tjb

Ok, I just received a couple of these puppies from a vendor on Ebay for $12.95 each (plus shipping of course). I opened one up and it is a complete copy of the original CX-40! I played a few games with it briefly and my first impression is that it's great! The price might be considered a little high but its still $7 cheaper than Best Electronics and B & C Computervisions. -tjb

The "buy it now" price really isn't bad considering Best Electronics charges $20 and B & C ComputerVisions $19.95 for a CX-40 joystick. They look just like the CX-40. Have you sent the seller a question asking who the manufacturer is? -tjb

I agree that there doesn't seem to be much interest in 5200 development compared to 2600 development. For what its worth I'm trying to do my part. I'm currently working on an Asteroids clone for the 5200 and home computers. Here's a short video: rast09162006.zip Getting back to the cart, I for one could use the extra memory for sprite data among other things. I could create enough Asteroid frames to smoothly rotate the Asteroids. Great work! -tjb

CSDB currently lists 918 Homebrew game releases and 133 WIP games. This is my favourite project right now: Eye of the Beholder I C64 Maybe they can't compete with the activities of the Atari crowd, but there's impressive C64 projects to be found as well I think. Wow, evidently there is alot going on in the C64 homebrew scene. I just didn't know where to look! I've been looking for the Commodore equivilent to AtariAge for some time. I've asked Commodore specific questions but usually get little or no response. Could it be because I'm asking on an Atari site? -tjb

And what are you planning to do past Asteroids? :-) I'd like to try my hand at producing at least one or two more clones of Vector-based games. Someone mentioned Space Duel earlier. That would be cool. I'd also like to do a clone of Armor Attack (Vectrex). Aside from that I've always wanted a version of Rampart for the 8-bits. The list goes on... -tjb

Latest Progress: The shield position is now adjusted properly as the ship rotates. Also, rather than causing the ship to bounce off Asteroids, the shield now damages large and medium Asteroids and destroys small ones. You are only allowed to deploy the shield for a few seconds. There is now a bar under the available ships area that shows how much shield time is left. Shield time is recharged for each reserve ship. The ship's thrust is now working properly. The rest of the changes are mostly minor tweaks. Asteroid size is now taken into account when an Asteroid nears a screen edge. The next major task is sound. As usual I've attached a video. I even remembered to turn off artifacting this time... I can't wait to finish this so I can go on to other Atari 8-bit projects. -tjb rast09012006.zip

Your game seems to be coming along quite nicely. I especially like the sound effects and backgound music. -tjb

I would recommend 4 Jays: http://www.4jays.com/. I have had good experience with them. I purchased a Commodore 128D from them a while back. For software I would also recommend Centsible Software: http://www.centsible.com/ They seem to have some items not easily obtainable elsewhere. There are others but those two I can speak of from experience. I recommend you steer clear of Click Here Software: http://cmdrkey.com/ The guy who runs it evidently has done some great work in the Commodore world in the past and he sells some great devices but he also ripped me off. Your mileage may vary but at least you've been warned. Good luck. -tjb

I started off (on my current project) doing a mix of C and assembly using CC65 and later moved to pure assembly. I then switched to Atasm but now I can't recall the reason It seems like the Atari crowd is more active in the homebrew scene. I'd like to look into porting my current project to the C64/C128. In particular the 128 has a "high res" mode of 640 x 200. I'd love to see what an Asteroids clone would look like in that mode! -tjb

