Dionoid

I'm really looking forward to testing & judging the games myself for each of the categories! I do agree with Thomas that there should be a special category for games that use an additional ARM co-processor. While I really appreciate these games, I think comparison to classic assembly-only games is a bit unfair. Anyway, these awards are going to be a lot of fun for everyone in the '2600 community! Many thanks to James, Brian and Albert for setting this up!!!

Yes, you probably have a PAL version of Desert Falcon. I'm in Europe, and it seems there are only NTSC versions of the game here; I've bought three of them already, and every one of them is NTSC (using 281 scanlines in the start menu, so showing black & white only on my PAL TV)

I know this is an old thread, but I'm in Europe and having a hard timing finding the PAL version of this game. Every cartridge of Desert Falcon I buy here seems to be NTSC (281 scanlines) and shows the menu in black & white only on my PAL TV. So a mixup at Atari in the US sounds plausible to me.

Yes, it's funny indeed. We both like the same type of games, I guess :-) Please check out the original PC-version or Tower of Rubble here. There's also a C64 port of the game, which I'm sure you'll also like.

Cool game! I think it plays a bit like Tower of Rubble, which has the same basic ingredients; a stick man running around on a deteriorating pile of rubble, trying not to get crushed by falling blocks. In case you didn't know: I'm working on a '2600 port for Tower of Rubble (see my post here). No worries, I think the games are different enough and both will be fun to play. For some reason you and I sometimes like to work on similar games at the same time, not aware of each other's efforts; remember Doodle Jump? I guess that's what they call "an idea that's floating in the air". And good to hear that you're doing 100% assembly!

Thanks for all the hard work on version 6 of Stella! I'm really happy about the new audio emulation, which makes developing in-game music much easier (I no longer need to check the sound on a real '2600 every time). Pick 'N' Pile is a game I recently added to my collection, and I noticed in Stella 5 it didn't play like on an actual '2600. Stella 6 now fixes this and also shows the jumping number of scanlines that the original game has in the title & menu screens (which has very sloppy programming). Thanks again, you guys make developing homebrew games more fun!!

[update: Tower of Rubble is now available for preorder from the AtariAge store!] "How long can you survive on the lethal TOWER OF RUBBLE as it crumbles and rebuilds itself around you?" - quote from the original PC game I'm working on a I've finished my '2600 port of Tower of Rubble, a really fun casual indie game that was originally created for PC by Flatgub as an entry for the 2017 CGA Jam. In 2018, the game was ported to the Commodore 64 and hopefully this year right now it's also available for the Atari 2600 on an actual cartridge! (pre-order it here) The original creator Flatgub (Chloe) told me that she was honored to hear that I was making a port, how cool is that? The honor is all mine, by the way! About the game Tower of Rubble is a simple, yet very addictive game, in which you control a little stick man that must survive on the 'Tower of Rubble' as long as possible. Blocks of rubble will fall from the sky every second at random positions, building up the tower. And at the same time laser beams will tear down the tower by clearing out full rows or columns of blocks. Also the outside walls will slowly disintegrate and sink into the sea. Sounds hectic? It is! But you have to keep calm and make the right decisions in a split second to stay alive. The music is synced with the pace of the falling rubble blocks, which helps to raise your adrenaline levels! Controls Control the game by moving the joystick (no fire button): left & right is for running across the blocks and jumping off - note that ledges are 'auto grabbed' if you jump towards them. up & down is for climbing up and down ledges By using diagonal joystick positions, you can also combine some moves. Below are the control-instructions copied from the original PC game, which explains it all: Practice first! Mastering the different kind of jumps is essential for survival on the tower. If you have never played this game before, please first practice all possible moves on the title screen. Especially the "long jump", where you're hanging on a ledge and jump to a ledge two blocks ahead. After you're done practicing, press fire to start the actual game. Pushing the 'Reset' button at any time will take you back to the practice/title screen. How to Play After you have practiced the running, climbing and jumping on the title screen, you should be ready to go against the tower. When the game starts, you will see two green converging laser beams that show you where the next block of rubble is going to land. Be sure to move away from that spot as quick as you can! There are three different kind of beams in this game: Block Strike - these yellow laser-beams are harmless and only indicats that a block of rubble will be falling from the sky at that position soon. A falling block of rubble is lethal though 🙂 Side Stike - these read laser-beams will wipe out a full row of blocks Hyperbeam - these powerful white laser-beams will crumble a full column of blocks within a few seconds You can touch laser beams that just appeared, but don't wait too long as the strength of the laser builds up and will eventually vaporize you... Also, the outside walls will slowly disintegrate and sink into the sea. Hint: you'll need to perform a 'long wall jump' to cross the emerging gaps. New: Two player mode The release/cartridge version of the game contains the '2 player vs' mode, which supports two joysticks so you can play against a friend! To select two player mode, press the 'select' button in the practice/title screen. Note that the players can't pass each-other, which results in very interesting strategies where you're trying to block the other player in order to get him/her squashed by a falling block of rubble or one of the laser beams. The player colors are red (left joystick) and blue (right joystick). You score a point when the other player dies; the first player who scores 10 points, wins. Porting from PC to Atari 2600 Because of its pixelated graphics, single screen and usage of straight lines, the original PC game lends itself very well to an Atari 2600 port. Of course I had to make a lot of concessions along the way, as you all know the '2600 has its limitations. My '2600 port of the game uses less than 128 bytes of RAM and 4K 8K of ROM, but I managed to keep the same basic gameplay and smooth animation (30 frames/second) as the original game. The playfield shows 16 blocks horizontally (compared to the 26 blocks of the PC game), which makes the Atari port a bit harder, but still very playable IMO. Porting the music was a tough job, as some notes just aren't available on the '2600. Two-voice polyphony solved some of the issues and also Paul Slocum's Music and Sound Programming Guide helped me a lot to get good results here. Online demo Play 'Tower of Rubble' in Javatari - the online Atari 2600 emulator Download Below is the single-player demo ROM for Tower of Rubble - available for NTSC and PAL. Note that the demo is a feature-limited version of the official cartridge release(*). Tower-of-Rubble-demo-NTSC.bin Tower-of-Rubble-demo-PAL60.bin Buy You can now pre-order the game on cartridge from the AtariAge store! (*) The official cartridge release contains these additional features: Two player mode - Play against a friend! Single player pro mode - Total chaos right from the start! Support for pausing the game (2600: Color/BW-switch, 7800: Pause button) Support for SaveKey / AtariVox to save your high score(s) A full-color 8-page manual, containing the game's backstory, instructions, gameplay, history, strategy tips & tricks and much more. And last but not least: the amazing label & box artwork by Dave Dries:

