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

On the mainline blog I have introduced a "new game" MILLI MUT8 (mutate). I added magic sauce to make the DDT mutate and splat across the screen and attempted to change the 'BONUS AT' message on the bottom of the screen to 'NEXT BONUS AT' and added a millions digit. Everything works except the functionality of the millions digit. The digit displays, but at the n,000,000 point crossovers/rollovers the millions digit continues to increment out of control. The code is confusing [to me] in many ways. The scoring could use 3 bytes to store 6 digits of score. For sure, at least in one point of the code, address $06C4 stores the 100K and 10K scoring digits, and it's possible that $06C5 stores the 1K and 100's digits and it's possible that $06C6 stores the 10's and units score digits. So I tried to add those 3 bytes and when zero, increment my new millions digit. But it doesn't work as you can see in this game sample when you play to 1 million points the millions digit increments out of control until 10K score points later. My code has a different version which detects 990,000 which doesn't work either, of course, but actually seems to look better than the other options I tried. SAMPLE GAME MILLI_MUT8_FA81.bin PHOTO SHOWING MILLIONS DIGIT ADDED CHANGELIST DESCRIBING MY CHANGES TO THE ORIGINAL MILLIPEDE MILLI_MUT8_Changelist.pdf RAW DISASSEMBLY FOR MILLIPEDE MILLIPEDE5200_5D9C_Disassy.pdf Once this issue is solved, another item I couldn't find is on the select screen to select what level to play at, the Select Starting Score should go from 10,000 thru 300,000, but when you achieve over 1 million points the Select Starting Score should always be set to 300,000. If your game ends at 1,200,000 the Select Starting Score sets to 200,000 instead of 300,000. I don't know how/where this is done. Thanks, BBA

I was never able to make the 'Next Bonus At' millions digit to fully function properly. The theory is that when the score reaches 000,000 then the millions digit should be incremented. I tried that, according to my understanding of the MILLIPEDE code, but it doesn't work. This just means I really don't understand this code. I will bump this over to the Programming section and see if someone will pick this up for us. Here's the MILLIPEDE TB disassembly for those who might be interested. Extensive work has been done on the sprite details. The program code has some comments to aid in the understanding. Some day I someone really digs deep into this code and tells us how this game really works. MILLIPEDE TRAKBALL (2016) DISASSEMBLY SHOWING DIFFS FROM 1984 J/S VERSION MILLIPEDE5200_5D9C_Disassy.pdf ENJOY!

You're welcome. To me, this game is a total blast. I laugh every time the unsuspecting Mosquitos enter the fray only to be completely wiped out. HNY to all!

By 1984, it was already too late for Atari. To me, the solution is simple. We all need to do is to retrofit our Delorians with a functional 1.21 Gigawatt flux capacitor and set the date to 10-27-1983 and destination 215 First St. Cambridge MA 02142. Knock on the door and ask for Mr. Ron Stephens. He would be shaking his head, wondering how we would know he was working on the 3600 (now 7800) OS that day. And then we would show him our nifty laptops and all the games we already have for the 3600/7800. GCC, and the world, would never be the same again. THE DESTINATION: By the way, Bob and Curt, you're doing a wonderful job. I can't even imagine what all went into BPM to make it work as well as it does! HNY, BBA

I admit this game has one problem, that I know of - hence the WIP status. But it's too much fun to not share it at this point. Based on MILLIPEDE, with DDT altered to MUT8 (mutate) and some score stamp scrubbing, and the Millipede colors changed and the Spider changed to Scullder, and adding a millions digit to the 'Next Bonus At'. It seems to all work on the JUM52 emulator, except the millions digit control logic isn't quite right. I just don't understand how the original code works - at all! Within days I'll take this over to 5200 Programming and see if someone can help me with this. Until I made this mod, I never really realized how tough MILLIPEDE is to play. Even with the assistance that this game provides, you still won't win! I got 7 million points last night, but sure enough I lost 3 lives at the inopportune time and promptly lost the game. Again, I warn, the millions digit isn't working right, but we hope we can get it fixed! Also note, there was no 'X' in the game to produce the word 'NEXT' so I whacked the 'W' which is used in 'TWO' so if you try to switch to 2 player ('-' key on the emulator) you'll see 'TXO' instead of 'TWO'. GAMEPLAY PHOTO: CHANGE LIST: MILLI_MUT8_Changelist.pdf THE GAME: MILLI_MUT8_FA81.bin

Sorry guys about the posting error here. I was in a hurry and there was an obvious problem with an attachment of an attachment and the the LAVA_FLOW_R+D was posted twice, and the Disassembly didn't get posted. Without this, it would be hard to assist me with my question. Thanks for your patience! /BBA JOUST DISASSEMBLY - RAW (in .pdf format): JOUST_8283_Disassembly4.pdf

THE RULES HAVE CHANGED (using Charlton Heston's voice). True, CPUWIZ is a very incredibly smart guy, but this is NOT the time for a "Hardware Hack." It's the software that needs a "Hack." PAM is a very good machine and shall not be manipulated. But all software MUST BE manipulated immediately. Fast backward, IF THE FUTURE WAS HERE IN 1984, WHERE ARE WE NOW? We had a perfectly good 5200 MILLIPEDE in 1984 but it wasn't published. Cancer wasn't solved then and it isn't in 2018 either. It will never be solved because cancer is mutating. And everyone's immune system is forever degrading. If we did what we're doing now with depositing defective DNA on a fruit fly to test for cancer eradication in 1984 and had the DNA test equipment I fixed in 2003 been available in 1984, then cancer would have been solved in 1984. And the need to demonstrate why cancer can't be solved in 2018 wouldn't be necessary. Will you risk playing this new form of MILLIPEDE to see what happens when cancer can't be solved? PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE OF DDT MUT8ING THE GAME. WILL YOU BE ABLE TO ERADICATE THE MUT8ING DDT AND SAVE THE WORLD? I COULDN'T. MILLIPEDE_DDT_MUT8_5DEF.bin Notes: 1) It used to be best to be invincible in games like this. But this game is better than invincible. You will die, eventually, but you'll have a ton of fun with this modern shooter. I need to expand the "Next Bonus At" to have an extra millions digit, and hope to have that some day soon, as it's too easy to get a million points and adding a scoring digit isn't very feasible. But this Christmas you have quite a game to play! 2) Only 2 bytes were changed so it seems this risk of non-compliance to any version of emulator or hardware is minimal. This was only tested using JUM52. It was not tried anywhere else. Good luck! Designed by BBAAKABA

