CPFace

Okay, here's a little thing I've been cooking up that I like to call melbourne tatty. It's a game that takes place in a maze where the walls are constantly shifting. The object of the game is to avoid the giant wolf head that's pursuing you and to collect the golden goblets that are placed randomly on the board. If you get ten goblets, you can go on to the next level. Levels are distinguished by the behavior of the walls and to a lesser degree by the starting speed. You get three lives. mt1.bin mt1.bas It's a work in progress. There's currently ten different levels, but I can make a lot more. Background music is in place, but I think I could stand to change it. I want to put in a quick animation when the wolf eats you and some sort of sound effect when you nab a goblet. But this is the general shape of the gameplay. I think it's difficult -- I've only gotten to level 5 legitimately -- but I think it's possible to get better as you get a feel for how each maze moves and how to manipulate how the wolf moves.

Gotta say, this turned into quite a clever little game. Kind of reminds me of the old Dragon's Lair arcade game, in the sense that you advance through a series of different situations and the way you get through them varies.

This is very encouraging to hear. I've been concerned for some time now that Nintendo's promises about its controller were going to be a lot of smoke and mirrors -- stuff that sounds cool until you find out how it actually works. To hear from a programmer rather than a PR person that the controller will be as cool as promised is probably the best news I've heard since E3. Good luck with whatever you're doing with it.

Huh, that's a bit of all right.

With 3 bytes remaining on the ROM and barring any major bug-related disasters, here's the complete version of Pong Kombat for the 2600. pk4.binpk4.txt I managed to get Monolith in as a hidden boss, but the condition to find him is different from the original. All in all, this is about as complete an adaptation of Pong Kombat as I'd hoped to make. I haven't the slightest hope of distributing this game in cartridge form, and considering the trademarks and copyrights held by Atari and Midway, I'm not sure how happy Atari Age would even be about hosting the ROM. But there it is. I think it was an excellent exercise and that I need to start dreaming up my own game ideas.

Huh, sure enough. I thought about trying that, but I wasn't sure bBasic would set up the counter to decrement if I had a "positive" number listed for the step. Silly me, should've just tried it.

In the end, I decided that the thing that makes Pong Kombat Pong Kombat is the fatalities. If you don't have those, then it's just "Pong where you can shoot at your opponent". So I used up the very last of my ROM space to add a fatality animation. The animation is basically the same for every character, but the keystroke pattern is different. I have under 100 bytes of ROM space left, and I'm tempted to see if I can get one more character in there. The character Monolith was important to the original Pong Kombat story (he played Goro to White Paddle's Shang Tsung), and it just wouldn't be the same without him. I might yet see if I can put him into the regular character rotation, but I really doubt I'll have enough room to make him a hidden character, as he was in the original. Unless I really start crunching my code down. Hmmm. Still, if I have to stop here, I'm pleased with what I was able to accomplish. pk3.binpk3.bas And a note about the source code -- it was written for bBasic .35, but it won't compile because of the way negative step values are handled in for-next loops. To compile it, you'll have to open the asm file, search for "ADC #-1" and change it to "ADC #255". I might write an assembly work-around for that bit, but I figure this is good enough for right now.

Cool, thanks.

I hope nobody minds a noobish question. I understand that there can be video problems if drawscreen isn't called often enough. My question is, would these problems be evident in an emulator, or would I have to run my game on the actual hardware to see if these problems are cropping up? I suspect that it's always better to test it on actual hardware, I'm just curious how much I should trust my emulator. I'm running z26 at the moment.

Well all right then! A far more complete build of Pong Kombat. pk2.bin pk2.bas At the title screen, press select to alternate between one and two players. A two-player match is one round, then it returns to the title screen. You now have to enter secret combinations to do the special attacks -- fire button doesn't do anything except in a combination. To make it easier to figure out, all combinations are a series of four inputs, and the only inputs used are UP, DOWN, and FIRE. There is no limit to how long you hold down an input, and no limit to how long you can go between inputs. To get you started, Red Paddle's special attack is DOWN, UP, FIRE, FIRE. You can figure the rest out yourself, or check a FAQ for the original game -- they're all the same. I have 519 bytes left, and I'm tempted to see how many of the following features I can still cram into this game: - Difficulty switches for each player. In A position, the player has to enter the secret combination to attack. In B position, the player can press fire to attack. - Fatality animation. Something simple. - Hidden boss.

