Any suggestions for "How'd they do that?" ?

[+SpiceWare]

I'm working on my presentation for next weekend's Houston Arcade Expo.  In part of it I'm showing how to utilize Stella's Fixed Debug Color mode to figure out how games are created using TIA's limited abilities.  I'd like to do a few more of the games from back in the day and am looking for suggestions of games with graphics which at first don't look like they should be possible.

 

The ones I've already included:

• Space Invaders
• Keystone Kapers
• Dolphin
• Battlezone
• Solaris
• Hunchy II
• Draconian
• Gingerbread Man
• Mappy

 

Example analysis:

 

[+Nathan Strum]

These two pairs of games use similar ideas for very different results:

Dragonfire and Dragster (large, moving bitmaps)

Enduro and Fantastic Voyage (high resolution borders)

 

Then these two really need the debugger to decipher them:

Midnight Magic just because it's pretty brilliant

Escape from the MindMaster because the mazes look insane in the debugger

 

 

Edited November 5, 2019 by Nathan Strum

[+SpiceWare]

Great ideas, Midnight Magic and Escape from MindMaster definitely need to to be added. They have so much going on though that I'll need to do a few run-throughs after adding them to see if there's any time left for the others.

[Colmino]

16 hours ago, SpiceWare said:

• Draconian
• Mappy

Heck yeah.  I was going to suggest Draconian just because I'm interested in the digital samples.

 

Mappy?  Technically I understand how they did everything in that game.  But that doesn't change the fact that it's the single most amazing thing ever created for the Atari 2600 by a factor of at least two.  Literally the only two things I would change to make it even more perfect:

 

1: The sound of trampolines.  Arcade used two higher-pitched tones slightly offset from one another; emulation uses single low tone.  Since this is by far the most common sound effect in the game, it feels important that it be done justice.

2: A longer (arcade-accurate) delay after Mappy enters and before the game begins in earnest.

[iesposta]

Endlessly fascinating topic, and one I’ve always been interested in — even back to 1982 when I wondered about the rolling numbers in Enduro. Activision you have covered. Dolphin or Stampede for Player sliding. 

Brilliant uses like Skiing with one Player for the entire scene which allows horizontal and - on a variation - vertical at the same time. Sky Jinx was also impressive to me. 

 

Mindmaster as suggested. 

 

•You could highlight “best clever use” of an object. 

The Ball is pushed and repurposed extensively. 

The 2600 Ballblazer homebrew does the two independent scrolling game grids with just Background! (In my mind I consider Background a 2600 programming object.  )

[+SpiceWare]

2 hours ago, Colmino said:

Heck yeah.  I was going to suggest Draconian just because I'm interested in the digital samples.

 

For this I'm just covering the visuals as that's what Stella's Fixed Debug Color mode is useful for.

 

I probably covered the digital samples to some extent in my blog, but the categories of Draconian, Medieval Mayhem, Space Rocks, etc. all went away with the forum upgrade so it's now difficult to track down stuff.  I started an experiment to use tags instead, but abandoned that as the categories are supposedly coming back.

 

Likewise I might have covered it in the homebrew post.

 

Regardless, I will be covering it in detail in the CDFJ forum of the Harmony/Melody Club so you may like to join or follow the club.  No ETA for when though as it'll be one of the last things covered.

[+SpiceWare]

1 hour ago, iesposta said:

Brilliant uses like Skiing with one Player for the entire scene

 

Quite clever how they swap player usage depending upon where the skier is in relation to the flags and the trees.

 

player is behind the flag

 

player is in front of the flag

 

Quote

•You could highlight “best clever use” of an object. 

Great idea! I've done enough work on this revision that I'm not going to change directions this late in the game, but that would be good for my next presentation update.

 

I'm only doing 4 homebrews for a specific reason. The authors of those games know why ?

 

Quote

In my mind I consider Background a 2600 programming object.

Yep - that's why I used Keystone Kapers.

 

[iesposta]

I noticed Skiing swapped players, now I see why. Thanks. 

[+SpiceWare]

Figured out how to point out things in succession in Keynote:

 

 

The 2 dark arrows are joined together as a group. The dotted red line is their path as you advance the presentation, with resulting positions shown by the ghosted arrows.  When the slide is first displayed it looks like this:

 

 

When advanced the arrows show up:

 

and then move with each click:

 

 

While not really needed for Space Invaders, it should help a lot when I go over Midnight Magic.

