Kurt_Woloch
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Posts posted by Kurt_Woloch
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Ok, my score here is not very good, but I don't want to play any longer...
32716.
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hi how about the texas instruments TI 99/4A home cpu. i read it a 16 bit machine and the games are all 36k!!!haven't seen and homebrews for that one.
No, that's seriously wrong. In fact I don't know of any game that was 36k... but maybe I'm wrong here. Anyway, I know of many games for the TI that were only 8K (for instance the Romox games), and many that were 16K (most of the Atarisoft ones).
As for homebrews... well, that depends on what exactly you would consider a "homebrew". If you mean homebrew CARTRIDGES (Command Modules in TI slang), then you may be right. But TI offered some possibilities to program their machine. If you had the console only, you could only program in BASIC (and save your creations on tape, if you had the optional tape adapter). If you bought the minimemory module or the rather pricey expansion box with the 32K expansion, you could also write games in Assembler. And there were several small companies who sold disk-based games for the TI-99. For instance, I have @APESOFT's "Cerberus". Now the question is if you could consider this a homebrew since, of course, you could consider @APESOFT a company... but I'm not sure if it was.
If you count games programmed in BASIC or EXTENDED BASIC as homebrews, then I'm sure there are literally thousands or millions of them... I have personally written about 100 programs for the TI-99 in EXTENDED BASIC.
And by the way, even professional companies did some "hacks". If you listen to the sounds of Atarisoft's TI-99 version of "Protector" closely, they will strangely remind you of those of TI's own "Tombstone City", whose source code was released on the pack-in disks for their "Editor/Assembler" module, which you needed to write machine language programs for the expanded TI-99.
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Yes, it's looking good so far. But some more comments to those screenshots:
1. The blue region below the mountains doesn't have to turn grey when the foot comes down because it can actually be drawn with the background color which then changes to black. So blue = background (stays blue), grey = dino mom's foot (turns grey).
2. Dino mom's foot could actually come in multiple colors. At least the toes could have a different color than the main foot. Since toes and leg are divided by a row of black pixels, this would look pretty realistic... there still is no scanline where the toe and leg regions overlap.
3. The solid wood graphics don't look too much like wood. Look at the C-64 screenshots... the wood is not drawn solidly in the original game, and I think it wouldn't make much of a difference doing it like that as well in the 2600 version.
4. I would do a blank line between the floors and the eggs / rocks. Why? You would need some cycles to reposition the players between those areas in order to display the eggs and wood (or, alternatively, above the floor, but in this case the players wouldn't be able to touch the floor).
Then I thought about how much flicker would be involved in the screenshot as you're showing it now.
On the upper level, at least two of the objects shown (two stacks of eggs and one wood) would have to flicker 30 Hz because there are only two players to display them. You have the same problem on the second and on the fourth level. The third level could be displayed without a flicker.
One little detail would be the spiders and their threads. I'd display the spider threads with missiles and the ball, which unfortunately means that they're changing color depending on where they are. But such is life (and that can be seen on other 2600 games as well, such as Jungle Hunt or Realsports Tennis).
Another idea would be to limit the "grid". In the Apple II and C-64 versions, there are 4 horizontal levels, divided into 12 spaces where either eggs, rocks, flowers, wood or ladders could be. If you limit those to 10 for the Atari 2600 version, you could space them apart by 4 playfield pixels which could make things much more convenient. Among other things, you could try to reduce flicker if you have the multiple copies in the same row (such as eggs and wood) to displaying them using multiple copies of a player object. Even multiple, different sized, stacks of eggs could be displayed that way by changing the number of copies of the player on the fly. Might not always work, but sometimes it just might.
Oh, and I've created some screenshots of the Apple II version for comparison (since shots of that version can't be found anywhere on the net). Note that in that version, there are actually two regions of mountains... one upper, richly colored, and one lower, only sparsly colored (that's where the spiders are). Food for thought maybe?
