Baby Blue Azure

Roger that, BOB. We haven't talked for a while as I'm "snowed under" with house reno's. The beach house roof is next and then I found wood rot in the front deck facing the ocean and the exterior needs paint badly as I last painted it in 1998. I haven't been coding for weeks as I'm too tired at nights. I added the obit to your Alan McNeal post today. It's sad he departed us. /BBA

Hey Guys, I didn't know him personally, but sad to hear this. He was 66. Quickly approaching age 40 (hex) myself that's too close to home for me. Way back, rarely did the programmers receive the rightful amount for their tremendous achievements. He landed in Montana which is a blast of a place to be if you like wide open roads with high speed limits and Big Sky. Maybe not so enjoyable in the winters. Highly recommend Yellowstone NP which is nearby, but be sure to avoid the summer crowds there. May and September works. This is Alan's obit: https://www.buffalohillfh.com/notices/Alan-McNeil

Bob, good to hear you have a possible workaround for this. I did finally talk to SIO2, publisher of SICK PICKLES purple cart. He says he used Creality Ender 3 for his carts. It's an assemble yourself printer and setup can be challenging, to say the least. So hopefully what you're doing is working for you. /BBA

Yoh Bob. A partner here, Brex Brixius, designer of Sick Pickles did a slick job on a purple cart. Maybe you can PM him and he might steer you in a different direction. He might give you a Pink Link.

True, Hank, at higher stages the mutants are faster, unless you disable them, or erase them entirely. I cut into the games to see how I change them, and then share them for amusement. The ultimate goal? Just finding new ways to change the game I guess. I was never very good at the game so I need all the help I can get with jumping higher, and jumping from anywhere without dying, et al. Of course the original game stands as one of my favorites as well. And almost 40 years later we're still talking about it. /BBA

Yoh DrClu, Glad you were amused by my question, of course I knew that you and Tix worked on Miner as I cited sprite credit to you in my update. What I meant was if anyone dove into the mechanics of the game to determine how lives count is determined; possible maze path changes; moving the 'old miner possessions' to alternative locations - which by now I know how to do that; how to make Bob jump higher - he only jumps 15 lines and now I know to alter that up to 30 lines, but 20 lines seems to be optimum. I wonder if the 'Donald Duck' sprite set was ever completed - I'd love to have a copy of that and I can add features to that. Thx, BBA

Then there's speech (how do you do that?) Bob's Astro Blaster (ca.2014) has voice. I could tell you how he did it, but then he'd have to shoot me. AstBlstr_RC9.a78

I like changes to changes of the changes - a SQA Engineer's dream. $1013 for this game. That's my final offer. Deal or No Deal? I am now booking flights for you to Bora Bora. Three weeks (no leaving early), no laptops, no source lists, no scratching of the head, no planning or thinking is allowed. Just margaritas and chix on the beach. When you return, you can post RC14. You can't stop at #13. Good night.

Nice job [again] GorfCadet. I haven't played the game much myself yet and already posted my highest score ever [on any game on any machine] on the other end. Sure the maze game is better with the energizers. The Play Type variable allows us to choose PIN, VIDEO ONLY, or FULL GAME. In the VIDEO ONLY you've got energizers full time so it makes it easy to practice your game play the wrong way. As we know, programmer Bob has a way to be constrained to the original designs and that's why you don't have the 'cheat' to have energizers in the maze full time. But I'm sure if you type in Pi [that 3.141592654 number] to 32 digits you should have energizers full time (!,?). Here is the video that shows how you play the PIN to gain energizers on the arcade game. Regardless, BPM is a phenomenal game. /BBA