Recently I have been working on a pet project on the 7800 JOUST. This is an R+D project on how the Lava Flows in 3 segments in the JOUST game. I have found the sections where these tasks are completed individually. But now, I’m trying to make them all happen in sequence right at the start of the game. I have a sample BIN/A78 that shows how close I got to completing this task. But perhaps it’s not the optimum choice of coding and it doesn’t completely work anyways. So I’m looking for a fresh set of eyes to look over my shoulder and hopefully solve this mind-bending code problem. It may be this proposed solution can be tweaked to work or there’s a completely different and better way to go. I’m sure a seasoned coder would understand all we need is to run 8+8+4 = 20 lines of lava in sequence and then $AC=01 and $B3=07 and the lava bridge opens and the flames are lit. This true, but how to shoehorn that new code is the ultimate question. Here is a photo showing how close I got it to work. Just 7 lines of the lava stage 2 are missing. Next, I have supporting info that will be key to solving this question. JOUST LAVA R+D BACKGROUND INFORMATION (in .pdf format): JOUST_LAVA_FLOW_R+D.pdf JOUST DISASSEMBLY - RAW (in .pdf format): JOUST_LAVA_FLOW_R+D.pdf Then the attached BIN/A78 is based on the original JOUST checksum=8283, with invincibility so it's easy to run through Wave 04 to verify the new change completely works, the 'WAVE nn' message stuck on permanently, the lava flow speed maxed, and the lava change code as shown in the LAVA R+D doc above. JOUST_Lava BIN: JOUST_LLL_A601.bin JOUST_Lava .A78: Joust_LLL_32K.a78 Thanks for your support! /BBA

Sorry Cro§Bow, I don't know the answer to this. Hopefully someone else can help us answer this.

Greetings fans! Hope your holidays are the best they can be. Looking back many decades at some of my old-time favorites like KABOOM (been there, done that), MINER2049 (been there, done that, mostly), MILLIPEDE (not been there, would like an invincible version(!) and then the game would be perfect for me), JUMPMAN (haven’t been there yet either), and then of course CRYSTAL CASTLES (CC). I have the CC cocktail arcade in my living room and it’s been sitting there dead for probably 2 decades. Then we moved everything to clean house earlier this year. Placed it back into position but didn’t fire it up yet. Then late this year I was hacking the 5200 CC and wondered how the arcade worked in comparison. Removed the stuff and covering from the table and fired it up. The sound still works as it always did, and SHAZAM (in movie theaters 4-5-2019)! The screen came up! My initials are still there, and other than the t-ball being rough and tumble, the game works 100%. Hurrah! In celebration of my CC coming to life I have some goodies for my friends. First, there’s a demo that automatically scrolls through all of the levels of 5200 Crystal Castles. CRYSTAL CASTLES 5200 DEMO BIN: CRYSCAST52_DEMO.bin Now that we’ve seen all of the levels of CC, let’s play! And there’s no better way to play through all the levels than being invincible. And once you get the hang of it, you can revert to the original game and your scores should improve! By the way, I believe this is the Trakball-compatible version that works with the TB installed in the player 2 port. Not sure where my CX-53 Trakball is right now, so I wasn’t able to test this. Either way you will win! CRYSTAL CASTLES 5200 INVINCIBLE BIN: CRYSCAST52_INV.bin YOU WIN PHOTO: When you finish Level 10, press start again. You will now see this screen (below), which starts at Level 1, but there’s now a door to a hidden tunnel that allows you to warp to Level 8. How does this happen? WARP TO LEVEL 8 PHOTO: CRYSTAL CASTLES 5200 QUIZ: So this leads to our quiz. There are several questions I have about the 5200 CRYSTAL CASTLES, none of which I can answer. 1) Does anyone happen to know what 5200 screen RAM locations store the '19' in the year of the game on the Atari logo start-up screen? I labelled this game 19B8=19118=2018. I want to do better! 2018 should be 2018! 2) How/where is it determined that there are 4 spare starting lives and 7 maximum displayed? 3) The skeleton is white, however hard to see against the white background. How/where is the skeleton color determined? 4) How is the ‘WARP TO LEVEL 8’ function designed? I’d like to have it in a normal non-invincible game that upon fresh new start-up Level 1 has the option to ‘WARP TO LEVEL 8’ (or maybe to any other Level?). Some flag must be set at the end of the game, but I don’t know where or how. There’s no time limit to answer this quiz (but I’ll bet someone more familiar with the 5200 could solve this while the turkey is cooking for 5 hours), and it’s completely open book. I have some materials to share here: BACKGROUND INFORMATION (in .pdf format): CRYSTALCASTLES_WARP DEV.pdf CRYSTAL CASTLES 5200 TB DISASSEMBLY - RAW (in .pdf format): CRYSTAL_CASTLES_TB_BFAA_Disassy.pdf Thanks, BBA CRYSTAL_CASTLES_TB_BFAA_Disassy.pdf