Dionoid

The Retron 77 seems to be back in stock: https://hyperkinlab.com/retron-77-hd-gaming-console-for-2600-hyperkin/ Not sure if this batch has the stronger joystick. And a "California's Proposition 65" warning has been added; is that because of the type of plastic being used?

Thanks for your explanation of DoDraw; now I finally get how this works. One question though: when preparing the HumanPtr pointer and subtracting the y-position of the player, I think it is possible this ends up pointing to an address in the page prior to the page where the gfx is located. Which - depending on the y-position of the player - can sometimes result in an extra cycle when doing lda (HumarPtr),y. So to be cycle-exact every time, you probably need to place the player gfx somewhere at the end of a page, right?

Let me rephrase my feedback: The music being off-key is not the main point. The main point is that the title music belongs to another - well known - game and TV series: Airwolf. And those shouldn't be mixed IMO. It's like creating a port of Sonic the Hedgehog and adding music from Mario in it. Or like creating a port of Pitstop with the music from Outrun.

Not add, but remove I too played both Choplifter and Airwolf a lot on the C64, and both games mean a lot to me. And I'm very happy with your '2600-port of Choplifter..... except for the title music. So don't get me wrong here; I'm just giving you feedback on what I think of the title music. IMO using the title music from Airwolf in your port of Choplifter doesn't do it any good. And the tune is very off-key, which makes me want to skip it right away. My suggestion is to do the same as Sega's port of the game: just play some rotor- and cannon sounds in the title screen. Anyway, I'm happy that this game is finally available for the '2600!

Looks and plays really nice; great job! The title music I don't like however: it is off-key and basically belongs to another helicopter game (Airwolf). What if - just like the title screen of the Sega port - you just play the helicopter rotor-sound and sometimes the sound of the cannons? See https://youtu.be/cGCSzPMj_70?t=93 Anyway, you did an amazing job with this port. But I hope this isn't the final version yet :-)

I had contact with Hyperkin a few weeks ago and they are expecting a new batch of systems with the updated Mammoth controller (super strong version). So the R77 is still on their radar!

Excellent reasoning! I overlooked that fact that missiles share the same color as their player object. In theory it could work with the Ball object, even a size of 6 is possible by doing a cycle-exact hack (i.e. setting the Ball to a size of 8 and then while the TIA is drawing disable the BALL object at the right time). But that's not a feasible solution anymore if you would like to move the egg during the game. Anyway, on second thought, the flashing of the egg didn't affect the game-play for me; it even helped me locating the egg while I was avoiding the spikes.

Really fun game to play! A suggestion (not sure if it's possible): To prevent the P1 flickering, you could put in the Missiles/Ball objects for drawing the eggs.

During last year's PRGE in 2017, David Crane and Gerry Kitchen hosted a panel talk. At 27:43 Garry talks about how he was crunching code to get Keystone Kapers within 4K, and that he used a BIT instruction as fall-through to save an extra byte, which I think is a quite common technique to avoid using a branch and win a byte. However, they found out that the BIT instruction was accessing an 'illegal address', which I assume is some sort of I/O zeropage address that will mess things up. But I don't understand how reading an 'illegal address' can mess things up. And if it actually does crash your game: how can you detect it in your own code? Is there someone who can explain this? For those who aren't familiar with the 'Skip 2 bytes using BIT'-hack, it works like this: ;set background to white if score is 0. otherwise set background to black lda Score beq ScoreIsZero lda #$00 ; black .byte $2c ; BIT absolute reads next 2 bytes as operand, so skipping the 'lda #$0f' and continues at the 'sta COLUBK' .ScoreIsZero: lda #$0f ; white sta COLUBK ; set background color

Thanks for the info! I just ordered a R6532P from China for $2 and free shipping. For that kind of money I'm fine taking the risk :-) And I did some investigation on the R6532AP, which seems to be a 2MHz version, while the R6532P is 1MHz.

Amazing good version of Pac-Man for the '2600!!! Thanks!

Hi, I have a '2600 with a faulty RIOT that I want to replace. I found some cheap R6532P's on AliExpress; are they any good to replace the broken R6532-15 RIOT? And what is the difference between a R6532P and a R6532AP? Thanks!

I joined AtariAge wayyyyyy too late... Would the new owner of BoulderDash (BBG Entertainment GmbH) be ok with putting them into the AtariAge store again?