 

 

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Sky Jinks is also pretty smart.

 

Edit: Mentioned above already.

 

How about Galaxian?

Edited November 6, 2019 by Thomas Jentzsch

[+SpiceWare]

Hadn't looked at Sky Jinks before, wow - most of the stuff is drawn using the ball ?

 

 

 

Hmm, looks like something's off with the Missile 0 when Debug Color mode is on....

 

 

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Hm, M0 should be two pixels wide. It works on my version of Stella.

 

BTW: Also look for the clouds.

[+SpiceWare]

I'm running 6.0.2.  If I disable the ball the missile looks like I'd expect it to in both regular and debug mode.

 

 

 

Nice, the clouds show off playfield priority over players.

 

 

 

Aha!  I zoomed in and what's going on is as the balloon moves left/right the missile's getting shifted 1 frame before the ball is.  Here's the balloon messed up when it's not in debug mode:

 

 

and the balloon looking correct in debug mode:

 

 

[DragonGrafx-16]

Anything on that scrolling planet background on Space Chase? I never thought the 2600 could do that.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Interesting, never noticed that.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

1 minute ago, DragonGrafx-16 said:

Anything on that scrolling planet background on Space Chase? I never thought the 2600 could do that.

Simple scrolling playfield, nothing special.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Snoopy and the Red Baron does some tricks too.

[DragonGrafx-16]

3 hours ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

Simple scrolling playfield, nothing special.

Been a while since I played it... saw a video of it and it did not look as complex as I remembered.

[Kid Ice]

I'm not kidding... I think the most amazing effect in VCS history is Gonzo's rotating head in Pigs in Space.

[+Nathan Strum]

The Rubik's Cube 3D Prototype is kind of cool. It's a little weird, in that you don't see anything change in the debugger when rotating it.  

[Kiwi]

Congo Bongo is probably another good choice, specifically the first isometic scene. 

[+Andrew Davie]

I'd throw in Cosmic Ark starfield/effect. It's pretty tied in to how the hardware works, and iconic on the '2600.

 

[Rom Hunter]

Solaris and Beamrider?

[Thomas Jentzsch]

14 hours ago, DragonGrafx-16 said:

Been a while since I played it... saw a video of it and it did not look as complex as I remembered.

Maybe you confused it with another game? Star Strike?

[Colmino]

On 11/6/2019 at 12:50 PM, SpiceWare said:

Figured out how to point out things in succession in Keynote:

Speaking of Space Invaders...

 

I've always wondered when folks would get together and have a chat about a video game phenomenon I've always wanted solid answers on.  And that would be the phenomenon of home ports of video games (prior to, say, the mid-late 80s) seeming to go out of their way to be different from the arcade originals.  I don't mean "different strictly because the limitations of hardware or ROM dictated it so", but different, like it was some kind of cultural philosophy or unwritten mandate that game engineers adhered to almost without knowing it.  Space Invaders for the 2600 is a prime example.  Along with the usual needless inaccuracies of sound effects and other minutiae, the graphics for the aliens and the base are needlessly huge deviations from the arcade graphics.  It's pretty much exactly what you'd expect to get if somebody were deliberately making a bootleg knockoff of an arcade game and wanted to skirt around copyright, as opposed to having the license to produce a port fair and square.

 

Space Invaders is a solid case-in-point, but this phenomenon is 100% reliable during this era.  Engineers going way out of their way to re-make the visuals and sounds of their ports in some personal vision of theirs, when in the same amount of ROM they could painlessly have produced something much truer (and made buyers happier, leading to better sales).  Growing up during this era and after, when ports of games started to appear which had taken obvious pains to mimic their arcade counterparts, it was always conspicuous and exciting, like I was seeing the dawn of a new era.  And now that we have modern homebrew efforts to point to, this trend from the early 80s is exposed all the more.

 

Why?

 

I admit I tend to hope the answer is something more elaborate than the obvious, arbitrary guess that "they literally cared so little about accuracy that they were effectively working from either a vague familiarity or a one-paragraph description of the arcade original".