Omegamatrix

After learning that the games are marked to their type I consider this resolved and a moot point. In the end people are going to play the game and love it or hate it on its own merits. I love Wall Jump Ninja. 😎 I'm said this so much in the past few days that I'm starting to sound like a broken record, but once again a great game is a great game no matter how it is made. A great game will always shine through. Of course it is possible that someone, somehow, will create the best Atari 2600 game ever, and that it will be done today. Hey, it might even be a 1K game! I don't think it's fair to say that masterpieces of the past can never be surpassed. Honestly, I would expect a game written 40 years ago to look a little less polished than one made today. This is not being offensive to the old game, its just progression. Progression then and now is also part of the consoles history, no?

Yes, that's correct. Thank you for your feedback. I'll have to think about what is the most intiuitive way it should work for future games. Maybe I will slow it down when it auto toggles, or only do one toggle on items that only have two choices. Typing this right now it actually sounds like the latter would work well. I saw the spike in downloads and knew something was up! Thank you Scott. 😀

I didn't say "bare bones" now, did I? I'm not even sure what you would consider "bare bones" either... some people are like 2K with no illegal ops. Others are like any type of format that was availble back in the day (even those like 32SC which was only used for one game after the crash). Still others draw the line at co-processors, yet Pitfall II had one and was a game back in the day. I don't want to debate what bare bones is with you. My point is just that it a slipperly slope of definitions. It's more or less up to the user to decide what it means. I'm a great lover of doing challenging things on the 6502. Some of the most fun I had in while was making 32 byte roms. Yep, just 32 bytes. What I'm most proud of is that they not only are displaying something, but that the scanline count is stable, and VSYNC is being done. I made 10 of them. It was fun, and you don't get much more bare bones than that. Note the roms are padded to 2,048 bytes, but are in fact 32 bytes. 32ByteRoms.zip Now that I have started dipping my own toe into ARM development I can honestly say the expierence is quite different than I imagined it would be. I'm finding that whatever additional resources you get come with unique constraints of their own, and it is indeed challenging in the right sorts of ways. Overall whatever you gain with the ARM you just end up consuming by throwing more into the game, and in the end you are still squeezing stuff in and don't really have enough time for everything. Typical stuff. So for me the tradeoff is a wash in terms of challenge.

I won't look at doing another one of these for several months unless I really need bug out and switch projects for a while. Asteroids was the game I was going to do next because of the amount of variations it has. While I did Super Breakout mostly because I really wanted to draw a logo out of bricks, Video Olympics and Space Invaders were chosen because they each had a lot of variations and needed the menu screen the most.

Also, Galagon is the game of the year hands down. While John has said a decent port could have been done without the ARM, after seeing how well it came out why would you want anything different? I mean really does it make any sense that we should purposely downgrade games?

Darrell, your games are great. Space Rocks is one of my favorite 2600 games. The work that you and others have done to make tools that allow us to push the 2600 beyond previous limits is phenomimal. Please keep it up.

I really wanted to just add a front end to these old games, and selected themes for the screens that I felt were appropriate. It was important for me to leave the game intact as I wanted it to shine on its own. These menus are really meant for people like me who never read the manual, and never got past few the first few select switch presses. The only modifications I did to the original games was to clean up some glitches so that the background color changes were even. That's just a little cosmetics polishing. Yeah, I think you remember my full screen instuctions I made as a demo (36 characters max per line). I started thinking about doing this and realized it would be a little bit overboard, and instead of having time for 3 games I might have only done 1 or 2. I also thought it would take away from the main game too much with too many new features... so I didn't do instructions. In the end these hacks are meant to honor the original game while letting people expierence all the modes much easier. For those that are interested here is some insight into how these games are constructed: 1) Create the menu screen as a new, built from scratch rom. This program runs on its own, and includes functionality such as row highlighting, available options, etc... 2) Disassemble the original game, and expand its size to add more code. 3) Insert the menu screen into the expanded rom. Modify the original game to go to some code that interfaces between the two screens when appropriate (like select being pressed). The actually amount of hacking done to the original game is quite minimal. By far all of the work is in writing the new menu screen, and writing the two way interface between the original game and the menu screen. The amount of work is quite extensive as each game is different requiring a different approach.

Thank you so much, Jstick! I never thought about the Matrix connection, but in looking back I can see the topic title was nothing but confusing. So I renamed it "Original Games Updated With Menus". When I created the topic I chose not to have any pictures of the screens. My thought process was it would be a nice expierence for people to see them for the first time when they open the game. This completely backfired on me. People didn't really find anything interesting so they moved on without trying the games. So I've now added pictures of each screen and placed Super Breakout at the top since it is the most colorful. With the menu options being greyed out, this is already being done. Here is a screen shot of Super Breakout when 2 players are selected. Progressive mode is not availble so it is greyed out. The most suprising thing I learned making these menus is that Video Olympics and Space Invaders are mostly multiplayer games. I never knew that. There are actually a lot of variations for each.

This is a good suggestion, and its something I went back and forth on when I was making the menus. I'm debating implementing it though because truthfully there hasn't been too much interest in these games.

