Trinity Posted June 20, 2012 Share Posted June 20, 2012 Would it be easy to hack starship so that it does not have the rotating colors/screen saver thing going on when it's not being played? Same thing with a lot of games now that I think about it... Thanks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nukey Shay Posted June 20, 2012 Share Posted June 20, 2012 Changing ROM address $F062 from $DE to $2E should work...it will be incrementing an invalid RAM address instead of the screen saver EOR value variable. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Atari Dogs Posted June 24, 2012 Share Posted June 24, 2012 Would it be easy to hack Starship back into Jefferson Starship or maybe even Jefferson Airplane? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Trinity Posted June 25, 2012 Author Share Posted June 25, 2012 ha ha, No really, I just like to have starship running on one of my 2600's as a 'screensaver'. And the changing colors are annoying. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nukey Shay Posted June 25, 2012 Share Posted June 25, 2012 Jefferson Starship it is JeffersonStarship.bin 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
snstay Posted June 25, 2012 Share Posted June 25, 2012 Ha Ha thats great!!!!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nukey Shay Posted June 25, 2012 Share Posted June 25, 2012 Somebody needs to hack tractor sprites into this game. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljhgJuS5IqU Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cloudmann Posted June 25, 2012 Share Posted June 25, 2012 Not sure about "Sara", but how's this song? (Music Video).bin Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Trinity Posted June 26, 2012 Author Share Posted June 26, 2012 (edited) Jefferson Starship it is Great! it doesn't cycle colors anymore. Now I need a harmony cart... Game 3 is fn' great as a screen saver! Thanks Nukey!!! How about this, Would it be possible to get rid of the time limit? I wonder how high the score could go up to then...? (100000 would be nice) LOL Edited June 26, 2012 by Trinity Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BassGuitari Posted June 29, 2012 Share Posted June 29, 2012 My guess is the score maxes out at 99. The game probably just ends at 99 points (Air-Sea Battle and Street Racer do this, as do, I'm sure, other early titles), so you'd have to hack that too. Don't ask me how, though, It's possible the score might reset to zero, or even crash the game. I don't think Bob Whitehead was banking on anyone hitting 99 points, so it's possible he may not have bothered to put any kind of check in place for that. After all, Star Ship is only a 2K game, and every byte of that 2K was precious. In any event, I'm about 99% confident that three-digit scores are impossible in Star Ship. (On another note, I always thought it'd be cool to play these games in one of the random "screen saver" color schemes, or to be able to cycle through them with a switch like the Game Select switch, and play with the color scheme you last landed on.) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nukey Shay Posted June 29, 2012 Share Posted June 29, 2012 The scores are held in $AE and $AF for the 2 players, BCD mode (i.e...hex, but treated as decimal). So not only is it impossible for 3 digits to be held in ram, but the existing display kernel would also lack the means to show it. The scores would simply roll over from 99 to zero and have no other effect if you managed to do it within the time limit of 127 x 64 frames (or roughly two and a quarter minutes per player...a common timer limit in early Atari stuff). Disabling/hacking the timer is kinda pointless, really...the game would just continue forever. BTW a partially reverse-engineered disassembly was made by Manuel (Cybergoth) Polik. You can read it as plain text here. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Trinity Posted June 29, 2012 Author Share Posted June 29, 2012 Starship is one of my all time favorites for the VCS. So it is very interesting to know these things. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keatah Posted July 2, 2012 Share Posted July 2, 2012 was there a reason for the flashing colors to begin with? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nukey Shay Posted July 2, 2012 Share Posted July 2, 2012 It's the "screensaver"...and pretty much all of the early 2600 games had something similar. Ya see...back in the old B.C. (before cartridge) days, dedicated Pong-type console developers thought it was pretty cool how their gadgets could display a dotted line, two much shorter lines, and a dot. So cool that they unwittingly cranked up the contrast/intensity of those images...so they'd be permanent reminders to viewers that their console had been used on a given television Consumers didn't find it to be so cool. As a selling point, Atari stepped up to explain that programming in a routine to shift the displayed colors of any unattended Atari games' objects would not result in this unwanted etching. And there was much rejoicing. OK...so it was bullshit in the long run. But consumers still bought the idea. