Has anyone attempted to program Rogue for the 2600?

[Drake69]

I played that game on mainframe ASCII ages ago and haven't seen it since. I imagine it would have to be a higher resolution than the standard original Atari carts, otherwise the letters would be huge and the dungeon size would be pathetic. I have yet to play with batari basic, but I think it might be possible if the list of items, monsters, etc were trimmed down some.

 

Thoughts anyone?

[Christopher Tumber]

http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/199475-what-defines-a-rogue-like-game/

http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/172686-destiny-wip/

 

Adventure and Venture come to mind.

[+SpiceWare]

Sure, use 32 character text display.

 

With a 3x5 font you can display 32x16 :

 

Using a 3x4 font gets you 32x20, though it's a little harder to read:

Edited January 18, 2013 by SpiceWare

[raindog]

Someone was working on a Robot Finds Kitten port about 10 years ago. I don't remember how far he got, but if RFK is possible, Rogue (or Nethack, or Moria) should be, albeit with some extra RAM unless you're gonna have the same dungeon every time.

 

I like the 32x16 or 32x20 text idea. But there have been Nethack ports that used custom character sets to make monsters, and since you have to create a character set regardless, you could always do that. It's not like you have to animate them or anything. It'll be hard in the heat of battle to distinguish between H and M, but ports can take liberties.

 

Venture, Adventure, and other Atari dungeon-crawlers aren't really roguelikes because the dungeons have the same layout every time. I wouldn't know how to begin to create dungeons algorithmically on the VCS.

 

Whatever you do, it can't be as bad a play experience as the guy back in my college days who tried to play Nethack on a teletype.

[+Gemintronic]

http://www.atariage....ogue-like-game/

http://www.atariage....86-destiny-wip/

 

Adventure and Venture come to mind.

 

Both those links reference my own dabbling in Rogue-likes for the Atari 2600. I've got to tweak the Destiny code to not go over CPU cycles. Been distracted with other projects though.

 

The key is to abuse the pseudo random number generator as hard as possible. No other way to store dungeon layout or object placement. Rogue-likes do NOT need to be text based. It's a genre not a screen mode.

 

Oh, and be ready for some skepticism. Plenty of people have dropped RPG projects for the 2600 already..

[Impaler_26]

Someone was working on a Robot Finds Kitten port about 10 years ago. I don't remember how far he got, but if RFK is possible, Rogue (or Nethack, or Moria) should be, albeit with some extra RAM unless you're gonna have the same dungeon every time.

 

RFK 2600 hasn't been finished AFAIK - looks like it uses the same "technique" to display text as Dark Mage...

 

robotfindskitten 2600 (2003) (Jeremy Penner) (WIP).bin

 

And here's another neat "Rogue-like" RPG for the 2600: Radiant Force.

[+Gemintronic]

I dunno if Master Programmer was really aiming for Rogue-like.. seems more proto Final Fantasy to me.

 

Just as a side this is the best "text mode" I could do in batariBASIC