Ben_Larson

Here's a new title screen with some theme music. This theme music is actually the chorus of a song I wrote a while back for this band I was in with my friends for like... 2.4 seconds. Figured I might as recycle it as the Panky the Panda theme song since it's kinda upbeat and catchy and seems to fit... titlescreen.bin

I'm glad you brought this up Trek. Time to get a little bit serious on my part now: I actually made this game from the beginning with the express purpose that it have no violence in it whatsoever - you don't actually kill anything during the course of the game. I did this because I wanted to see if it was possible to do it and still make an interesting game. In fact, I will note that the stated goal of the game is to *prevent* violence from occuring. Now I won't lie, the title was borne from sheer absurdity, and yes maybe my sense of humor is a bit juvenile. That I won't attempt to rebut - but this does bring up an interesting point here: If a game has no violence or killing in it but has some crude sexual aspect to it - is it more or less family friendly than most video games where you kill things indiscriminately with no repercussions? Something to think about...

Having your junk bobbitized for black market Chinese herbal products and/or aphrodisiacs is no laughing matter guys. And frankly I think Panky would be offended that some of you would view his noble quest to save his brother's member - not to mention his future nephews and nieces from never existing - as some kind of joke. This is serious business... about the ability to get down to business... and every panda's unalienable right to that. Now think about that for a minute... and if you still insist, I will provide a PG version too. But rest assured that the PG will stand for Panda Guilt... *dramatic pause* ...because that's what you'll be feeling when you play it...

Ok, here's the title screen of doom I've been working on: the pandas are kind of a spoof on Contra in case you didn't pick up on that... titlescreen.bin

No that's an opinion. Guys, we are not here to refight the 16-bit Wars. It does a disservice to all the veterans on both sides who gave their lives fighting for their console back then.

Somewhat technical update: I've been working on an epic 96-pixel wide title screen. Thing is, I only have about 700-some bytes free in one bank and 300-some in the other, and the data alone for this title screen will be at least 1K. So... looks like I'm gonna be going to 16K. I hate wasting an entire bank though, so maybe I'll have to add more bells and whistles, i.e. a super-fancy ending sequence or something.

You need to get devkitPro - it's a free toolchain for development on Gamecube (among other systems) that you can download. I think there's a Gamecube graphics library included that has some demos that should get you started. This is all C development, BTW. I used devkitPro to port a game to the Gamecube a while back. Actually testing on the console itself is kind of a pain in the ass, though - you'll need a Gamecube memory card to SD converter for one, and a USB to SD card converter as well in order to copy your game onto the SD card from the computer. There's sites online that should explain all the software you need and the procedure for getting things up and running. Feel free to PM me if you need more help.

Hi everyone, Here's the latest binary. All enemies have been added now. The game is now pretty much complete and playable. Next things on my to-do list are to add the title screen, ending sequence, and sound. And fix any bugs that are found, obviously. -Ben pp.bin

I took at look at the video and some of the screenshots for 'A Slow Year'. For the winter scene, I'm going to say it probably breaks down like this: The vertical brown window parts are probably a player graphic set to 3 copies wide. The rest of the window, including the backgrounds, darker parts, and windowsill, are probably playfield, reflected along the middle. The player graphic appears in front of the playfield in this case. The top part of the table is playfield, reflected along the middle The bottom part of the table (where it goes all the way across) is probably background The far coffee cup is probably both player graphics overlayed one on top the other, set to 4x stretch The near coffee cup is probably playfield and 2 player graphics set to 4x stretch

My advice, if you haven't started coding yet, is to start with Nick Bensema's 'How to Draw a Playfield' demo in order to get a basic display kernel working, and then modify that and build on it from there. http://www.io.com/~nickb/atari/docs.html Here's a rough overview of the difficulty of doing some of the things you mentioned, by the way (in my opinion): 1. Multi-colored sprites: Not too much harder than doing regular sprites as long as you only want to do one color per line. Just gotta load and store color data each line in your kernel the same time you load and store the sprite data. 2. Multi-colored playfield: Possibly a little bit harder than doing a regular, doubled playfield, but again not too terribly hard, again assuming you're talking about one color per line. Again this just involves loading and storing color data each line in the kernel - but this time you're storing it in the playfield color register. More than one color per line in a playfield or sprite is pretty much impossible to do for any practical purposes, except for having the playfield be one color on the left and a different one on the right (which the hardware explicitly supports). 3. The ability to show multiple varying sprites on screen at once: If you use flicker and only have 2 sprites on screen at once, this isn't too hard. You just draw one sprite one frame and a different one the next frame. If you want to use intelligent flicker (i.e where things only flicker when they're on the same line) and also have free motion of all objects on screen?... now you're getting into some advanced programming techniques. I don't recommmend you jump into that right away unless you want to get frustrated very fast. 4. Insight on how to do animation on the Atari 2600: I suggest you read some of the documentation here: http://www.qotile.net/minidig/tricks.html ...particularly relating to 'Horizontal Repositioning' and 'Skipdraw explained'. That should basically show you how to modify the 'How to Draw a Playfield' kernel to display a sprite on any given line and at any given X coordinate (without having to worry too much about all the coarse/fine positioning stuff). I haven't actually used that particular horizontal positioning routine, but there are others that do pretty much the same thing (i.e. abstract away the details of the coarse/fine positioning hardware crap), although maybe not as efficiently... Hope that helps.

