2600 in 2006

Totally unreal

Absolutely C 8) L !

 

Wow, very cool!

 

Just out of curiosity, how did you create that video?

 

..Al

That looks very nice - the sprite movement and screen scrolling is extremely smooth. The sprites could look better though - perhaps you could ask Nathan to add this to his lengthy to-do list? Are you planning to write a complete game, or is this just a demo of your 4A50 cart?

 

Chris

Just out of curiosity, how did you create that video?

I changed the code so that with difficulty=A/B the game would run in single-step mode (press fire to advance an animation frame [1/4 gametick]). Alternated the fire button and "=" keys to capture a bunch of frames (127 I think), then converted them to an animated .gif.

 

This shows the action very nicely. It does not accurately convey the motion artifacts that result from flickerblinds (noticeable, but liveable), but watching the game on a real machine is the only way to really see that.

That looks very nice - the sprite movement and screen scrolling is extremely smooth. The sprites could look better though - perhaps you could ask Nathan to add this to his lengthy to-do list? Are you planning to write a complete game, or is this just a demo of your 4A50 cart?

 

Yeah, my clock monsters are a little dorky, aren't they. They rotate nicely, though.

 

For quite awhile I'd been somewhat 'up in the air' with 4A50. I knew it could most certainly do amazing things, but I didn't know what to do with it. A Stella-sketch kernel with striped colors can allow for some nice effects, and I even have some special hardware support for accellerated drawing, but I didn't know what I could do to really shatter the 2600's [apparent] limitations.

 

Then, after I got my flicker-blinds version of the RPG kernel working (I'd intended it more for others' use, since I have no particular interest in doing a 2600 RPG) I decided to play around a bit with character-set animation. The results were so great that I decided that should be my first 4A50 game. I'll see what I can come up with as a game before I shop out graphic and sound design. A level contest might be fun, perhaps. I could probably get 64 levels on the cart, but I wouldn't want to have to buy a free cart for everyone who submitted a level that got used.

 

BTW, I figured out how to save enough kernel cycles that a similar-looking kernel could probably be done without RAM expansion if one didn't mind blank lines between character rows. Homestar Runner is quite similar, but there are some key differences (most notably the fact that HS uses one foreground color and two background colors; RR uses one "background" color and two foreground colors per line.

Hi John!

 

A puzzle for you

 

Do you think 4A50 would allow doing something like this:

 

 

The three circles of football helmets rotate to the left and to the right independently. The color schemes are hardcoded as is. It works breakoutish, so individual helmet-ball collisions checks would be required as well as the removal of helmets. Also the ball must be able to freely roam the whole area.

 

See a way for coming close?