wogihao

hmmm when they say populated board does that include the TIA/cpu and inpuit IO chip? intresting.....

http://www.retroreview.com/paldatabase/Sea...amp;SortBy=name Very cool, Thanks!

But what does it do! lol Together with the line above it, it forms a sentence In my defence i was in a rush when i posted that. haha doh i fell silly.

But what does it do! lol

Hi is there any info on the rarity of these carts one im looking at now is a double pack with a box with World end and Base atack. whats a good guide price for these? $20 maby?

Thanks for the help! I wasnt planning to do them that thin, it was just the way the program generated the maze, i was planning im makeing them more chunky. hopefully the resolution wont be that much of a issue. (like you said at least 4 pixles i have messed around in tiapaint with the 8 pixle chunks. I will have a play with the 4 pixel one and see what happens. hopefully with so few objects it will be ok.

Ok this is the inital level designs. Level 1: Level 2: Level 3: Level 4:

Right straight off the bat i can see this project would kill me at my current ability, the colision dectection with even the maze element will be chalange enough. there will be no monsters, no tokens. the p0 character will have to navigate through a series of mazes of increaseing complexity. I found with a google search a number of maze generators (and a dungeon on i will save for the future). with this simplication of the inital spec i can concentrate on a smaller number of task that hopefully will not present the masive challange of the orignal spec. All i have to do now is... a. generate the 4 maze levels in some utility- DONE b. plan the playfield - Pending c. create a screen with the playfield for the levels. - Pending d. create a p0 - just a block at first - Pending. e. get p0 moveing - Pending. f. create collision detection for the playfield and P0 - Pending. g. set the start and end points of the level - Pending. h. check the level progression works - Pending. i. create a decent player sprite - Pending. Possible problems. With the maze a large player will present some collision movement issues, if the sprite is to big then it will make fitting the maze on the screen thats chalangeing difficult without obsureing part of the playfield. As i imagned that the maze would be contained within the boundaries of the tv screen therefore this presents a problem with a large character - So i would imagine that the character sprite will be very basic.

Ok today will be reading through the PIA information and makeing a pretty list like i did with the TIA. more pondering of the playfield today - I think im getting closer to understanding it. funny how stuff like this leads on to tangents, I was sat there thinking "what if i wanted to do a multi level game with loads of screens - carts are avalible now with 64k of space.... " this lead onto looking at how to actualy write a game over 2k (fun but i wanted to save that till I had mastered the basics/fundementials). On another point, the design of levels (for things like maze layouts). How do you generate maze levels without them being rippoffs of another game? Is there a utility that can generate a maze that i can then take as a template for a playfield? I dont want to use other peoples level design as it seems cheating to me... I rember games like rogue and adom auto generate the dungeons, i guess there is a program out there that can do a similar thing (pity its beyond the 6507 chip to do this on the fly but then you cant have everyting i guess...) Anyway the first project will be a maze game where the P0 character (not a plumber or a italian food inspired creature) will run round colecting tokens (yet to decide what these are) and will be chased by P1 characters (not supernatural creatures). Ahh hell its a pac man clone. But im not hacking no existing roms, its all going to be my code from the ground up. Outline spec: Version 1: a. it will be 1 player b. there will be no sound (for the first version, i have enough to work out at the moment) c. there will be 4 levels (or as many as i can fit into 2k) d. it will be joystick controled. e. it will work in PAL/NTSC/SECAM/PAL+ (to be honest this is the easyest one to meet in the codeing just have a compiler option) f. it wont flicker like pac man on the atari g. it will be responsive (as good as i can make the controls) h. there will be monster vunrability tokens scattered around the level. i. monsters when comming into contact with the P0 will kill it. j. if the monsters are vunerable and P0 collison occurs then the monster will die. k. level is populated with a number of tokens, when the tokens are all taken (through collision with P0) then the level is finnished. l. the tokens on colision with P0 will be removed. Version 2: a. will have a high score b. will show the score on screen c. will have primitive sound (on obtaining a token, death, level sucess, game over, monster vunerability mode, monster death) d. will have more levels (thus takeing it into the 4k+ range) Its quite a complicated first program but i think i will learn alot doing it this way. On another unrealted note.. I have been looking for Secam carts on ebay (the french one) and its a nightmare, the one auction i could find looked to be nothing more than a bunch of PAL carts miss labled when he started the auction. I guess because they run on the system they dont care never mind somthing will come up.

Been tralling ebay france today but there nothing there. Also alot of pal games seem misslabled as secam in the search

exelent now the task is to find them!

Is there going to be a price guide for the carts any time soon? i apreciate somthing might be a r9 pal ect but its going to be worth much less than a NTSC cart. on the secam carts, whats there status in the list - i assume that a number were produced but i cant seem to find the information anywhere on them.

ahh cool yea i was looking at them today in maplin but i could have sworn that the pin needed to be longer lol, ah well. the one of ebay is about 1/2 price. will have to bide my time....

