Kurt_Woloch
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Posts posted by Kurt_Woloch
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OK, I'm late again this week, but since the times have not been tallied up yet, here are my times for the past week...
Park Patrol (C-64)... 482 minutes (in 5 sessions)
Flash Gordon (2600)... 76 minutes (in 2 sessions)
Toyshop trouble (2600)... 76 minutes (in 2 sessions)
Doris (2600)... 16 minutes
Fonz (Nukey Shay's Enduro Hack) (2600)... 10 minutes
Pacman 4K (2600)... 3 minutes
Ballblazer demo (2600)... 2 minutes
Zoo Keeper Audio (2600)... 1 minute
The C-64 has been emulated on VICE, the 2600 has been emulated on Stella.
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OK, here's my best for this week... 17400.
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Well... maybe it was planned to turn Zeke into a monochrome character when he's standing sideways. Don't forget that when he's standing horizontally, there isn't an asymmetric playfield to draw on those scanlines, so they have more time to do Zeke's color stripes, for instance... while on the scanlines where the interior is (and Zeke moves on those scanlines when standing sideways), there may not be enough cycles to do any color striping at all.
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OK, here are my times for this week...
Toyshop Trouble (2600) 191 minutes (in 4 sessions)
Snake-Pit (C-64) 122 minutes
Space Treat Deluxe (2600) 22 minutes
Buck Rogers - Planet of Zoom (C-64) 20 minutes
Jack and the beanstalk (2600) 15 minutes (in 2 sessions)
Ballblazer Demo (2600) 3 minutes (in 2 sessions)
(in addition to some non-retro games... 77 minutes of "Pizza Hot" and 98 minutes of "ORF Ski Challenge 2009" in 2 sessions)
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Are there multiple versions of it? Then I think it's for the first version, which came out in 2001 or earlier.
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Now that's funny... I once made a Pac-Man map for Unreal Tournament.
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Added bass notes to "Greensleeves."Wow... the game keeps getting better and better. It would be great, actually, if a full verse of "Greensleeves" would be playing. Right now, the music repeats after half a verse of it.
And the ability to shoot the troll definitely adds to the game. However, I think it's a bit illogical that if you collect the watermelon, but don't use it during the screen you picked it up on, you enter the next screen empty-handed. I think it would be better if, once collected, the watermelon is yours until you shoot it (or get through Level 1 completely). This could help prevent stupid cases where you just can't get past the troll in time, since then you would be able to pick up the watermelon and reserve it for those cases. However, I'd also reward the player for picking up the watermelon, let's say with 50 points. If the player enters a new screen and still has the watermelon, that new screen should not contain another watermelon. Thus, no chance for scoring the points then. This could lead to different strategies... the player would have to weigh the advantage of scoring another 50 points on the next screen against the advantage of being armed in case the troll gets in the way.
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OK, here are my collected times for this week...
Buck Rogers - Planet of Zoom (2600)... 631 minutes (in 4 sessions)
Buck Rogers - Planet of Zoom (C-64, emulated in VICE)... 51 minutes
Toyshop trouble (2600)... 35 minutes
Buck Rogers - Planet of Zoom (Arcade version, emulated in MAME)... 15 minutes
Squared away (2600)... 2 minutes
Knight rider (2600)... 2 minutes
Jack & the beanstalk (2600)... 2 minutes
Ballblazer WIP (2600)... 1 minute
Total classic gaming time... 739 minutes (106 minutes per day)
All 2600 games emulated in Stella.
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Made it to level 13 this time and the enemies were all over the place.So what is the change from Level 12 to Level 13? I know that from Level 8 to 9, the "double enemies" on a line get added in the places where the hoppers are... what is different from Level 13 on?
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OK, here's a rather long explanation...
The lines on these two games are due to the fact that both games have an asymmetrical playfield. What does this mean?
As you may know, the Atari 2600 had very primitive hardware. The display chip called TIA had no means of doing DMA, so all screen changes had to be done by the CPU in each scanline where something should be changed. Without those changes, the TIA would only be able to display vertical bars on its own, and not even do a proper frame refresh.
Now there's another problem with the background graphics. The TIA has only got memory for half a line of background graphics, which can either be repeated or mirrored (Examples for repeated playfields would be some sections of Vanguard, while we have a mirrored playfield on River Raid). However, you can get a full line of different graphics by rewriting the background graphics registers on the fly. But the CPU only has a limited amount of time per scanline (74 cycles, as far as I know), and the rewriting of these graphics takes away a lot of this time.
