Dionoid

DASM 2.20.14 is released! Get the latest binaries from the dasm releases page. Short summary of changes: Technical Documentation / User Guide in PDF format (by @Andrew Davie) Dynamic Labels support by concatenating evaluated values (by @RevEng) Multiline C style /* */ comments (by @RevEng) Support for mc68hc908 controller family (PR by thomas374b) Cleaned up and improved Unit Tests (PR by thomas374b) New switch -R to remove output file if dasm found an error during assembly (PR by thomas374b) Small optimization in the Atari 2600 CLEAN_START macro (PR by @JeremiahK) SETSTR expression; typically used within a macro to use the name of an argument (by @RevEng) Lots of bugfixes! Thanks to all the contributors - both within as outside our team - helping to push DASM forward! - The DASM Team

I wanted to append "FIXED " to the title of this topic, but apparently that isn't supported on this forum.

Yes, it's fixed now. Thanks!

I think so. Does that affect storing the value?

Using PlusCart ver. 0.14.15 When I go to Setup and change the TV Mode to PAL (or PAL 60Hz), the mode is changed. However when I turn off & on my '2600, the TV mode is back to NTSC again. It seems like the TV Mode isn't stored? Btw: the new 32-char text is amazing!

It’s probably not your console that has a problem, but the cartridge. The 32-in-1 PAL cartridge actually also contains some NTSC versions of 2K games. On my PAL ‘2600, some of these show the wrong colors, some will make my TV roll and some only show as black&white. The cartridge is a mess, basically. Atari didn’t even care to put a top label on them.

Ah, from this picture and some debugging in Stella, I think I understand how this background is created with 2 colors per scanline, as you mentioned during the Zeropage Homebrew stream: It looks like you change both the BGCOLOR and PFCOLOR for each scanline, and then use some clever PF-interleaving to create very colorful backgrounds, right? Is this similar to the ChronoColour technique used in Boulder Dash? (I think in Boulder Dash the BGCOLOR is always black, but I might be wrong there?) O, and by the way: excellent game! 🙂

Just thinking out loud: wouldn’t joystick FIRE combined with RESET be a more logical combination? Or in case some games already use that combination to reset the highscores, joystick UP and RESET would also make sense to me (like as in going up to a root folder)

That is a useful feature for me! Thanks!

Thanks for this information, @FlorianD! I had the same problem (i.e. the black washer was cracked, so it lost grip on the axe and got loose, releasing the conical spring). Like you suggested, I've put a little superglue on the top of the small plastic socket around the axe, and then put the spring on top of the wheel and pushed the washer back onto the axe. Fast-forward and Reverse works fine again now!!

Hi @lazzeri, Nuts is indeed a great game and I think it's the best of the three 2600 PAL games that Technovision released. Technovision was probably a German company, but at least their games were also released in The Netherlands (and maybe other EU countries). I'm not sure if you want to hear this, but I have the game including an original English manual. Looking at your translation, it seems to be pretty good, but of course there are some differences to the original manual. Anyway, I scanned the original manual and attached it here. Hope it helps to perfect your version. Note that my booklet has only two sides, and folds like shown in this video: Nuts-manual-en.pdf

Someone got a great deal. I intended to bid on this, but my work meeting ran out big time, so I missed it. 😢

I just played the original cartridge on my Atari 800XL, and the tempo of the '2600 version seems about right. But that's probably because I have a PAL machine 🙂 But: any tempo will be fine by me. I consider the '2600 port of Boulder Dash the 'magnum opus' of Andrew Davie and Thomas Jentsch, and the idea of being able to play this game on my Atari 2600 fills me with great excitement.

Thanks for explaining the kernel code, Thomas! The RESP trick is on my 'have to look into'-list for a few months, and this helps understanding this cool little TIA quirk. I think it first appeared in Galaxian, right? Running and modifying the kernel code in RAM is also really clever; for C64 programmers this is normal practice, but when you only have 128 bytes, this makes it much more challenging 🙂

Bump! Any news on the 2020 release of my favorite game on my favorite console? Is no news still good news? 🙂

Hi guys, thanks for the new Stella release! The first thing I tried is the new Emulation menu, however when I change the emulation speed (or tick the Turbo checkbox) and then click "OK", Stella shrinks to a small window and freezes up (see screenshot below). It does this for every game, and even when I don't change any settings, but just click the "OK" button in the Emulation window. Note that I'm using the Windows 64-bit version.

Watching the ZPH show, I actually assumed this was an Atari 7800 game, until I found out this was for the 2600. Amazing job!

Well... I found that desktop publishing is harder than I thought 🙂 With new things, I usually think: "how hard can it be?". Sometimes it turns out to be easy, but in this case it wasn't, and I spent a lot of time learning new tools.

Working on it as we speak 🙂

Due to the corona lock-down, the tower's appointment with the dentist was canceled 🙂

Here's a closeup shot of the label artwork done by @DaveD for the upcoming cart release. Now that's an evil-looking tower, right?

There is an existing homebrew game called Defend Your Castle, which features two catapults and two castles. But that game is two-players only, so I would think there is room for a single player castle-attacking game with the extra features you’re describing.

Thanks for sharing the recordings from actual hardware. These are great songs for a 7800! (except the Style-1 song, where IMO the melody that starts at 0:09 is out of tune) I can hear high pitched squealing in three of these recordings, which I think are between 10-12 kHz and should be audible for people younger than 50: Style 2 (e.g. between 0:09 and 0:11, but audible occasionally throughout the song) Style 3 (e.g. at 0:03 and 0:06, but audible occasionally throughout the song). Here the squealing tone is somewhat lower, I think about 8 kHz Style 5 (e.g. at 0:03 and 0:04, but audible occasionally throughout the song) My guess is that you don't hear this squealing, but for people who can hear them, it is very annoying. I hope you can figure out the source of the squealing and fix it 🙂

I saw this game on ZeroPage Homebrew; an amazing conversion to the 7800 and an insta-buy for me!

Never mind, my bad; I was actually trying to control the menu with a joystick instead of a paddle controller. D’Oh!