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OK, some feedback here...
1. OK, some things are missing, most obviously the sound, the scoring and life counter. I won't comment further on that...
2. The game seems to run rather slowly, at least on my PC. If all robots are still there and shooting, it does only 4-5 frames per second, though it does speed up when most of them have been killed. And I don't have a slow PC... I've got an Intel Quadcore 4x2.4 GHz one.
3. You didn't tell us that we need a recent version of CYGWIN1.DLL and GLUT32.DLL for it to run. This also isn't mentioned in the documentation. Speaking of documentation, there's no README file either. But such things (dependencies that are needed which don't come with the download) should be mentioned, in my opinion, so that the user doesn't get confused.
4. There's a probability that you start the game or a new room and immediately get shot by a robot. Maybe the robots should be prevented from shooting for the first 1-2 seconds you're in a room so that the player has a chance to get out of danger.
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One console that hasn't been mentioned yet is the Creativison, a console made in Hong Kong which coupled a 6502 CPU with a TMS9928 video chip and a TI sound chip. That console was sold in Austria and Italy, though I don't know if it made it to the USA.
Anyway... as far as I know there has no homebrew game been written for it yet. There is some homebrew hardware (a multicart), and I managed to write a graphics and sound demo which also has been put on the multicart, but it isn't a game since it doesn't accept any user input.
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Well, for Ms. Pac-Man, I have my own memories how this turned out...
The first home version of Mrs. Pac-Man I saw reviewed in a magazine (I think it was back in 1983 here in Austria) actually was the 7800 version. They talked about it as one of the first games for the 7800, and how close it came to the arcade because they used the original programmer from the arcade version (Bally). Of course, as we know today, the 7800 actually wasn't released until much later. Anyway, only after I read that mag article, I saw the 2600 version of Ms. Pac-Man, which wasn't that arcade perfect, but nonetheless was a huge step up to the 2600 version of Pac-Man. And in fact, this holds true for most home versions of Ms. Pac-Man vs. Pac-Man. On the C-64, Pac-Man by Atarisoft (which is only 8K in size) only has mono-colored ghosts (and is generally very close to the Atari 8-bit version of Pac-Man), while Ms. Pac-Man has got multicolored ghosts, an attract mode, all the original mazes and all the intermissions. The same holds true for the Atari 8-bit version of Ms. Pac-Man. On the ZX-Spectrum, the original Pac-Man moves all characters in 8-pixel steps (!), while in Ms. Pac-Man they move smoothly. The only exception seems to be the TI-99, where Pac-Man itself wasn't that bad already, and Ms. Pac-Man seems to be based on it, having the same ghost sprites etc. (just like the Ms. Pac-Man arcade version is based on the original Pac-Man machine), thus not being such a big step up.
Ms. Pac-Man, because of Atari's attempt to mimic the introduction of the ghosts and Ms. Pac-Man, and also the marquee-type display with the ghosts substituted for the marquee lights, from the arcade original's auto-play mode. -
OK, here's my best so far... 901.
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It's been a while...Anyone having an idea for dino moms foot?
Well, it all depends on how much flicker you can stand. Obviously, there often are too many objects on each scanline to do without flicker. Another problem is that you can lay down your eggs anywhere, so if there are multiple stacks of eggs on one scanline, you probably need multiple players to display them. Same problem with the wood that can be laid down anywhere.
As for Dino mom's foot... on the mockup screenshot the playfield is already asymmetric, so I would just overlay that asymmetric playfield with the foot, if possible. The foot should be 48 pixels wide on the 2600, which corresponds to 12 background pixels. I'd draw the foot with the background graphics and have all other background graphics on those scanlines change color to the color of the foot. Alternatively, you could use two players with quadruple width, but then flickering would be almost unavoidable (not that it would be avoidable if you don't do it like this...).