I just uploaded version 1.2 of Amoeba Jump. I think this could well be the final version. Changes: Returns to the title screen if the game has ended and left idle for more than 21 seconds; this acts as an attract mode. Thanks to r_type2600 for the suggestion! Note: I know some people like to take pictures of their high-score, so I thought 21 seconds should be sufficient for that :-) When a new game starts and the joystick isn't moved yet, the score bar shows the score and high-score alternating. Note: saving your high-score on SaveKey/AtariVox is only supported in the cart version. Download it from here: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/280211-amoeba-jump/?p=4059709

That is a good suggestion! Then the title screen can act like a sort of 'attract mode', which is a nice feature when the game is demoed at the AtariAge booth during the coming Portland Retro Gaming Expo.

I just uploaded version 1.1 (release candidate #2) of Amoeba Jump where the acceleration curve is almost the same as the original controls, without the downside of being "too sensitive". Also in the NTSC version, the red spring-buttons are now a bit darker, so hopefully they don't look pink anymore. Thanks to TheHoboInYourRoom for the feedback and testing out my changes! Download the latest version here: Amoeba Jump v1.1 NTSC.bin Amoeba Jump v1.1 PAL.bin

The display kernel of the game has little room to put more visual effects in, but I like the suggestion! Could be a good concept for a new game.

And another '2600 game company covered by Mike! Suggestion for next book: Tigervision? :-)

Thank you for the suggestion! :-)

Ok, thanks for the explanation. With the current controls I've tried to strike a balance between fast acceleration and the controls not being too sensitive for people. I tested out a lot of different configurations, and IMO this one works out pretty good. You can still jump across 3/4 of the screen with these controls, which is the about the same as the previous version. Anyway, I'll look into the controls tomorrow to see if a small tweak is needed. Otherwise it's probably a matter of getting used to these new controls. Thanks!

Great to hear you like this final version! About the acceleration curve: I just watched the recorded ZeroPage Homebrew stream where they played my game, and noticed that they sometimes missed platforms because they expected the slowdown to be less abrupt. Is this what you're experiencing? I'll PM you and send you a version where there is slightly more 'drift' in the Amoeba, so you can feedback me if you like that better. Like I said, tweaking the controls is certainly something I still can do before the game gets released on cartridge :-) Thanks!!!

Hi, Here it is: the "final" community version of Amoeba Jump! It's actually more like a release candidate, which means that I won't make any big changes to it anymore, but only do some fine-tuning like adding an extra pixel here, changing a color there or tweaking the controls a bit. I have around 50 free bytes left of the 4K, so I've reached my self-imposed limit for the game :-) Amoeba Jump v1.0 NTSC.bin Amoeba Jump v1.0 PAL.bin Changes in this final version: Added a title screen with music, where the Amoeba is bouncing on the big "AMOEBA JUMP" title. The grey springs have been replaced by red and green spring-buttons, which I think look better on the screen. The red spring-buttons give you the normal boost, while the green ones boost you even higher! Jumping from spring to spring (i.e. a "spring run") will give you extra bonus points and you will hear a higher-pitched sound effect. When your score gets beyond 1000 points, little oval-shaped bacteria start appearing on the platforms, which can be eaten by the amoeba. Each bacteria holds one of the six letters from the word A-M-O-E-B-A. Collect all six and the single next time you jump on a spring, you will get a super long boost. While doing this super boost, the amoeba will show all kind of rainbow-colors, which is done by using code-bytes as colors (just as in Yars' Revenge) I did some (minimal) changes on the controls to give you more precision. You can now move the amoeba just a tiny bit my moving the joystick left/right briefly. On the long jumps, the deceleration is stronger when you stop moving the joystick, hopefully resulting in a better precision. Also, moving in the opposite direction while in mid-air works much better now, which makes it easier when you’re stressing to find a good landing spot for your amoeba. The all-white and all-blue screens are now half the size, which makes it a bit more doable - or less brutal :-) Note that the version of Amoeba Jump that will become available in the AtariAge store (somewhere early 2019) will have two extra features: High-score and SaveKey/AtariVox support Alternating 2-player mode, introducing Ms. Amoeba (dressed in pink, wearing a bow) The game-play of both versions is exactly the same; I just wanted to add something extra for the people who buy the game on cartridge. Please let me know what you think of the game-play and the controls!

The game, artwork and video all look great! I didn't play any RPG games before, but the idea is that you walk inside a maze, pick up things and fight with/flee from enemies, right? My brain has trouble seeing movement when the main character navigates through the maze. Would it be an option to scroll the 3x3 grid a bit when you move into a specific direction? Or is this in the style of classic RPG games?

You are so right!!!.... I didn't expect this to be fixed in the community version, but it is!!! This community build rocks!

Wow, looks really good already! The music in the title screen sounds a bit off-key to me; have you looked into fractional frequencies techniques like this: https://8bitworkshop.com/v3.1.0/?=&file=examples%2Ffracpitch&platform=vcs