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On 11/19/2019 at 4:11 PM, ZeroPage Homebrew said:

 

We'll be featuring the WIP Marble Madness arcade port for the Atari 2600 LIVE on tomorrow's (Wednesday) ZeroPage Homebrew stream on Twitch at 11AM PT | 2PM ET | 6PM GMT! Hope everyone can watch!

 

(Wakes from his slumber).

 

Well, that was certainly a trip down memory lane.  Thanks for sharing!

 

-John

 

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  • 1 month later...

Hey folks,

 

I decided it would be worthwhile to:

  1. Grab all of the assembly and binaries that I posted for Marble Madness 2600 back in 2011
  2. Organize them with version control
  3. Create a Makefile so I could actually rebuild / retest it if that ever came up on a clean machine (Sorry-- it's Mac.  And, use at your own risk)
  4. Post it to github: https://github.com/johnkharvey/marble_madness_2600/

I doubt anything more will ever come of this, but I wanted to let people know.  Who knows-- maybe someday it'll see a pull-request. ;)

 

 

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I've recently watched the Youtube video of Zeropage Homebrew Stream showing the Marble Madness WIP. Today I've again noticed something that's been hanging on my wall for many years now... it's a hand-drawn mockup of Marble Madness on the Atari 2600. Back when I drew it in the late 80's, I was under the (wrong) assumption based on the display of Pitfall II that the Atari 2600 would be capable of showing 4 playfield colors per scanline if the scanlines were doubled (similar to the C-64's multicolor mode)... which then proved to be wrong, BUT with the technique shown here, something similar could still be achieved.

 

It just seems that in the WIP presented here, the actual graphics is a little different to the one I envisioned... the WIP here basically scaled up the grid pattern so that the grid is still visible, it apparently took the level maps from the 8-bit instead of the arcade and Amiga versions, and it scaled it down a bit so that it looks a bit squashed.

 

So... I decided to take a photo of what I drew and present it here. Some of the colors are pretty much washed out over the years... most notably I used two different pencils for the dark blue, one of whose color bleached while the others' didn't. But I think the vision I had is still visible... basically the grid is replaced by black lines at different heights. I drew this in 4 colors, and those colors (like in the shots above) could be simulated by alternating scanlines between black/white and black/blue. The arcade version is 36 characters wide, so we'd need 5 PF writes per line with a 6th write writing 0 to PF0 on the left side (assuming that the playfield is displayed using the 36 rightmost columns).

 

There might be trouble with repositioning players in mid-screen and also with color-striping them, so that the way I drew the enemies might not be possible. It might even be necessary to alternate graphics writes for the two players on alternating scanlines, but I don't exactly know by heart how many writes are really possible. Alternatively, you could maybe alternate write to the graphics and color registers of the players to get them color-striped, but at a lower resolution, like it's been done in the post above.

 

The 3D effect could be strenghened a bit by making the black bars thicker on the ramps that run down to the right side.

 

Anyway, here are the mockups (I actually meant to rotate them properly, but the uploaded pictures don't seem to reflect that):

1857084878_MarbleMadness2600upper.thumb.JPG.6d1db5c8e486e132d1f83c8e2d953de2.JPG

Marble Madness 2600 lower.JPG

Edited by Kurt_Woloch
additional idea for color-striping
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On 3/23/2020 at 9:54 PM, grafixbmp said:

Seal-do LOTTM.png

It just occurred to me that Atari 2600 graphics drawn exclusively with playfield pixels look a lot like SNES graphics... in mosaic mode! It kinda looks like the game is in the middle of a scene transition (à la Super Mario World), and my brain keeps waiting for the animation to finish and the final graphics to appear.

 

Not that the graphics look bad or anything, it's just that rendering detailed backgrounds is far from being one of the things the 2600 excels at. I love all the mock-ups posted in this thread, especially because they're so unconventional.

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On 8/7/2020 at 1:52 AM, tokumaru said:

It just occurred to me that Atari 2600 graphics drawn exclusively with playfield pixels look a lot like SNES graphics... in mosaic mode! It kinda looks like the game is in the middle of a scene transition (à la Super Mario World), and my brain keeps waiting for the animation to finish and the final graphics to appear.

 

Not that the graphics look bad or anything, it's just that rendering detailed backgrounds is far from being one of the things the 2600 excels at. I love all the mock-ups posted in this thread, especially because they're so unconventional.

 

overworld sprites.png

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