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I don't care about learning new tricks .. old ones will do


rob fulop

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I am humbled to report that it's apparently true what they say about old dogs not being able to learn new tricks. Curious if there exist any 2600 dogs near the San Francisco Bay Area willing to toss an old canine a bone or two once in awhile, in the form of advice or a brief consultation? You don't have to live nearby, it would simply be better if you did. Thanks - you can leave me a message on this board. Bow Wow.

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I am humbled to report that it's apparently true what they say about old dogs not being able to learn new tricks. Curious if there exist any 2600 dogs near the San Francisco Bay Area willing to toss an old canine a bone or two once in awhile, in the form of advice or a brief consultation? You don't have to live nearby, it would simply be better if you did. Thanks - you can leave me a message on this board. Bow Wow.

 

There have been a few new tricks developed for the 2600 over the last few years. Some are refinements of techniques that were discovered, but not used much, back-in-the-day; others are entirely new.

 

The trick that I'm retrospectively most surprised at having not been used (so far as I know) is the cycle-73/74 HMOVE. Although some weirdness of the HMOVE circuitry was discovered and exploited (Cosmic Ark starfield) I don't know of anyone exploiting the early HMOVE. An HMOVE which completes on cycle 73 or 74 will put all sprites eight pixels left of where they would be after a "normal" HMOVE, but will not show an "HMOVE bar".

 

Cycle-73/74 HMOVEs can work very nicely and easily to allow many types of games to avoid zone bars, combs, etc. without having to blank the left 8 pixels. Using them in Missile Command would have been tough, because the missiles can go right instead of just left. They could probably have been used in combination with some other tricks, though that might have bloated the code too much to fit in 4K.

 

A trick that was used some back-in-the-day, but which lends itself to a very wide variety of applications, is called the "multi-RESP" trick. Although the TIA cannot generally show the first copy of a sprite following a RESPx or RESMx, it will show subsequent copies on the same scan line. If a sprite is currently being displayed, the RESPx will not affect the current copy, but will position the later copies 18/34/66 pixels to the right of the current beam position. If the sprite is about to be displayed, RESPx will cause it to be displayed two pixels to the right of the current beam position instead of the currently-specified location. Otherwise the first copy will be 18/34/66 to the right of current beam.

 

Either Galaxian or Commie Mutants would be the earliest game I know of to have exploited this. The multi-RESPx trick is quite versatile, though it can also be hard to tweak, especially if one is trying to trigger a sprite that's about to appear; if the sprite isn't in the right place, it won't show up at all.

 

The final class of tricks is the use of undefined 6507 opcodes. This approach may have been dubious back in the day, since MOS could have at any time changed the 6502 die so that such instructions would no longer work. That never happened, though, and doesn't seem likely to. Some of the undefined opcodes are very handy; my favorites are:

  • LAX -- Load A and X register with the same value (allow any mode except #imm).
  • SAX -- Store the ANDed value of A and X (modes: zp zp,x (zp,x) abs)
  • DCP -- Decrement address and compare the resulting value to accumulator. Allows any addressing mode but #imm and accumulator)
  • SBX -- Stores (A & X)-imm into X; immediate mode only

These instructions can often save a cycle or two; sometimes they can save a lot more than that. LAX is often handy since it supports (zp),y addressing whereas LDX does not. SAX and SBX can sometimes be useful for and'ing a lot of data with a common mask.

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I am humbled to report that it's apparently true what they say about old dogs not being able to learn new tricks.

Well, since you made one of my favorite games, Demon Attack, your old tricks are pretty darn good. In case you've forgotten any of your old tricks, you can always turn to batari Basic. :D

 

I'd still like to know what magic some of the Imagic games had that other games didn't. My favorite Imagic games have a crisp, clear, colorful, arcade look (similar to the look of Defender at the arcades) and they usually have cool sound effects that seem totally original. Many games by Atari and other companies have characters that seem kind of stiff and look like they are made out of heavy cement blocks, but Imagic characters are usually looser, lighter, more colorful, more detailed, and more arcade-like. Even most homebrews with all of the tricks and tools available to programmers today seem to have a clunky look and feel. It seems that when Imagic died, so did the magic. Maybe it won't be that way forever.

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I am humbled to report that it's apparently true what they say about old dogs not being able to learn new tricks.

Well, since you made one of my favorite games, Demon Attack, your old tricks are pretty darn good. In case you've forgotten any of your old tricks, you can always turn to batari Basic. :D

 

I'd still like to know what magic some of the Imagic games had that other games didn't. My favorite Imagic games have a crisp, clear, colorful, arcade look (similar to the look of Defender at the arcades) and they usually have cool sound effects that seem totally original. Many games by Atari and other companies have characters that seem kind of stiff and look like they are made out of heavy cement blocks, but Imagic characters are usually looser, lighter, more colorful, more detailed, and more arcade-like. Even most homebrews with all of the tricks and tools available to programmers today seem to have a clunky look and feel. It seems that when Imagic died, so did the magic. Maybe it won't be that way forever.

The particular magic trick you are referring to was achieved by a less than remarkable solution ... basically Imagic was the first videogame company to bring in actual artists to do graphics for games. At Atari, we did our graphics by taking a piece of graph paper, and filling in the squares with pencil, and then coding each row of eight squares as a two digit hex value. Combine this primitive method, with the fact that most programmers sense of style is so gawd awful that many have a hard time figuring out which shoe goes with which shoe when they get dressed in the afternoon when they finally wake up, and it's no shock that game graphics looked like cement blocks.

