Ben_Larson

Not sure I follow. Here's the Larson/PacManPlus (tm ) up/down versions with the original left/right versions on Dennis' screenshot. I think they look ok together.

Al is waiting for me to write the text of the manual. I was supposed to do it last weekend but I got wrapped up in a bunch of stuff, then I conveniently came down with some kind of stomach/intestinal illness. After I write it then the layout needs to be done. Then it should be ready to go...

I like the left/right ones... not sure about the up/down ones though. what about something like this:

Slightly off topic, but... Looks like I'm probably getting laid off from the small software development company I work at, here at the end of February. While it does suck, I'm married, my wife works, and I don't really have any outstanding debt or mortgage, so I'm not too terribly concerned. Anyway, since some of you are at least familiar with my Atari game, I thought I'd take this opportunity to plug myself if anyone is interested or has connections. So without further ado, here's a link to my resume... http://seeker.dice.com/profman/servlet/Pro...37440f8d58b7261 Later, Ben

14MHz is just the max that the CPU can be run at. You should theoretically be able to solder it in and fire up the VCS (I think...), since the oscillator is external to the CPU. Of course...illegal opcodes might not work anymore, since they're undefined according to the CPU spec. It would be an interesting experiment if nothing else!..

I agree, very cool and also quite original. I hope you don't give up on this propane. Also I kinda like the name 'Steam Tunnel Bob'. Sort of an everyman, what with his backward hat and all...

Anymore I usually just go to craigslist first if I'm looking for random computer/videogame stuff. No point dealing with feebay's nickel and diming and with strangers halfway across the country when you can deal with people locally and actually know what you're getting...

The other option is a Supercharger + the makewav program that Bob Colbert wrote. Superchargers are pretty cheap on auction sites (last I checked at least). But of course you can't test bankswitched games with it...

In general there's nothing wrong with changing macros into subroutines...except that it will eat CPU cycles due to the JSR/RTSes and the pushes and pops. Here's a document that shows how to do f8 bankswitching: http://www.qotile.net/minidig/docs/2600_ad..._prog_guide.txt It's not too hard...partitioning the code is really the hardest part. Ben

Oh yea, you're probably referring to this article: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,1156412,00.asp ...which was written probably 5 years ago or so. I had actually completely forgotten about it until several months ago when I was googling myself... Ben

OK everyone! First off, thanks for everyone who participated. The decision making process wasn't entirely easy, especially when I know that lots of people have sacrificed their free time to make these entries and that only one of them can be picked. I sort of feel bad picking just one...if I had it my way we'd perhaps do a gimmicky multi-cover 'Incoming!' extravaganza and use 10 different labels on 10 different numbered cartridges. But since 'there can be only one', I've decided that the winner is... *dramatic pause * Holger Bommer #1!!!! Like I said, a lot of them were very good. I liked Holger's first entry due to it's general theme, comic-book-ish feel, colors, and layout. Everyone else... please don't hate me for not picking you! Lastly, I figured I might mention that I'm working on a new game which is completely different from 'Incoming!'. All I can say at this point is that it involves a panda on a quest to save his brother's penis... so perhaps I'll have the privilege to solicit label designs from you guys again at some point in the near (or far ) future... Thanks again, Ben

Well, I think I've made a decision. I'm still waiting for Al to send me the high-resolution versions to look over before I make anything official though... Ben

What about F-14 Tomcat? That's a pretty impressive example of a post-crash game... Ben

Well there may be no vote, but I guess this discussion thread is still as good a place as any for anyone to lobby for their favorite. I don't accept kickbacks though... Ben

For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, it's a game of Cold War geopolitical strategy that came out for a number of computers in the 80s (in fact the PC version ran under Windows 1.0 (!) ). You play as one of the superpowers jockeying for international prestige as you attempt to prop up or overthrow governments around the world, by shipping arms, intervening militarily, sending in the CIA to destabilize regimes, making public statements against countries, etc. My dad bought this game back in the 80s for our PC, yet I ended up playing it more than him. Here I was, all of about 10-11 years old, sitting in front of the amber glow of the monochrome monitor, debating whether to send arms to insurgents in Mozambique to counter the Soviets (I guess I was a weird kid in retrospect). Anyway, I just downloaded it and started playing it again. Just wondered if anyone else has any fond memories of this one... Ben

I'm not sure I completely understand. Are you thinking about dynamically picking a combination of sub-kernels to use for each frame depending on the situation on-screen? In that case, yes, you would want to do the logic during the blanking and then set up some kind of data structure that you can look at during the actual kernel to determine where to go next. But all of this would probably be very difficult to implement... Ben

My new working theory is that he never existed and that our memories of him were implanted by the Matrix, which also added this backdated thread to Atari Age...

trilobit makes some damn impressive atari 2600 demos. I wonder what the difference is between the 'real' and the 'emulator' versions, other than the fact that the 'real' version crashes my emulator...

Early on I actually considered doing a game with weapons like Scorched Earth, but I more or less dropped that idea once I realized how hard it was going to be just to do anything starting as a complete noob. As simple as the game is, I think, in all honesty, probably half the development time was just fixing bugs or rewriting things. It can sometimes start to feel more like work than fun when you get bogged down in all that, which is probably one reason I lost interest in Atari 2600 programming for so long... Ben

Yea if the goal is to get higher resolution, then there's other more practical alternatives to experiment with. I remember someone else on the stellalist a while back managed to get the VCS to generate an actual 525 line interlaced NTSC signal as opposed to the usual 262.5 line one, effectively doubling the vertical resolution. Don't know what came of it though, except for a simple demo. Then there's the color-switching technique roland P is using with the ballblazer demo which sort of gives a 53.3-pixel wide 'playfield' instead of 40 pixels wide. To my knowledge I don't think anyone has used such a technique before, in an actual game at least... Ben

Sorry, I couldn't resist being completely melodramatic with the backstory. Ben

Yea someone did it about 10 years ago I think. Not sure what the results are but I remember seeing it in the archives. I'm not sure about how exactly the horizontal sync timing occurs, but IF it's tied to the color clock and IF you could change the color clock multiplier then I guess theoretically you could overclock the CPU and also get a stable picture...i.e. CPU at 3.58MHz with 1x color clock multiplier. Although it would probably be somehwat useless seeing as everything would be restricted to the left 1/3rd of the screen i think. Ben

Eh the universe will probably die via heat death before we come up with a playable game, considering there are 1.19 x 10^4932 permutations (2 to the (2048 x 8)th power). Although civilizations far in the future might have better computing power and AI than we do now to devote to the quest... Ben

man...I must have been reading this thread too much or something becuase Gary Coleman was in my dream last night. I said something to him like 'hey sorry your marriage didn't work out bro, gimme a hug!' It was very sentimental as you might imagine... Ben

If there was a way in the atariage web application for members to mark games that they owned, then this argument would be slightly moot because we could use that data for reference in determining rarity of games. Ben