Jump to content
Have You Played Atari Today?
2600|5200|7800|Lynx|Jaguar|Forums|Store  

Kurt_Woloch

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content Count

    1,781

  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by Kurt_Woloch

  2. Posted

    Yes, I think the original allows you to make corners faster. If you take a turn, you can take the turn a few pixels (I think 3-4 pixels) before you reach the actual intersection, while the ghosts don't do that.

     

    I've been playing this some more, and I actually got through a few more boards than usual (yeah, I suck at Pac-Man...). One thing I noticed is that if I get that red ghost on my tail, I can't get rid of him. He always catches me. Is it just me, or did the original allow you to make corners faster than the ghosts did? I don't remember being run down like that - and this is in clear spaces, I'm not eating dots.

     

    But man, this game is excellent. I'm really enjoying it! Once again, excellent, excellent work!

     

    -Ian

  3. Posted

    I'd actually vote for the Commodore 64 as a starting platform. It's very well documented (even the manual that came with it shows some kind of memory map and documents all memory locations of the video and sound chips), and you don't have to do too much to make anything appear on screen, since everything is memory mapped. Also, you can start programming in BASIC and only write short assembler routines which you call from BASIC.

  7. Posted

    Well... I just played that Alien's Return game, and while it's true that there are many similarities to Turtles, there are also differences (to the arcade version of Turtles):

     

    - There are no enemies on screen as you start a round. In Turtles, you start out with 3 enemies already on screen (more in later rounds)

    - There are no question marks displayed, thus you don't see which rooms you've already visited

    - Not every collected piece gets accepted... it's possible that pieces aren't accepted (if it's the wrong one) and you have to bring them back to where you picked them up

    - In Turtles, the enemies are just as fast as you

    - In Turtles, not all the enemies instantly home in at you... they only get smarter after a time, but get dumb again if trapped by a bomb.

    - In Turtles, the enemies can't overlap... before they bump into each other, they reverse direction

     

    And the most important difference is... there's background music in the arcade version of Turtles!

     

    And have you seen the horrible flicker on Alien's Return? I suppose it's just as horrible as in Pac-Man (no reposition logic at all).

  8. Posted · Edited by Kurt_Woloch

    OK, here are my times for this week:

     

    Park Patrol (C-64) 468 minutes (in 6 sessions)

    Subterranea (2600) 37 minutes

    Ooze 0.85 (2600) 4 minutes

    Pig Perambulator (2600) 3 minutes

    NOBeta1b (MausGames Attempt at Ooze) (2600) 2 minutes

    Jack and the beanstalk (2600) 1 minute

    Ballblazer demo (2600) 1 minute

     

    Maybe I should explain why I'm still playing Park Patrol that much... I'm desperately trying to roll it, but didn't succeed yet. I got close, though, at a max of 900000 points. Unfortunately, reaching 999990 points takes nearly 2 hours, hence the long playing times. However, the difficulty level tops off at Level 6, it doesn't get any harder after that. But there's still a chance to screw up a game even if you've got plenty of extra lives because you've also got to watch the supply, which from level 3 on gets stolen by the ants. You start off each level with 9000 units of supply, but 1000 of those get stolen about every 20 seconds. The supply also gets decreased by 1000 if you lose a life or go into the house to fill up your own supply. If the supply reaches 0, it will be game over on the next life you lose, even if you've still got spare lives left. This is usually how games end for me...

     

    As always, the C-64 was emulated in VICE, and the 2600 was emulated in Stella.

  9. Posted

    Hmmm... the graphics on this look rather simple. Reminds me a bit of this game...

     

    Here's an idea... don't know if it's possible in Batari Basic, though... since the player on bottom and the pig on top never overlap, it should be possible to use both players for each of the characters (thus providing better graphics), and reposition them somewhere in between the top and the bottom.

  10. Posted

    Ummm... in case you didn't notice, the Atarimania page linked to above contains a ROM download for this... so you can check it out for yourself.

     

    According to Atarimania "Although finished, this game was never released."

     

    Is this true? That would be killer if it was! Then we would just have to hope someone comes across it somwhow.

  11. Posted

    Yes, I know... this game hasn't been emulated yet, since apparently no one got hold of a tape of it. But that was back in 1981, 28 years ago.

     

    First, there was the Data East game "Manhattan", actually running on their DECO system.

    I'd kill for that. I've always wanted it for my DECO cab. I don't think it's been dumped or released either.

     

    Tempest

  12. Posted

    That reminds me of my attempted port of Tetrinet to the G7400 (the European, released version of the non-released Magnavox Odyssey^3).

    The G7400 has multiple levels of memory with ascending size but, also, ascending difficulty of accessing it...

