Nostalgic
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Posts posted by Nostalgic
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There is no overlay for Codebreaker. Most of the time you're just entering numbers.
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It's vaguely like Arkanoid in that you are trying to knock down a wall of blocks with a ball and power-ups occasionally fall down for you to pick up. However, the control is somewhat frustrating - you use a joystick rather than a paddle, so quick moves are out of the question. I've also yet to figure out how to direct the ball in a particular direction.
It's an OK game - nothing great, but a pleasant diversion once in a while.
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How about games in which the level/round rolls?
I rolled Defender's level counter once. It took about an hour. It went from 99 down to either zero or one; I don't remember exactly since it was a couple of years ago.
Unfortunately, unlike the arcade Pac-Man, nothing interesting happened.
Are there other games in which you can roll the level counter?
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How about Warlords?
Sure, the home version is round-based rather than point-based, has only one ball in play, and features some questionable computer A.I. (why don't you hit yourself _again_?), but it's a classic multi-player game and keeps the fast action of the arcade version.
Actually, until the Atari emulation packs started coming out, I didn't even know Warlords had been an arcade game.
That shows which version got the most attention... -
I have a certain fondness for Millipede. Though you have blocks for the mushrooms and shooter, the vast number of enemies and all their various effects on the board (raise it, lower it, slow the action) are intact, along with bonus rounds, multiple spiders, and a lot going on at once.
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That may depend on when you downloaded the ROM. The version on my Euchre page was last updated on October 1. I don't remember whether AtariAge had that version or not.
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It was great to have a national - and in some cases, international - radio station give significant attention to the "retrogaming" movement. The interview went well and Albert touched all the key bases - Tennis for Two, Spacewar, the typical Atari player demographic, emulation, and most importantly, that Atari games are still enjoyed because the game play is key.
Well done Albert!
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This morning I woke up to an Ultima dream. Given my avatar, that should be no surprise.
It surprised me, though, since I haven't played any version of Ultima in several years. (I stopped since Ultima VII was such a disappointment, then found a copy of Ultima I for the Atari 8-bits for a few bucks. But I digress...)At one point I have an overhead view of a land that is supposed to be Britannia. I see the little adventurer icons wandering a southern island, walking on water (!) north to avoid some monsters, and then a demo starts up in which I slowly float over the whole country. Keep in mind I'm not looking at a monitor - this is all that I see!
Next, I'm taken to a land above Britannia. (Imagine the Underworld, but in the opposite direction.) I'm being driven in a car through suburban subdivisions. The driver is another Britannian royal, a woman who is also from "my world." (For those who don't know, Lord British and some of the regulars who appear in the Ultima series are supposedly transplants from the real world.) The season is winter and is probably perpetually so; there's light layers of snow on the ground and rooftops and the sky is a very clear pale blue.
I get a feeling of peace and contentment. This is a very nice place to be. I don't know if the fact that this Overworld has modern technology means anything, but being up there in the quiet of a car with snow hushing the chaos of the world was a great feeling. The woman's company was comforting as well.
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It's easy to slip up after rolling the score because the difficulty goes back to the easiest level. The difficulty is based on score, not a level, so when your score goes to "zero," you're used to the pace of the hardest game (Qotile launches three times, sometimes instantly, and changes direction) and suddenly it's slow again.
It throws off a gaming-zen state.
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The 666 display is intentional. It indicates that only the numbers 1-6 are used and that the code has three digits. If you hit Select a few times, this will change to 999, 6666, and 9999.
As for it showing 666 after you hit Reset... I've never seen it happen. Then again, my copy is the only one I've seen in action.
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I am tempted to plug Euchre here, but as there's no cartridge yet, I have to refrain.
That aside, I enjoy a game of Backgammon or Othello to pass some time, and occasionally I take in a few rounds of Codebreaker.
I do have 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe, Casino, and Video Chess, but I don't play any of them much.
There was a very nice Poker Squares homebrew floating around the Stella list months ago. I'm not sure if it ever got made into a cartridge.
Lastly: Cupcakus - what is Quest? I may have missed the post announcing it; I'm not consistent about reading the forums.
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It's now just past midnight in Michigan, so it is technically Saturday, October 5 here.
This means that Euchre is now released!
