Feralstorm
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Posts posted by Feralstorm
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Holy Crap! my old thread got zombiefied! (and in a good way)
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Arcade Battlezone had obstacles. 2600 Battlezone gave you extra stuff to fight.
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The impossible screen mockup made me consider another speculative possibility. The non-moving parts of the maze are symmetrical, so maybe use the missiles to depict the doors. This would greatly lessen the amount of RAM-buffered asymmetrical playfield used (down to just the dots), would allow the doors to be different colors from the maze (but not from the sprites). Could be done not too badly with clever use of flicker and/or repetition. Might even be possible to make the doors transition from one state to another.
just a thought from someone who doesn't know enough.
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I must be tough on Flashback sticks, 'cause I snapped the stick off of one (leaving the threaded part broken off in the base) and another one works, but sounds like a maracca, because the little plastic tabs around the edge of the plastic part that presses the contacts inside have broken.
May be just as easy t get another FB2. you get two new sticks for prices comparable to or better than you might find for used sticks on Ebay, and a new console to boot.
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A few thoughts from an admittedly non-programmer:
The biggest stumble-block is apparently the assymetric/movable playfield combined with a bunch of moving objects.
I'm not sure how much playfield data has to be buffered in RAM, versus being built on the fly from variables when things are drawn. Since the turnstiles have only two possible positions, horizontal or vertical, only one bit is needed to register position, and one byte can potentially store data for eight of them. Perhaps the maze(s) can be rearranged to limit the areas which would use an assymetrical playfield.
Many ports of Universal games to the 2600 dispense with requiring you to grab specific letters for the bonuses, and instead just add a letter to the bonus word when the item is collected, which for Ladybug would be when the right image or color appears (might have to tweak timing to make that a little more challenging)
Maybe use the missiles for something? Possibly even flickery dots so that part doesn't have to be playfiled.
In any case, it's a helluva challenge. Good luck however it works out.
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Looks nice from the screenshots.
If you're looking for any other "arcadeifying" ideas, this thread has my own DK hack in it.
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At least visually, especially is there's no flicker as claimed, it's two metric tons of improvement.
Gotta keep my eyes open for whichever Flashback model gets the updated game(s)
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I like Millipede better on the 2600, which is interesting since I like Centipede better than Millipede for arcade versions.
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I could potentially see a little bit of flicker-reduction if the hostages' were changed a bit so they moved in unified groups of up to three, and limit their movement area so only so many 'clumps' would be on-screen at any one time. Wouldn't kill flicker by any means, but it should prevent those "putting everything in the same room in Adventure" moments
Can't say I'm a fan of 7800 Choplifter. The graphics look decent, but it lacks the flying inertia of the original computer versions.
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I pretty much had to vote for Frantic Freddie, since I was campaigning for a port of it back when I was new here, and didn't know how popular it was to bug homebrew authors to do your ideas instead of their own.
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Oddly enough, I worked on some improved 2600 Dig Dug graphics too some time back. Mine were more working around the 2600 GFX designs than trying to closely copy the arcade graphics though.
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Seems only fair the 5200 gets a Space invadres Arcade hack or two. - the 2600 has about ten or twenty now counting hacks, homebrews, and tech demonstrators.
Seems to me that extra 8K could be put to use somewhere, like making the "Play Space Invaders" screen with the invaders screwing around with the letters.
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Have you tried a Toys 'R' Us near you? FB1's still seem failrly common there and Wal-Marts in my area.
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I don't think scrolling would be a big issue, if a display kernel can be made to handle it. the C64 Rally-X clone Radar Rat Race did pretty much everything with character graphics, scrolling in great chunks, and seemed pretty acceptable. the 2600 playfield scrolling should be fine if it moves quick enough.
another possible approach might be to do something like Jr. Pac-Man, and only allow vertical scrolling, with the maze itself only as wide as the screen. the radar might be handled on a different horizontal band, with a different display kernel.
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Ms. Pac, Dig Dug, Robotron, and Food Fight are my most-played quartet of 7800 games. I live for the Instant Replay!
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I had a game for my Palm Pilot with a very close approximation of that, only that one had you catching gifts dropped by a big Santa head on a wheeled platform.
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You can change colors in a bit-hacker, but you have to know where to find them (using something like commented source code/disassembly helps a lot here). if you know the color values, you might be able to search them out, but that's pretty hit-or-miss if you don't have anything else to go on.
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I can't speak for others, but I personally find the whole "hit a key to insert a coin" thing in MAME more annoying than immersive, but I accept it because MAME is an emulation of the arcade hardware, and coins are integral to that. I don't really see it as a good thing to have to deal with it on any system that doesn't require it, personally.
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My problem with it is not the hardware/authenticity, but the surprisingly bad porting for several of the games.
super-flickery Desert Falcon
Physics-free Asteroids and Gravitar
Food Fight and Crystal Castles, where control and collision detection vary wildly
Battlezone, which comes close to unplayable.
Maybe the games improved a bit in later revisions (like they are apparently working on for FB2) and my Fb1 is just 'too early', but tht's what turned me off to the system (after I bought one)
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I'd love to see a "do-over" for some of the games that got a shabby treatment on the FB1, such as Crystal Castles and Solaris, but I'd agree with most marketing folks who would probably tell you that each extra game from the FB1 repeated on the FB2 means a score of consumers who say "Why should I buy this if I already have all these games on the last Flashback thing?" (especially since a large portion of said consumers likely don't know much about the hardware and software differences between "1" and "2", and may not even have the memory of what certain classic games are supposed to be like.)
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I was playing with my (rev. A) Flashback 2 last night, and I noticed Battlezone also seems a little buggy. The radar is not a perfect circle, and the screen occasionally jumps, as if an extra scan line gets thrown in every now and then. Is this from the game code getting tweaked, or just because of the slight incompatibilities between the FB2 hardware and actual 2600 hardware? The very left of the screen also has an interesting distortion effect, but I'm assuming that's the result of the overseas engineers' contributions.I was assuming that stuff was part of the HMOVE-related quirkery in the FB2 Hardware. Interesting to see the HMOVE comb/bar missing from the left side of the Battlezone screen, and pretty much everything "slurping" off that side of the screen where the black would normally be.
I notice some minor sprite-alignment issues in FB2 Save Mary! too, most noticeable where the crane line connects to the mechanism
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kewl.
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I doubt there would be a variation in the case design unless there was a "New version" with different games of something like that
Wouldn't be all that tough to do though, since all you really need is to change or remove the veneer.
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question about caverns of mars
in AtGames Flashback and Portable Consoles
Posted
FB2 Battlezone gives a great illustration of that, as landscape and moving objects appear to "slurp" off the left side of the screen.