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Showing results for tags 'Elevators Amiss'.
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Here's a sneak peak at the games that I have ordered, so they will probably appear in future installments of Feeding My Atari. And of course, future installments of Game Review. I currently have 5 Atari Age and 2 Pack Rat orders being processed, and some eBay stuff. ATARI 2600 / HOME BREWS All Games From Atari Age Unless Stated Otherwise 2005 Mutigame Multicart Hunchy Jetman M-4 Marble Jumper Nightrider Rocket Command Zirconium Astronomer (Pack Rat Video Games) This game is being referred to on some sites as Astronomer 2600. BerZerk: Voice Enhanced Draconian Elevators Amiss Explosive Diarrhea (Pack Rat Video Games) Juno First Lady Bug Warring Worms: The Worm (Re)Turns ATARI 2600 / CUSTOM REPRODUCTIONS Atari Age Assault Gas Hog River Patrol ATARI 2600 / NTSC eBay Demolition Herby ATARI 2600 / PAL VERSIONS eBay Planet Patrol / Wall Defender 2-in-1 (this arrived today) Meteor Defense (PAL Exclusive) Mission 3000 A.D. (Boxed) ATARI 7800 / HOME BREW Bentley Bear's Crystal Quest - POKEY Notes I am continuing to see home brews for sale on eBay for more than they are being sold for here at Atari Age. Sorry, I'm not spending $30 (plus shipping) for games that I can get here for $19 (plus shipping). I'm sure some of you have noticed that Pack Rat is slow. They are a one-man operation with no inventory is why. He produces each cartridge one at a time. I did receive an email about two weeks ago saying that my orders are approaching next-in-line status. Yes, I already own a Custom Reproduction of Demolition Herby. I ordered it when ratty looking cartridges were popping up on eBay for between $50 to $75. Well, a few nights ago I was searching thru eBay and found a near-mint NTSC cart (handle) for $24.98, with FREE shipping. I jumped on it! Why purchase PAL carts? Well, I ordered the 2-in-1 from Germany to see if it would work with my NTSC set-up. It does, but in black & white. I was recently told by another user at http://highscore.com that he has had this same experience on some releases, while some PAL carts will run in color but with a vertical bar that rolls. I've seen videos of this and it's except-able to me. Other PAL games run fine. I see no reason not to collect PAL carts, especially as some are PAL exclusives. Tonight I bought Mission 3000 A.D. (Boxed), and Meteor Defense (PAL Exclusive). Meteor Defense is one of those games that I've seen playing on an NTSC console in color, but with the rolling vertical bars. No one has yet told me if the first Warring Worms game is still available somewhere. Is this classified information that I'm requesting? Oh, I achieved a score of over 400,000 points on Worm War I; Game 1; B/B. That explains the image for this entry.
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It's not easy keeping my Atari 7800 ProSystem well fed with 2600 and 7800 games that it has never experienced before while staying on a budget. I received 3 emails from Atari Age today confirming that three of my orders have shipped, leaving 2 still being processed. So what did I do? Placed another order of course. Plus which, I buy games on eBay. I'm not as mobile as I once was, so I do most of my game shopping online. Here's some of what's coming: Atari Age (Homebrews/Hacks) Bentley Bear's Crystal Quest (7800; POKEY) Berzerk: Voice Enhanced (2600) Draconian (2600) Elevators Amiss (2600) Flappy (2600) Galactopus (2600) Meteor Shower (7800; Red label variant. I already own the Blue label variant) Rainbow Invaders (2600) Atari Age (Custom Reproductions) Demolition Herby (2600) Gas Hog (2600) River Patrol (2600) Packrat Video Games (Homebrews) Astronomer (2600) Explosive Diarrhea (2600) eBay (Games from back-in-the-day) Deadly Duck (2600) Planet Patrol / Wall Defender (2600; 2-in-1; PAL) Thunderground w/Manual (2600) I only order Custom Reproductions of games that I can't otherwise afford. Sure, they play through emulation. But I'd rather play on actual Atari hardware. I especially like Demolition Herby, which is a take on Amidar/Spiderdroid but with some vehicular combat added for extra spice, and River Patrol, an extremely rare port of the arcade original for the 2600. It even has music throughout. I only recently started playing Gas Hog thru emulation. An interesting game. You probably noticed that I bought a PAL 2-in-1 on eBay (from a seller in Germany) - Planet Patrol / Wall Defender. I already own the NTSC release of Planet Patrol, however Wall Defender is another matter. Not only do I not own it on cartridge, but it will not run properly on my emulator - EMU7800 (version 2.2). I downloaded the latest version of Stella for Windows 10 (64-bit), but I have a problem. It seems to have many games already pre-loaded (such as Wall Defender), but when I select a game it only runs an attract mode for that game. I can't start an actual game. Maybe someone here can help me with this. -Mark