I had the same symptoms on my vic-20 (except for the AM radio ). The problem was that the little RF modulator box that hooks it up to the TV was going bad. I replaced the electrolytic capacitors inside it with some equivalent ones I bought at radio shack and it works fine now, for what that's worth...

Yea, Orbiter is pretty awesome, although also very difficult to learn. My best accomplishment was achieving orbit, landing on the moon and returning to earth without flying off into space, although I did accidentally land in Mexico instead of Florida. Better than the ocean I suppose. I never have tried interplanetary travel - just too freakin complicated...

it says on Wikipedia that you need an external RF modulator for what that's worth:

it says on Wikipedia that you need an external RF modulator:

Been a long while without an update. Work is still progressing, though, just at my usual leisurely pace of a few hours here, a few hours there. Here's a new version demoing 3 of the enemies: the Armadillo, the Fireball, and the dreaded Goon. Walk to the left and right and you should see them (they can't hurt you yet though). LS: Making the orbs/lightbulbs change color when you encounter one is on my to do list, BTW... Ben pp.bin

Amen to that. Reviewers think any clever bit of dialog makes the game War & Peace. I agree 100%. I remember playing Far Cry a number of years back after reading all of these glowing reviews and thinking 'this game is like a really bad summer blockbuster.' I just completely lost interest and quit playing it eventually. That's when I first began to realize the disconnect between my own expectations and reviewers...

One thing I think people sometimes miss is the *reason* for the Atari 2600's longevity in the market: a large part of that longevity was I think due to the unintentional genius of it's simplistic hardware design that gave the programmer so much power to exploit the system. So I guess what I'm saying is that just from an engineering standpoint alone I think it may be the greatest video game system ever made...

Opcode, I've actually been thinking about this too. There does seem to be a major lack of centralized homebrew info on the internet. It wouldn't be that hard to set up like a homebrew news blog though. Updating it would be the hardest part, but if there were enough editors, the work could be spread around. Maybe have one person specializing in each platform, ideally...

I might be biased but I agree with Holger. I got mine as well in the mail (thanks Al) and immediately challenged my wife. Of course I won - that would have been pretty sad if I lost my own game to someone who's never played it. FYI for everyone thinking of buying a cartridge, there is a minor bug I just discovered the other day. Nothing that affects gameplay - it's just that I forgot to initialize the hardware timer on startup, so there's like a .2 second startup lag where the screen displays the infamous vertical bars of doom. Hopefully Al doesn't kill me over this...

You don't have to reserve the X register. Before the kernel starts, you can do a: LDX #$1F TXS Then inside the kernel, on each line you want to display the missile, you do: CPY MissileYPos PHP PLA Although that does take longer. After the kernel, you'll probably want to restore the pointer stack.

I think there's 123 screens total. When you say you weren't able to get up to the blue door, you mean you saw the blue door but couldn't get to it? Because you should be able to get up to it without any special equipment... although it does requires a little creative jumping. I haven't actually tested all the jumping with a real joystick, though, so I don't know if things that are doable on the keyboard will end up being next to impossible with a real joystick. Any feedback in that regard would be appreciated.

Here's a new ROM. The game is now completeable (if that's a word), sans enemies. Nothing in the last room to see though, but... an empty room. There's save points now. Basically you get 3 lives but unlimited continues. When you lose 3 lives you just start back at the original spawn point with all your stuff you've collected so far. I'm contemplating doing in-game hints, but here's some non-in-game hints for now: * Not everything is as it appears. Watch out for ledges that seem out of place. * The flute might be useful when it looks like you're stuck * Jump boots enable you to... jump high of all things * Ice is generally hard to walk on without snow boots * The penitent panda shall pass... pp.bin

Well of course a programmer will tell you that it's better to be a duct-tape programmer: because it means less work for him (or her, as the case may be). Less work that is... until he or she has to *maintain* that code years later, whereupon they realize that they have no f**ing clue what their 1000-line function with zero comments and case statements out the ass is supposed to be doing. Then, suddenly, carefully designed code don't look so bad after all! But what do I know...

Guys, I'm in the process of putting together an HTML, hyperlinked version of the Stella Programmer's Guide. I realize there's already at least one such HTML version online, but I sort of feel like a more structured and better-hyperlinked version would be nice, especially for newbies. So anyway, here's the first draft I've made: http://www.nightshiftweb.com/stella/index.html This was generated automatically by a Perl script I wrote, so there's probably lots of errors. I do intend to refine it. Feedback, of course, is welcome...

Changing the background to black instead of blue would be an easy fix that would, I think, make the flicker less annoying on a real TV. However those tanks are flickering at 15Hz, which is going to look bad no matter what. Flickering the player along with the tanks so that everything flickers at 20Hz might be doable but also might screw up some of the collision detection... particularly tank-on-tank collisions.