The shields might look better if they spun with the ship when it rotates. I agree. My focus this pass was more on getting the mechanics of the shield working rather than the look. The asteroids just seem to disappear once they are near one edge then reappear inside the opposite edge. It would look much better if they moved off/onscreen smoothly - but it would probably involve extra processing time. Most implementations (on this particular platform) do this. This includes Atari's orginal implementation and Asteroids II. Meteorites seems to be smooth horizontally but does the same thing when an Asteroid moves off the bottom or top edge. It appears that the arcade game also moves smootly horizontally but not vertically. It's probably a bit more obvious in Rasteroids because I need to adjust the numbers a bit. Right now the min/max numbers are the same for all Asteroids. This causes medium and smaller Asteroids to wrap before they really needed to. This is on my list of tweaks that remain. I'll also look into making them wrap smoothly. For pure horizontal it can pretty much happend for free. Vertical would take a little extra effort (and cycles as you pointed out). I do believe that in the arcade game, it is possible to be crushed whilst shielded by 2 asteroids approaching from opposite sides - coding that might be a little tricky. Perhaps I need to shield functionality more closely. Was it crushed or did it simply run out of shield time? I still hate the "artifacting" look - IMO the point of using GR.8 is to get hires - forget about colour and trying to simulate it - lots of us either use proper monitors or capture cards which don't do artifacting anyway. I'm not trying to simulate color. I want the hires look. Are you simply wanting me to turn off artifacting in the emulator? Does the ship getting bounced around when the shield is on seem reasonable or is it cheesy? I could always take the easy way out (as Atari did) and simply turn collision detection off and let them pass over the ship. Thoughts? BTW, thanks for the feedback.

A few of the Asteroids are updated every frame but not all of them. -tjb

I don't know that the method I use is necessarily the best way to go but here goes: I determined what the maximum number of asteroids the game would ever have active at any given time and created arrays for such things as x and y positions large enough to accomdate the maximum. I have one array that simply holds a flag that indicates whether or not that index or "slot" is in use. I have another array that I call the "active list" that holds indexes to each actve Asteroid. I also mantain a counter that reflects the number of active asteroids so that I know how far to walk the active list. Whenever I need to spawn a new asteroid I walk the array that holds the flags that indicate if a slot is active looking for a slot that is not in use. When I find one I change the flag to active, note the index, and add that index to the end of the active list. Finally, I increment the asteroid count. You could probably keep the flag array sorted so as to make seaching for an empty slot easier but you'd also have to update the active list as well. To me its a trival matter to spin through an array looking for a particular value. I'm sure there are probably ways that use less memory at the expense of execution speed. For instance, I could simply walk the array of flags directly looking only at slots marked as active. Of course I'd have to look at each flag every time. The additional overhead of updating the flag array and active list only happens when a new asteroid is spawned or destroyed. -tjb

YARV (Yet Another Rasteroids Video) This one shows the first cut of the shields. The graphics for it will likely change and I'm sure the behavior will be tweaked. It's a start anyway. The ship can really get bounced around if there are alot of fast moving Asteroids bouncing off it. Right now you can toggle the shield on and off and can leave it on indefinitely. I will likely only allow it to be on for a few seconds. Perhaps there will be a bar that indicates how much shield time is left. Should shield time regenerate over time? -tjb shield_demo.zip

I like it. It looks good. I think I'd like to stick with the name Rasteroids to avoid possible legal issues. -tjb Done! I also put together a couple of other labels just for fun. One is an XE style, the other a 400/800 box style Hmm, I think I'm partial to the one in the middle the most. I like the older style. I have to admit that I like the logo on the last one the best with the rainbow stripe and Atari with the 400/800 vertical.

Forgive me if this is a bit off topic. (I know, I have some nerve posting Commodore questions on an Atari Site!) I was wondering if I could get some recommendations on a good PC-based Assembler to use in C64/128 programming. I found a number of them here (You have to scroll down a bit): http://www.fairlight.to/tools/pc.html For the Atari 8-bit I use and very much like ATASM. Is there something on par for the C64/128? Also, are there any good C64/128 sites similar to AtariAge? I was wondering if there is much homebrew development going on in the Commodore community. -tjb P.S. Please direct all flaming arrows to /dev/null

I like it. It looks good. I think I'd like to stick with the name Rasteroids to avoid possible legal issues. -tjb

I've played it but not extensively. What's you opinion on it?

The shield will definitely do the bounce thing. I didn't really like the cloak effect. When you say energy level system do you mean for the shield?

