SlithyMatt

Brief update on the Alice game as part of a larger channel update video:

Elementary School only had Apple IIs - my first time touching a computer was a II (maybe a II+?) in second grade (1982-83). In third grade learned to program in Logo, and the school kept investing in Apple, eventually getting a IIc in every classroom by 85-86. Christmas 86 I got my first computer: a 64kB CoCo 2, complete with CCR-82 tape deck, DMP-130 dot matrix printer, and Color ScripsIt cartridge. It was my first exposure to BASIC, and I taught myself to program with the manuals and example listing provided with the system. Eventually acquired a floppy drive and a bunch of games, and even OS-9 that was a mystifying, strange thing that my father somehow agreed to buy for me. Starting Middle School the next year, the computer lab there had TRS-80 IIIs with the integrated monochrome monitors and floppy drives, which is where I first encountered BASIC in school, and by then I was a "seasoned expert". We also played Oregon Trail on those, never on Apple II, like most folks in the US apparently did. By high school, I got my first PC clone at home (a Tandy 1000 HX, because where else would you get a computer than Radio Shack?) and at school they had Apple IIgs's (connected to a handful of Macs) and IBM PS/2s, but no more TRS-80s to be found. I gave away my CoCo 2, and haven't touched any TRS-80 since outside of emulation.

Elementary School only had Apple IIs - my first time touching a computer was a II (maybe a II+?) in second grade (1982-83). In third grade learned to program in Logo, and the school kept investing in Apple, eventually getting a IIc in every classroom by 85-86. Christmas 86 I got my first computer: a 64kB CoCo 2, complete with CCR-82 tape deck, DMP-130 dot matrix printer, and Color ScripsIt cartridge. It was my first exposure to BASIC, and I taught myself to program with the manuals and example listing provided with the system. Eventually acquired a floppy drive and a bunch of games, and even OS-9 that was a mystifying, strange thing that my father somehow agreed to buy for me. Starting Middle School the next year, the computer lab there had TRS-80 IIIs with the integrated monochrome monitors and floppy drives, which is where I first encountered BASIC in school, and by then I was a "seasoned expert". We also played Oregon Trail on those, never on Apple II, like most folks in the US apparently did. By high school, I got my first PC clone at home (a Tandy 1000 HX, because where else would you get a computer than Radio Shack?) and at school they had Apple IIgs's (connected to a handful of Macs) and IBM PS/2s, but no more TRS-80s to be found. I gave away my CoCo 2, and haven't touched any TRS-80 since outside of emulation.

I now have music and sound effects implemented for the first two levels, as seen in my latest video: The ca65 macros I created for audio are available on the GitHub repo: https://github.com/SlithyMatt/vcs-alice

@MLockmoore, I approved and merged the PR. Congrats, you're the first official contributor after me!

Thanks! I'll take a look at the PR tonight.

A bit off-topic, but do you really need Matlab? I've found that Octave works just as well if you don't need any specific Matlab-only packages. And I'm surprised Xilinx doesn't have better Linux support. I remember back in the 90s having to use an HP-UX system to do FPGA development!

Make sure you use the new release: https://github.com/SlithyMatt/vcs-alice/releases/tag/v0.1.1a As you can see above, certain emulators may not play v0.1a correctly, but that's been fixed now.

I have fixed this in a new release: https://github.com/SlithyMatt/vcs-alice/releases/tag/v0.1.1a So, today I learned one key difference between the Windows and Linux versions of Stella: on Windows, the state of the D bit (BCD math) is set at startup, whereas on Linux it's clear. So, that first ADC instruction to set the sprite frame offset is doing it in BCD instead of binary, changing the pointer to an invalid address (some where in the $2000's). I simply added a CLD to the top of the code, and now it works fine on both platforms. So a word to the wise: don't assume any status bit values!

Not necessarily. If that bit is already set, then we need to do a full binary add. Right now, I'm not looking to align the sprite data to ensure that, plus this code is in the VBLANK, so timing isn't as sensitive. I have plenty of time to do the add -- I'm already burning off 30 scanlines doing nothing before that part of the code. I've considered this, as it makes the processing quicker, but it takes up a lot of ROM space, which is why I crammed every row into a single byte before. However, now that I'm resigned to the fact that level 2 will take up the whole bank, I can probably take up more real estate and get some time back. It totally does. Nobody's perfect. 😉 Not sure what that's about. Somehow each sprite table is getting a bad pointer at the beginning, but that should be explicitly initialized. I've never seen this with Stella on Linux or on Javatari. Do you still see it if you do a reset? Yeah, both were intentionally let slide as it's hard to really tell when playing the game in real time and it made things a lot easier. Basically, I didn't want to use a special index, so they are formatted to use whatever is currently in the Y register, based on all possible branches. Yes, in the original illustrations, they are petit fours shaped as gift boxes, but I like the ones you created! So, wow, you really dug deep there! Have you created a public fork of the repo on GitHub? It would be the best way to share any modifications you come up with, and you can do pull requests, if you come up with any fixes or improvements.

As promised, here is the new demo video: Alice 2600: Alpha Release 0.1, "Cake or Death?"

I have the first two levels working now, just without sound for now. I have a release build up now: https://github.com/SlithyMatt/vcs-alice/releases/tag/v0.1a Soon to come, a new demo and a peek at the code on my YouTube channel.

Thanks! As soon as level 2 is fully working, I will make a preliminary release build on GitHub. Hopefully that'll be tonight, as it's very close right now, if you were to build it yourself.

Well, it's very much a work in progress. I am very close to making the second level fully playable, but later levels have not been implemented yet. Stay tuned!

I am working on an open-source homebrew adaptation of "Alice in Wonderland" for the 2600. I had posted my first demo on Facebook, but now I'm finally here! So, here's an update of my game with some new gameplay elements implemented: Alice 2600 Demo #2 - Down the Rabbit Hole! If you have any ideas about what could go into an Alice game, please feel free to reply to this thread or comment on YouTube. Thanks!