EarthQuake

Ack! Yeah, so... I've been away from AtariAge for a little while busy with some other things, but in several weeks I'll be returning to finish up my Adventure hack. After that, I'll be putting my time into writing Ceuta. I've been sort of challenging my programming skills lately, so hopefully I'll be a bit more prepared for this when I get back. It's a rather ambitious project. Getting the Odyssey engine to work flawlessly is my main priority, as Ceuta will use the source code as a base for everything you can do with it. You won't be able to compile a 4K ROM with it, but you'll be able to accurately reproduce the original Adventure as an 8K ROM.

Only if you kept the dragons the same gray color as the background.

He started on it in 1978 and handed it to Atari in early 1979. It was released sometime halfway through that year but sometime before the Christmas season. Warren mentioned this in an interview. I did some research into it because I wanted to release my Adventure hack in observance of the 30th anniversary of Adventure, and this seems to be what had went down. I'm not really sure about the catalogs and box/manual dates though. Perhaps that was the planned release date? I can't find the interview though, as all my links to it are broken.

Sweet! I disappear for a month and Nukey is still happily pumping out improvements. Will this man ever cease?

Sounds like a really neat idea. I've always loved things that involved around with hell. Hell is just probably one of the most frightning settings for any game, because anything can go really. Can't wait to play it. lol Why would he be joking? There are already several text adventures for the 2600. They leave a bit more to the imagination than that of a graphical game, and as long as they have a good interesting story, they can be fun to play.

This is something where you need good knowledge of assembly. Most games have routines that store values to the sound-related hardware registers. Thing is, each game is different, so you not only need to know where these routine calls are in the binary, but how they work. Unless you get a hold of the disassembly and change the form of the sound effects to be generated, you probably won't be able to do much in regards to how the sound is structured, just by hacking the binary. There are three parameters to work with when dealing with sound: volume, frequency, and the noise type (IIRC). Different games do different things to put these parameters to use. My knowledge about sounds on the VCS are pretty limited, so I hope my answer was correct.

Not trying to be mean or anything, but if you're not going to at least improve a game by hacking, why do it at all? If the answer is "to test my skills" or "because I got bored", then why release it?

Gah. It looked so promising...

I'm sad... Adventure is starting to fall behind.

You know, you could always not reveal if the game was written in batari Basic. I think many wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

Just as a followup, the problem I was experiencing in that thread has seemed to have resolved itself. I'm very thankful I can finally view AtariAge properly. It sounds to me like you're having a different problem though. Hope it works out for you.

Honestly, I don't make any distinctions. I haven't worked with bB yet, but from all the different prototypes and in-progress games, it just seems like a faster, yet less efficient way of programming. I mean, it's a decision, with both programming methods having advantages over the other and each with their shortcomings. Look at the complexity of Dungeon. Hell, that's better than many games written in raw assembly (in my opinion ). I mean, is there a wrong or right way to create a good game?

The game is progressing nicely. 3 variables left, eh? Have you tried reusing variables? Better yet, have you tried sharing variables? You can store two 4-bit variables in one byte each with a range of 0 to 15. If you have boolean variables, you can store 8 of those in one byte. Logical binary operators are a blessing if you know how to use them. If you don't mind me peddling some more ideas, here are some things you could consider: Instead of stopping the game after the time ends, have a certain number of jellyfish you must catch. Then once you have met the quota, continue on until time runs out. If you fail to catch the number of jellyfish for the round, game over. Otherwise, advance to another stage (maybe switch up the playfield colors for each round). Bump up the jellyfish quota by like 10 or so, and repeat. Eventually it will get so frantic the player would eventually fail to get enough jellyfish per round (probably around stage 5 or 6). You'd need 3-4 bits of RAM for the current stage and the jellyfish count could be based on that, like: Required Jellyfish = (Stage Number x 10) + 40 You could limit the number of stages to 8, which would use 3 bits of RAM (values 0 through 7). And you could store the remaining jellyfish required to be "safe" for the remainder of the stage using 7 bits of RAM (values 0 through 127). So that's only an extra byte of RAM usage. In the above formula, stage 8 would yield a jellyfish quota of 120 (which will fit in your 7-bit variable). You'd need to have a condition that checks if the game ends on level 8, probably at which that point you can just stop the game. I'm not saying you should do all this if you don't want to, but consider it a challenge. You could then slap a simple title screen on this thing and call it a complete game.

Excellent work! The addition makes a huge impact on the gameplay. It's a lot more fun striving for better "combos". I think I landed 5 or 6 jellies in one jump. Only got a top score of 110 so far though. Can anyone think of any more ideas for "style points"? Since this is a timed game and there is another good chunk of ROM space left, it could benefit from such things, to provide a few alternate ways of racking up the score. Some way of extending the time would also be nice, maybe by getting certain combos (like 5 in one swoop) or grabbing some random item that appears and disappears.

I really love this idea. It wouldn't be too difficult either. Just have a counter that increments whenever Spongebob catches a jellyfish in the air. Then when he touches down, reset the counter. You can then add points to the score based on the value of this counter whenever another jellyfish is caught. So like catching 3 jellyfish in one jump would add +1, +2, and then +3 to your score. After landing, the counter is set to 1.