I took on another project before others are done. Dammit, someone stop me!This is a Supercharger game written in bB (with large chunks of inline asm.) Thanks to cd-w for posting SC skeleton code, which I used here.The maze generator makes a 128x128 maze in 2k of SC's RAM. To generate a new maze, hit reset, and the screen will act as a progress bar. It takes about 15 seconds to generate a new maze. You can block off dead ends by pressing the joystick button, which should help in solving mazes
My computer's hard drive just went belly-up, just weeks out of the 1-year warranty. But I was able to get in and recover much of my work, including bB. It takes something like this to remind me how ephemeral hard drives are these days, and that I am lucky that I didn't lose everything.So before I buy a new HD and reinstall the OS and tons of software and all that fun stuff that takes forever, I thought I'd post my latest WIP version of bB for y'all to play with. This one doesn't add too many
Quick blog entry here...I've added the functionality for powerups. So far, I just put two in the game, and they give you turbo speed for about 4 seconds.I want to add the following (some are more accurately road hazards or power-downs that are more useful in a deathmatch setting) Super handling Ice (turns the whole road icy) Oil/Sand or something that makes the car lose traction Super offroad traction (no crashes & can go faster offroad) invert trackDeathmatch-only powerups: weapon
OK, so not much interest in an Indy 500 clone... Understandable. I was just doing that so I could get the skid/car handling physics working. Here's what I am REALLY doing...This is inspired by the obscure 1977 Kee/Atari videogame Super Bug. This game was in my friendly neighborhood arcade... and despite its age (even at the time) it sucked up quite a few of my quarters. I still play it now in MAME.The following still applies:Left difficulty: A=ice, B=asphaltRight difficulty: A=fast car, B=sl
Bob's categorization work revealed to me that the 2600 library has a disproportionately small number of driving/racing games.So I decided to see if I could come up with my own racing sort of game from scratch. Right now, this is just a game engine (no pun) but will be expanded into something more meaningful. Probably not an Indy 500 clone... So right now, this is kinda like Indy 500. The car sprite is taken from the game, but that's all. I tried to understand the ice/skid physics from the pa
A couple of months ago, someone suggested that Rally X might be possible on the 2600.Well, I thought I'd try to take it a step further and see if it were possible in bB. I found that a demo was possible but the full game wouldn't fit into 4k.But that was then and this is now, and bB supports bankswitching. So I've recently revisited this game between short bouts of coding for bB itself (which is sorely in need of an official release, but some objects are shinier than others...)So in order to g
There has been no update in bB since the halcyon days of summer. And there won't be a real release too soon, as all this stuff I want to do is taking fucking forever.So I decided that I should release something even if it's half-assed, kind of working, slapped together, and with no new docs. You know, just in case I get T-boned by a fully-loaded tractor-trailer carrying rocket fuel on my way home from the market because my cat ran out of kitty litter. At least then, all this work won't go to
Whatever will be, will be.I wrote the VHDL code for the SARA+F6 chip in about an hour, so it would have been a miracle if it worked right. No surprise, simulation revealed a problem. I got so hung up on getting the timing right for indexed writes to SARA RAM that I forgot all about A7 (which determines the state of /WE.) Fortunately it was a single line of code, and after I fixed it, the simulation looked more promising.The simulation here is supposed to hit a couple of bankswitching hotspots
That is the question.Didn't mean to fool ya into thinking that there would be news on Atari projects. I hope there will be soon. But today I feel like bitching about writing.I saw the movie Sideways a few weeks ago. I don't obsess about wine nor do I even like it particularly, but I really liked this movie. Probably the best movie I've seen in years. Maybe because I can relate to the plights of both characters, but mostly the main character. He is a teacher who is trying to write a novel,
Some may have noticed that the last release of batari Basic was sometime in August. Well, there is a good reason for that. I don't have a real job. I work in academia. I'm a research assistant at a local university, and I teach a class or two here and there. The point in all this is that summertime tends to be a little relaxed around here, so nobody noticed that I spent gobs of time working on bB.I also underestimated how much free time I would have once the regular school year started. Ther
The serial novel started as a loophole in British tax law. Newspapers were taxed based on their size. If they were made larger and called pamphlets, the newspaper tax could be avoided. With all of this extra space, however, some filler material was needed. Someone had the idea to fill this space with a few thousand words of a continuing story. Thus the serial novel was born.Eventually, the newspaper tax was relealed, but the serial novel continued to grow until it reached its peak in popula
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