     

    1. The 8048's registers (R0-R7)... always available

    2. The 8048's internal RAM... 32 usable bytes, only accessible by pointing a register to the RAM location

    3. External RAM... 128 bytes, only accessible by pointing a register to the RAM location, AND before doing that you have to set the port so that the write goes to the RAM (since the address space is shared with the external RAM, the video chip and the teletext chip, and you have to select where to read or write from first)

    4. Video RAM... several kilobytes, but only accessable by defining characters or writing them to the screen on the Teletext chip - no way of accessing the memory directly

     

    Because of those added difficulty levels, I tried to pack as many of the game variables as possible into the internal RAM. However, instead of displaying falling bricks as they should be, every time a brick came down to a halt, the program virtually "exploded", putting characters all across the screen. After a long time of debugging, it turned out to be the following error:

     

    If a brick went down, the program went into a routine that brought up the next brick (the line checking wasn't implemented yet). However that routine took longer than usual, so processing time exceeded the time needed to draw a frame on screen (partially due to the slow access to the Teletext chip's screen RAM, where each access takes over 100 yS in average). Normally, I was waiting for the next frame to start and then executed the game calculations. However, in between that, the interrupt happened, and the interrupt routine got called, and also trashed some CPU registers and some internal RAM locations. As long as the game calculations didn't exceed the frame, it was all fine, but when they were not finished at the time the interrupt routine kicked in, some temporary variables (most notably a loop counter which counted down the bricks from 3 to 0... or up?) got trashed, and everything went mad from that on. The solution to that problem was:

    1. not to use those locations which got trashed by the interrupt routine

    2. to spread the long routine across several frames... which I planned to do, but then I didn't continue work on that game. However, this point would be necessary in order not to influence the speed of the game by the actions of one player, which would cause the game to run at an inconsistent speed for the other player for no apparent reason.

     

     

     

    2000-ish, platform game engine for the nintendo gameboy colour.

     

    works fine, music plays, no graphical corruption.... oh wait.

     

    player is running left.

     

    so i went over the main loop, the input routines, checked the scrolling code for good measure and blew 2 days going mental at the z80-ish monstrosity I had created until i reached the point the music was making me borderline psychotic and commented it out.

     

    problem solved.

     

    reinstate music - problem reappears.

     

    Turns out that after collecting the input, but before processing it the interrupt routine that called the music driver kicked in every frame. Guess which register I hadn't stacked on entry/exit? :ponder:

  13. Posted

    There are a few games I've seen that are pretty rare (which I didn't know back then, of course...)

     

    First, there was the Data East game "Manhattan", actually running on their DECO system.

     

    At the same time, in another arcade, I saw "Sheriff" by Nintendo. It was the color version as shown here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheriff_(arcade_game).

    Actually, I didn't know Nintendo was a company back then, so I thought the title was "Sheriff Nintendo". Of course, I learned better not too long afterwards when Nintendo put out the Game&Watch games.

     

    One of the later games I saw I would consider rare was "Parasol Stars" by Taito, the sequel to "Bubble Bobble" and "Rainbow Islands". As I learned later, there really wasn't an arcade version of that game, rather they put the NEC PC Engine version (or was it Neo Geo?) into the arcade.

     

    Other games I saw which I didn't consider THAT rare were "Turtles" by Konami (which actually there were some home versions of by Entex and Philips), "Splash" (can't remember the company name), "Super Space Invaders '91" and "Super Burger Time".

     

    Most of them I saw in the Prater of Vienna, which is a big amusement park which is open all year long (but more attractive from April to October than in other months, when many of the rides are closed). It contains about 100 rides, arcades and restaurants. In the early 80's, there were about 10 arcades in there with video games (and some more which only had gambling machines). From the mid-80's on, however, they closed down one by one, and today there are only 3 or 4 of them left... and others have converted from video games to gambling, such as the "Fortuna Halle" at the entrance near the Praterstern, which converted to gambling in the early 90's.

  14. Posted

    Actually, this game (in both versions presented) reminds me of the released game "Ram it" by 20th Century Fox (if I got it right) which has been played on the Hi-Score competition recently... only that in Ram It!, bars grow from the left and right instead of from the top.

  17. Posted

    OK... here (again a bit late... unfortunately) are my times for the past week. Playing time this time has gone down considerably since I found a new hobby of mapping in Openstreetmaps.org.

     

    Park Patrol (C-64) 185 minutes (in 3 sessions)

    Fatal Run (2600) 39 minutes

    Toyshop Trouble (2600) 34 minutes

    Jack and the beanstalk (2600) 11 minutes

    Conquest of Mars Rev. 2 (2600) 11 minutes

    Spider Fighter (2600) 6 minutes

    Solar Nexus (2600) 5 minutes

    Tint (2600) 3 minutes

    Ballblazer Demo (2600) 2 minutes

     

    As always, the C-64 was emulated in VICE and the 2600 in Stella.

