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@Omegamatrix your creativity is amazing. Thank you for making/sharing these games. Atari could have benefited from your work BITD.

 

<Edit> My son and I laugh every time we fire up the Warlords menu. The Holy Grail is one of our favorite movies.?

Edited by sramirez2008
Warlords - MPHG
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1 hour ago, atarifan88 said:

Looking through my games, I just realized Space Invaders would benefit greatly from this "menu" treatment!  Thanks for all your work on these.  They are greatly appreciated!

Please check out the first post of this thread. I have Space Invaders on there and links to all the games that have gottent the treatment. ?

 

 

 

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Wow, cant deny this is interesting, innovative, and something.. people apparently want.

 

Not for me though.

 

Checking the manual, toggling those switches, and remembering your favorite game number is part of the experience, and why I use a 6 switch system. Only the Atari VCS has those buggers (that I know of) and doing away with them, is just... not right?

 

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1 hour ago, Torr said:

Wow, cant deny this is interesting, innovative, and something.. people apparently want.

 

Not for me though.

 

Checking the manual, toggling those switches, and remembering your favorite game number is part of the experience, and why I use a 6 switch system. Only the Atari VCS has those buggers (that I know of) and doing away with them, is just... not right?

 

I get what you are saying. Each person will have a different expierence. At least with these the user can choose not to use them at all.

 

 

 

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These are so awesome, @Omegamatrix! And, uh, just in case your bored in quarantine, I'm just going to leave this here...

 

image.thumb.png.7d265336f9307d8880e65a3947a01686.png

These are the game options for Maze Craze. It's such a fun 2 player game but I can never remember all these variations. And it's worse than it looks. Each of the 16 games has four visibility options. And that's the only part of this paragraph I can actually get through without getting dizzy! :) 

image.thumb.png.4692858068cb5b432bb77a7762cacc2c.png

 

Ha ha! Got all that? :)

edit-- Oh and I forgot that those 16x4 options all have 3 or 4 speed options! I was counting them by I'm worried I'll wear out my select switch! 

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Looking at this example makes me wonder, have you ever found extra variants not found in the commercial release of the game? 

 

Like here, they lump game 7, visibility 1 with the 5 ROBBERS and TERROR variants. I wonder if they did that for design reasons, or if they grouped variations together sometimes just to reduce the number of game variants? Otherwise you might have to hit the sect switch 255 times to get to your game.

 

So if you exposed the raw byte where they're storing all these flags, have you ever enabled undocumented combos?

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On 8/16/2020 at 1:44 PM, Torr said:

Wow, cant deny this is interesting, innovative, and something.. people apparently want.

 

Not for me though.

 

Checking the manual, toggling those switches, and remembering your favorite game number is part of the experience, and why I use a 6 switch system. Only the Atari VCS has those buggers (that I know of) and doing away with them, is just... not right?

 

Agree - the VCS was released in the era of the Altair when folks understood that switches on the console were for programming the computer system and that was a big part of magic.

 

You could either just play the games, or you could throw the switches in combination to program in commands to access additional games, sometimes dozens per cartridge! All you had to do was learn to program the new video computer system via the switches like you saw your friends learning to do.

 

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Omegamatrix, I just want to say thank you for your effort in putting these together. One of the things I enjoy most about playing Atari today, is the amount of "new" variations, mods, homebrew, and other goodie options available now, that wasn't when I started more than 40 years ago. I appreciate the work everyone does that allows me to collect my roms at no cost to me.

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20 hours ago, quohog said:

Looking at this example makes me wonder, have you ever found extra variants not found in the commercial release of the game? 

 

Like here, they lump game 7, visibility 1 with the 5 ROBBERS and TERROR variants. I wonder if they did that for design reasons, or if they grouped variations together sometimes just to reduce the number of game variants? Otherwise you might have to hit the sect switch 255 times to get to your game.

 

So if you exposed the raw byte where they're storing all these flags, have you ever enabled undocumented combos?

I haven't found any undocumented ones, but I haven't tried either. All of the games I've looked at have built in-handling to wrap around from the highest game variation back to the lowest, and none so far had 255 game variations. Some games don't use binary bits of the game number as options, and some do.

 

There are certainly game variations that don't appear in the matrix at the back of the game manual such as the difficulty switches, and there is usually a Color/BW variation as well. I'm not sure if anyone noticed but the Combat, Indy 500, Warlords, Hangman, and Championship Soccer menus have a built in a BW menu screen. I didn't think of adding a BW screen when I did Video Olympics. The Space Invaders Menu though is mostly black and white already so that is okay. The rest of the menu games are color only so they didn't get a BW menu.

 

Maze Craze is a game I've thought about but never started. Maybe one day. I have started another menu game already (no hints), but I've currently paused that as something far more interesting has come up.

 

 

 

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