Circus Convoy PAL - color loss in Duck Shoot sideshow

[Circus Convoy PAL - color loss in Duck Shoot sideshow]

Hi, while playing Circus Convoy (the PAL version) I noticed CRT color loss while in the Duck Shoot sideshow. As soon as I exit the Duck Shoot screen, all colors are fine again.

When entering the Duck Shoot screen, everything is black & white. Then after a few seconds the colors come back, but they are constantly changing, which is kind of annoying. This is typically something you see in PAL games where the number of scanlines is uneven.

 

Is there someone on this forum who has bought the PAL Collectors Edition (incl. digital download) and can verify in Stella if the number of scanlines are uneven in the Duck Shoot sideshow?

[Boulder Dash™ 2 - a new engine in development]

3 hours ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

If you want to play Boulder Dash on your Atari 2600, you can look forward to the coming (negotiations are finally done) re-release of Boulder Dash.

YESSSSSS!!!!!! Really looking forward to be able to play my favorite game on my favorite console!

[Boulder Dash™ 2 - a new engine in development]

On 4/13/2021 at 9:53 AM, Andrew Davie said:

Much to my delight, I found a bit of legacy code in the scrolling. In my earliest efforts here, I had a triple-screen Interleaved ChronoColour(TM) system -- that is, the colours rolled over 3 frames. To prevent "shearing" during the scroll, I limited the scrolling to only occur on the start of each frame triplet. I neglected to remove that limitation when I went back to the single-frame ICC display. Having just discovered (and removed) that limitation, the scroll is now super-silky-smooth. A wonder to behold, actually. Here it is in action...

I actually prefer the faster acceleration/deceleration of the legacy scrolling, which is more easy to process for my brain when the "R" is moving around on the screen. 

When watching the latest video, I feel the scrolling is accelerating and decelerating at the time while "R" moves across longer distances, which causes a slight disorientation.

 

The overview screen is really good, btw.

[Boulder Dash™ 2 - a new engine in development]

That low-resolution overview screen looks much better than I expected, because if the colors and animations. Really nice.

[Looking for the best portable Atari console.]

I love the Evercade for its screen size and D-pad. Maybe the EverSD cart is what you’re looking for?

[The term homebrew?]

I guess it comes down to how you define 'homebrew'. To me, 'homebrew' sounds like something that is for personal, non-commercial purposes. Similar to homebrewed beer, which is for personal use and something you drink at home with friends.

 

Looking at the top-notch quality of the after-market Atari games offered in the AtariAge store, including professionally printed manuals and boxes, I agree with Dennis that the creators of these games can be considered indie developers, and that AtariAge is a relatively small, but very professional publisher of these retro indie games.

 

[Boulder Dash™ 2 - a new engine in development]

12 minutes ago, Andrew Davie said:

The meeting of the left/right edges makes them hard to distinguish.

Yes, I agree that when stacking a lot of diamonds, your triangular shape looks much cleaner and easier to distinguish. I guess it's just because I was used to the shape of the diamonds in the C64 version 🙂.  The sparkle-animation that you added is really effective, btw.

[Boulder Dash™ 2 - a new engine in development]

Hi Andrew, I remember the first thing that I noticed when seeing Boulder Dash 2600 for the first time, is how well the graphics match that of the C64 version... except for the diamonds.

 

I'm sure a lot of alternatives for the diamond graphics were tried before, but did you and Thomas ever try a more skewed shape like this:

 

instead of

?

 

Stacked together, it would look something like this:

[Mouse Trap Disassembly]

Hi Dennis, great to see all your Atari 2600 disassemblies are now available on github; I wasn't aware that you moved them there. Nice!

 

I wonder how you can tell - only from looking at the code - that this game was mostly done by a single developer (Sylvia Day). Is there like a specific pattern you noticed?

 

[Tigervision banking and low-memory reads]

On 6/5/2017 at 3:31 PM, Thomas Jentzsch said:

Some years ago, I have written a dumper that which dumps from RIOT RAM onto a SaveKey (which lead to RAM-Pong BTW).

DumpJTZ_18.asm 11.32 kB · 35 downloads

Excellent stuff, Thomas!

I found that on my Atari 2600 Jr, while hot-swapping the carts, reading the joystick's fire-button sometimes triggers the dump too soon. I think INPT4 isn't stable when hot-swapping carts.

So I changed that to listening to the RESET switch, which works better for me (but takes up an additional byte of code in RAM):

...

; wait for user pressing RESET button:
.waitForTrigger:
    lsr SWCHB
    bcs .waitForTrigger
    
.startDump
...

 

[Ex-Activision Designers Launch Retro Game Publisher Audacity Games™]

37 minutes ago, video*game*source said:

Yeah, I got my copies today: VIP #61 and CE #126. But... No patch with the letter included. Anyone else didn't receive a patch with such low serial numbers? It was mentioned on the web page the first 250 buyers will receive one!?

Right after you ordered the game, did you receive an email with subject "Confirmation of your purchase from Audacity Games"? On that invoice, can you check if there is a line saying "THANK YOU PATCH"?

[Boulder Dash™ 2 - a new engine in development]

Very nice smooth scrolling! 

And good to know that Boulder Dash #1 re-release is still in the pipeline 🙂

[New Tool for creating PF + 48 px title screens (functional WIP)]

This is going to be another great tool, next to PlayerPal!!

[Ex-Activision Designers Launch Retro Game Publisher Audacity Games™]

While watching the ZPH show, I noticed a couple of times that the back wheel of the left truck showed some corrupted graphics.

Could this be a glitch that only happens on an Atari 7800, which I think James used to play this game during the show?