Thanks. It just occurred to me that the 5200 version could allow the player to use flip, hyperspace, or shield at any time (as opposed to having to choose one as an option) thanks to the additional buttons available on the joystick. Does anyone know off hand if the official Atari version allows this? Do you think this would be ok? Would it deviate too much from the arcade version? Come to think of it the arcade version had no flip. Shields were only in Asteroids Deluxe. I'm also not sure if in Deluxe you could use hyperspace as well as shields. Personally I'm not too concerned with staying close to the Arcade version. My aim was to provide something that looked/felt a bit more like an arcade game. Thoughts? -tjb I'd like to see a sort of "Asteroids Collection" Where option 1 would be Asteroids, 2 Would be Asteroids Deluxe, and 3 could be something like Asteroids Remix with flipping, sheilds, hyperspace etc. On that note, it would be event cooler if you did Space Duel as well...man, I'm making myself drool. I think your "Asteroids Collection" idea might be doable. I think Space Duel you be cool as well. I like vector based games. I was thinking of doing a port of the Vectrex game Armor...Attack after this one. It's a simple premise I know but I like it.

Thanks. It just occurred to me that the 5200 version could allow the player to use flip, hyperspace, or shield at any time (as opposed to having to choose one as an option) thanks to the additional buttons available on the joystick. Does anyone know off hand if the official Atari version allows this? Do you think this would be ok? Would it deviate too much from the arcade version? Come to think of it the arcade version had no flip. Shields were only in Asteroids Deluxe. I'm also not sure if in Deluxe you could use hyperspace as well as shields. Personally I'm not too concerned with staying close to the Arcade version. My aim was to provide something that looked/felt a bit more like an arcade game. Thoughts? -tjb It would be nice to be able to configure the buttons instead of having static assignments. This would accomodate users of the Redemption 5200. It would also allow users to set one fire button as fire and the other one as hyperspace, flip, or shield (depending on personal preference). -tjb

Thanks. It just occurred to me that the 5200 version could allow the player to use flip, hyperspace, or shield at any time (as opposed to having to choose one as an option) thanks to the additional buttons available on the joystick. Does anyone know off hand if the official Atari version allows this? Do you think this would be ok? Would it deviate too much from the arcade version? Come to think of it the arcade version had no flip. Shields were only in Asteroids Deluxe. I'm also not sure if in Deluxe you could use hyperspace as well as shields. Personally I'm not too concerned with staying close to the Arcade version. My aim was to provide something that looked/felt a bit more like an arcade game. Thoughts? -tjb

I'm not a hardware guy so forgive me if I ask stupid and/or obvious questions. I was wondering what else is needed to hook up the MIO board to a SCSI hard drive besides the drive and cable? I'm assuming you also need a power supply of some sort. Do you have suggestions for a power supply? -tjb

Hit F8? It would be nice though if some assembler could export labels and the emulator could import them. I am thinking the assembler from CC65 can output some kind of symbols a certain C64 emulator can read? I would just settle for Atari800Plus would adjust its internal equates to the 5200 when running a 5200 program. I was thinking more along the lines of writing the code, assembling it, and running it without leaving the IDE. You'd set breakpoints directly in your source code like any of the modern IDE's like Visual Studio, Eclipse, etc. Maybe I've just become spoiled using such environments... -tjb

I often dream of someone taking something like ATASM and merging it with an emulator like Atari800 Win+ along with an IDE to make the ultimate development environment (for 8-bit Ataris that is). It would be really cool to write the assembly code, assemble it, set break points, step through the code, etc. It would make debugging graphics output much much easier. It seems like all the individual pieces are there, it would just be a matter of integrating them all (not a trivial task I know). At times I debug individual subroutines using a 6502 simulator which is great but it sure would be nice to step through it in the context of an 8-bit emulator. -tjb

Thanks for all the kind words. I originally posted the topic under the 8-bit forum and one of the moderators moved it here. It's true that there doesn't seem to be much traffic here. It could simply be that there is not alot of interest in yet another Asteroids clone. It's also not listed in the under development area here at AtariAge. -tjb