though for all I know it could just blast out static.... maybe someone could try it out? fd_09feb05.zip

Erm no, I just meant that the old version had to be 4k to enter in the compo. I'm not entering FD in next year's (who thinks that far ahead, anyway? ), so I can make it as big as I want.

Well, I just couldn't help myself. I started working on Fall Down again. So... here's what's new: back when I started writing this thing, I didn't have much grasp of the use of INTIM, so the code had WSYNC statements pretty much everywhere there was a possible branch. Very wasteful... So I got rid of all that stuff, freeing up around 100 bytes for new features (still to be added). I also got to thinking the game might look better (particularly on real TVs) with bright sprites on a dark background, instead of the other way around. The screenshot uses the new color scheme. Opinions please. And that's it for now. I'm kicking around the idea of making it 8k, what with the Mini-Game contest over, though I'm not sure how I'd fill up such a vastly huge amound of space... fd_05feb05.zip

For PC, Planescape: Torment is one of the most immersive rpgs I've played. It lacks in action at times, but the story totally makes up for it. OTOH, if you like a good dungeon crawl (and um, don't care about graphics...), nothing beats Linley's Dungeon Crawl.

One of the nice things about, e.g. DCP is that it supports address modes that DEC does not. DEC (foo),y is impossible but DCP (foo),y works fine, so it can be a quicker way of decrementing something if you don't care about the flags. LAX works like this too - LDX (foo),y doesn't exist but LAX (foo),y does. And of course there are times when you actually want to increment something and then subract it from A (ISB), but those are rare... :wink: Anyway, you said you went through several lists, but this one is my favorite: http://atarihq.com/danb/files/64doc.txt, even if the explanations are a little cryptic...

Actually you don't need the hacked version, as River Raid already has a cheat code in it. In fact, the cheat was so commonly exploited that many later games copied it almost exactly. What you need to do is press the "fire" button - this will cause enemies in front of you to die. Clearly the cheat wasn't meant to be in the final build, because it works on bridges too for some reason.

Fall Down is done code-wise. I could almost see upgrading it, given how much stuff Alex (my arch nemesis! ) has thrown into MGD, but.... nah.

Ok, this time I'm actually going to help instead of making groundless assumptions... I got it to assemble in 3 passes in DASM 2.20.07, with the same messages Cybergoth got. Maybe some bug got introduced in 2.20.10...? Anyway, you have Waste = $2E defined all the way at the end of the file... It looks like DASM doesn't see this on the first pass and tries to fill in the code using a 2-byte address, so the labels get offset by the extra byte. DASM /should/ recognize the zero-page address on later passes, but doesn't for some reason... So you could try moving the Waste definition to the top of the file. When I did that it assembled fine in 2 passes.

I've seen this error a few times... in my case it meant I ran out of rom space. The code that exists at the labels in question gets placed at the same address as a later org statement. And you can't have two sets of code in the same place, right? Looking at your code, I see you have an org statement right after the last label. Changing it to a higher address will probably fix things, if you can do that. I have not idea how Cybergoth got it to assemble the way it was though...

Actually Fall Down does that to draw the players - it was the only way I could find time to draw both sprites and a moving assymetric playfield. The code is only used for the width of a platform though (iirc 8 pixels), so only a little bit of padding is needed between sprites. Outside the platforms I used a normal skipdraw. Works out nicely. Fall Down did have issues with page boundaries as Andrew described (the source is full of weird org statements), but this was mainly a result of some other crazy stuff I did...

You might want to put links to the original threads, so people can see how the ideas took shape. New developers (like me) are always going to come along and wonder where these things came from...

I can't say Otto ever gave me that much trouble, so I'd go with the bat... but imo the tiny saucer in Asteroids was so much more evil than either of them. You'll be sitting there doing fine and then all of a sudden it comes in, takes one shot and kills you

My mistake, it's actually 18 bytes. Maybe it does count after all... JoustPong is too hard

Falldown 2600 has a very distinct 3 note jingle. I really don't think that counts , it takes up all of 6 bytes... I'm happy with how Fall Down did though - the main complaint was that it was too hard, but then I had added an easy mode the day after the submission deadline.

Congratulations Thomas I'll have to admit I didn't vote on the 1K games, but Cave 1K is really a lot of fun. Nice sprite too.