Nostalgic

The box of my copy of Maze Craze states it has 256 games on both the front and back. The copyright year is 1980. The cartridge doesn't show any number of games. The 256 comes from 16 games * 4 speeds * 4 visibility levels.

The original special edition - signed and numbered - of Euchre did not sell out when it was in Hozer's store. Unfortunately, I did not get a list of who owns which numbers. When AtariAge starts offering Euchre, I want to continue offering the special edition, so I need to know who has which numbers. Can those of you who have a Hozer Euchre SE please let me know what number you own? (Private messages or e-mail are best.) That will help me prepare the new numbered labels for the AtariAge version. Thanks!

Good luck... try to find some transplanted midwesterners. A friend of mine moved to Georgia recently and was disappointed that no one she's asked has even heard of Euchre, much less played it.

There's worse out there! I've never played, but in Calabrasella, the 3 and 2 are higher than the Ace and King, and the 8, 9, and 10 are left out. Even more confusing is Ombre. The 8, 9, and 10 are again removed. There are three or four top trumps: 1. Spadille - always Ace of spades 2. Manille - 2 of trump if black, 7 of trump if red 3. Basto - always Ace of clubs 4. Punto - Ace of trump if red, none if trump is black Then, in black suits, the sequence is K Q J 7 6 5 4 3 2, and in red suits, the sequence is K Q J A 2 3 4 5 6 7. I read about these in a book on three-player card games. They scared me!

That's ok. The altered card sequence is one of the hardest parts of Euchre to get used to. Cupcakus' explanation of the strength of the right and left bower is on the mark. It may still help to see a full layout of the ranks of the cards, though. Let's say clubs is trump. This makes the jack of clubs the right bower and the jack of spades the left bower. So, the rank of the cards in each suit, from high to low, is: Hearts: A K Q J 10 9 Diamonds: A K Q J 10 9 Clubs: JC JS A K Q 10 9 (JC = jack of clubs, JS = jack of spades) Spades: A K Q 10 9 Notice that the jack of spades is counted as a club. This might be what's throwing you off - despite the suit printed on the card, the left bower is considered to be the same suit as the right bower. Therefore, in this example, the jack of spades is truly a club. Hope this helps!

For us Kraftwerk fans who aren't members of the forum, could you provide the low-down on this? I hadn't heard of any more tours... (This is drifting off-topic, so posting in the Off-Topic section probably won't hurt. )

We are functioning automatic... And we are dancing mechanic... We are the robots! Ah, Kraftwerk... great stuff! Anyhow, I don't think sheet music for The Robots exists. However, there is a Kraftwerk fan site - Keep Werking - that has scans of sheet music for several Kraftwerk songs (Computer World, The Model, Tour de France, and Trans Europe Express). This may help any enterprising programmer who wishes to hack Berzerk or some other game.

Thanks for the raves, StanJr! I haven't discussed finding a new home for Euchre with the Als yet. (For the readers who didn't know, Euchre was originally sold by Hozer Video Games, which is now out of business.) However, seeing that there is still interest in the game gives me some incentive to do so!

I've been monitoring this for the past couple of days now. It's really a sad thing to see. One of the best parts of the experiences I had in making Euchre was the fantastic support I got from the Atari community. Fellow programmers on the Stella mailing list offered their help and advice on numerous occasions. (Without Andrew and Thomas, Euchre would never have been finished, or would at best have been a bloated 8K cart.) Readers of AtariAge offered comments about the game and performed some testing. I've gotten e-mails from people who were enthusiastic about the game before its release and thanking me for creating it after they got it. Randy was very helpful in getting everything together for manufacturing the cart - he put me in touch with David Exton to have the label made, he sent me the labels themselves to sign, and he printed the longest Hozer manual ever, all in a timely and friendly manner. Al from AtariAge was great about posting updates to the forums and to the Euchre in-development and finished-game pages. I'm sorry to see that such a wonderful community has such a large rift in it now.

Perhaps you're thinking of Trailblazer. It was a one- or two-player game and you controlled a soccer ball bouncing down courses of checkered squares. Some sped you up, some made you bounce high, and others reversed your joystick (!). There's an Antic Magazine review here. (The C-64 and Atari 8-bit computer versions were on the same disk.)

Mmm... puzzle game happiness... Clever use of the six-digit score routine. Is this going to be a sit-and-think puzzler, where you ponder your next move carefully, or is it a "twitch" puzzler where you race against the clock?

