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What's new at the plant.

Entries in this blog

2600 Homebrew Author Impromptu Gathering

Wow, just through sheer good fortune I got to meet in person with cd_w. Since vdub_bobby is close by, the three of of us got together last night to talk shop and have a beer. :-)   cd_w on the left and vdub_bobby on the right. Chris was visiting Seattle and just happened to be doing work at my company. Through some small talk about homebrew he found out that I was there. It's a games company and he was a little surprised to find me there.   I have now met in person almost every person who I

djmips

djmips

Hello Again

Hi, everyone. Yes I have returned. I guess I wasn't gone that long after all. I took a break, everything worked out, and now I feel refreshed.

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djmips

Turning off the lights at factory

Well, I'm just letting you know that I won't be around here anymore. It was great to hang out and talk shop on a semi regular basis but I'm retiring from active duty.   Take care everyone.   - David

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djmips

ATAN2 in 6502

Some code rolling off the heavy industries math line today.   I've implemented a straighforward version of a CORDIC ATAN2 routine. I've taken a few shortcuts. The #'s are normalized by shifting left 4 (x16) and I've limited the iterations to 8.   The accuracy is around 1 binary radian. (Binary Radians or BRADS : 0 - 255)   The slowest part is the two subroutine calls to ASRN in the inner loop. The slowness is a reflection of the fact that the 6502 doesn't have a barrel shifter, and does

djmips

djmips

Mega Man 2600 post mortem

Mega Man 2600 post mortem   It was cool how Mega Man 2600 blew up on the Internets.   It was very fun and hearkens to a time when I thought game programmer was going to be something like rock star. I distinctly remember hero worshiping the Kitchen brothers. The benefactor of this game (iam8bit) had assured me of a modicum of notoriety and it was certainly part of the attractiveness of the project. It was a paying project though, but certainly not the 'big bucks'. It was a lot of fun and so t

djmips

djmips

Homebrewing on the GBA - Charmed Labs XPort

I was recently emailing D. Debro about PSX development and It reminded me that I have a lot of homebrew development hardware.   One of the systems I have is the Charmed Labs Xport. This is a very cool system and while not cheap ($200), it is affordable and you get a lot for the price. It has 4 megabytes of flash and includes a Xilinx Spartan II XC2S150 FPGA which has a claimed 150,0000 programmable gates. While a smaller FPGA, this can still be quite useful for interfacing or as a co-proces

djmips

djmips

EPROM Burner

For sometime, I've been wanting to burn a few EPROMs but not wanting to shell out for an eraser and burner. I've got a lot of different EPROM carts for various systems like the Vectrex, Gameboy, SEGA Genesis, NES, and 2600.   Just a couple of days ago, I was walking around at my work when I spotted an N64 gang cartridge programmer sitting in the corner collecting dust and it struck me dumb. Of course, we probably have an old burner lying around somewhere. After asking around, it turns out that

djmips

djmips

BLiP Football Source

Today, I'm posting up the source for BLiP Football.   About BLiP Football. Original name: LEDhead because of being based on LEDhead by Peter Hirschberg. Was released in a small quantity in a beta version at NWCGE 2K6 1.0   I had a lot of help. I was the lead programmer you could say. There is a big contribution from Peter Hirschberg who wrote the PC version LEDhead and was generous in sharing his source code. This gave me a design template and allowed me to shortcut and just focus on the 260

djmips

djmips

Arcade Pong status

For the one or two of you out there that are following the Arcade Pong project. I'm here to report that I delayed releasing the finished version. It's done but I recently re-discovered the DanBoris' Tech Blog on the original Arcade Pong. I've been poring over the hardware diagrams and trying to understand how it works.   I've managed to glean a few great insights into how the real Arcade Pong worked and I will apply them to the code.   (I've also come away with a desire to build a Pong mach

djmips

djmips

Debugging with Stella

EDIT: the following is actually proven to be an academic exercise since I have been prompted/discovered that if 'developer support' is included in your Stella you have 'developer' command line parameters that let you set the controller left and right properties and the format <NTSC|PAL> and more...     I find the Stella debugger useful for some of my debugging but launching it with game specific settings (like paddle controls) can be a bit of trouble.   Here is my solution.   In wi

djmips

djmips

Arcade Pong now with sound!