This could be accomodated by a special version of the kernal which doesn't change the foreground colors as it normally would, but instead takes the foot into account when writing to the PF registers. For this application, the foot could be confined to a few positions which don't make too much trouble (i.e. covering a full PF register and half of another one). The foot animation could also be simplified so that the foot raises and lowers a half or a full playfield level at a time.
I think it would make sense to divide the playfield in regions, as usual for Atari 2600 games:
- sky region with typical Atari 2600 mountainscape and incoming spiders
- 4 main regions which are subdivided as follows:
- region for high flying objects
- region for low flying objects
- platform, eggs, wood and rocks
- status and scoring region
Between each region, as usual, there would be an opportunity to reposition players.
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Oh, I see- the Fairchild console only offers a few choices. Yellow isn't even available?No, there are only four possible color combinations which can be changed line by line. So each pixel line may use one of the following hardwired color palettes:
1. black - white
2. light green - red - blue - green
3. light blue - red - blue - green
4. light grey - red - blue - green
These are all the colors and all the palettes you get (the colors are not necessaraly coded in the order I gave).
Are RPGs (simple ones) possible on the system? Or is there enough memory?I think maybe simple ones may be possible. On one hand, the Channel F has a bitmapped screen (though in rather low resolution). But as far as I know, video memory is write-only. I don't know of any documented way of reading from video memory, which means that video memory can't be used for storage. So the only RAM you have (unless there's extra RAM in the cartridge) are the 64 bytes that are internal to the CPU. Which is not very much.
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OK, I've tried to do a video on YouTube. It's not very hi-res, but here you go...
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OK, here's mine... 1043. This was my third game, and it already took close to 15 minutes, so I doubt I'll be playing this again...
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OK, here's mine... 50093.
I must say that this is really a fun game, reminiscent of such classics as "Toy bizarre", "Manic Miner" or better yet, "Bounty Bob strikes back". It also reminds me a bit of Bomb Jack. I also like the cute face movements of the snowman character. And the fireballs... well, that's the way they should have been drawn in Donkey Kong.
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OK, here's my best... 25100.
Here's some of my experiences, also containing some tips on how to play the game:
The game seems to be more watered down than necessary from a technical standpoint. The music is awful, the graphics and enemies get pretty repetitive after a short time, and I also don't understand why all enemies you shot simply disappear instead of properly exploding.
Like in other Atari 2600 games, this game is divided in "zones" which are small horizontal strips. About 3 of those zones are shown on screen at one time. Actually, you can see them pretty clearly because the background graphics of the field repeat in each of the zones (as long as you are on the open field, that is). Each zone only contains one enemy or building (or an item), which is confined to that zone. This means that once an enemy appears on screen, it will stay on pretty much the same height (relative to the background). This also means that if you've cleared a zone, no further enemy will appear until you advance in the game so that the next zone gets visible (which effectively pauses the game as long as you don't do anything).
And there are only so many different things than can appear in a zone:
1. a soldier
2. an enemy tank
3. an enemy helicopter
4. a red tank you can jump into
5. an item
6. a building
7. a barrier to shoot
8. the boss
I'll tell you how to deal with each of those. Generally, it's best not to advance too far at a time as long as you're not in a tank. Try to have only one enemy on screen and deal with that one before advancing to the next one.
Oh, and there will only be a maximum of 2 enemy shots on screen at a time.
Soldiers:
Soldiers run back and forth in their zone. They can shoot at various angles. The three most important ones are straight down, and in an about 45 degree angle down/right and down/left. They always start out relatively close to the middle, so if you stay close to the middle as well, they won't ever use any other angle to shoot at you. These are three angles you can also shoot at as a soldier. If they shoot at you in other angles, you're probably in trouble. Either you hit them by shooting up straight or by shooting up diagonally. For this you should get a feel of when you're in the correct line of fire to hit them with those diagonal shots. In that, you are aided by the diagonal shots they fire back at you.
If you're a tank, you can either run over the soldiers or shoot them with your grenades. For the first tank, it's better to run them over, however, on tank 2 and 3 you can also shoot them. I'll explain why in a moment.