 

[Ex-Activision Designers Launch Retro Game Publisher Audacity Games™]

8 minutes ago, Karl G said:

It's possible also that some serial numbers were skipped for orders that were initiated but never completed. 

I can confirm that serial numbers for skipped orders are reused, as yesterday when I tried to add three copies in my basket, I got two sequential serial numbers, and one number that was lower, apparently from an abandoned order.

[Ex-Activision Designers Launch Retro Game Publisher Audacity Games™]

9 hours ago, Omegamatrix said:

That brings it to (299-10)+275 = 564 confirmed sales. Yeah there will certainly be more sold but overall the surge is over and sales are slowing.

When adding a new standard edition and collector edition to my shopping cart on AudacityGames, I get #002346 (Std. edition) and #000390 (Coll. edition).

So I think that means 389-10+345 = 724 confirmed sales as of now.

[Tower of Rubble (2600, DionoiD)]

13 hours ago, WishItWas1984 said:

Will "Tower of Rubble" be made available for digital release as a ROM for R77/Stella?

There is a demo ROM (downloadable from the original post) which has some limitations, but is fully playable. 

If you want the full experience (cartridge with all features, savekey support, manual, box), you're going to have to buy a copy from the AtariAge store.

Note that Tower of Rubble uses F8 bank switching, so the cartridge is supported on a Retron77.

Maybe at a later stage I can release the rom through itch.io. I don't expect many people wanting to pay for a digital-only full version, but it doesn't hurt trying this out.

 

4 hours ago, WishItWas1984 said:

Thanks! If v1.1 was indeed the pre-final version, then I would hope any differences would be minimal.

The release version is different from this v1.1 version: different colors, slightly changed graphics and some minor fixes.

 

2 hours ago, WishItWas1984 said:

The guy just won't grab the ledge next to him. He keeps bouncing off.

That shouldn't happen; do you get the same results when playing on a PC using Stella?

[Ex-Activision Designers Launch Retro Game Publisher Audacity Games™]

I had to switch to Chrome, but I got my copy!

[Q&A for World Premiere of Circus Convoy + Interview with David Crane, Garry Kitchen & Dan Kitchen]

3 hours ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

Do we know better now? In last night's ZPH show, the Audacity guys mentioned that their new games will work in Javatari, Stella and RetroN77, which would indicate that they are using an existing bankswitching, already supported by Stella.

During last night's ZPH show, I remember Gary Kitchen saying that Circus Convoy doesn't work on a Harmony cartridge. So maybe SuperBank is not supported on the Harmony, or maybe Gary was referring to the basic Harmony (not the Harmony Encore), which only supports up to 32K, while Circus Convoy is 128K.

 

@batari Do you know if SuperBank is supported on Harmony?

[Why can't you purchase roms for new games??]

I know Sheep It Up! offers the rom download through itch.io:

https://drludos.itch.io/sheep-it-up-2600

[Q&A for World Premiere of Circus Convoy + Interview with David Crane, Garry Kitchen & Dan Kitchen]

1 hour ago, D Train said:

this is a great philosophical question; it would be even more interesting to see a full panel on this rather than a section of an interview!

Nooo... not that 'cheating' discussion again! But I guess the cat is out of the bag, and this somehow needs to be addressed tomorrow.

[Q&A for World Premiere of Circus Convoy + Interview with David Crane, Garry Kitchen & Dan Kitchen]

• The game footage of the Circus Convoy trailer looks amazing with all these screens and mini-games.
  How long did you guys work on this game?
• Did you use any new TIA tricks for this game, which weren't discovered/known yet? If so, do you plan to share some tricks with the community?
• The group of potential buyers seems to be relatively small, so my assumptions is that Audacity Games is more about fun than making money.
  Or did you also start Audacity Games to maybe send out a message to the mainstream game development industry to bring back the focus to smaller games using efficient and optimized coding?
• What other systems are you planning to create games for? NES, Commodore 64?

[TOOL UPDATE: PlayerPal 2.2]

Good news! I use this tool all the time to design my sprites. The sprites in Amoeba Jump and Tower of Rubble were all created in this tool.

 

Feature request: it would be nice to be able to optionally remove the padding between the 10 different sprites. Reason: I also use this tool to create 48-pixel sprites, and it would be great if I can see the resulting "big sprite" without these paddings.

 

And I noticed that in the resulting generated code, all bytes have the # character in front of them, which I always remove. Maybe that # has some meaning in bB? (I only do asm).

 

[Ex-Activision Designers Launch Retro Game Publisher Audacity Games™]

12 hours ago, insertclevernamehere said:

I'm hoping these games aren't going to be super similar.  On a surface level they do.  Both feature a guy jumping over animals.  One on a convoy of trucks, one on train cars.

I had the same concern. Initially, Dan Kitchen's Gold Rush was also going to feature a circus convoy and jumping over the same animals (snakes, giraffes). But I hope that, besides the game's renaming to "CASEY’S GOLD", Dan is also replacing the circus theme. And from the recent press release, this seems to be the case:

"Kitchen's game, originally announced in 2018 as GOLD RUSH, features a train conductor named Casey O'Kelly who must search for lost gold bars aboard a runaway western-style steam train.  The game features dozens of unique train cars, numerous animated obstacles and over 50 levels of game play."

 

[VROOM!]

Wow, this game is progressing fast!! I just tried it out, and the gameplay is really good (= IMO simple but addictive).

This is a really nice casual party/mini game.

 

When playing as single player, it would be nice if there were "stages". E.g. for each race/stage you would need to finish in the top-3 to go to the next stage, in which the A.I. cars are a bit harder to beat.

 

Anyway, it's a fun game with refreshing gameplay!