AAA177 Posted January 4, 2021 Share Posted January 4, 2021 Any chance of a homebrew Congo Bongo update? 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+splendidnut Posted January 4, 2021 Share Posted January 4, 2021 Potentially. It's one of the ones I'm interested in doing at some point. No promises though. 6 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AAA177 Posted January 4, 2021 Author Share Posted January 4, 2021 I understand. Thanks for the reply. It's a cool game... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+splendidnut Posted January 13, 2021 Share Posted January 13, 2021 Welp... ended up going down the rabbit hole with this. I started looking thru my "in-progress" disassembly of Congo Bongo, starting the debate of whether to do a hack of the original 2600 game or start from scratch. While I do enjoy the 2600 version, and it would be relatively easy to do some hacking and cleanup on that, it doesn't quite have the flexibility to easily add levels. So I would probably start from scratch, and lean more towards looking like the arcade. So, I ended up doing a "quick" mockup of Level 1 to show what it could look like: Adding water to the scene would take a bit of figuring out, but probably some form of mid-screen color changes I think the other levels could easily be drawn in a similar fashion. And then they would all be using the same display engine, unlike the original 2600 version. ROM: congo_poc.bin 10 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+SpiceWare Posted January 13, 2021 Share Posted January 13, 2021 2 hours ago, splendidnut said: Adding water to the scene would take a bit of figuring out, but probably some form of mid-screen color changes Looks like you're getting 3 colors from the background & playfield. Have you seen @cd-w's Zevious? He's getting 4, you might be able to do something similar. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+splendidnut Posted January 13, 2021 Share Posted January 13, 2021 @SpiceWare Thanks for the nudge. It was in the back of my mind to attempt that... but I thought mid-line color changes would be the ticket, but that was a bit of a pain. Doing 4 colors seems to work somewhat well... Will need to tweak them though -- currently the blue I used appears a bit garish on a real CRT. It's probably going to be a bit of a trial and error to find the right colors. ROM: congo_poc.bin 10 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+splendidnut Posted January 13, 2021 Share Posted January 13, 2021 Alright... last one for the day. I've added the ability to change the colors with the joystick. There are 4 colors in the palette, 2 background and 2 foreground, numbered 0..3. The left most set of digits is the currently selected palette index. The right most set of digits is the current color value. Joystick controls are: Left/Right changes hue. Up/Down changes brightness. Fire button selects next palette index. Right difficulty switch controls whether primitive color blurring is enabled... it's flawed, and I'm not sure if it's really necessary. But it's there to try out. I've chosen a better set of colors for the defaults. Enjoy. congo_poc.bin 5 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Video Posted January 17, 2021 Share Posted January 17, 2021 That actually looks pretty darn good. I was going to suggest using a ball for water (it can be any width on each line, and you have two. Then the rest of the playfield could be done with two colors, black for the job interactive bit, and a light reddish color for the ground, while using the blinds for walls, giving the appearance of another darker red color. Of course, either way, you'll end up with blinds, so using it on everything like you've already done, might look better? Though memory usage may be more efficient on what I mentioned. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+splendidnut Posted January 17, 2021 Share Posted January 17, 2021 The ball object uses the same color as the Playfield. A bit of a non-starter, but it could potentially be used to animate the water; though, I'm not sure how much of a burden that would be. I'd want to get a simple version of the sprites in there before attempting to do that. If you're referring to the missiles (which I think you are), they could be used to add the water. BUT, they each share their color with their respective player object (i.e. Player0/Missile0 share a color, as do Player1/Missile1) so that wouldn't work too well once sprites are added in (i.e. color conflicts/contrast issues). And I already have plans for potentially using the missiles to handle the falling coconuts and/or adding shadows on the ground for the coconuts. With all that said... the very next stage (Level 2) has a lot of water in it (snapshot uses colors: D5, 87, AC, 3A): So I need to take that into consideration Thanks for the suggestions. Glad you like it. 5 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alfredtdk Posted January 20, 2021 Share Posted January 20, 2021 On 1/13/2021 at 10:04 AM, splendidnut said: Welp... ended up going down the rabbit hole with this. I started looking thru my "in-progress" disassembly of Congo Bongo, starting the debate of whether to do a hack of the original 2600 game or start from scratch. While I do enjoy the 2600 version, and it would be relatively easy to do some hacking and cleanup on that, it doesn't quite have the flexibility to easily add levels. So I would probably start from scratch, and lean more towards looking like the arcade. So, I ended up doing a "quick" mockup of Level 1 to show what it could look like: ? Adding water to the scene would take a bit of figuring out, but probably some form of mid-screen color changes I think the other levels could easily be drawn in a similar fashion. And then they would all be using the same display engine, unlike the original 2600 version. ROM: congo_poc.bin 4 kB · 11 downloads Wow ? 