I actually enjoy a game of 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe now and again. It's pretty challenging against the computer even at the lower levels... mostly because I'm not used to seeing all the possible paths to winning. What's nice is that unlike regular Tic-Tac-Toe, two good players aren't always going to end up in a tie. Maybe it's not graphically impressive, but it doesn't need to be. A grid drawn on paper isn't graphically impressive anyway.

I did some more thinking about this... I believe that you could actually show a board and all the cards you'd need to all at once. Imagine the top of the screen like this: 052 029 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . O . O . . . . . ------------------------------------ . . . . . . . . . . . . . .X. X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ------------------------------------- . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The dots are playfield graphics. There are forty pixels per row, twenty on and twenty off. A peg could be placed either on a dot or between them. This gives 40 points per row. There are three rows, for a total of 120 points. Since a full game is 121 points, this is enough. The first and third sets of rows run from left to right and the second runs from right to left. The dashes, which would be solid lines of playfield graphics, separate the rows. The Xs represent the first player's pegs and the Os represent the second player's pegs. Below the board, you can fit in three rows of cards - one for what the computer has played, one for what you have played, and one for what is still in your hand. There'd even be room for the starter and the current point total of the cards played.

That was only if you used sprites to show smaller peg holes than the playfield graphics allow. It's not a bad idea, but more difficult than a horizontal orientation. Think of how many Atari games are set up so that there are horizontal rows of objects rather than vertical - Seaquest, Demons to Diamonds, Space Treat, Oystron, etc. This is due to the limited amount of time available per scanline to draw objects and possibly reuse them. Demons to Diamonds done vertically would be much harder to implement and would involve a lot of "intelligent flicker," which is flickering only when two objects need to be shown on the same line. (This is done in Ms. Pac-Man, for instance.) It would be much easier to lay out the board and cards horizontally. That way, on any single line, you're only trying to accomplish one thing: draw a row of pegs, draw part of a card, show some digits or a message, etc.

Per scanline, you get one color for the background, one color for playfield and ball, and one color for each sprite, which is inherited by the missiles. You can change these colors as the line is being drawn, but the more you do this, the less time you have in the line to do anything else, like change the images. The time limitations in one scanline are why scores are a single color. There's not enough time to change the images as the line is being drawn and change the colors along with it.

If I'm reading this right, it sounds like you'd put the board vertically on one side - maybe as playfield graphics - and all the cards on the right. It might be doable, but timing each scanline would be complex. (I'm not a cycle counting expert; that's why Euchre's display is so simple.) Ah, Antic... those were the days... I can't see using the borders as a pegboard on a 2600, but it's a nice idea. Perhaps instead one could show only part of the board and put numbers above it to indicate which part is shown... Brian Watson's Poker Squares/Poker Solitaire (whichever it is called now) showed that this can be done. However, in a two-player game, each player gets six cards and puts two in the crib. I don't think there's enough cycles to switch six sprite images and their colors (going back and forth between red and black). Brian was clever in making the sprites in reverse - the white pixels are on - and putting red playfield graphics "behind" the white sprites to color the hearts and diamonds.

Several months, at least. No problem, though. I've seen a couple of other Ultima avatars floating around. It's not plagiarism, it's different people expressing enthusiasm for the same game.

I actually had pondered doing Cribbage for the 2600 as a follow-up to Euchre. (Don't get excited, folks - I only pondered it. Nothing's happening. ) When I thought about it, I saw two primary obstacles. First, it would be rather difficult to show the board with the pegs. Horizontally you only get forty pixels with the playfield, which isn't nearly enough, unless you have the tracks bend several times. If you made the board vertical, then it would have to share screen space with the cards, likely resulting in flicker. Were I to program this (and I'm not saying I am ), I'd start off with just showing the score as numbers, and only add the board if I had ROM left over. Second, you have an odd turn and scoring sequence. Euchre was easy - each player plays a card in every trick, in the same order. Scoring is always at the end of the round. In Cribbage, one player could play two or more cards in a row if his opponent says "Go," and the points for that are deferred in case the non-Go player can make it to 31 exactly. It's pretty convoluted, especially when you have to maintain the game's state over several frames. This doesn't mean it's not possible. It just won't be pretty. I agree with you all - a 2600 Cribbage game would be nice. I'd certainly play it!