Here it is with sound. All of the sounds are pretty much straight square waves with some envelope modulation.   The interesting thing is that the missed ball sound is about a B3 for 400ms (24 frames). But it is LFO modulated (amplitude) at 120Hz. I tried 60Hz and it sounded all right, but I wanted it to be better.   What I did was update the sound envelope twice per frame. Once before start of display (after Vertical Blank) and once after display (before Overscan). This isn't quite 50/50 (m

djmips

djmips

Arcade Pong update

- Now with double digit scoring up to 11 - Digits are taller and positioned (what I think is) more accurately - Rudimentary serve mechanism    

djmips

djmips

Arcade Pong

I already had it on my TO-DO, to work on an Arcade Pong and when vdub_bobby posted his Arcade Pong demo with the an open offer to work on it.   Now, I have some time and I am putting in some work on Arcade Pong.   So.. here's a new version of the Arcade Pong game.   APong.asm - July 02_01 version   -paddles shorter (snuck in prev changelist really) -net thinner -collision with paddles work correctly (always rebound away) -score digits taller (but not tall enough) -changed digit font

djmips

djmips

Silly young ones

My wife just sent me this link which I think is pretty funny.   so cool. heh heh. Can you spot the problem?   http://www.threadless.com/product/133/Game-set-match

djmips

djmips

NWCGE 2K6

Our own NW (of the US) classic gaming bash is happening on Feb 25-26.   NorthWest Classic Games Enthusiasts   We'll have some game sellin' and vdub bob and I will be there to talk about homebrewing (if anyone will listen) and show off a few of our games and demos.   We'll launch the 2600 Football game (there now you know what it is... sorta) at the show and maybe even sell a few copies, that is.. if I manage to make carts before the show   I think it will be a relaxing lazy weekend ha

Guest

Guest

First game for 2006?

Well, the little game project didn't make Christmas or New Years eve (happy new year), but that's OK. It's getting a little more polish.Bob (my cohort) is really doing a lot lately, what with Go Fish!, MiniGame Cart and Reindeer Rescue and now collaborating on this project. You've got to hand it to him. hip hip huzzah! I hope he doesn't burn out and turn to organic pepper farming like one of my other hobby programmer friends...I can see the end of the project soon however, I think the graphics a

Guest

Guest

Homebrew Development Tools

A little bit of a dry entry today. It's just to discuss my own personal setup for homebrew development.I have a late model P4 and am running Windows 2000. For me this is just so that I can work in a similar environment to what I have to use at work.I recently switched from Codewright to Textpad and I am very happy with the new editor.For 2600 work, I am using DASM, distella, PCX2GRP, Z26 and Stella. I really enjoy using the new debug capabilities in Stella.But what I really want to talk about is

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Guest

Amiga Boing 2.0 Demo is Gold! (I think)

Well, I just sent Al, Release Candidate One (RC1) and then closely followed by RC2. I hadn't tested the PAL colours in the RC1. They should be good now, however I'm only going by what I see in Z26 and Stella.You know, I thought I had published the first two entries in this BLOG... but I guess I didn't. The first one is from somewhere near the beginning of Nov and the second is towards the end of Nov.This one is today. and fresh. tssst.Well, now that that is out of the way. It's on to the next

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Guest

Broken tools - Rendering from Maya

Well, I rendered out another set of animations for Amiga Boing 2.0 last night and I still had problems with the conversion. The new anims look good in the viewer but I still haven't seen them running in the demo.The problem is that the PCX2GRP only takes 320x200 grayscale PCX files as input. Well, I found a fantastic tool (Image Magick) that does everything you'd want. It takes the 48x90 rendered bitmaps and can convert them to 8 bit grayscale PCX files at 320X200 ALL IN ONE STEP! alas... it has

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Guest

From the factory floor

We're going to finally finish the last few details on the Amiga Boing 2.0 unit by the end of the month. We still need to gather some supporting information for the eventual inclusion with the final product. Re-tooling is already complete and should be rolling of the lines by early December.There is a new game in the works. A bit of a surprise, it came out of the R&D lab and turned out quite nice. It's already fully playable but we're outsourcing the kernel and so when that comes back we'll i

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