Enemy tanks:
They move in a similar way to the soldiers, but only shoot left, right and down. You have to hit them with a grenade to destroy them. Since you have to hold the button down a moment to fire a grenade, they generally are harder to hit than soldiers, but on the other hand, they are bigger and also have a pretty generous collision detection.
When approaching them in a tank, you shouldn't get too near because they can shoot you too with their grenades.
Enemy helicopters:
These also move in a similar way to the soldiers and are able to shoot in the same directions, however, you have to kill them with a grenade. Like the soldiers, they shoot normal shots, so they won't be able to harm you if in a tank, you just have to avoid colliding with them which is deadly. If you're in a tank on a bridge, and they are far enough to the left or right from the bridge, the best way to hit them is from the side since that way you don't have to wait for them to come into your line of fire.
Red tanks:
Well, this is the one you can enter and drive. If you drive a tank, you shoot grenades (no normal shots), and you can only be harmed by grenades, not by normal shots. But you can only run and shoot horizontally and vertically, not diagonally.
If you're in the first tank, it's advisable to run over the soldiers, however by shooting them, you can save time in order to advance further in the game before you have to leave the tank.
In the 2nd and 3rd tank, however, you should rather shoot the soldiers than run them over, because by hurrying up, you can reach the "S" item waiting for you, and with it you get another full tank of fuel which prolongs your time in the tank considerably.
Be careful when your fuel supply runs low. Try to have a screen clear of enemies when you get out of the tank so that you won't get hit instantly by their shots or grenades. And, of course, get out of the tank in time!
Once you're out of the tank, by the way, you will again have 99 shots to fire (if I'm not mistaken).
Items:
There's only one item here, which gives you a new supply of 99 shots, grenades and fuel units. Those also occupy a zone.
Buildings:
These stand still, but shoot at you like the soldiers do (I think there are also ones that don't shoot). You have to destroy them with a grenade.
Barriers:
You have to hit barriers with a grenade. Touching them is deadly.
The boss:
I only saw him once, but he seems pretty easy to kill with a grenade. Expect to see him at a score of well over 20.000 points for the first time.
Once you've cleared the boss, the game starts over, but now the enemy shots are twice as fast! This is where I lost all of my lives quickly.
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I'm not very good at this... 467.
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OK, I managed to slightly improve my score... to 98550.
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OK, I've played it now, and here's my best so far... 74350. I must say that the 2600 version was the first one I ever played (back then I was going to school, and we used to swap Atari cartridges in class for some days... and one classmate had this game and swapped it against my Sea Monster cartridge). After that I played various other versions and clones of it and forgot what was different about the 2600 version... and of course, there are a lots of differences. Other than the obvious ones in the graphics, the enemies also behave differently. For instance, there always seems to be only a few large groups of enemies which always move right and left synchronously, such as most of the landers, and all of the mutants in the mutant waves. Therefore, it's impossible to get more than 4-5 enemies on the screen and blast them together with a smart bomb, unlike in the arcade version where it's possible to group many more of them and destroy them at once.
The physics also seems to be quite illogical, compared to the arcade version where it seems more or less believable. And it's nearly hilarious that you can stop enemies on your track by simply reversing your ship. But that's also one of the main keys of coming far in this game (though not to recommend for the arcade version!)
One tip I haven't seen yet is that when you've got only one humanoid left, you shoud stop travelling all across the planet surface and rather stay directly above the humanoid, shooting everything reaching you from the left and right. That way, no lander will be able to capture that last humanoid. And once they have one, at least in the later waves, it gets very hard to recover it, since the landers ascend with their victim at the same speed as you do, so if you're below them, you won't be able to catch up!