I have been looking everywhere today for one, but they use like a audio jack conection it seems. does anyone know where i can get one of these bad boys or will i have to mod the DC input on the case?

Thanks, Pressure is on i prommised the wife i would finish my first playfield by the end of the week. But then its not so difficult now, now with emulators i would hate to think what the learning curve was before the advent of powerfull development platforms for the 2600 - Dammm I have nothing but respect for the guys that did it that way, so many waisted eproms! It must have been heartbreaking when it didnt work after all that effort. One thing i was thinking was, did the first wave of programers have to work everything out for themselves or was there easy acess to the stella documentation? or was it just the support of the other coders? or maby a combination of both hmmmm..... I noticed there are a few brazilian atari carts availble on ebay... hummm that would be intesting to take a look at.... ah well theres still 4 days... I have some german ones on the way also and one from Oz. I have been looking for some french carts to study but they seem to be very hard to come by on ebay I will have a hunt for some roms on the net. someone must have a archive somewhere. However i rember reading that very few secam carts were produced. So it may be a hunt in vain. Finaly after reading about the eastern block knock off of the atari i wondered if there were any programs developed there? or was it purely a pirate consumer market?

ahh thanks anyway!

Ok, im looking to build up a colection, starting off with the cheapy carts first. any bulk lots i would be intrested in, but singles are fine as well (just because of postage im thinking it might be a issue with single carts). I would like boxed ones but at this stage i dont mind. I already have real sports soccer and fishing derby (but they are both unboxed no manual and fishing derby is damaged lable ). one thing i would consider offering a good price for would be anything related to the development of 2600 titles.

According to some private messages I got from him, this was a box of stuff leftover from his sales days that he quite literally found in the back of a closet, and all he had was a set of 6 of the Telesys 2600 releases (mostly CIB, a few manuals were missing) that included the Fast Food t-shirt (I bought that set from him), another Fast Food t-shirt, maybe a few other loose and/or boxed games, and IIRC he had an A8 prototype (might have been Fast Food) that was auctioned off (for $717.38 - might have been some other stuff in the auction, too). He also had some sales brochures and stuff that he said he was going to send to me, but he never did. Oh well. Not all of them are legal to sell (clearance of ownership issues). makes you wonder with the colectable stuff with there being so many things still underscovered when the price point will be reached on average cartridges ect for people to actualy look for them. if that happened then many of the prices for the regular stuff would come down quite a bit i would think. I rember seeing some documentary where there were baskets full of boxed games for $1 or something crazy. the ownership issues thats a intresting point i had not considered. i guess the same would go to game development material relateing to a project.

hmmmm nice.... looking forward to (hopefully) someone dumping the rom. Intresting story about the salesman fella, do you think hes sitting on a ton of Telesis stuff? also why is ebay against the sales of prototypes?

I am suprised such a small document can contain so much usefull information. I went back to it after reading the tutorial in the newbie section and it made alot more sence the second time round. I also subscribed to the stella mailing list so hopefully i can pick up a few tips there as well (the 10 years of archived posts will help alot i think many of my questions are going to be answered in that archive.) On another point, today I receved Realsports soccer and fishing derby! muhaha the colection starts with 2 crappy carts but who knows where it will lead. Things to do: 1. get a decent understanding of the TIA memory map. (i drew out a nice diagram this is helping quite a bit.) 2. read the 6507 opp code list and explanation. 3. look again at the commented dissasemblies. 4. do some more work on playfield graphics and study the controler interface. (i never realised that a whole port was just for the switches on the atari!) poss... investigate how bank switching works but to be honest thats quite minor at the moment.

Thank you thats very usefull.

Thanks thats very usefull.

On average...anywhere from six weeks (or less!) to six months. Depends on how good the programmer was...and how good the game was. Of course, it really comes down to how much time and effort was put into it, regardless of the programmer. Examples from the same programmer: E.T. took less than six weeks. Result? Saboteur took over six months. Result? Depends...code was often reused if someone came up with something good or useful (Steve Woita's use of the 'woks' in all his games). Other times, things were started from scratch every time. Thanks I see what you getting at, it seems to have been a golden era to be a programer! its a pitty so much information about these projects has been lost but i guess people just didnt see it as important back then (much like kung fu films).

the ampage is fine as long as its in excess of the requirement of the unit so anything over 1/2 a amp will be good. That said the voltage will be criticial. if its out I doubt that the atari was robust enough to take a wide voltage range. so sticking to 9v would be key here.

Im curious, what was the development time for a average 2600 game in the early 80s compared to say when the 2600 came out first? Were the developers working on multiple projects that shared a common kernell/code and it was basicly just a hack between the versions or were they distinct programs in there own right?