Itchy Scratchy

HMMM..... I smell future collaboration may be on the horizon.

I would almost be ignorant to believe that this questions has never been asked. Has anyone attempted to make a Colecovision cartridge with battery back up. I am researching my options as far as how large I can make a game. We have seen the limits of the Colecovision in our games. A quick shoot 'em up, what's your high score but there is another reason why that is all we ever had and no save game feature on the Colecovsion. Shove the cartridge in, play the game then put your cartridge back on the shelf. DONE! I have no issues with creating a decent size Zelda-ESK adventure game with a feature to save your progress. I mean seriously... If I have to be limited to a password system then so be it but I would rather have something that you can play till you are tired, save your game then turn it off until you are ready to progress. So lets make it happen people. BTW, I know this can be done with emulator save states or better yet make a full ADAM game using file BIOS features saving to data pack or disk but how much more can we do with cartridge based games. Let's not allow the TI 994A to be the only hobby machine from all these years. Heck, I have seen more done on the old TRS 80 than I have for ADAM...

I can name that tune in 2 notes. I can log into AA with two cans and a string between them.

A future Request to have the ability to overlay the sprites on the screen layout. To be able to put it anywhere and maybe even cycle an animation. This would help enormously with scale and color selection. No one is saying moving it around the screen or logic other than just in an overlay capacity.

After the coming civil war we will all be using ADAM'S to get around the big tech tracking. Sort of like morse code during Independence Day.

I will neither confirm or deny that statement about the ADAM Disk Drives in my collection.

100% Z80 Assembly

Something I will never understand is that the ADAM Donkey Kong on Data Pack was superior in game play so why would you want the older Cartridge version yet they sold it anyway. It's not like you couldn't find them because they came with every Colecovision which sold in the millions. Now the one on EBAY went for $621 buckazoids.

I'll look into it today. Tony Cruiz gave me some ideas to check when I ran it by him. I have a lot of debugging routines left in the code I can turn off as well. This feedback helps a lot I tell you. I can fix the bugs early before I advance the rom.

Thank you for the feedback. I have run it on a stock ADAM using the Ultimate SD Wafer Drive cartridge. I have also successfully run it with two types of SD based Disk drive emulators. Before we release it officially we will fix it or just will not release it until we do.. Quality is my number #1 priority. Can you give me any other feedback as to how you tried to run it on your ADAM. What cards you may have installed if any.

So far the bulk of the code is under 32k and we have no plans of yet to need anything outside stock Colecovision hardware even if we added extra levels. The SGM provides joy to it's users however, currently every game in development at From Scratch has the goal to make them stock so everyone can enjoy them. The key is from using modern programing and tools we can write, test and run experimental routines to see what we can get away with in seconds of compiling. Back in the 80's you needed a lot of expensive equipment with extremely slow development time. Compile and test on an emulator. Debug then add more fun if you have the space before burning to a rom.

So far it is pre-animation and a map with room numbers but whomever wants to give feedback is welcome The offsets have not been tuned so you might get stuck in a wall. If you stay within the green lines you should be fine. Do not go left in room 0, that is INFINITY!!!!!!!!! You may get the same result at the end in room 128. I would like to get the approval of the original author but if that is not the case I can tweak this to be an entirely different game. All 129 rooms are there 0-128 Enjoy !Shamus v2.5.rom

Best Holiday wishes from The From Scratch Family Hopefully 2021 will see better days.

oooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhh aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh

May I have a copy of the cave generating routines ect... As far as the book. It is now on my Christmas list 😁 I wanted to make something similar as Cloudy Mountain and need as much info on how it works as possible.

Been looking for a realistic Intellivision game disassembler. What gets me is that Colecovision has decent emulators and Mame is so limited Atari has theirs but Intellivision is not only lacking since Bliss went nowhere. I mention Bliss because it was extremely load a game and go. No fiddling with front ends or cli. So this leads us to a disassembler. I would love to have an emulator that has a built in debugger and disassembler or better yet just a really good disassembler. My biggest quest is to figure the scrolling routine for Cloudy Mountain as well as other games. If anyone has ideas, direction, code for cloudy mountain or anything to help me write new games for the Intellividion then please chime in. TIA

Never read if this was a feature but tried anyway. Double Clicked on the .SPR file generated by the Sprite Editor. Windows did not recognize so I assigned it to the Sprite Editor EXE. Sprite Editor booted as normal but the pattern was not loaded. So, could be a new feature to create immediate access to your work. Just another part of a wish list. It did run another instance of the editor if one was already running.

It is a great book but some errors would be in the index which probably ocured from revisions and being rushed out the door because of all this covid nonsense. I would love to see more BIOS functions, setup and examples such as... The Book is title with ADAM in it but very little as far as ADAM. Accessing the disk and tape, printer ect... from assembly language. I have the original ADAM Users manual with the code listing but you need to be a scientist to figure it out and some of these routines you have to be showed by the guys who wrote them. Just like I can't read a legal document very well. I can say the same about an engineering and that thing was written by people who want to look smarter than you. Tony's book translates a lot of that into plain language as long as you can follow the basic principles of Z80 programing. However, there is a lot missing from Tony's book but I believe he said there are followups coming. Then again at over $30 I expected more but I am still going to support the guy within my ability.

This one is nitpicking. You click on File->Load Then double click on the file to open it. It draws on the sprite because the open file box is directly over the sprite grid. It's not about the positioning of the open dialog box but more because it starts to draw on the second click of the mouse while opening the file. I know, I know...Like I said it is nitpicking and could easily be remedied just by clicking on open instead of the double click but I thought I would mention it because that is a feature of the windows environment since the GUI came to fruition. This editor is a beautiful piece of software that is much needed and I hope you continue making it even more awesome over the coming months. I will do my part by continuing to purchasing your wares including any new chapters of your book series.

oooooohhhhhhhhhh, Yours is much prettier.

As far as this book. Just curious. I have had this giant book since 1985 and have not seen any other revisions. Apparently if I have v3 then there are at least 3. Anyone...Anyone... Bueller...Bueller Anyone...

NIAD should know. Was there a FACTORY released DISK version of this. I know there are fan based labels and disk sleeves. How about CPM?

As a follow up that definitely was a part of my clip board. Apparently your routine is very liberal that it will take anything whatsoever from the clipboard. It cleared up I suspect when Win 10 refreshed the system. As far as your program goes. I do not know if it would help to clean the clipboard or Sprite Editor buffers at start up.

Devastating bugs in the character editor window. Everything works to my goofing around however... After copy and paste say 000 to 001 or any you no longer have independent colors. If you change a color on 000 it will also change the same bit on 001, 002 whichever you pasted too. Also, get from table ceases to clear out the color bit if the table is blank after the paste routine. Meaning if the table is blank with the black and clear it does not copy that to the color table. Another weird bug is the Clipboard Preview grabbed part of my screen. This was a surprise because it showed an open folder for a top secret project I am working on. The screen grab was before and not a result of this screen grab to show you. This happened after the paste then click on get from table. A new odd thing is after I completely close the program and now when I start your editor the picture directly below is a permanent thing with part of a screen grab of my desktop. Even after deleting the cruise research directory to reset, it is now a permanent fixture. I take it this is grabbing part of my previous screen capture in your import buffer of some sort. But now I can't get rid of the thing. New CTRL+N does not always clear the color bits.

The sentiment was that you have the Atari 2600 with one button doing everything. The Colecovision had multiple buttons to stand out from the rest so why not use them. They weren't put there to phone home. Use the single button approach for the ports if any.