Ed Fries

Here's a nice article with some comments from me and Ian Bogost: Retro Halo 2600 Reaches Into Videogames’ Past

As I said above, I was working on Nitro when the company went out of business so it was never released. I suspect the same is true for Eliminator. The one you link to from Atarimania is a different, older game. I was surprised by the distibutor cost spread too. By comparison, at Microsoft we would sell a game at about $37.85 for a $49.95 retail price.

Here's the backside of the flyer and a price list I found in the same stack. The price list shows the fourth game I was working on but didn't finish before Romox went out of business: "Nitro". It also lists a game called "Eliminator" that I don't know anything about.

Huh. I also noticed that two of the packages don't have writing on the side. I wonder if they are box mock ups or if they released some that way?

Sea Chase was my favorite too. It was my third game and by then I had started to figure out what I was doing. Too bad that was just before Romox went out of business...

I found a few more things in the furnace room... The things in the lower right are marketing flyers for the first three atari games from Romox. I guess I just need Spark Bugs to complete the collection?

Sorry, I've received several private messages asking to buy the carts. I didn't mean to imply they were for sale. They are a reminder of part of my life and so I'm sure they are worth more to me than they would be to you. I guess I was just showing them off... -EdF

Making Halo 2600 recently got me digging through my old stuff and I found some original Romox Carts from back when I was working for them in the old days. The bottom 3 are the games I wrote. The others are just random ones they sent me from time to time. I may have a few more lying around if I dig a little deeper. Just thought I'd share this here in case anyone is interested. -EdF

Congrats!

Ben Fry, the creator of Distellamap, has just posted a blog entry announcing the availability of Halo 2600 in Distellamap format! Check it out here: Awesome now travels by poster tube.

The bug is with the line: bpl nevermind Figure out why and you will be enlightened.

Hi Will, As far as I'm concerned you are welcome to use any of the screenshots (or other pictures) I've put up on the Halo 2600 Facebook fan page. Whether I have the right to grant permission to use something related to Halo is a question for lawyers. I do have a conversation underway with the Xbox Game Room people which may clarify the legal status of Halo 2600. I should be meeting with them next week. Hope this helps, -EdF

LDA #0 ASL ByteToSwap ROR ASL ByteToSwap ROR ASL ByteToSwap ROR ASL ByteToSwap ROR ASL ByteToSwap ROR ASL ByteToSwap ROR ASL ByteToSwap ROR ASL ByteToSwap ROR STA SwappedByte

I could definitely go back and free up more space. I'd probably use it to fix some of the half-dozen or so bugs that I know about if I did. But is that really the best way for me to spend my time? No game is perfect. I don't really want to keep making minor revisions and releases. I picked a time to be done and said the game is good enough. Unless I was going to do an 8K version with lots of new features or something, I don't think it makes sense to open it back up. Hopefully people are enjoying it as it is and I am starting to think about what, if anything, to do next.

I have both of those and it didn't stop me...

I liked it!

Done Impressive!

Go for it!

I thought about it, but I wanted to ramp up the difficulty as the player went on, introduce new items, and generally control the pacing. It could probably be done programmatically but to do it well would likely end up taking more bytes than I used for the map.

Ed, is there any piece of code you're extra proud of? Something that was technically tricky? Or some optimization or creative reuse that saved a lot of bytes? I know you give credit to the old masters, but to fit all this in 4K must have required some innovation of your own. Well, one tricky thing is the representation of the rooms. There were going to be 64 of them so they needed to be really small. I settled on two bytes per room. At first I allocated 4 bits for the walls and 3 monsters that could be one of 16 types (4 bits each) for a total of 16 bits (two bytes). But then I wanted to have 4 different areas (outdoor, base, ice, and boss) so I needed 2 bits for that. The walls were redundant in that if one room has a top wall then the room above it must have a bottom wall, so I reduced the wall bits to just two bits per room (bottom and right) and that freed up two bits for the room type. But then I wanted to have more than 16 types of things in the rooms. How could I do that? 4 bits can only represent 16 things no matter how you look at it right? But then I realized that certain items only appeared once and never again. For example the first gun only needed to appear once. What if I thought of the 4 bits as a 16 wide window into a larger list of items/monsters? As you move down the map certain things would come into the window and others would go out. But that means that, say, a 3 would represent a grunt monster in one place and, perhaps, a key somewhere else. That could be confusing. But I built a macro to hide the confusion so that the code looks nice and clean. So room definitions look like this: ; row 4 ROOM EliteGiantLv,Key3Lv,TreeGiantLv,0,0,Outdoor, 3 ROOM EliteGiantLv,TreeGiantLv,EliteGiantLv,0,0,Outdoor, 3 ROOM TreeGiantLv,EliteGiantLv,TreeGiantLv,0,1,Outdoor, 3 And the complexity is hidden in the room macro: MAC ROOM .byte (({1}-{7})<<4) | ({2}-{7}) .byte ((({4}<<3)|({5}<<2)|{6})<<4) | ({3}-{7}) ENDM That lets me have 23 different types of monsters/items but store them each in only 4 bits. Hope that sort of makes sense!

Thank you sir. Coming from you that is a great compliment and an honor.

Thanks! Space was pretty tight with 4K and all so the only Easter Egg is what I call "Magic Land" (which is really just a bug). If you can get there it's fun to explore and document the strange creatures that live there.

That is cool, did they have any feedback or restrictions? Mostly they just laughed at me!

I really don't know how many hours I spent on this. The project was roughly 6 months from start to finish. Some days I would work on it for maybe 4 hours, other days not at all. I'm involved with lots of other things but this was my fun project over the last 6 months when I had free time.

It appears as if the game remembers the last few rooms that have been cleared of enemies. How'd you implement that? For a long time I didn't have this feature at all. I was thinking there's no way I can afford the ram to remember the state of all 64 rooms. Then I was playing NES Zelda with my 5 year old one day and noticed it only remembers the state of the last few rooms you've been in. I've got no problem stealing good ideas like that, so I did! Halo 2600 only remembers a room if you kill all the enemies in it and when you do that becomes your respawn point if you die, so it's a good idea to kill everything now and then as you work your way through the game.