Another oddity of the Atari 2600 is that it's only got 2 players (the same as "sprites" in other systems, but with an unlimited height). Now, if you need more than 2 objects on screen, and they should have different vertical positions (which is the case in both games), you have to "reposition" one of the players, which unfortunately also takes rather much time since the CPU has to wait until the electron beam has reached about the correct vertical position and then do a write to a TIA register. This, however, conflicts with the ability to write a full display line. So as far as I know, it's impossible to write a full display line and to reposition a player on the same scanline. That's why many programmers resorted to display their asymmetrical playfield only on some lines and leave other lines blank. As you can see, Super Cobra displays its background only every other line.
On Amidar, the problem is even a bit more complicated. Here they use 2 different foreground colors to denote the lines the objects can go and the filled-out areas. But the TIA can only display one foreground and one background color per scanline, so they display those colors on alternating lines. If you look closely, you can see that the lines don't even strictly alternate... there are single blue scanlines followed by one or more red scanlines. I believe this because of the need to reposition players which they wouldn't have if they were constantly changing between red and blue lines.
That's why both games display a bunch of lines instead of a solid display for their background.
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OK. this is my last entry for this week... because... I ROLLED IT!!!
Here are 2 screenshots... one taken shortly before the rolling, at 999475, with the game still in progress, the other one at the end of the game, at a score of 1021011, with the score displayed as 021011, but in YELLOW instead of white. Also, there are 2 vertical bars on the title screen which aren't there normally as far as I know.
I think I played this for over 6 hours today.
Here are some last tips... I now found out that what I said about the unsafety of flying in between a 2-enemy group only applies to certain groups where the two enemies are closer together than the posts normally are.
Also I found out how you can make some nice extra points:
- When you've passed the last post on the ground, the screen flashes for a few seconds before you enter space. During that time, you are invincible, but you still can fly through posts and hit additional saucers and hoppers. You should also accelerate to full speed while this is happening.
- When you've shot the mothership, the game will take a few seconds to add up the 40,000 points you get for it. While that happens, you also should accelerate to full speed, since that will give you a few hundred points more as you still get additional points for flying fast while the bonus gets added up.
Also I found out some more bugs... some work in favor of the player, and some don't. First, the counter which counts down the saucers you still have to hit sometimes counts a saucer twice (but you still only get the points for it once).
Then you'll maybe notice that if a level gets repeated, you get a bit more time to make it than the first time around. This is because the time line already gets refilled the moment the mothership is hit, and the time it takes to add the 40,000 points is already deducted from the time line. However, if the level gets repeated, the time line starts out full right at the start of it.
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Another improvement... 811977.
At later rounds (from Level 7 or so on) it might be better to fly slower and not make the level every time than to fly faster and make a lot of errors, i.e. lose a lot of ships. If you fly slowly, you'll still be able to make about 30000 points or more for each level that gets repeated, so with a 60% chance, you'll win back the ship you lost by not making the level. You should also try to make as few mistakes as possible in earlier levels where you still have ample time to meet your goal in order to win a lot of extra ships which you can use in later level for a lot of level repetitions and, thus, added points.
Another thing I found out is that when two enemies (saucers or hoppers) are beside each other (which happens from Level 9 on), it's not very safe to try to pass through between them. You should better try to eliminate one of the two in order to make enough room, or fly around the whole group.
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OK. Got a little higher today as well... 741548.
Meanwhile I noticed something about the space battles... if you keep your ship close to the middle, you won't get hit from behind by the saucers or the mothership, since they either come out on the left, flying a curve to the right, or vice-versa (they always fly in the same path, by the way... only sometimes from left to right, and sometimes from right to left, so the path is mirrored)
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OK, here's my best so far... 710203.
Actually, the manual here is wrong on many counts:
- The time line doesn't FLASH red, it only TURNS red when you have only 1/4 of your energy left.
- The rounds of battle are divided differently than described in the manual: You have two goals to meet. The first goal is flying through a certain number of electron posts. While you do this, you first have no enemies to shoot, then saucers, and then hoppers get added. However, this all happens while you're still on your way to your target number. The second target is shooting a certain number of saucers in space. If only one saucer is left, the mothership will come out instead.
- They talk about five skill levels in the game. I don't know what they mean by a skill level, though... there are (supposedly) 15 levels with *some* rounds each, but where are the skill levels?
- The mother ship is worth 40,000 points, not 20,000 as described in the manual.