Do you think that the screens were each explicitly described in ROM or were they generated by a pseudo-random number routine always using the same seed (as in River Raid)?

I'm able to play it on my (non-heavy) six-switch. My pain comes from a different source - incompetence! I've not gotten the hang of this game at all. I'm constantly missing targets and crashing. I've only gotten back to the carrier _once_ and crashed on my attempted landing. Ouch. How does one manage to get by in this game?

The pot in my 7800 is probably set differently than the pot in my 2600. The one in the 2600 is likely off by a bit. Thanks for the explanation! Yours too! Ultima ][ (which I think yours is - it looks like Minax is there) was the first of the series I owned and solved. I played it for hours upon hours. I got hooked then.

Has anyone else who has both a 2600 and a 7800 noticed any difference in how the 7800 displays colors in 2600 mode? Take Euchre for instance. On a 2600 the greens seem a shade more blue and everything is much brighter, especially the white parts. It's much closer to what I intended when played on a 7800. I found it similar in Circus Atari. The blue background and the colors of the balloons are a bit darker when I use my 7800. Then again, I've sometimes wondered if my 2600 (an old but not "heavy" six-switch) is a little off on colors. I remember my dad had bought Basic Programming when I was a kid, but returned it to the store since the colors on screen never matched what the manual said they should be. (The colors were significant somehow.) Perhaps it's part of the "Never Twice Same Color" curse of NTSC.

Great! Perhaps this will serve as inspiration to the many creative programmers out there... With a Supercharger the lack of RAM isn't so much a problem, but then you'd have to force the direction of the game in a certain way through all those multiload parts. However, for the 2D sections, you could do it with the six-digit score routine. Say you give the player an 11x11 view of the world, with the player's icon in the center. Each "digit" would be a cell in the world - a forest, a river, a castle, etc. Alternate between showing the left half of this window and right half in each frame. There probably isn't time to switch between both colors and shapes, but if you can accept monochrome, it may be fine. Hmm... perhaps a port of one of the old mainframe Hack games? By the way, I like your taste in RPGs. How about the old Lemonade Stand games? Hammurabi? These (probably) have relatively simple rules and displays. As for MULE, I would definitely love to see that! I imagine it would have to be a 16 KB cart, if not larger, just to handle the different phases of the game. Rather than draw colored boxes around the cells, you could just show the symbol in the cell (red energy, blue smithore, etc.), plus maybe another icon or below it to indicate mountains. Lose the scrolling messages (but still have messages) and some between-round animation and you might be ok on graphics. Paul Slocum could adapt the music. Same idea as #3... have a small window of the board on the screen, use the six-digit display routine, and flicker enough to get as many groups of six images per line that you need. It probably would have to be a Supercharger game to have the RAM for the gameboard. How about these? 7. More text adventure games! Dark Mage proved it could be done. Add to it a way to type commands with the keyboard controller - much like typing words into a mobile phone - and you can have the classic verb-noun interface. (For truly "impossible," port the Infocom sentence processing engine.) 8. Specific game challenge: Qix. Use the Suicide Mission engine to give the resolution needed. As for the lack of color... it was certainly acceptable on the Game Boy version. I like to say at work that "anything is possible given sufficient time and resources." In the case of the 2600, it also involves figuring out what compromises you will accept. If you're fine with a port of Super Pac-Man in which you eat dots instead of different prizes each round, you're one step ahead. If you can accept a port of I, Robot that has only one perspective, but still retains the gameplay, you've moved the impossible into the realm of the improbable. Thanks for listening!

It's in Section One, listed as "Stella Stella Stella!"

You just have to be patient. _Really_ patient. A couple of months after a For Sale page was implemented on our Intranet, I posted a "2600 Games Wanted" ad. I heard nothing for close to a year, other than from one coworker and a contractor, both of whom had already dumped their games. Several months later, one of my teammates, who happened to be the Project Manager for the Intranet, noticed my ad as he was performing some testing. He said that he not only had several games, but a system - which turned out to be a 7800! I told a friend (outside of work) about this. He said he had a 7800 while younger and still had several games. As he's gone home to his parents' place a couple of times, he's managed to dig up those games for me. The only thing I'm lacking is the two-button joystick. But for a free system and games, I can't complain. The moral of the story is: ask around. You just might be in luck.