  19. Posted

    OK, here's some ideas how the game could be improved:

     

    - Start out with the difficulty a bit easier, that is, with the planet moving only half as fast as it does now, and then make it pick up speed gradually

    - Display the player's score after the game is over (right now, it's reset to 000000 immediately when the "MAUS" screen gets shown again)

  21. Posted

    OK... to specifically answer the question about Spider Fighter:

     

    Basically, in Spider Fighter, things are pretty much zoned out. Here are the zones I found, from top to bottom:

     

    Zone 1: Enemy's reserve (one player used)

    Zone 2: Fruits (one player for fruits standing still, second player for a fruit carried away by the mothership)

    Zone 3: Upper enemy (one player for the upper enemy, second player for the mother ship)

    Zone 4: Lower enemy (one player for the lower enemy, second player for the mother ship)

    Zone 5: Your ship (don't know if any enemies come down that far)

    Zone 6: Your reserve ships (up to two players used for up to 6 ships)

    Zone 7: Activision logo (both players used)

     

    So you see, you never need more than two players in any zone here, and the zones are fixed in where they begin. In between them, there probably are a few scanlines where there's time to reposition players that aren't able to cross the boundary.

     

    The only mystery remaining is how they make it to have two streams of shots (yours and the enemy's) in different colors, that is, different colors than all other objects. If worse comes to worse, we'd have 2 objects and 2 shots on a scanline, each in a different color, which would be one more object than the 2600 has color registers for. But apparently, they used the ball for all the shots, so they have to interleave the scanlines the shots are using so that a bunch of scanlines are reserved for the enemies shots, the next bunch for your shots, and so on. When shots travel, they skip the scanlines that aren't reserved for them.

  22. Posted

    Here are my times for the past week...

     

    Park Patrol (C-64, emulated in VICE)... 391 minutes in 8 sessions (will probably go down now since the last game already lasted for 51 minutes)

    Doom2600 (Dark Chambers graphics hack) (2600)... 99 minutes

    Toyshop Trouble (2600)... 37 minutes

    Galaxian (2600)... 19 minutes

    Arctic Landtran (2600)... 2 minutes

    Spider Game (2600)... 1 minute

     

    All 2600 games were emulated in Stella.

     

    Aside from that, I played a contemporary game, ORF Ski Challenge, for 28 minutes.

  23. Posted

    Hmmm.... well, here's a rough calculation:

     

    The 6502 steps through the code one byte per cycle, but stops if data access has to be done. Also there are some instructions which take an additional cycle to process something internal (for instance, INX and INY take 2 cycles although they are only 1 byte long and don't transfer data over the bus).

    So let's assume that the average instruction is 2 bytes long and takes 1 additional cycle for a data transfer. In this case, the average instruction would take 3 cycles to process. Since a cycle on the 2600 takes 840 nanoseconds, we have one instruction occuring every 2,52 microseconds, which would give about 397 KIPS. But that's only a rough estimation.

  24. Posted

    Ah, Galaxian... this was one of the first arcade games I played. I can still remember going to the Shopping City Süd (a big shopping center south of Vienna) with my parents back in 1980, where there was a remote controlled robot called "Klatu" acting. Anyway, after Klatu's show was over, there was this Galaxian cocktail machine standing around somewhere in the mall, and a technician was there to fix it. We were watching, and in the end he turned the machine on, and before he left, he gave us about 15 free credits on it by means of short-circuiting the wires of the coin mechanism directly. So we took turns playing Galaxian for a while until the credits were used up. I still have this on a tape, I had my portable cassette recorder with me to record Klatu. Each game lasted for about 1-2 minutes (the arcade version is rather hard), and needless to say, I played Galaxian often later on other arcade machines in other locations, most notably the "Las Vegas" arcade in the Vienna Prater. I can still remember the background music they played there, most notably "Funkytown" by Lipps Inc., "Knock on wood" by Amii Stewart and "Matador" by Garland Jeffreys. This was in late 1980...

     

    Then we bought the Atari 2600 version in mid-1984 for an already discounted price of ATS 598.- (full price cartridges were up to ATS 1398.-). So I own this game, but it's the PAL version which is probably a bit slower than the NTSC one, so I still emulated it on Stella for the sake of the HSC.

     

    Got to Level 13 already, with 28090 points. post-8393-1233776251_thumb.png

  25. Posted · Edited by Kurt_Woloch

    post-8393-1233612487_thumb.pngOK, this is my entry for this week... 109880. From the 6th city on, the gameplay gets much harder in that the debris fields start moving so fast that they catch up with you easily and you're practically constantly surrounded by debris.

     

    Actually, Flash Gordon was the first movie I ever saw in a cinema back in early 1982 at the age of 10... but I can't remember anything remotely being similar to this game being in the movie. Actually, your ship's movements are pretty unrealistic when compared to the surrounding's movements... the background graphics somehow seem to scroll, but your enemies still keep the same speed relative to you no matter which direction you're flying.

AtariAge
Forums
Store
General
Follow AtariAge

Copyright ©1998-2021 AtariAge

×
×
  • Create New...