Good. I was worried it would be too easy. > I've already gotten to the point where it's easy for me to beat White Paddle. In this version, the easiest strategy is to pick Green Paddle as your character and hold down fire to unleash a nearly-continuous string of attacks. You don't have to bother aiming, but your chances of hitting are slightly better near the middle of the screen. The CPU paddle only fires when it's directly across from you, so avoid lining yourself up with it if you can manage. When the ball is at its greatest angle, its vertical speed is greater than yours, so you'll have to learn to anticipate where it's going and get there in advance. You can put a spin on the ball by holding up or down on the joystick as you make contact. Get the ball bouncing at +/- 60 degrees for your best chance of getting it past the CPU. (This doesn't work with White Paddle -- he never misses.) Right now I've got everything done on my must-do list except button-combination attacks, and all of 691 bytes to implement it. I suspect that I'm not going to get around to the extra features; I'd like to keep it under 4K for now.

I got permission from Stephen Gagne to do an Atari 2600 adaptation of Pong Kombat, and I've got enough done that I'd like to show it off. pk1.bin pk1.bas At the first screen, press up and down to select your character (one of five multi-colored paddles), then press Fire or Reset to begin. Up and down moves your paddle, fire button launches a projectile. Select returns you to the first screen. Both paddles have an energy bar along the top of the screen. You take a hit every time you miss the ball or your opponent hits you with a projectile. If you lose all of your energy, the game's over and you return to the first screen. If you beat your opponent, you move on to the next round. There's five regular characters to beat, and then a boss encounter with the original White Paddle. Still left to do, in order of importance: -- Sound effects. -- Text on the title screen and before and after rounds. -- Two-player support (I know I'll have to dip into assembly to read joy1) -- Button-combination special attacks. Stephen Gagne's version worked like most fighting games -- you had to enter a specific sequence on the controller to launch a projectile. And if I still have some room left, I just might try and squeeze in a fatality animation and/or some secret bosses.

Thanks, I was pretty proud of that. n_n The theme tune is a rough translation of a traditional song called "The Fox".

Hey everyone. I'm kind of new to Atari stuff. We had a 5200 when I was little, but it was eclipsed when we got an NES. It's only recently that I've gotten interested in these classics, mostly through TV games and compilation packs. I've gotten interested in homebrew development recently. I've had some experience programming in assembly, but when I heard about batari Basic, I knew I had to look into it. And I just want to say THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU to batari and everyone else who's gotten involved in this project. It's really nice to have a stepping stone on the way to working with full-blown assembly language and to see something working with only half a page of code. I threw together my first game in about two days, and I've refined it for about two more. It's pretty simple, but I think it's worth sharing as my first attempt. It's a quick little action game based on a friend's cartoon character, a fox named Jym. The object is to catch rats and butterflies and avoid tomatoes as they fly across the screen. Right now, about the only thing that really bugs me is the control; as the speed revs up, it gets very difficult to keep control of your character. Ideally, I'd like to transplant some trackball code into the game, but I'm saving that until I understand what's happening in that Missile Command game. I've posted a zip file that includes the binary, source code, and brief instructions. Enjoy if you like. jym.zip

Here's one way to do it. I used z as a flag to tell the program when it's okay to advance the number counter. In this case, if z=0, then it's okay to advance. If z=1, then we're waiting for the player to release the fire button before we advance the counter again. Every time you check the fire button, you also check z. Set it to 1 if the fire button's held, set it to 0 if it's not. Depending on how tight you are for variables in your game, you'll probably want to look into implementing the flag with bitwise operators. z = 0 20 COLUBK=70 : COLUP0=128 25 x=20 : y=20 28 drawscreen 30 player0x=x : player0y=y 40 player0: %00100 %00100 %00100 %00100 %00100 end 51 if joy0fire && z=0 then z=1: goto 53 if !joy0fire && z=1 then z=0 52 goto 20 53 COLUBK=70 : COLUP0=128 54 x=20 : y=20 55 drawscreen 56 player0x=x : player0y=y 57 player0: %11111 %01000 %00100 %10010 %01100 end 58 if joy0fire && z=0 then z=1: goto 60 if !joy0fire && z=1 then z=0 59 goto 53 60 COLUBK=70 : COLUP0=128 61 x=20 : y=20 62 drawscreen 63 player0x=x : player0y=y 64 player0: %01110 %10001 %00110 %10001 %01110 end 65 if joy0fire && z=0 then z=1: goto 20 if !joy0fire && z=1 then z=0 66 goto 60