My first journey in homebrew

[acsabo]

I'm just sharing my progress in the game I've being working for a few months...

The inpiration/motivation came from the movie Tron with that light cycles racing game, later on I played one called ktron for Linux (does anyone know it?).

I found it would be a good starting point to do it in Assembly (I've always wanted to have a change to learn this programming language), so now I had a good reason, why not?!

 

Don't know why I got surprised, but I found that they already had developed a similar game called Surround and that was done right after Atari 2600 was release, that was awesome!

 

Anyway, I think it is still a good starting point for me, and maybe I could do it a little differently...

 

As soon as I get a playable release, I'll put here the roms, source code and everything... And of course, specially my questions on how to do it better and better...

 

Edited February 7, 2019 by acsabo

[acsabo]

After a long long time, I finally got something to share. I could't find a way to upload the rom here yet (sorry, I'm a newbie). But you can find it here: https://github.com/acsabo/Atari/tree/master/Tron/rom

 

youtube link - quick demo:

 

The game is supposed to be played in two. Since there's no such a A.I. yet...

 

Tips:

- The player that reaches 9 first wins;

- Avoid collisions with the walls and the borders of "the grid";

- Press the button between turns and at the end;

 

That's it for now... I keep working on it... I hope you enjoy it!

[Arenafoot]

I like the red gridlines in the background! A nice extra touch to the game..... can't wait to see where you go with it!

[neotokeo2001]

Looks great!! I really like the grid lines also. Shared with the Atari 2600 Homebrew Group on FaceBook.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/Atari2600homebrew

[RevEng]

Great start! Visually it's attractive and stylistic.

 

It looks like you're relying on undriven bits to be a certain value, which may work on most consoles, but isn't great for compatibility reasons. Run the game in stella with the " -dev.tiadriven 1" option, which changes the undriven bits randomly, to see what I mean.

 

For the game itself, how about moving the light cycles smoothly? ie. you still can only turn on playfield boundaries, but the cycle animates intermediate locations. It might complicate the collision detection a bit, but I think the result would be a lot more appealing than Surround.

[JeffJetton]

Looks great, acasabo!

[acsabo]

Great start! Visually it's attractive and stylistic.

 

It looks like you're relying on undriven bits to be a certain value, which may work on most consoles, but isn't great for compatibility reasons. Run the game in stella with the " -dev.tiadriven 1" option, which changes the undriven bits randomly, to see what I mean.

 

For the game itself, how about moving the light cycles smoothly? ie. you still can only turn on playfield boundaries, but the cycle animates intermediate locations. It might complicate the collision detection a bit, but I think the result would be a lot more appealing than Surround.

Thanks for your feedback RevEng. I haven't notice that issue yet, maybe because I always run stella with default parameters. I'll have a look on that for sure!

About smooth movement, I started with this idea but I endedup without enought memory to address the collision, and I didn't want to sacrifice one line from the grid to do that, at least for now. I managed to implement that smoth on the horizontal lines, but I had a critical time consuming trying to render the players on the vertical lines, since the grid is asymetric and time consuming to render it. You know what I mean.That is a challenge, so I left as is for now.

[RevEng]

Yep, I do understand.

[+ZeroPage Homebrew]

We'll be featuring KTRON LIVE on tomorrow's (Wednesday) ZeroPage Homebrew stream on Twitch at 11AM PT | 2PM ET | 7PM GMT! Hope everyone can watch!

Twitch Stream: http://twitch.tv/zeropagehomebrew/

Games:

- Billy the Ball (2019 WIP) by Chris Read aka atari2600land
- White Water Madness (2019 WIP Update) by Chris Read aka atari2600land
- KTron (2019 WIP) by Adriano Sabo aka acsabo
- Climber 5 (2003) by Dennis Debro aka DEBRO

 

EDIT: Updated with YouTube Archive of Stream

 

Edited April 12, 2019 by ZeroPage Homebrew

[azure]

I was watching ZPH's video and I had a thought. Would you consider adding a mode such that pressing the button can make the player hop over the snake? It would only hop 1 block and be limited to 1 or 2 uses. It might add another dimension to the game play. It could also be a power up.

Edited April 12, 2019 by azure