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Bruce Tomlin

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Some of you may have noticed me mention working on a 7800 game. I've been trying to keep it quiet until I had something worthy of showing off. I've been stuck for two months needing to get a tricky algorithm working, and even had to write a 6502 monitor program so I could debug it. You try writing a pipe-tracing algorithm in 6502 assembler, it ain't easy.

 

Well, I finally got the tricky part working after hacking on it all weekend.

 

I came up with the idea on July 4. I had an idea for something sort of like a cross between Tetris and Pipe Dream. And this is the result.

 

Just so you know, I only just now got this thing working to the point where I can see if the gameplay will even work. I plan to do scoring by computing the triangle number (1, 3, 6, 10, 15, 21, etc.) of the number of tiles in a chain, or one point per bombed tile. I'll probably shrink the boards to 7 tiles wide so there's room on the display for scores and stuff. I also need to do something about the flicker when tiles fall. And it may not display correctly on older versions of 7800 emulators. (CC2 owners, use 7800_16K)

 

So here it is, the first public demo release of... :ponder: Tubes.

tubes_2004_10_31.zip

Edited by Bruce Tomlin
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Not only is it 320 mode, it's using double-byte indexed character mode for most of the display. Each double-byte character gives half of a tile.

 

Making the graphics was a bit tedious. I was doing it all by hand. But once it was done, it was done.

 

Has anyone left it running idle for a couple of minutes?

 

 

Anyhow, I definitely have to put back the tweak to the random tile generator that allowed for more bombs. It might even be better yet to just make a lookup table so I can tweak the percentages on a tile-by-tile basis. The problem is that most tile types have four versions, but there's only one bomb and only one 4-way cross.

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finally a 7800 homebrew! gotta play this, if only i knew how to set up mess on mac...

Don't bother. The only version out there is too old and doesn't support the 320B graphic mode properly.

 

Of course it would be nice if someone would take the time make an up-to-date version of MacMESS, hint hint.

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finally a 7800 homebrew! gotta play this, if only i knew how to set up mess on mac...

Don't bother. The only version out there is too old and doesn't support the 320B graphic mode properly.

 

Of course it would be nice if someone would take the time make an up-to-date version of MacMESS, hint hint.

 

There has been some discussion on the MESS forums recently regarding MacMESS so maybe it will get an update soon. Apparently the *nix version should work on the Mac as well.

 

Mitch

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Okay, here it is with the "bombs/4-ways more often" patch restored, and with the bottom edge exits removed.

 

It would be a bit of work to make the edges be configurable (right now it's just less-than/greater-than comparisons to detect it), but that might be one way to control the difficulty level. You know, like every other one is a cap, or no caps at all.

tubes_2004_11_03.zip

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