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Mr_Me's 35.0 score. At least on mine, it makes me run Slope 15 downhill 4 times in a row and averages the total times.

The crazy thing is that's not one lucky run, but the average of four great runs!

This was not my favorite game as a kid. Didn't ski in real life, and had a hard time controlling the skier in the game. I think I picked it up for cheap from Kay Bee Toys when the video game fad was collapsing. Just gave the downhill course a try on course 15. Got 122.0--about four times slower than the best time so far. Not sure I'll be competitive at this game. I don't have my second controller working yet on my Pi, so Dracula is hard, too. I think I got to the 5th night before just turning it off. Frustrating to watch those zombies just stand there for 10s for 50 points! Both are cool games though. Just haven't played them before.

Took playing off and on all day to break 10K. Doubt I can do better before the deadline.

Might be too late, but this is from October 11. Thought I'd get more time to practice. This is a pretty cool game!

Been playing the "fixed arc" version to improve before working on "dir & tongue". Improved to 440 with "fixed arc"!

There should be an efficiency point where the table required by adaptive Huffman and the algorithm to encode and decode the text pays off. But not within the limitations of the original hardware (I am guessing! Haven't done the math of course.) Maybe I'll work on "Zork" so we can have more text in games? I know we don't have the same restrictions with emulators and other tricks--even putting memory right on the cartridge was a good hack. But I enjoy working within the constraints of the original system--so far. I'm just dipping my toes in the water.

Really excited to dig into this game. It sounded like a great game on the Intellivisionaries podcast when they covered it. Until now, I've only had my original Intellivision II and the games I'd collected as a kid over about 10 years. It's great having a Passable Flashback. (It's not an Ultimate Flashback because it's just a naked Raspberry Pi that I built and quit working on once it started playing games. 😛 Need to read the rule book on this one. Flew my very first mission with no clue what I was doing and managed 408 points. LOL Also played River Raid for the very first time. Did better, but didn't realize those fuel depots were for me, so I was blasting away at them until my jet was bingo fuel. Then I couldn't get enough fuel and that was the end of my river raiding. Also learned the hard way that you have to stay over the river! Love the diversity of the games. Frog Bog is peaceful. I can see going for the "end" of DF if I had had it as a kid. Playing an Activision game would have been treasonous during the years of the 8-bit wars of the 80s.

Little better with some practice! Fixed Arc: 425 Dir ^ Tongue: 315

First entry. Tongue did not deploy many times. Wondering about the quality of my Flashback controllers now that the console has given up the ghost. Should probably read the rule book on this one. I overlooked it as a child's game when I was a kid. Fixed Arc = 295 Dir ^ Tongue = 170

When I look at a game like Tron Deadly Discs, I can see how it would be implemented: 1. Draw the background using 'cards' 2. Anything that moves on the background is a 'sprite' (of which there can only be 8): i. Player ii. Player's disc iii. Enemy 1 iv. Enemy 1 disc v. Enemy 2 vi. Enemy 2 disc vii. Enemy 3 vii. Enemy 3 disc 3. Doors can be implemented by location checks of the Player Don't know if that's how it works, but I imagine I could re-implement the game this way. When I look at a game like Advanced Dungeons & Dragons or any maze game like Lock 'n' Chase, I have no idea how Player pathing would be implemented to control where the Player can move their sprite. The only thing I can think of is a 2d array that is constantly checked against controller input. That would be straightforward for a game where the entire maze is visible, but not a scroller like AD&D. Unless the entire screen is an abstract of a single card, and a finite number of them are implemented like a static maze, which would explain the repeating room shapes in AD&D. Anyone have any suggestions on how this might me done? Maybe I need to get into reverse engineering? I know someone reverse engineered Utopia, but I'm only aware of modern RE tools like Ghidra. I doubt it knows anything about the Intellivision architecture, but I bet a lot of this is documented by the creator of 'jzintv'!

Just found it on page 14 of "Programming Games" (page 30 of the PDF). 'show_grom' is really cool! Thank you!

Sorry for such a basic question, but I'm kind of surprised how hard it is to find the answer. What is the enumeration mapping for the 16 available colors? I looked in the 'manual.txt' for IntyBASIC and "Programming Games for the Intellivision". I can recompile "Hello, world!" with different values, but... seems like something this basic should be easier to find? Any tips on a "programmer's reference" to GROM, etc.?

I've been working off and on on a compression algorithm I call "Zork". Given a set of words, what is the shortest single string (alpha) you can generate such that every word in the set is a substring of alpha? You'd need a table of coordinates outside of the game to generate the words, but you could save a ton of space! Creating alpha is its own algorithmic exercise.

BTW, the Python program will take a seed as an optional argument for consistency to conform with the rules about compiling from source and matching the submitted binary.