Atari Flashback Portable score fix for bB

[+Karl G]

As many of you know, the score portion of bB games is corrupted on the AFP. Specifically the thousands and hundred thousands digits are repeated. The reason for this is because bB, along with a number of homebrews use a trick to avoid producing the black lines that appear on the left edge of the screen in many Atari games, and the emulator in the AFP is not complete enough to display this the same way an actual console would.

 

Anyway, I have produced a version of the standard kernel that fixes the score display on the AFP. To use, place this in your project directory before compiling a AFP-specific version of your game, and bB will use this custom file instead of the standard one. Rename it to something else when you want to compile a standard version of your game.

 

Technically, this could be used for both versions, eliminating the need for two versions of your game, since it should display correctly on both. There are a couple of caveats to using this version, however:

 

1. I have only lightly tested this so far.
2. If you do not use a black background, you will see a small black line on the left side of the screen right above the score.
3. The score uses one more scanline than the standard version. This will probably only matter if you are using a minikernel that uses a full 14 lines, such as the bitmap minikernel, however

 

Anyway, please give it a try, and let me know how it works for you! I've attached a basic example that displays a score for reference.

 

std_kernel.asm

 

score.bas

 

score.bas.bin

 

 

[ultima]

Thanks for this! Will try it out as soon as I get a minute on sword of surtr to test.

[+Gemintronic]

I think there's also some memory initialization problems with the Flashback and batari BASIC games. I vaguely remember Mr SQL bringing it up. I should try to look up the post with the fix. Maybe we can combine fixes