Ben_Larson

I bought a Gamecube shortly after launch and played the crap out of it - still play it occasionally. The best thing I liked about it was it's portability - I was living about 75 miles away from my girlfriend (now wife) at the time, so it was easy to pack it all up with a couple games when I came over for the weekend. I have very fond memories of playing Metroid Prime over the weekend at her apartment. Actually I also started hacking around on my Gamecube a year or so ago - doing some homebrew related stuff - and ported a very old 2D DOS game to it which you can download here: http://code.google.com/p/gamecubesopwith/ Of course you need an action replay and a memory-card-to-SD card converter to play it. The same guy that wrote the main graphics library I used for this port actually ported Quake to Gamecube, if you can believe that...

It looks interesting but, looking over the scripting language, I'm not quite sure how/if it might work, because what I would need to output isn't really graphics data per se, but just 6-bit indexes (indices? ) to tiles. For example: .byte #%00001100,#%00110000,#%01000001 .byte #%00001000,#%00000000,#%00000100 .byte #%00010100,#%01000001,#%00000101 ...is the first room. Each room consists of 12 tiles in a 4x3 arrangement. There's 64 tiles to pick from total (actually 32 plus a reflect bit, but who's counting ).

Thanks. Likewise with K.O. Cruiser. I was crunching the numbers today, and I think the game will have 113 screens. If it takes me 15 minutes to put together a screen (that's probably optimistic), that's like 28 hours of effort. With that in mind, I think maybe I'll make a very simple Java level editor that allows me to place the game tiles for a screen visually and then output the appropriate text. I have a feeling this could be a major time saver down the road...

Ok new WIP version. Still mostly just a useless demo right now though. Changes: * Fixed scanline bug * Added in functional item display * Added ability to have multiple-objects-on-screen 30Hz flicker (walk to the left to see) * Refactored into 8K, in preparation for adding the level info * Added ability to have different colored backgrounds (walk to the left to see) I have the game world already laid out on paper. I think I'm getting close to a point where I can start implementing it and maybe have an actual playable demo of some sort... Ben pp.bin

No, Atari's main downfall IMO was a) their desire to do things on the cheap at the expense of quality (and fun), and b) their stupidity when it came to not retaining good talent. Now Sega - they, I think, would still be making consoles if they didn't blow their money on stupid ideas.

Kinda old thread, but I figured I'd comment anyway. IMO any smart person with the *motivation* (that's the key) can study and learn how to program for the Atari 2600 in assembly language. 1) First, you have to understand the fundamentals of assembly language, 2s compliment binary math, and memory-mapped architectures. These are basic computer science things you'll need to know. Google could probably help here if you're willing to spend some time learning. 2) Then you have to look over and understand the 6502 instruction set, which can be found at 6502.org among other places. 3) After that, you should be ready to study stella.txt and other online resources (i.e. Nick Bensema's page) to learn the architecture of the Atari 2600. 4) At that point you might be ready to take Nick Bensema's 'How to Draw a Playfield' demo, compile it, run it in an emulator, and then start making changes to it. 5) Once you do that, you can start modifying the code further to try other things. Before you know it, you might have a work-in-progress game. This is the rough sequence of steps I used to get started. I more or less started at step 2, though, since I already covered step 1 in college. Using Batari Basic will get you in the game faster, potentially enabling you to skip steps 1 and 2. If you ever want to do assembly language coding though, you will have to go back and do those steps.

Oh nevermind, I though there was no link to the store on the main page. In that case I don't know what the situation is.

as far as I know, the manual is done, so i think it's ready to go. however, I think the atariage store is still closed, so it's probably a moot point...

Well... , it probably won't stay that way. The way I've set up the data structures for each room in the game is that you can have 2 objects per room, even though I'm only showing 1 right now. To display that, I'll probably have to use 30Hz flicker on the objects when there's 2 in a room. The other option would be to reset the object position mid-screen and 'reuse' the sprite if possible. Unfortunately, I don't think there's enough time in the kernel to do that...

I think 1989 is an important year in it's own right, but not for arcade games. After all, it was the year the Gameboy, Sega Genesis, and Turbografx-16 were released, the NES was at it's height (which *was*, after all, the system that resurrected home video games after the crash), and the 2600 Jr. phenomenon was still going on. 3 generations of console systems were being sold at the same time - I don't know that that's ever happened before or since.

I don't agree that 80/81 were necessarily the peak. As much as I like many of those games, a lot of them were more or less variants of the same thing: shoot stuff. Pac-Man really started the bizarre think-outside-the-box sort of arcade games. Then of course, in the same vein, you had Donkey Kong, Frogger, Dug Dug, Joust, Burgertime, Qbert, Crystal Castles, Marble Madness, Mario Bros., etc. Those are the games I tend to think of when I think of 'the golden years', simply because they were genre bending, zany, and original (i.e. unlike most modern video games ).