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- Bentley Bears Crystal Quest
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A NEW YEAR! TIME TO MAKE plans! What...February already? Oh well, better late than never. Anyway, my plans for the year have come into focus only recently, so I thought I'd share. Major Projects: 1. Finish the Maids+Elevators game. 2. Port Squish 'Em to the 2600. Minor Projects: 1. Modify Go Fish! to allow higher scores (or allow the score to "roll") for a few folks that can actually max it out. 2. Mystery project that I'm working on with Nathan Strum. Details: Squish 'Em is going to be a Christmas present for my two boys, or maybe just for my oldest. So for the year as a whole this is the top priority. However, I'd really like to finish the M+E game so I'm going to work on that first - but I'm going to start working seriously on Squish 'Em in mid- or late-spring, so if M+E isn't done by then it will have to wait. However, before all that I'm going to make the modifications to Go Fish! This should be a relatively easy project - - I just need to get off my duff and get busy. The mystery project only exists in some mockups that Nathan has done (and is working on) and, on my end, on paper. He will have more time in the summer to work on this and I'll probably fit some time in then as well to whip up some demos. But this project, assuming it happens , is really a 2008 project. I.e., it is as tentative as it is possible to be. So that's that. I'd still like to write something for the GBA and the A800, but I just don't see that happening.
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OK, NOT THAT DIFFERENT. But I did free up seven bytes of RAM, which is pretty huge. I finally wrapped my mind around supercat's fractional-position replacement - it was a little tricky because, unlike his example (16 speeds between 0 and 2 lines per frame) I wanted 64 speeds between 1/2 and 2 lines per frame (LPF). I ended up going with 64 speeds between 1/2 and 2 1/2 LPF, using a counter which goes from 0 to 32 and a 128-byte table (i.e., thirty-two 32-bit entries). I realized about halfway through coding this that, since my counter tops out at a power of two, I could just use the frame counter (which is a byte of RAM that is decremented every frame, going from 255-0 continuously). So I ended up saving all seven bytes which were being used for fractional elevator position. So no apparent changes except that all the elevators except the slowest are a little bit faster: ElevRep20061109.bin
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BACK TO STRIPED elevators, based on feedback. I thought this would give me lots of RAM back - but it wasn't to be. I really wanted to add stairs on either side of the screen, and I just couldn't fit it into the old kernel. So I've gone back (again) to the RAM-hungry kernel that supercat suggested. And so now RAM is an issue. Probably can make it work, though. So new binary: still isn't playable - I was too tired last night to add the code back in that moves you up a floor and increases your score - but the status stuff is back at the bottom of the screen: ElevRep20061105.bin Thoughts on the stairs? Other changes: I fixed the maid sprite and increased the height of the elevators. I also completely revamped the routine that moves the elevators. There are 64 elevator speeds; the one on the left is the slowest and the one on the right is the fastest. I wrote special-case kernels for the top and bottom of the screen, so the kernel needs 65 bytes of RAM for the elevators, which isn't so bad - however, I also need 3 bytes for each elevator (Y position, fractional Y position, and velocity/direction); 21 bytes total. Features requiring RAM that I want to add: -AtariVox support -MemCard support and high score support -a second player (might be able to overlay other RAM for this) -music -sound effects I probably need between 10 and 12 free bytes to add all that; right now I have 3 free bytes. So we'll see what I can do.