Beating the mutant waves... well... for me it works like this: At the start of the wave, you'll typically be attacked by a mutant from the right, which you should shoot right away. After that, each time they start homing in on you, just reverse your ship... that will stop them and enable you to get one or multiple ones into your line of fire before they attack again. Alternatively, you can also fly below or above the screen and either activate hyperspace (which will put you at your start position with another humanoid attacking from the right) or reverse direction while you're above the surface, and then come up again. Howver, there's no guarantee for success!
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OK, haven't played this yet, but it occured to me that Deteacher did NOT roll the score. Rolling it would mean that it starts at the beginning score again, but in fact, it does not... instead, it shows trailing zeroes after the score has been "rolled", so you can see by the zeroes that there's a 7th digit which doesn't get displayed.
Therefore, I'd propose that we don't set 999990 as the maximum here, instead we should set it to 1099990 (100.000 points more) because that's the maximum that can be distinguished from the not-rolled score. In this case, 1099990 would be displayed as 099990, while 99990 would be just 99990 without the trailing zero. From 1100000 on, the 6 digits should be the same again, so THAT should actually be considered "rolling" the score, although you don't start at 0 this way.
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Here's my highest one so far... 3093. And yes, I also adopted the strategy of keeping the enemy alive as long as possible, but at the same time I try to freeze him from time to time as long as that doesn't let him fall off the screen.
Oh, and I didn't use the trap opportunities at all... I guess they don't really help your score, do they?
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OK, here's my best so far... 85265.
I also have got some tips...
This seems to be another game where you have to prioritize things. In this case, buildings get gradually destroyed, and then the enemies begin to dig their tunnels. Now the tunnels, once digged, never go away, while every 10.000 points, the building with the most damage gets restored. Thus, aside from of course aways destoying the game-ending bomb, you should concentrate on shooting those paratroopers who go for the most damaged buildings, because if these reach their goal, they will start or continue digging the finally deadly tunnel.
An exception to this could be if there's no building that received three hits yet. In this case it might be better to let the paratroopers hit one building completely in favor of other, yet undamaged or less damaged buidings, because on reaching the next multiple of 10.000 points, the building with the three hits gets restored... but if the damage is distributed evenly across all the buildings, and none of them has three hits yet, the one with the highest hit count will get repaired, while the others remain damaged... which ultimately repairs less damage than if one building has three hits and others have none.
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OK, I'm probably the first one to post a score... and it's NOT great. I've managed only3 laps, but that's via emulation. Sadly, I don't own this game (nor do I have "real" driving controllers), so I have no choice but emulating it. I suppose using real driving controllers, I could zip through the track much faster...
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OK, here's my best score so far... 34-24.
This game seems to be similar to "Basketball" and "Fishing Derby" which we played earlier in some respects... the 2-digit scoring, and that it's actually a two-player game, and a timed one.
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OK, here's my best so far... 57240.
I found the best strategy to be shooting mindlessly to the top. :-)
No, seriously... in the waves before the banana wave, it's essential to dodge the enemies' shots. It's better to make that first priority than to hit the enemy (unless the master nest tries to steal a fruit).
Generally, the master nest swoops around the whole screen, while for the other enemies, the screen is divided in 4 horizontal bars. Once spawned, each of the other enemies stays in his bar. And only two of the enemies will actually shoot at you: the master nest and the highest flying other one. Therefore, out of the other enemies, you should take out the lower ones first, because they don't shoot at you anyway as long as the top one is there (so no danger of getting hit by them), and the bullets dropped by the top one are visible relatively long, so that it's possible to dodge them if necessary.
As for the master nest, I think it's best to wait until it tries to steal a fruit, because at that point it will stop bouncing around erratically and rather go in a straight path which is easy to anticipate, so it's much easier to take out the master nest at this point.
My strategy changes a bit with the banana level, because at that point both your and the enemies' bullets begin to travel twice as fast, which also means you get to shoot at twice the rate as before. This also means that it's much harder to dodge the enemies' bullets at that level, so it's best to stay out of their line of fire entirely. The non-guided missiles, I think, are better suited for this strategy... just give off a constant stream of bullets and wait until the enemies cross your line of fire. Most of them will be killed this way. And if they get killed at that point, you also have an easier time dodging their bullets.
