I wasn't quite happy with how I was handling colors in the last build using drop down menus. I also didn't like being limited to a subset of colors. I'm much happier with the color palette and being able to visually see the changes as it looks a lot closer to actual game play.
What's new
You can edit energy dots, dot color, and outer maze color in 7800 Pac-man!
I've changed the font for dots and energy dots to look more like the actual game.
Colors are now implemented for th
I spent a little time on an airplane over the weekend. That gave me some time to look into colors for the maze and dots. A maze is a combination of two colors an outer and inner bar color. Dots are a single color. So for example, in Ms. Pac-man collection there are 4 mazes so there are 12 different locations you can change the colors. On top of that Pac-Man Collection has 21 mazes and can run in “plus” mode which means you have 3*21*2 = 126 different colors you can set using the following 22
The other day I spent a little time working on enforcing some rules for the games so that you don’t accidentally create a maze that won’t run.
Ms Pac-man – has 4 levels all 31 cells tall by 29 wide. You can have horizontal tunnels, but not vertical.
Pac-man – Originally based on the Ms. Pac-man code it has 2 levels (get to the second one by using the player select switch) 31 cells tall by 29 wide. You can have horizontal tunnels, but not vertical.
Ms Pac-man (Bob’s Arcade Hack)
I am done working on a Jr. Pac-man Construction Set and have moved onto a Pac-man Construction Set. So far this is working with Jr. Pac-man, Pac-man Collection, Ms. Pac-man, and Bob’s recent Ms. Pac-man Arcade hack.
On top of supporting additional games and fixing some bugs, the controls are a bit different. You can still select and enter dots, mazes, or energy dots, but now there is a Maze and Dot mode where you can draw freely with the let mouse button and erase with the right mouse butt
In Jan 2008 I saw this thread about 2600 IDE not supporting .bas files > 64K. That got me thinking about developing an integrated development environment for batariBasic. So I guess Atar2600land should get credit for inspiring VisualbB because if I hadn’t read that post I would have never thought about it. Anyway I figured that it was a limitation of the COM control being used. I vaguely remember that being a limitation in Visual Studio 6. Since I was getting into writing some games using
About once a year I get some external motivation to code. In 2007 I started looking at some of the bit hacking tools bit-hacker, hack-o-matic & HOM ][. They were better than using a hex editor for hacking up 2600 graphics, but lacked some of the flexibility I was used too in other applications. For me bit hacking needed to be a lot more like Microsoft Excel. I actually started by creating an add-on for Excel, but eventually I figured not everybody would have Excel and I wanted to really
Ok made some more progress on this project today. First I added some of the basics such as the ability to cut, copy, paste and delete. Build 3 was mainly fixes I found while playing with Build 2.
You can place items on the board by selecting one or more cells and pressing one of the following keys on the keyboard
• SPACE - places a maze part
• D - places a Dot
• E - places and Energy Dot
• Delete - clears a dot
If you hold down the left mouse button while pressing any button it wil
Now that the Memorial Day holiday is over I took a fresh look at this again. To understand this blog post you need some basic grasp of how mazes, dots, and energy dots are stored.
Mazes
To begin, the 8 mazes are stored as a series of 8 bit codes. Decoded into binary, from lowest to highest bit they are read horizontally. Since the maze is symmetric only half of the maze is stored in the binary. In the editor you will see both sides for ease of development, but placing dots is mirrored
Ever since I saw Pacman Plus’s original 5200 hack of Pac-man I wanted to create a graphic editor for manipulating Pac-man mazes. I’ve looked at the mazes using HOM3 and other text editors, but the exact format always confused me. Creating a graphical tool is pretty easy, but decoding the maze is another thing! Unlike Beef Drop (aka Burger Time), the mazes are not as straight forward.
Last week Bob shared with me some partial source to Jr. Pac-man. It was just enough for me to finally fig
I actually own a full size Burger Time so I was really excited when Ken Siders started posting Beef Drop(actually Burger Time) roms to the 5200 forum. I had played it for almost a year before I noticed that there were a couple errors in level 3 in the 5200 version. So I started looking at BD using a hex editor to make the changes and also discovered hidden levels available in the AtariAge cartridge release.
Ken created mazes that were incredibly easy to view in a text editor, but it was a
I’ve been a member of Atari Age since 2004 during which I’ve written several applications for the Atari community. I’ve never bothered with a blog, but I figured this would be a good time to start documenting some of those projects and sharing my thoughts on them.
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