Well, overall this thread is just showcasing that everyone thinks differently and has different opinions. Nothing wrong with that. In terms of new tech the only true constant is change. There's no stopping it. As a programmer it is easy to look at a game and get a rough idea of its construction through a quick peek in Stella's Debugger. The GP don't know how to do so or even what they are looking at. A programmer does and forms a different perspective on what went into a game. Again, nothing really wrong with that. Shovelware has its place. I personally have no issues with better tools allowing barriers to be taken down and gives more people the opportunity to create games themselves. They can expierence the joy (and pain) of programming. I'm all about letting people expierence this. Truithfully we need much more programmers to help keep the 2600 alive.

You might want to check out the menu version I did for Super Breakout, amongst others. There's a PAL60 version in there too.

From observing these forums for many years I can understand your fears. The general public are not programmers and don't know the difference between game types. From what I've seen though they generally don't care to know about the differences either... they just want to see a great game. I am an advocate that a game should be judged by how it makes you feel. It should not mater whether it is an assembly game, BB game, hack, Arm game, etc. Just judge it for how it all comes together and plays. While you might expierence tears of joy you might also just want to take a sledge hammer to the cartridge. What's important is that it made you feel something. A game is a game, is a game. Play it as such, and judge it as such. While the ARM gives amazing resources, it still takes a great programmer to make a great game. Have no fear there. Now I will give you the choice. You can take the Blue pill to wake up in 1980 with all games are being banged out in assembly and the story ends. You believe what you want to believe. If you take the Red pill I will show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

For those who tried, any feedback on the menus? Did you like the styles?

Darrell, are you able to incorporate FASTJMP into your collect tutorial? I'm trying to get that working for my kernels. Edit: I was able to get it working. I had a bug where I was trying to set the data but was using the wrong constant.

A while back Tempest shared a great idea of adding a menu screen for Atari games which had their options laid out in a matrix at the back of the manual. I really loved that idea because it breathes some new life into these old games. Menu screens are great because they take away the awfulness of having to use the select switch to cycle through all 112 options of Space Invaders, and lets you know what game you are selecting in Video Olympics. You can also choose valid game types for the amount of players that you have. Example: Games: Video Olympics - Video Olympics Menu.zip Space Invaders - Space Invaders Menu.zip Super Breakout - Super Breakout Menu.zip Asteroids - Asteroids Menu Combat - Combat Menu Indy 500 - Indy 500 Menu Warlords - Warlords Menu Hangman - Hangman Menu Championship Soccer - Championship Soccer Menu Outlaw - Outlaw Menu - START -

Well that is pretty slick that only one of the audio registers is needed for 3 voices. That of course leaves the other register for sound effects such as shots of collisions which could be updated once a frame.

Tomorrow. 😎

No need to rush Darrell, I still got lots of other work to do, and I will be slowing down as I will be going back to work soon too. For right now I am just inserting placeholders where the writes will go and building the kernels around that. I am going to make them at the same cycle all throughout so that nothing sounds off. I'm no musician, and I'm always amazed when someone can listen to something and pick out what notes it is using. When I did the music for VR it was awful as I had to constantly move music up and down Octaves due to missing notes, and even then I would still have to substitute notes quite often. I actually spent weeks on it tweaking and tweaking trying to get it to sound better. It was quite painful to be honest. Now though I'm hoping that the different waveform generations (Square, Triangle, Sawtooth, Sine?) will be able to provide a better range of notes. Has the third (channel constructed by combining the volumes of the first two) been fully investigated with how the 2600 combines both channels? When doing three channels I imagine either AUDV0 and AUDV1 would be either updated every line, or AUDV0 would be updated one line, and AUDV1 would be updated on the following line. Anyhow, there are more possibilities for sure, and music overall should be a lot better because of it. All the ARM games I've heard had really good music.

Darrell, thank you so much for these threads. I've gone through them since yesterday and I got everything compiling now for CDFJ. Ironically, I was wondering about a faster clear and that was covered in this latest update. I also like Dionoid's buffer identification so I'm going to use that as well. Right now I have started tinkering by converting one of my balloon kernels from CAA, just to draw a single stationary row. Darrell, there's a missing # on line 516 of collect3.asm. I'm also wondering about the comments on lines 424 to 427 of collect3.asm. Can there be a startup in bank 5 or will CDFJ always start in bank 6? At this point I am going to go through the Draconian source to learn more about the creating music. From making Venture Reloaded I got a major appreciation of how hard it is to get anything to sound tolerable on the 2600. I'm really looking forward to using the ARM to get better sound.

After several years hiatus I have decided to restart Circus AtariAge in 2020. I am shooting for a WIP release in about 4-6 months for now. Currently I am just pondering whether or not to port it to CDFJ. In any case it needs to re-booted with a re-write from scratch.

Just in case you guys missed it, the latest version of Venture Reloaded includes a AFP compatible rom. Enjoy!

The issue is that there is a lot of sequencing in place when Winky does his movement to get the arrow, and each step has different processes built in that get out of step if started early. There are differences in the treasure screen depending on whether it's a new game, life lost, level completed, game over, and high score display.