Many thanks again for all those who provided comments and tested the game, as well as the many forum readers who have provided a lot of praise. I'm really pleased about the reaction my game has received!
You can get the ROM image from my Euchre site and read the HTML version of the manual.
There's no cartridges... yet. However, I've submitted both the label designs and manual text to Hozer and I've received the first draft of the manual, so things are coming together well. I don't have a date for the release of the cartridge. (Please don't submit orders or reservations to either Hozer or to me just yet.)
It's been a really fun process and you all make a very great community. I look forward to releasing the game as a cartridge and seeing you enjoy it.
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Wouldn't you know it... I found a bug.
Argh!I saw it happen twice - if I was the lone maker and the "west" player led to the first trick, it would lead a low trump! This is bizarre behavior, so I checked it out.
It turns out that I was reusing the variable that the computer uses to remember who the maker is for other purposes, so it would sometimes think it was the lone maker - thus, leading trump to draw out everyone else's.
I've posted an update at the Euchre web site.
Since this was a very easy bug to correct and no others have come out in my testing, I'm keeping the cut-off date as Friday, October 4 at 11:59 PM EDT.
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Thanks so much! I'm still amazed at how well the game has been received. I didn't expect there to be enough fans of both the 2600 and Euchre to make much of an impact. I've been pleasantly surprised!
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Homebrews are fairly common these days, and new games are in development all the time.Just sit back and think about this statement for a while...
Did you ever think you'd see the day when someone could say this?
It's staggering, in a way, to see how much support and interest has come about in the past few years.
Wow...
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Try to think of just ten paddle games, let alone GOOD paddle games. And you can't count Kaboom or GI Joe or any other 3rd party titles...Let's see if *I* can do it:
Breakout, Super Breakout, Warlords, Video Olympics, Casino, Night Driver, Street Racer... ummm... that's seven. =)
Just off the top of my head, I came up with eight. I thought of all of the ones you listed, plus Canyon Bomber.
How about Backgammon? (I, out of anyone, have to support the Atari board and card games!
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Has anyone else out there encountered "Galaga" for the 2600? I downloaded a ROM file years ago and it turned out to be a hack of River Raid. There's some particularly nasty levels in there - some passages have ground at the end of them, so you have to remember not to go down them or else you crash!
Was this ever produced as an actual (bootleg) cartridge?
For those who know the internals of River Raid: how do you think this hack was accomplished? Tweak the pseudo-random level generator? Change what gets generated to include things like dead ends?
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What do you out there think? Would you consider not having your cards cleared at the end of the hand a bug?Well, I don't think it's really a bug as in real life the player who sits out of the game still holds the card. If you want, you could include a little feature that with difficulity switch setting lets you keep the cards or hide them.
I think I was just feeling particularly lazy that night.
It only took nine bytes to fix. (It will be part of the release candidate.) You get to see your hand until the last trick, after which it is cleared.However, if I need to recover nine bytes, I'll take it right back out.
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1. With the current debugging, how close are you to a finished product?2. Are you planning to package the game with basic Euchre rules (perhaps
in an instruction manual) for those who are naive about the game like me?
3. What, if any packaging, have you considered for the final product?
1. Very, very close. I fixed the bugs I identified a couple of messages ago and made a couple of tweaks to the computer's playing routines. I plan on putting out a release candidate in a few days. (I am, however, still waiting on feedback about whether it's fine on a real PAL television.)
2. Absolutely! At this point I plan for it to contain the same text and screen shots as the version on my Euchre web page. Just scroll down to "How can I get an instruction manual" and follow the link that is there.
3. The packaging will be whatever Hozer uses to ship a cartridge.
The game will consist of a cartridge and printed manual. I have no plans for a box, bag, or something similar. -
I discovered today that if your partner goes alone and it is the last hand of the game, your hand is still shown during the color-cycling attract mode.
I never bothered with clearing out the human player's hand if his/her partner goes alone, so it already still shows when the "D" (deal) indicator appears.
What do you out there think? Would you consider not having your cards cleared at the end of the hand a bug?
The screen shot shows an example of this situation. The odd colors are a result of the attract mode.
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It's amazing what being away from the source code for a few days, plus a little luck, can leave you fresh enough to see.
