Chadivision

You can be in an exclusive club, but I am the only one in the ultra-exclusive club for owners of the much sought-after E.T. cartridge. There's only one in the world and I have it in a safe deposit box in an undisclosed location.

Definately go throught the tutorials in the homebrew forum. They are really well done. Download the stella programmers guide. There should be a link to it somewhere on this site. I'm sorry, I don't have time to find it right now, but you should be able to find it pretty easily. Read over it a few times. A lot of it won't make much sense to you at first, so just try to understand the general concepts. Check Ebay for some old 6502 assembly books. I got a really good one for $7. The one I have is 6502 Assembly Language Subroutines, by Leventhal Saville. That is the only one that I have, but I'm sure that someone here can suggest some other good books. Also, make sure you join the stella mailing list. The link is on the page that Big Player suggested. You can search the archives for different keywords. I plan on reading through more of the archives before starting my next game. The people on that list really know what they're talking about.

I'm just going to pretend that what they said is true. Which means I have an unreleased prototype! (I know that it has been released, but please don't interrupt my delusion)

I just got my copy in the mail! The cart and manual look great. PDF, I'll sign the label and the manaul and get them in the mail right away.

You're right, it is Kassar not Kazar. In the comic book they spell the name of the galaxy Razak. They must have changed the spelling to make it less obvious. I've only tested it on my 2600 with my Cuttle Cart. I haven't tried it on the 7800. Backfire doesn't really use any strange programming tricks. It's all pretty standard stuff, so my guess is that it would work. Then again I don't really know that much about the 7800.

Congratulations Gateway. I wondered if anyone would figure that out. Jack Turney is a former boss of mine who was a real jerk, so I decided to use his name for the evil clan of invaders. I got the idea from Yars Revenge. Yar = Ray. Razak Galaxy = Kazar. (Ray Kazar was the CEO of Atari at the time.) I had to put the ' in K'caj because it looked strange without it.

Phosphor Dot Fossils - Thank you for the compliment and thank you for the amazing artwork. I can barely play it in an emulator. The emulators do a pretty good job at running it, but it just doesn't feel right to use the keyboard. It's still pretty hard on the actual system, but it does play a lot better. At one point I gave some serious thought to making the game easier, but I can get more than half way to rolling the counter, so I decided to keep it how it is. It is hard, but the difficulty progresses slowly. I never liked games that get difficult really fast and then stay at the same difficulty level. I wanted a more gradual progression. I also thought about using the difficulty switches on the back, but I decided against it so that there would be only one version of the game. That way, if we ever do a high score contest we can be sure that everyone is playing the same game. I agree that a signed manual might be better. I'll check with Albert and see if he can send me some to sign and I'll send them back. I hope to make it to a gaming show at some point so that I can meet some of you in person.

I fell really bad now, because I always thought that Astroblast was pretty hard. Everyone else is complaining that it's too easy. I didn't know that you could use the paddle controller. I'll have to try that. I have always liked it. The scoring is pretty cool.

I didn't realize that I'm such a celebrity now, but if you would like my autograph I guess we could arrange that. Albert is sending me a label to autograph for Earl (the winner of the label contest). If there are enough other people who are interested in having a signed copy, I guess I could get some more copies of the labels and sign them. (Personally I think it would be a shame to put my ugly signature on that beautiful label.) For the record... I was just kidding about doing a Backfire Minus addition. This will be the only version of Backfire. I promise.

I'm not going to do a plus version. I could do a minus version where I take away features. That would be easier to program.

That extra artwork for the manual looks really cool! Unfortunately I wasn't able to attend OKGE, so I haven't seen it yet. Albert shipped me my cart yesterday, so I should have it soon. I can't wait to see it.

I'm definately not planning on releasing another version of Backfire. I don't have a lot of time to spend on programming right now, but any time I do have will probably be spent writing a new game.

I just want to thank Earl for creating such great artwork and Dale for putting the manual together. I haven't seen the finished manual yet, but from what I have heard it is really well done. Also, thank you to Albert and everyone else at Atari Age. I also want to point out that Backfire is much more "user friendly" on an actual Atari with a joystick. I did most of my testing using my Cuttle Cart and I admit that it is very difficult to play using a computer keyboard. I wonder who will be the first one to find the Easter Egg!

OR.... You could always rip the label off of Quadrun and sell it as "This might be Combat". I imagine that a decision like that would involve a LOT of drinking.

I might give that a try. Oh, wait. He has been in the military for several years and works out every day. While I on the other hand... Play Atari. Maybe I should just challenge him to a game of Combat.

I was very happy with the Backfire label contest. I'm glad to see that there is so much interest in doing these labels. One thing that I have always loved about Atari labels is that the artists had to come up with a concept that shows what the game represents, not what it actually looks like. It was really cool to see all of the different ways that the game was interpreted. I like the Atari style layouts as well as the orignal concepts (not to imply that the Atari sytle ones weren't original. There was some VERY original artwork!). I wanted to have a game with my name on it that looked like the ones that I grew up with. Maybe next time I'll lean more towards an original layout.

Swordquest Waterworld. I just told my sob story in a recent post. My brother let someone borrow our Atari stuff and we never got it back. The way I see it, technically, I STILL own Swordquest Waterworld... I'm just not really sure where it is right now.

Thanks for the help.

Does anyone know what emulator makes the highest quality screen captures? I was using PCAE to make some screenshots for the Backfire manual, but it only does .jpg format. Albert said that they wouldn't look good when they're printed because of .jpg's compression. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thank you to everyone who submitted artwork for the label contest. I was very impressed with the quality of the work. I wish I didn't have to just pick one because there are several great entries. The winner is... Phosphor Dot Fossils, entry #1 posted on 9/5/2003 Congratulations.

I thought that some of you might get a kick out of this. It's an old version of Backfire before I decided on the final color scheme. I just typed in random values for the colors and this is what I got. I can't believe that I looked at these terrible colors for the four and a half months I spent writing the game. I particularly like the red gun on an orange background. Don't worry the cartridge version will NOT use these colors. bkfiredevcolors.zip

Does this mean that I shouldn't refer to my Atari collection as my "portfolio"?

Since most of the games are $20 to $30, you can hardly complain if you get a decade of so out of them (which is a fairly conservative number from what I have heard). The other thing to consider is that as long as people are still into collecting, someone is still going to be making carts. Unless the original programmer decides to stop granting permission to make the carts, but that 's probably not very likely to happen. I think that your best option is to buy 10 copies of every homebrew available (or 100 copies in the case of Backfire, but I might be a little biased) to increase your odds of having a working copy at all times.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think the Wedding Singer had a single Atari reference. How do you do a movie about the 80's and not mention Atari?

I agree that there is something to be said for using a goal oriented development schedule. I used a schedule for developing Backfire. My point is that if you really want to write a game, don't talk yourself out of it because you don't have a lot of time on your hands. If it takes you several months or a year, that's fine. It's better to spend a year writing a game than to spend a year not writing a game. If you have more free time, great. Maybe you can get it done in a month or two. I wrote Backfire while I was in the process of starting a new career as a real estate agent, which is very time consuming. I think that having a goal oriented hobby can keep you from getting burned out on other things in your life (like a new career).