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Trinity Posted July 4, 2012 Author Share Posted July 4, 2012 It's the "screensaver"...and pretty much all of the early 2600 games had something similar. Ya see...back in the old B.C. (before cartridge) days, dedicated Pong-type console developers thought it was pretty cool how their gadgets could display a dotted line, two much shorter lines, and a dot. So cool that they unwittingly cranked up the contrast/intensity of those images...so they'd be permanent reminders to viewers that their console had been used on a given television Consumers didn't find it to be so cool. As a selling point, Atari stepped up to explain that programming in a routine to shift the displayed colors of any unattended Atari™ games' objects would not result in this unwanted etching. And there was much rejoicing. OK...so it was bullshit in the long run. But consumers still bought the idea. And back in the day, Having a 25" color TV was like being next to God Allmighty... A lot of my friends got 'subordinated" to some shitty TV to play on because their parents would not let 'that TV game' near their TV.LOL Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SoundGammon Posted July 5, 2012 Share Posted July 5, 2012 ....I remember a lady who played Tetris so much on their big projection screen, she ended up with a Tetris "Tower" burned-in the middle of the screen! New shows: Tetris sports, news, sitcoms, commercials and Pac-Man running around too! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
almightytodd Posted August 9, 2013 Share Posted August 9, 2013 First attempt at this post left out the video... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
almightytodd Posted August 9, 2013 Share Posted August 9, 2013 I figured out a way to use Stella as a screen saver! So what I wanted to do, was to have the attract screen for an Atari VCS game running for awhile, and then stop, and then start again with a different game. I know that Stella can be launched from the command line, but how to launch it, wait for awhile, stop it, and then start again with a different game? The solution I found, is to have two separate batch files running in two different DOS windows at the same time. One launches Stella with a list of games, and the other waits for a period of time (20 or 30 seconds works well), and then stops any instance of Stella that is running. I set this all up to run on a Windows XP machine. So here are the batch files. Of course, you'll have to change the Launcher batch to point to the folders where your games are... :: LaunchVCS.cmd - Launches a new game as soon as the game running is stopped... :LOOP "C:\Program Files\Stella\Stella.exe" "C:\_Emulation\AtariVCS\AATop100\001. Pitfall II.bin" "C:\Program Files\Stella\Stella.exe" "C:\_Emulation\AtariVCS\AATop100\002. Pitfall!.bin" "C:\Program Files\Stella\Stella.exe" "C:\_Emulation\AtariVCS\AATop100\005. Space Invaders.bin" "C:\Program Files\Stella\Stella.exe" "C:\_Emulation\AtariVCS\AATop100\006. H.E.R.O.bin" "C:\Program Files\Stella\Stella.exe" "C:\_Emulation\AtariVCS\Try\spacerocks20121129_NTSC.bin" "C:\Program Files\Stella\Stella.exe" "C:\_Emulation\AtariVCS\Try\SuperPongNew.bin" "C:\Program Files\Stella\Stella.exe" "C:\_Emulation\AtariVCS\Try\D.K.VCS_130617_NTSC.bin" "C:\Program Files\Stella\Stella.exe" "C:\_Emulation\AtariVCS\Favorites\Juno First.bin" "C:\Program Files\Stella\Stella.exe" "C:\_Emulation\AtariVCS\AATop100\009. Yars' Revenge.bin" "C:\Program Files\Stella\Stella.exe" "C:\_Emulation\AtariVCS\AATop100\010. Asteroids.bin" "C:\Program Files\Stella\Stella.exe" "C:\_Emulation\AtariVCS\AATop100\021. Centipede.bin" GOTO LOOP The key to this next one, is a utility called, "pskill" from Microsoft's SysInternals tools: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896683.aspx :: WaitAndKill.cmd - Let Stella run for awhile, then kill it... :LOOP :: sleep 30 seconds ping -n 31 127.0.0.1>nul :: Stop Stella pskill Stella.exe :: Do it again GOTO LOOP The one downside of doing it this way, is sometimes the DOS windows show in-between stopping and re-starting Stella. Here's a video of the result. I set the wait time to be rather short, so you can see a wide variety of games without waiting too long. I decided to use AC/DC guitar riffs for the sound-track... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
almightytodd Posted August 9, 2013 Share Posted August 9, 2013 Oh, one other cool thing... ...while this is running, you can press "F2" and start playing any game while its attraction screen is showing. When the time runs out, the game will quit and then go on to the next game. Stopping it is a bit of a challenge. I used "ctrl-shift-esc" to launch the Task Manager. I then selected one of the running batches and pressed "ctrl-C" to stop the batch. You only need to stop the Launcher. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gliptitude Posted August 22, 2019 Share Posted August 22, 2019 RE: the original post, I suggest flipping the TV type switch to B&W on your console or emulator. The hack I want for this game is for the Left Controller to correspond to player one so I don't have to unplug my AtariVox+ from the Right Controller port and plug another joystick in. Apparently this convention was not set when Starship came out. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nukey Shay Posted August 24, 2019 Share Posted August 24, 2019 On 8/22/2019 at 3:09 PM, gliptitude said: RE: the original post, I suggest flipping the TV type switch to B&W on your console or emulator. That only strips the color hue...you'd still have shifting shades of grey for a screensaver. Hack for swapped sticks: StarShip(joyswap).bin StarShip.asm 2 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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