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Robotron 2084 for atari 2600?


jaymz887

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Hi all,

I don't know if anyone came up with this idea for a hack. robotron 2084 for the Atari? I was thinking hacking berserk taking out the inner walls and adding more robots and humans. if for some reason the humans cant be added just adding the robots and giving it a different name like otto's world..

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I think it would need the harmony - along the lines of what spiceware is doing with frantic.

 

I don't know if its just me but I found the speed and movement/animation disappointing on the 8-bit versions - not as fast as the arcade and with character cell movement i.e not smooth.

 

Strangely the spectrum version( expect when it gets overloaded) appears smoother for the majority of the time.

 

I've been thinking of resurrecting my bezerk/robotron hybrid for the mattel aquarius not quite ready for the 2600!

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II don't know if its just me but I found the speed and movement/animation disappointing on the 8-bit versions - not as fast as the arcade and with character cell movement i.e not smooth.

 

I played the 5200 version of Robotron quite a bit, and even though it is not graphically arcade-perfect, I was always impressed by it! Even the screen-wipes and sounds from the original are intact. After suffering with weak 2600 coin-op ports so long, the 5200/A8 coin-op ports were usually quite impressive, back in the day. Just sayin'. :)

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I think it would need the harmony - along the lines of what spiceware is doing with frantic.

 

I did a Robotron Test of the 50 sprite kernel used for Space Rocks. It simulates the "converging on the humanoid" that occurs during the game by limiting the range of the asteroids. The flicker is atrocious. Since the key part of Robotron is the mass of robots converging on you, I don't it's worth pursuing on the 2600.

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post-17869-0-80654500-1363742103_thumb.pngExcuse my sorry excuse for a batari basic mockup:) But what about a Robotron like game borrowing elements like the playfield from bezerk which could be used to corner the player and increase the difficulty without having to have quite as many items on screen. The other one I was thinking off was keeping a large portion of the screen invisible with only a proportion of the screen "lit" up by the player effectively hiding enemies in the dark

 

 

I did a Robotron Test of the 50 sprite kernel used for Space Rocks. It simulates the "converging on the humanoid" that occurs during the game by limiting the range of the asteroids. The flicker is atrocious. Since the key part of Robotron is the mass of robots converging on you, I don't it's worth pursuing on the 2600.

Edited by barnieg
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I did a Robotron Test of the 50 sprite kernel used for Space Rocks. It simulates the "converging on the humanoid" that occurs during the game by limiting the range of the asteroids. The flicker is atrocious. Since the key part of Robotron is the mass of robots converging on you, I don't it's worth pursuing on the 2600.

 

I strongly disagree.

I have seen much worse and much more annoying flicker. Even Wizard of Wor 2600, and that's FUN!

Your worse case scenario reports mostly 4 with a slight 5. Perfectly acceptable when gameplay rapidly shrinks the number of enemies.

I think it is a beautiful, amazing intelligent flicker routine.

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The developer could make a concession of simply not drawing all enemy robots from the start of the wave. Draw as many as possible, and then every time you shoot an enemy, have another pop up in another spot, until you finally have thinned the herd and killed them all. Also keep them a bit more vertically separated so that multiplexing can be used as much as possible, preventing unnecessary flicker as much as possible.

 

If playfield gfx could be used, then there is your solution ala the 5200 version.

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The developer could make a concession of simply not drawing all enemy robots from the start of the wave. Draw as many as possible, and then every time you shoot an enemy, have another pop up in another spot, until you finally have thinned the herd and killed them all. Also keep them a bit more vertically separated so that multiplexing can be used as much as possible, preventing unnecessary flicker as much as possible.

 

If playfield gfx could be used, then there is your solution ala the 5200 version.

 

That's not a shabby idea...

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 years later...

Atari actually showed a prototype version of Robotron 2084 for the Atari 2600 back in 1983-4. It required their add on keyboard gadget (which never got past the prototype stage), and it flickered terrribly...

 

Catsfolly

 

I think this thread is worth bumping if this post is accurate. So supposedly Atari Inc whipped up a proto of Robotron 2084 to work with PVI's "Graduate" keyboard for the 2600. Very interesting. Now if Atari Museum's info is accurate, the "Graduate", before any additional expansion, had 8K RAM included. That was the base version. Now I wonder if this port just used the added RAM and still relied upon the TIA or was the port made to use the later enhanced graphics chipset "Fred" and "Wilma" that came along later in the Graduate's development?

 

It would be interesting to compare the Fred/Wilma vs the DPC in terms of capabilities… And it's really a shame the later Atari Corp - and Activision - didn't use enhanced chips in the post-1984 2600 - or 7800 - releases, at least IMHO.

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  • 1 year later...

9 enemy isn't enough for robotron. Are you familiar with C programming? If so you may want to go through this blog series to get yourself set up for DPC+ development*, or even wait for the more advanced BUS that we're working on. One possibility with BUS that would use 30 Hz flicker for everything would be to use a 128x100 or 128x200 monochrome bitmap display.

We just wrapped up a major rewrite to the BUS Stuffing driver - it now fits in 2K (DPC+ uses 3K) which frees up ROM and RAM as the driver must be copied into RAM at startup. The reduced RAM usage is very important as the default allocation for C Variables & Stack went from 1K to 2K.

 

I need to rewrite support in Stella for it, after which I'll be working on additional demos to make sure everything functions as expected.

 

 

* not bB DPC+, which is just an optional kernel for bB that takes advantage of DPC+. Frantic used DPC+ to get up to 24 sprites on screen at once, while Space Rocks gets 51.

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Even a limited version on the 2600 would be great to see! Every time I play Robotron on the 7800 I think about how great it would be to play this on the 2600. Robotron was the only reason I purchased a 7800. If you need some $$$, this sounds like a good Kickstarter idea.

Edited by adamchevy
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Even a limited version on the 2600 would be great to see! Every time I play Robotron on the 7800 I think about how great it would be to play this on the 2600. Robotron was the only reason I purchased a 7800. If you need some $$$, this sounds like a good Kickstarter idea.

i can box a box for a hypothetical 2600 versión for free

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