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+splendidnut Posted January 20, 2021 Share Posted January 20, 2021 And here's one with all the stages: congo_poc-(20210119).bin Same as before with the joystick controls for changing the colors around. Select switch can be used to move thru the different stages: Stage 1 -- Primate Peak Stage 2 (2 variants) -- Snake Lake variant 1 -> light-colored ground variant 2 -> dark-colored ground Stage 3 -- Rhino Ridge Stage 4 -- Lazy Lagoon NOTE: If you have issues running it, try changing the file name from .bin to .e7 7 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+ZeroPage Homebrew Posted January 21, 2021 Share Posted January 21, 2021 On 1/19/2021 at 5:55 PM, splendidnut said: And here's one with all the stages: All the levels look REALLY great @splendidnut! Looking forward to showing off what you've done on ZPH once we're back from Awards season. I've played around with the colours and I always keep coming back to the default one's you've picked. I do prefer Variant 2 for Stage 2 if I had to choose one. - James 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zzip Posted January 21, 2021 Share Posted January 21, 2021 On 1/13/2021 at 1:33 PM, splendidnut said: @SpiceWare Thanks for the nudge. It was in the back of my mind to attempt that... but I thought mid-line color changes would be the ticket, but that was a bit of a pain. Doing 4 colors seems to work somewhat well... Will need to tweak them though -- currently the blue I used appears a bit garish on a real CRT. It's probably going to be a bit of a trial and error to find the right colors. ROM: congo_poc.bin 4 kB · 13 downloads Wow! If you get this working, it will look better than many of the home ports on more powerful systems 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+splendidnut Posted January 21, 2021 Share Posted January 21, 2021 19 hours ago, ZeroPage Homebrew said: All the levels look REALLY great @splendidnut! Looking forward to showing off what you've done on ZPH once we're back from Awards season. I've played around with the colours and I always keep coming back to the default one's you've picked. I do prefer Variant 2 for Stage 2 if I had to choose one. - James Thanks James! After all the color tweaking I've done, I usually come back to defaults. There are some fun color tweaks and combos that be found... but what I have now seems to work best for a jungle. I'll probably bump up the brightness on the background colors a bit (they're a bit too dark on some hardware variants). But, for the other colors, I'm quite satisfied. I think the bright blue and orange combine quite nicely for the light sand color. I might provide some actual "palette" selection for the game itself to compensate for people's preference and system color differences. I definitely like Variant 2 best for Stage 2... although I might change the upper right area to use the sandy color since that hints nicely at the next stage, Rhino Ridge. I'll probably go thru and add a bit more playfield details to the stages... since the backgrounds of Stage 1 and 2 are a bit plain compared to some of the background details seen in stages 3 and 4. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+splendidnut Posted January 21, 2021 Share Posted January 21, 2021 7 hours ago, zzip said: Wow! If you get this working, it will look better than many of the home ports on more powerful systems Thanks! It shouldn't be too hard to get this working (famous last words).... Overall I'm quite happy with how this turned out for something that was started spur of the moment. I've been very tempted to try and do this as a cross-platform project... but I need to get this to a point where the graphics engine is in a "similar working state" as Paint The City was when I first posted that. 6 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Video Posted January 22, 2021 Share Posted January 22, 2021 Yeah I remembered balls or missiles shared sprite or bg color, just don't remember which. Still that looks awesome, and I'm not nearly as anti blinds as some people. I hope you can get sprites and ai and such working on it, I'll certainly buy one if it happens. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
freshbrood Posted January 30, 2021 Share Posted January 30, 2021 (edited) I can't believe no one's ported Lemmings to the VCS yet. Seems totally doable. That Congo Bongo looks great! In the Zevious I'd think you could get 5 colors with flickering 2 sets of playfield colors. It doesn't even use the background other than as a black border. Edited January 30, 2021 by freshbrood Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+SpiceWare Posted February 6, 2021 Share Posted February 6, 2021 @splendidnut FYI 5 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
7800Knight Posted February 6, 2021 Share Posted February 6, 2021 I'm not exactly a techie here. But I do want to know something. The Atari 2600 could NOT pull off a three-quarter isometric view and Congo Bongo firmly proved that. Given the limitations of the hardware, how can one work with that? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+splendidnut Posted February 7, 2021 Share Posted February 7, 2021 1 hour ago, 7800Knight said: I'm not exactly a techie here. But I do want to know something. The Atari 2600 could NOT pull off a three-quarter isometric view and Congo Bongo firmly proved that. Given the limitations of the hardware, how can one work with that? Uh, I think I proved that it is possible... but maybe that's just my opinion? 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Andrew Davie Posted February 7, 2021 Share Posted February 7, 2021 1 hour ago, splendidnut said: Uh, I think I proved that it is possible... but maybe that's just my opinion? "could NOT" being past-tense. All OK. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+splendidnut Posted February 7, 2021 Share Posted February 7, 2021 Potentially. I was going to go off on a crazy rant about throwing in the towel on the project, and then put the icing on the joke cake by posting my latest updates on the POC. But I held back... maybe tomorrow. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Al_Nafuur Posted February 7, 2021 Share Posted February 7, 2021 4 minutes ago, splendidnut said: But I held back... maybe tomorrow. can we expect a crazy rant tomorrow too? 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+splendidnut Posted February 7, 2021 Share Posted February 7, 2021 Rant tomorrow? Maybe... I'll probably forget what I'm suppose to be ranting about. ANYWAYS... Food for the savages. Here's Stage 1 with the first attempt at player movement. Enjoy. congo_poc_move_around_stage_1.bin 9 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xybot67 Posted February 8, 2021 Share Posted February 8, 2021 Wow, I can see the potential! Anxious to see how this evolves. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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