Note that this latest RetroN 77 community build also includes a special homebrew version of Amoeba Jump that saves your highscores! Thanks to @remowilliams for updating my game on the image and pushing the R77 community build forward. And of course a big shout-out to @stephena for all the work he's done on stella and the backported fixes he did to make the Retron 77 better. Without the stella debugger, I'm sure the development of my game would have taken much longer! --DionoiD

Hi, I'm looking for a PAL Compumate keyboard for the Atari 2600. Preferably boxed. I know in these were sold under the brand 'Universum' in Germany, and 'SpectraVideo' in the rest of the world. Hope anyone can help. --Dion

Always nice to hear the programmer giving some background information on how a game came to be! In the video you talked about creating this game during a boring summer job, so I assume you're a young developer. Great to see young people showing interested in an old console like the Atari 2600!

The PAL carts from Atari: Picture labels: have a "p" after the title on the top label Text labels: have a "-P" after their serial code on the front label Silver and Red labels sometimes have a little "P" sticker on the backside of the cart, but not always (I guess some people peeled them off) PAL carts from Activision: Have a serial number printed on the front label that either starts with "E" or "P" (I guess that stands for European or Pal) or sometimes "INTERNATIONAL VERSION" below the title on the front label PAL carts from Imagine: Only have text on the front-label and no image And for the rest of the carts: try them out on a real Atari console to see if the colors are the same as in a recorded video of the game on Youtube.

Yes, please! :-)

+1 for earlier shows now and then. I do watch the recordings on youtube, but nothing beats watching in real time and adding something to the discussion. Of course I realize that there is a big time difference with Europe (9 hours between PST and CET)

Those bricks look amazing, John!!! How did you manage to get that fine gray line between the horizontal bricks? What kind of TIA-Voodoo is that? Is the trick to draw the lines of the bricks in alternating style, and turn them on & off in sequential frames? So maybe this is a side-effect of how a CRT draws the lines with its phosphor-beam?

Yes, Scott contacted me about making a limited run of his hack of Amoeba Jump for a retro convention. It's a nice hack and having it signed by Warren is really cool. I didn't expect this many people to go crazy about getting the game. I hope they can wait a few months until Amoeba Jump hits the AA store :-) Until then you can download the community-version of Amoeba Jump from the AA forum!

I guess the FPGA isn't 100% compatible yet, as there is only one audio voice and the score should't be displayed double :-)

Note that the CHECKPAGE macro has an off-by-one error as it compares with the page of the current program position instead of "current program position - 1". This should fix it: MAC CHECK_PAGE .PREV_POS SET . -1 IF >.PREV_POS != >{1} ECHO "" ECHO "ERROR: different pages! (", {1}, ",", .PREV_POS, ")" ECHO "" ERR ENDIF ENDM

I'm using the Java-based PFEditor by @vdub_bobby It's attached to this post: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/124177-is-a-concept-playfield-editor-available/?p=1503666

Poodle Jump is now "Amoeba Jump", see http://atariage.com/forums/topic/280211-amoeba-jump/ Hopefully Amoeba Jump will be in AA store somewhere early next year (the game is finished; work is done on the label design).

Update: I received the R6532P from AliExpress today and replaced it with the broken RIOT. All works fine and I've got a working 4-switch woody again. Yay!

I actually stopped reading after HardWork stopped posting to the thread, which is somewhere around page 10 I think.

You're too late, as there is a big team working on this already. AFAIK the storyboards are all done and people are working on the countdown timer in QBasic. :-) Thanks for the link to the KR2600 thread, Thomas. It's a funny story.

My record so far: 21,256

I have several 2600 PAL machines, and the only incompatibility I found is that both my 2600 Jr systems wont play Fatal Run, which is a late Atari game known to have issues. Other than that, all systems play all carts

I like the new "flashlight" level where only a circle around you is lit, which is an effect I know from the game "Fear of the Dark" from @MemberAtarian.