- Every 50,000 points you do receive an extra ship, but NO full time line. You only receive a full time line after you defeated the mother ship, or if the level gets restarted because you ran out of time.
Some of those errors may come from the writers of the manual not taking into account what's different in the 2600 version compared to other versions. In the C-64 version, for instance, there ARE multiple rounds on the ground where you have to meet a target in each round. However, in that version, hitting saucers and hoppers on the ground also counts towards your goal, which is not the case in the 2600 version. The arcade version seems to be another different thing, since it contains some stages not present in any home version. Just played it for a comparison... the arcade version contains 8 "sectors" (which are the "rounds" in the 2600 version) per round (which are "levels" in the 2600 version), some of them play in space, some play on the planet surface, and some play in a sort of tunnel. The timer bar gets refilled at the start of each sector, but when it counts down to zero, the sector simply ends, and you don't lose anything... if, however, you make your target before the time runs out, you get a bonus for the time you left over. I think Sega settled for a simpler round structure for their home versions, which got further simplified on the 2600 version.
Sadly, there's a portion of luck involved in this game too. The collision detection doesn't seem to work too well... sometimes, especially in later rounds, you suddenly lose a ship although you didn't touch anything. Contrary to that, you sometimes get hit from behind by oncoming saucers or the mothership. However, sometimes the saucers fly right through you without harming you, but not always. I didn't manage to find out if there's a pattern to this.
The farthest I came was Round 10, which actually appears as "ROUND 8C" in the game. I don't know if this is an emulator-related bug (I use Stella again).
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OK, I managed to improve my high score again by doing an additional trick I didn't mention yet...
this trick is giving up rounds that are pretty hopeless instead of hoping to be able to finish them, and by doing so, scoring some more points on the timer bonus.
I figured if I only have 1 full bar left and 3000-4000 units on the timer, there's only a slim chance this bar will turn into a bonus bar, so I'll better end the round by shooting the last bar "alive". A similar thing happens if there are many closed bars, but you can reach only few of them, so the others are useless if they turn to bonus bars because you can't shoot them. In the game where this high-score happened, I lost my last two lives consecutively, but scoring an additional 5000-7000 points on each of them through the timer bonus. Thus my new high score of 49560.
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OK, here's some feedback. Basically, the "eat something and get bigger" game genre is already covered by "Go Fish!" on the Atari 2600. But your game offers some interesting twists on it. Here are some suggestions to make it even better:
1. Introduce more player sizes. Right now, you start out as a 4-pixel ball, which grows to 8 pixels, but after that, you immediately go up to 16, and then to 32 bytes. What if you put the double-size sprite down to the 4-pixel version again, which grows gradually, and the same with the quadruple-size sprite?
2. Right now, the game seems to be "strictly timed", that is, there's no way to extend the time. Here's my suggestion how to improve this:
- Make the player consume "energy". The bigger the ball gets, the more energy it consumes. Let's say it consumes 1 energy point per second in its smallest size, and that goes up by one point per second with each growth. The objects you eat give you back energy points, depending on their size, let's say 1 point for the dot, 2 points for the roll (or whatever it is), and 3 points for the square. This way you could play the longer the quicker you make it to gobble up relevant objects.
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One thing that could be done is to write a compiler/linker that could compile SmartBasic source code, but even that wouldn't work because of the special graphic modes available on the Adam computer (which combine weird pixel displays with 4 lines of text at the bottom of the screen) that are not natively supported by the ColecoVision graphic chip.
I don't understand that... if the Adam essentially has the same graphics chip as the Colecovision, how can there be graphics modes on the Adam not supported by the Colecovision? (How do these graphics modes work?)
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Um... OK. Right now, the triangle does nothing. What it actually should do is to deflect the ball when it's hit by it. But how the deflection works should depend on which side of the triangle gets hit... let's assume that X is the horizontal motion (up / down), and Y is the vertical motion (left / right).
Then, when the ball hits the lower side of the triangle: Xnew = -Xold; Ynew = Yold
When it hits the upper left side: Xnew = -Yold; Ynew = -Xold
When it hits the upper right side: Xnew = Yold; Ynew = Xold
I hope that was clear enough...
Actually, the square the player controls reminds me of the player sprite in "Centipede". How if you could earn points by hitting the playfield objects with the circle, which would disappear, and new objects would appear at the same time?
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OK, here are my times for the past week. Sorry if I'm a bit late again...
