I was a bit bored this weekend, so I had a closer look to some games. A lot of games, especially from Taiwan, contain garbage data, which is unsed by the game itself. Often this garbage contains traces from the game development, sometimes even snippets of source code. In this entry I will post some source code findings.
After a longer break, I finally took the time and decided for a kernel. Many thanks to John for providing the basic idea of it.
SudokuKernel.bin
SudokuGridKernel.bin
Pixelboy's Sudoku game got me thinking. Now I am wondering about a Sudoku game and especially a generator for the 2600.
Some initial brainstorming:
Display: Has been discussed multiple times already. Should be able to display the digits (doable), annotations (tricky, 2^9 combinations!) and a cursor. Later...
RAM: 10 different values per cell (~3.4 bits), should be easily direct accessible, so no fancy compression algorithms. So 2 cells/byte, 40.5 bytes in total. After ge
When reading some stuff about one of my old C64 favorites "The Sentinel", I wondered if something similar would be possible for the 2600. Since 3D was sure impossible it had to be in 2D. Attached is a very preliminary result.You now watch the game top-down, your own position is at the bottom of the screen. Your sight is limited but you will be(!) able to rotate in 90° (maybe 45°) degree steps. For the heights, various colors are used, starting with dark magenta, then blue, cyan, green, yellow, o
Following this thread, I though I might be able to make a game out of my friction code.The (unnamed) result is maybe best described as an action version of Simon Says. Attached is a first version, showing all elements and very basic gameplay. Scoring, enemy collision detection etc. are missing.As always, opinions and suggestions are very welcome.
Noname.bin
After "some" time, I recently decided to have another look at Robot City. Since the Minigame Compo deadline for 1K is coming soon, I decided to try again to squeeze the gameplay into 1K. Last time I failed, but now I have some more experiences in compact coding. Still I had to strip down the game massively, but finally I managed to keep the important gameplay elements intact.Attached you find the current version. It is almost complete, except for missing sound and some polishing (especially betw
Question: What do you get when you combine interleaved flicker for mixing colors with horizontal scrolling? See attachment! (scrolling left every 2nd, right every 3rd frame)
ParaTest3.bin
After reading Manuel's blog and trying out Uridium after a long time again, I wondered if that typical Braybrook look could somehow be transformed to the 2600. For the dreadnought, we'd have to use playfield grahics. Obviously we would need more than just two colors (foreground and backgroud) there. From Andrew's experiments we know, that flicker can help here.By mixing the constant background with two different foreground colors (changing every line) and switching the order of the foreground co
Ok, that's the name of the game I am trying to develop now. :)It still a very long way to go. Attached you find a first (still slightly buggy) demo, which shows the kernel and the horizontal scrolling over one deck ("Repairs").Next planned steps are debugging and improving the kernel (especially getting rid of the annoying stripes in space) and allow vertical scrolling too (this one is going to become pretty tricky). Since I am pretty busy with my daily job again, progress might become very slow