There, however, is a problem if the master nest comes out with the white band which stays on for some seconds, while the master nest bounces around erratically. In this case, it's better to avoid the master nest and its line of fire as well as possible and wait for it to deploy other enemies. Then let them all run into your line of fire. However, if you can't take out the master nest that way (you will usually take out the other, slow going, enemies by that strategy before they turn into stingers), and it stays on screen last, avoid it until it goes to steal a fruit, as described earlier.
By the way, if the master nest spawns a stinger, that stinger is as slow-going as the other enemies. However, if you then take out the master nest, while other enemies will turn into fast-moving stingers, the "native" stinger will remain a stinger, and also will remain as slow as it was.
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I've managed to improve my score too... 124920.
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Here's my best so far... 87930.
I don't know if you could call all this "tips", but here's some things the manual doesn't mention:
- The game seems to have two level counters... one for the Mogwai stage and one for the Gremlin stage. The one that gets displayed before the Mogwai stage is the one for the Mogwai stage, not the one for the Gremlin stage.
- The level counter for the Mogwai stage goes up by one for each set of 8 falling Mowais where at most one of them turns into a pupa. If two or more turn into a pupa, the counter won't go up for that set of 8.
- The level counter for the Gremlin stage (which doesn't ever get displayed) turns up by one for each successfully completed Gremlin stage.
- Each phase seems to have 8 levels.
- The levels of the Mogwai stage only differ in the speed the Mogwais are fallnig at.
- The Gremlin phases are built up as follows:
Level 1: slow-descending Gremlins which don't multiply.
Level 2: faster descending Gremlins which don't multiply.
Level 3: fast descending Gremlins which don't multiply.
Level 4: slow-descending Gremlins which turn into 2 each at water contact.
Level 5: faster descending Gremlins which turn into 2 each at water contact.
Level 6: fast descending Gremlins which turn into 2 each at water contact.
Level 7: slow-descending Gremlins which turn into 3 each at water contact.
Level 8: faster descending Gremlins which turn into 3 each at water contact.
- The level number can also be seen by the background color of the scoring line (I didn't write up the exact sequence, but Level 7 seems to be red, and Level 8 seems to be brown, for instance).
- After reaching Level 8 on both phases, the difficulty seems to top out. However, there might be subtle changes after that, such as the rate the Mogwais and Gremlins appear at, which might get even faster (but I think it already tops out at the 8th or 9th Gremlin stage as well).
- When a row of Gremlins has reached the bottom and is running towards Billy, the rows above them stop descending. You can use this to your advantage by activating a flash cube as late as possible, which buys you a little time to shoot the other rows (but not too late, otherwise you get thrown out before the flash cube deploys).
- If you see that you can't shoot the bottom row of Gremlins in time, don't try still to shoot some of them, rather concentrate on the upper rows because all of them will run away when activating a flash cube anyway.
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What have you actually PLAYED this week? New Top Ten
in Atari 2600
Posted
Do only Atari 2600 games count or any type of game?
In the case that any type of game counts, here's mine...
Gate-Empire (game revolving around Stargate) 13 1/2 hours
Dino Run (Online Flash Game) 3 hours
Dino eggs (Apple II version, emulated in MESS) 125 minutes
Pitfall! (for HSC competition, emuated on Stella) 80 minutes
Buck Rogers - Planet of zoom (2600 version, emulated in Stella) 68 minutes
Stargate Role playing game (in a forum, in German) 53 minutes
Elevator action (Arcade version, emulated in MAME) 42 minutes
Popeye (emulated in Stella) 40 minutes
Berzerk (Open GL version) 10 minutes
Prince of Persia demo (emulated in Stella) 4 minutes
Ballblazer demo (emulated in Stella) 1 minute