I played many games of Euchre tonight. I noticed a disturbing trend in a couple of them. If the computer player decided to go alone, it was with a weak hand.
On one occasion, my partner went alone with the right bower, ace, and king, and an off-suit queen and nine. I had the other four trump cards! We managed to take three tricks, but that was an awfully weak hand to go alone on.
Soon after, my partner went alone on right bower, left bower, queen, with an off-suit queen and jack. Again, we managed to get three tricks.
Later on, an opponent went alone with the right bower and left bower, having two tens and a nine for support. Needless to say, this earned a euchre!
After seeing all this, I dug into the code. I found three bugs in the routine that the computer uses to determine the strength of its hand!
1. When counting the number of trumps, the left bower was not included.
2. The left bower was counted as one of its original suit when trying to find lone off-suit aces. (This means if hearts is potentially trump and a hand has the ace and jack of diamonds, this ace would not be considered a lone off-suit ace.)
3. The counter of aces of a suit was not reset in the loop used to scan the hand for aces. This means the computer could think it had more lone off-suit aces than it actually did.
The third bug was likely the biggest contributor to the computer players' tendency to go alone on mediocre hands.
If you're playing the Beta version, you may notice this behavior.
Anyone tried the PAL version on a real Atari? I fed it through my Supercharger and played on my NTSC TV. The colors are close, except the green table is a dark red and everything else is really bright. The screen does appear to be stable for the most part, though it occasionally drifted down. I believe that's just because I'm relying on vertical hold.
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I've taken a liking to Backgammon and Othello (which I found at the last PhillyClassic - in Pennsylvania, which somewhat contradicts Othello not being in eastern PA
) to pass some time. I also plugged in Codebreaker after playing Mastermind for the first time in many months.I guess I must like the board game games.
I also had a friend visit a couple of weeks ago. While waiting for a phone call from another friend, we fired up the 2600. We played Yars' Revenge, Warlords, Super Breakout, Canyon Bomber, and Air-Sea Battle, the latter two because he was frustrated (not being a frequent gamer) and simply "wanted to shoot stuff". Then again, this is a friend who can beat the heck out of Diablo. I don't get it.
I'd enjoy some of the very early games more when playing on my own if the computer players put up more of a challenge. I became rather disappointed with Warlords when I became able to win 5-0-0-0 almost every time against three computer players.
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The Euchre page lists September 8th as the time of the last version .. Is this correct? Or am I missing something?You're right. The last time I altered the game itself was on the 8th. I made a few changes to the manual up until the 12th, at which time I posted everything on the website. I also submitted the source and binary files to the Stella list, but it got caught up in the approval queue and didn't appear for a couple of days.
Sorry for the confusion about the dates.
From now on, he'll only bugfix the game, so he's waiting for feedback regarding that. He's especially looking for feedback how the PAL version is looking/working on the real thing, since he can't test this on his own.Since YOU are the the beta testers it'll depend on YOUR feedback/bugtracking when the game will be done, so the more you support Erik in the process, the quicker you get the game
Thanks for providing all the explanations, and in particular, the importance of feedback.
The feedback from AtariAge readers about the Alpha version was a great help!Cybergoth is right - the PAL version is a concern of mine. I have tested it under Stella 1.2 for Linux, but I don't know how well the colors correspond to those on a real TV, nor if the display is stable. (It should be considering all I did was add blank lines to make up the difference between NTSC and PAL, but in programming, "should" doesn't count for much.
)BTW: Can't wait to see the label artwork, as I'm expecting a masterpiece here :wink:I just received a preliminary version of the artwork today. (I'm not doing it myself.) I'm impressed. I think everyone else will be too.
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I'm a tad dissapointed in you guys. You listed nearly 50 different original games and you forgot one recent original game that can be addicative: Euchre.
Thank you very much for mentioning Euchre. (My game has an advocate!
) However, I think everyone was concentrating on games that have officially been released. Euchre is close to that, but not quite there.
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using Supercharger games/tapes
in Atari 2600
Posted
I actually have to use my Stella CD rather than tapes. My Supercharger has gotten sensitive in its old age and refuses to work with cassettes. I've tried both a portable tape player and a stereo system - no luck.
That said, $5 for as many games as you get is a tremendous bargain. The Supercharger version of Frogger alone is worth it.