 

After leaving Atari, Bob Smith and myself wrote a few simple editors that ran on the Atari 800. These tools enabled a graphic artist to author actual game graphics, changing both the graphics, and color, on each scan line. When they were happy with the way it all looked, the programmer ran some utility tool to add the appropriate hex codes to their program. Michael Becker was the first artist to use these tools, and he did such a great job on the set of demons that appear in Demon Attack that he became Imagic's first resident artist devoted exclusively to video game graphics. I think it took other companies awhile to catch on to this, which is why Imagic games were known for the distinct look they have. The sound effects were created by the programmers themselves, both Bob Smith and Dennis Koble, as well as myself had done several games on the 2600 at Atari .. so we had generated enough sound effects at that point that we knew our way around the primitive Stella sound system.

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I am humbled to report that it's apparently true what they say about old dogs not being able to learn new tricks.

Well, since you made one of my favorite games, Demon Attack, your old tricks are pretty darn good. In case you've forgotten any of your old tricks, you can always turn to batari Basic. :D

 

I'd still like to know what magic some of the Imagic games had that other games didn't. My favorite Imagic games have a crisp, clear, colorful, arcade look (similar to the look of Defender at the arcades) and they usually have cool sound effects that seem totally original. Many games by Atari and other companies have characters that seem kind of stiff and look like they are made out of heavy cement blocks, but Imagic characters are usually looser, lighter, more colorful, more detailed, and more arcade-like. Even most homebrews with all of the tricks and tools available to programmers today seem to have a clunky look and feel. It seems that when Imagic died, so did the magic. Maybe it won't be that way forever.

The particular magic trick you are referring to was achieved by a less than remarkable solution ... basically Imagic was the first videogame company to bring in actual artists to do graphics for games. At Atari, we did our graphics by taking a piece of graph paper, and filling in the squares with pencil, and then coding each row of eight squares as a two digit hex value. Combine this primitive method, with the fact that most programmers sense of style is so gawd awful that many have a hard time figuring out which shoe goes with which shoe when they get dressed in the afternoon when they finally wake up, and it's no shock that game graphics looked like cement blocks.

 

After leaving Atari, Bob Smith and myself wrote a few simple editors that ran on the Atari 800. These tools enabled a graphic artist to author actual game graphics, changing both the graphics, and color, on each scan line. When they were happy with the way it all looked, the programmer ran some utility tool to add the appropriate hex codes to their program. Michael Becker was the first artist to use these tools, and he did such a great job on the set of demons that appear in Demon Attack that he became Imagic's first resident artist devoted exclusively to video game graphics. I think it took other companies awhile to catch on to this, which is why Imagic games were known for the distinct look they have. The sound effects were created by the programmers themselves, both Bob Smith and Dennis Koble, as well as myself had done several games on the 2600 at Atari .. so we had generated enough sound effects at that point that we knew our way around the primitive Stella sound system.

Thanks for the information. Do you know if those tools still exist? If not, I hope someone can make similar tools that will help batari Basic users create better graphics. I plan to make a few of my own batari Basic games that I hope will be worth playing. I love the Imagic look and I will attempt to make my own original Imagic-inspired graphics if I can get some tool or tools to help me do that. I hope that one of these days someone will make an all-in-one Gary Kitchen's GameMaker type of program to use with batari Basic. If I wasn't a perpetual programing newbie, I'd make it myself.

 

By the way, that's a really good explanation about the graphics and sound. Is it OK if I repost what you said on my web site?

 

 

Thanks.

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By the way, that's a really good explanation about the graphics and sound. Is it OK if I repost what you said on my web site?

 

 

Thanks.

 

sure, np .. there's a documentary floating around the web somewhere about Imagic ... and they show Michael Becker using the editor I'm talking about ... I think it was called "It's all in the game" or something like that.

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By the way, that's a really good explanation about the graphics and sound. Is it OK if I repost what you said on my web site?

 

 

Thanks.

 

sure, np .. there's a documentary floating around the web somewhere about Imagic ... and they show Michael Becker using the editor I'm talking about ... I think it was called "It's all in the game" or something like that.

Thanks. If the following is what you are talking about, I've seen it, but I wasn't totally clear on what was being used and who was using it:

 

http://www.livevideo.com/video/7B3359CD667...t-1-imagic.aspx

http://www.livevideo.com/video/875EBC38067...t-2-imagic.aspx

http://www.livevideo.com/video/151AF95D9F4...t-3-imagic.aspx

 

Thanks again for letting me repost what you said.

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http://www.livevideo.com/video/7B3359CD667...t-1-imagic.aspx

http://www.livevideo.com/video/875EBC38067...t-2-imagic.aspx

http://www.livevideo.com/video/151AF95D9F4...t-3-imagic.aspx

 

Thanks again for letting me repost what you said.

 

In part one of the three part documentary, about 2/3rds of the way through .... you can see a segment of Michael Becker working on the Atlantis space ships. The sprite editor ran on the Atari 800 .. I probably have it somewhere on a disc buried in my closet .. but certainly somebody could make a much more streamlined version using FLASH in less than a week.

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In part one of the three part documentary, about 2/3rds of the way through .... you can see a segment of Michael Becker working on the Atlantis space ships. The sprite editor ran on the Atari 800 .. I probably have it somewhere on a disc buried in my closet .. but certainly somebody could make a much more streamlined version using FLASH in less than a week.

Thanks. Maybe someone reading this thread will get inspired and create what you are talking about. I and many people who use the Atari 2600 BASIC (batari Basic) forum would greatly appreciate it.

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  • 1 month later...

Thanks for the links! That was a great documentary. At the end of the third part they talk about an upcoming game based on hot air balloon racing. At first I thought Sky Jinks but that's from Activision and this is an Imagic documentary. Do you know what game they were referring to?

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