Sorry, yea it's 2600. You may have noticed that if you hold the button vs. tapping it, you jump higher, just like SMB... Actually that's where your 'active item' is going to be, which you'll be able to change by pressing up/down. You might have noticed in the first screen a pair a boots sitting there. That's going to be one of the items that you get at some point in the game to use later...

I guess it's high time I announced my new WIP homebrew, so without further ado I present to you... the epic saga of... PANKY THE PANDA: EPISODE I: QUEST FOR THE UNSEVERED PENIS This is going to be a platformer game where you will traverse a bunch of underground rooms looking for keys and other items to help you proceed to new areas. Think scaled-down metroid-type gameplay. The goal (obviously!) will be to find your brother who is being held captive by Chinese poachers who are going to cut off his you-know-what and sell it on the black market. Anyway, here's the latest WIP build. Not much to do yet except jump around a few rooms, but the game engine and physics is mostly complete as you'll see. The game uses a tile system for each screen, with 12 tiles (in a 4x3 arrangement) out of a 'palette' of 64 tiles (actually 32 plus a reflect bit) making up a screen, so I think it should be possible to get 100+ rooms in an 8K ROM. Of course if it ends up being larger, even more rooms will be possible. As always comments are welcome... pp.bin.zip

Hi everyone. I posted this elsewhere a while back, but I thought it might be more useful now that GEdit has finally been ported from Unix to Windows. What I'm reposting is a GEdit syntax highlighting file for Atari 2600 6502 development (GEdit is just a text editor, in case you were wondering). Here's the categories of things that it currently highlights (using different colors of course) 1. Numerical constants (i.e. #44, #$BC, #%10101010) 2. Mnemonics (i.e. LDA, STA, etc.) 3. Keywords (i.e. WSYNC, RESP0) 4. Comments Here's the location to get GEdit itself: http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/binaries/win32/gedit/2.26/ After you install it, you will want to drop the attached 6502.lang (unzipped) into your 'C:/Program Files/GEdit/share/gtksourceview-2.0/language-specs' folder. Then open an ASM file and select 'Atari 2600' under 'View->Highlight Mode->Sources'. You should then be good to go. Comments and improvements are welcome of course... 6502.lang.zip

I'm not sure if this topic has been done before, but are there any 2600 games that you think are better then the 5200 or 7800 version of the same game? Off the top of my head I'm going to say Winter Games - while the 2600 version is fun and faced paced (with good graphics to boot), the 7800 version just seems rather dull and boring to me...

He sold his cache of massive games at Sotheby's and retired in style with the massive proceeds. I thought everyone knew...

I was there for about an hour. I agree, it is a pain in the ass that a lot of vendors do not mark prices on games. I usually don't even bother if there's no marked prices because I'm looking for deals and I'm not going to ask what the price on every game is. Even still there were deals to be found. Atari common cartridges were plentiful and dirt cheap. NES and Genesis games seemed to be plentiful as well. Hardware was hit and miss, although I bought a Commodore 1541 disk drive off some guy who was set up in the parking lot for $15, which is pretty good considering that they usually go for like $25-30 on ebay...

Dude gets a gold star on his ability to follow simple requests...

I'm tentatively planning on going seeing as how I live in Columbus. I was actually thinking of getting a table to sell duplicate carts and set up a system to demo 'Incoming', and maybe also demo my new 'incomplete super-secret homebrew-in-development' , but all the tables were already taken... Ben

Easiest thing to try first would be something that just saved and restored the RAM contents, program counter, and processor state. I'm thinking that would work with a lot of games. I think restoring horizontal positioning in the TIA would be pretty much impossible since that's all done using software timing and horizontal motion register writes.

I gotta laugh at people like that, in 10 years, nobodynwill even care or recognize the xbox 360. The NES and the 2600 however, will still be alive and well for years to come. Moreover, in 10 years there probably won't be any functioning Xbox 360s left to bother recognizing. *contemplates buying an Xbox 360, leaving it NIB, and waiting 10 years*

I recently acquired a Pitfall 2 cartridge, and having remembered that it uses a proprietary chip for the sound, I became curious as to how exactly it works. From looking through the Stella archives, I gather that it generates sound waveforms by changing the sound register volume every scanline. I guess I'm wondering how exactly that's done though. Is the chip, like, intercepting dummy instructions on the fly and replacing them with real instructions to load/store the next value in the sound register?

What's the verdict: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewI...=tab%3DWatching

The magazine looks cool, but the website makes it kind of difficult to figure out what it's all about IMO. Is it is a paper magazine or a digital-only magazine?

With or without music, it's already the best Pac Man on the 2600 ever IMO. What blows my mind is to think that Tod Frye made like a million dollars in royalties on his version of Pac Man, and yet... this homebrew version is so obviously superior. Someone needs to invent a time machine and become rich... (Dennis?)