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ELEVATOR REPAIRMAN, now kinda playable. Also rethemed a bit: ElevRep20061011.bin Changes: I stopped trying to develop the 1K and 4K versions simultaneously and am now using a table to change the background color, rather than manipulating the line counter and plugging that into COLUBK. Also created a sprite. Also cleaned up the display a bit, tweaked the left/right boundaries. The main changes, though: a) the score, b) the timer, and c) collisions. It's all very rough, but now all of the essential pieces are there - well, except for a game-over condition. As you can see, I haven't thought of anything better than the hotel maid theme; please throw theme suggestions at me! I like what I've got alright, but if there's something better I want to know about it! EDIT: Small update before the weekend: Just prettied up the text a little. Currently displaying about 200 visible lines, which is a bummer since I also wanted to have the title of the game and a small bitmap (~10 lines) above the play area, and ~215 visible lines is probably too many. Or is it? ElevRep20061012.bin
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LATEST 'N' NOT-SO-GREATEST version of the Elevator Repairman knockoff: ElevRep20061025.bin The sprites is all screwed up because I rewrote part of the kernel and didn't have time to fix the variable setup routines. The kernel works fine; the variables just aren't being setup properly. But that's no big deal. Oh yeah, I also took out a bunch of stuff (score, 48-char display, etc.) that was using RAM - I needed the RAM and I didn't want to waste time optimizing when the kernel is still in flux, so I just deleted all that stuff. These are bigger deals: at the suggestion of supercat, I sunk a ton of RAM into making the elevators solid. RAM is pretty tight now, but it should be manageable. However, as I mentioned in the comments to the previous post, the routine that sets up all that RAM for the elevators takes a looooooong time. It took about 65 scanlines but I optimized it (and fixed some bugs) last night so now it takes about 48 scanlines. So I could split it between the overscan and the vblank, but that's such an annoying pain that I'm hoping to come up with something faster. [EDIT: I knew I could count on you guys! With the suggested optimizations the whole thing runs in about 33 scanlines now - long, but not too long. New binary and source: ElevRep20061027.bin ElevRep20061027source.zip The new routine is in the comments; this post is plenty long already.] Here's the routine in question: SetElevRAMSubroutine ;--new method: ;--Y position of elevators ranges from 0 to 80 ;--so: ; upon beginning this routine, ElevY will hold values pointing to the tops ; of the elevators ; -so first thing to do is to subtract ELEV_HEIGHT from each Y position ; so that ElevY holds the *bottom* of the elevators ; -after processing the bottom of the elevators, flag that we processed ; the bottom of that elevator (temp variables) and add ELEV_HEIGHT back to the ; the Y position so that it points to the top. ; -after processing the top of the elevators, ORA ElevY with 128 (set top bit) ; -when the lowest Y position (ElevY) is a negative number (top bit set) then we are done. ldx #6 InitializeElevYLoop lda ElevY,X sec sbc #ELEV_HEIGHT sta ElevY,X lda #0 sta Temp+2,X;clear flags also dex bpl InitializeElevYLoop ;--initialize the bottom band with zeroes lda #0 sta ElevRAM sta ElevRAM+14 sta ElevRAM+29 sta ElevRAM+44 sta ElevBandHeight ldy #0 SetElevRAMLoop jsr FindLowestPtSubroutine ;--now Temp holds lowest value ; and Temp+1 holds index into which elevator is the lowest lda Temp bmi AllDone cmp ElevBandHeight,Y beq SameBand ;--else: new band, so ; bring all values from old band into new band: sta ElevBandHeight+1,Y lda ElevRAM,Y sta ElevRAM+1,Y lda ElevRAM+14,Y sta ElevRAM+15,Y lda ElevRAM+29,Y sta ElevRAM+30,Y lda ElevRAM+44,Y sta ElevRAM+45,Y iny SameBand ldx Temp+1 lda ElevPtrTableLo,X sta MiscPtr lda (MiscPtr),Y eor ElevFlipTable,X sta (MiscPtr),Y lda Temp+2,X ;flags that determine top or bottom of elev eor #$FF sta Temp+2,X bne JustProcessedElevBottom ;--else that was the top lda ElevY,X ora #$80 sta ElevY,X bne SetElevRAMLoop;branch always JustProcessedElevBottom ;--that was the bottom, now set it for the top lda ElevY,X clc adc #ELEV_HEIGHT sta ElevY,X bne SetElevRAMLoop;branch always AllDone ;--now we have to deal with situation where the highest ; elevator(s) is at the top line lda ElevBandHeight,Y cmp #80 bne NoElevAtVeryTop dey NoElevAtVeryTop sty Temp+2 ;save this value for later rts ;---------------------------------------------------------------------------- FindLowestPtSubroutine lda #255 sta Temp ldx #6 stx Temp+1 FindLowestPtLoop lda ElevY,X cmp Temp bcs NotLowestPt sta Temp stx Temp+1 NotLowestPt dex bpl FindLowestPtLoop ;--Temp+1 holds index into lowest elevator ; Temp holds the height of the low elevator rts And here's the source if you want to see things with more context:
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SO I THINK I've finally found my project: A port of Elevator Repairman. I loved that game 20 years ago and I decided that I wanted to write a version for the 2600. My goal is to write a rock-solid 4K version of this and have it done by the end of the year. We'll see if that happens... I also think a stripped down version is a good candidate for a 1K game; my plan is to work on that after the 4K version is done. Here's what I've got so far: ElevRep20061009.bin Nothing too special: the elevators are the playfield and the sprite is actually both players on top of each other - player 0 is color-striped and player 1 is a single color - which, actually, won't work to exactly recreate the A8 sprite, but I'm planning to re-theme the game anyway, and create new graphics. Any ideas for a cool new theme? My best ideas so far are: Busy Bellhop, Manic Maid, and Maid's Mayhem.
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