Thanks to bro Bob for replying to Kosmic Stardust's question about 1B points. (I hope I didn't waste too much of your time on this). I think 1B is like 1,000 points cubed. Why, if I played 1,000,000 points a day it would take just under 3 years to accumulate that score. And Bob is right, the game isn't that easy. Why not? What I did was 're-wired' the game to play the maze game by itself and amped the scoring closer to infinity. I think it took about 40 minutes to amass the 1B score. Sorry to disappoint anyone about this news. But it's good to know that Bob thought of EVERYTHING when he built this game. No one can be disappointed with this game. It's really special. I never buy games but I will buy this one, just so I can have the box and manual. Bob will probably charge me $1000 for the official final release cartridge for mucking with the downrevs of his game, but I can afford it. /BBA

Glad you like it Karl G. I noticed the collision problem as well. The game is too easy so you're penalized for not hitting the invaders dead center. Well, actually the invaders are wider with the new sprites so the fine collision detection needs to be tweaked. However, I tried this and it didn't seem to work exactly right. Unfortunately, this must be a downrev version of Bob's final release (cs=5010) so how this bin works is anyone's guess. I'll post an update here but if we go any further I need to shoehorn my changes into the cs=5010 version to have any chance that this will work 100%. This INV2 version updates the UFO sprite so now all of Karl G's sprites are on display. Also, the invaders no longer go left and they don't drop down either. And the speed is much faster. And the UFOs can appear even when there is only 1 invader remaining - exposing another glitch, which wasn't intended but is happening anyways: With one invader remaining, wait for the UFO to appear and shoot the last invader and then try to shoot the UFO. The shot freezes and the UFO freezes as well. The next rack appears and you can take your time to shoot the UFO or go get him right away. The UFO scoring still functions properly. Also another glitch is the game plays racks 01 thru 09 and then plays racks 02 thru 09 forever, I guess. Unknown why the game does this either. So this is clearly a gadget/WIP game in progress for fun only. PHOTO OF THE NEW UFO SPRITE INV2 A78 FILE - PLAY ON THE EMULATOR ALL YOU WANT! INV2.a78 ENJOY, BBA

Speaking of HIGH scores...while the BPM crew has been busy slaving over this game, I've been playing it for what seems like forever. I'd like to personally thank Bob for creating the first billion point capable game! Bonus points to you! This must be some kind of a record! For sure we now know the scoring algo completely functions. But what happens when the game rolls over at 10 Billion points? Stay tuned, you never know what Bob's cooked up!

True, when you begin the game the Next Bonus is at 030000 (unless you select lower on the select screen which would be 20000 or 10000). But later, when you die with 300000+ points, then the New Next Bonus is at 300000.

That is correct Smitty B., thanks for replying. Credits should be made to PMP Bob for the original port design of Space Invaders to the 7800 - one of my faves. The differences between this release and Bob's final release (checksum = 5010) is this isn't based on Bob's final release, it's some iterative (down-rev?) version that I don't know where it came from. This version was used on Space Invaders Coke and Space Invaders Time Attack which I modifixed here. When the invaders close in to kill the player, they turn red in this game. The game name was changed and I had to fudge up the message length to allow extra characters, and of course the sprites were changed. It's a standard non-invincible game and fun to try, in my opinion. We have the disassembly of this and it would be interesting to see if we could change things up a bit more. Maybe increase the invader speeds but the invaders step down less each time across the screen. That could probably be simply done with 2 byte changes. And when you die you always start on the far left. I would prefer to start where you died or close to where you died. And the delay for the return of the player could be reduced as well. Maybe I'll look at this over the weekend.

The guys over there on BPM are working overtime and emotions are heightened. This is to be expected. The internal timer expires and the game still isn't done. I feel for Bob and Kurt as well. It's a mammoth job they've taken on. I'm staying off the BPM blog because I know they'd say SHUT UP! Same thing happened at Atari, so we don't need that again. But I do support them 100% and understand the sacrifices they are making. If I did go there I would be an INVADER OF SPACE, hence my latest entry. I'd like to thank Karl G for the inspiration of sprites for this game. PHOTOS: INVASION OF SPACE, BINARY: INVADER_OF_SPACE_FA24.bin INVASION OF SPACE, a78: Invader_Of_Space_16K.a78 Enjoy this game and Godspeed to the BPM crew! /BBA