Ram it: 518' (in 4 sessions)
Jack and the beanstalk: 36'
Mountain king: 15'
RollUp: 5'
Squared away: 1'
Knight rider 2600: 1'
Fonzie: 1'
All games played on an emulated 2600 in Stella.
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I was always interested in the inner workings of computers. I already programmed the C-64 in assembly language back in 1985, and I drew up mock-up screenshots of different games. For instance, I drew up a mockup screenshot of the non-existing Atari 2600 version of "Penguin Wars" and other games back in the 1980's. Sadly, I didn't know about some of the 2600's limitations back then. For instance, the "Marble Madness" mockup screenshot implied that you could do a non-symmetrical background in 4 colors in a resolution of 40x96 on the Atari 2600. The mockup of "Penguin Wars" looks a bit more doable...
Of course, when the Internet came up, and with it accurate information about the Atari 2600's inner workings back in 1998, I absorbed it quickly. And since I already knew 6502 assembly from the C-64, I decided to try something in this direction too.
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Let the circle jump around the screen (physics similar to how the square moves, or similar to how the bubbles in "Pang" move). The circle should be deflected by your player (similar to "Reactor") and by the triangle. The way it is deflected depends on which side of which object it deflects from (similar to Billard or to "Jinks" on the Amiga). Every time it touches the ground, you lose 2 points... if it touches the ceiling, you lose 1 point. If it touches the side walls, however, you gain 1 point.
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9 To 5
in Atari 2600
The Fall Guy would have been the 2600 version of Squish 'Em. In the early days TCF used to take old Sirius titles and put movie licenses on them. Sometimes this worked alright, sometimes not.Yeah, there's a mock-up screenshot from a CES press kit that confirms this.
I'd like to see this mock-up screenshot... I wonder how close it comes to the actual Squish'em 2600 (homebrew) version that has been released.
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Yeah, I think if there was a bit less randomness involved, the game could be definitely more fun. So, I'd...
- show the bonus bars in fixed intervals rather than in random ones
- do some kind of fixed determination of the growth rate of the bars - such as each second 5 randomly chosen bars will grow by one block each
- award extra lives every 10000 points
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OK, I managed to improve my score now to... 42830.
By now I've got a pretty good strategy of playing the game, although it's a bit too much based on luck to my tastes...
First, I always try to kill all the bars that haven't grown yet (so they only need 2 shots each), and out of those, I first kill those on one side, and then those on the other one. This decreases the chance that I get caught by a line which grew to full length from both sides, forming a barrier.
Then, when a bar is near the middle, I try to get it back somewhat. The highest priority, however, is getting all the bonus bars, since they give additional time. And actually, the higher the timer is, the slower the bars grow! So if I manage to get the timer above 5000, the growing action will slow down considerably, and I have a much bigger chance of shooting back all the growing bars before they hit the middle.
Now comes the luck factor... sometimes, on the same round, the bars grow slower, and sometimes they grow faster. Also, sometimes the bonus bars come out very often, and sometimes they don't come out at all. This way, you can lose even the first round if the bars grow very fast, and you get no bonus bars, so you don't manage to clear the round before the timer runs out. I'll usually reset the game if that happens to me in the first round.
But generally, with each round, not only the bars grow faster, but also the bonus bars come out more often, even if they don't last for that long, but that's fine if you still can catch most of them. This way, on later rounds, you can actually push up the timer up to 9900, which is impossible on the lower rounds where the bonus bars just don't come up often enough. This also means that if you screw up on a lower round so that a bar has hit the middle, you don't have a high chance of still winning the round, since for still winning the round you'd need every bar that has hit the middle turn to bonus bars one after another (unless the game accidentally turns an already fully grown bar to a not full one, which also happens from time to time). However, the chance for that to happen increases with every round because the bonus bars come out more often, and you also accumulate more time to hit the last bars as bonus bars. But alas, so increases the chance you get into that situation, and also the chance you get into a blockage.
So, if the bars start to grow so fast you can't kill them all before they reach the middle, your priority should be to prevent a blockage by holding back those bars whose other side is already fully grown. If you mess up and get shut out of a portion of the screen, you won't be able to shoot the bars in that region even if they turn to bonus bars, because you can't reach them.
So far for my tips and experiences...
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Stranded Game...
in Atari 2600
Posted
Hmmm... an 8x8 grid? Then it could maybe be done with the kernel of Atari's Othello... as far as I know, this kernel actually allows for each grid position being in a different color.