bluswimmer

Over the past couple of days I got bored and made one of those stacking games for the Atari 2600. If you've ever seen a stacker arcade machine, you probably already know how this works. Essentially, all you need to do is time your button presses to stack the "blocks" as high as possible. The block platform gradually shrinks if you don't time your button presses perfectly, so accuracy is key. When making this I made a conscious effort to stay below one kilobyte. As of now, there are 45 unused bytes of ROM, and 58 bytes of unused RAM (including the call stack). I don't think this game is particularly interesting or original (it wouldn't surprise me if someone already made a 2600 version of this kind of game), but I hope you find it amusing regardless. As per usual, download is below, and you can watch gameplay footage here. stackgame.bin stackgame.zip

In Firefox this appears to activate the "Quick Find" function, as does the quote key. I assume that has something to do with the stuck keys?

I am playing via keyboard, but the strange thing is that the bug only crops up in those specific directions... I've tried to replicate the bug using some other games, but no luck so far. Scratch that, I've managed to replicate the bug in other games. Likely a Stella issue, considering all other direction combos seem to work fine. Wait, yeah, scratch that again! My keyboard is just stupid, apparently. Please ignore me. I swapped over to WASD for the second control stick and things seem to work fine now.

This is a fantastic port, but I've noticed a bug with the dual joystick implementation. If I'm shooting downwards, I can't move to the left diagonally up or down. Same thing with shooting down left diagonally. If I shoot down right, I can't move to the left at all. Granted, I assume you've noticed this already and are working on a fix. Hope to see a second demo with this annoying bug fixed... Please disregard everything in the strikethrough text...

Glad to see that this is getting more development! Would like to see a color palette with greyscale blocks.

This shades game is pretty neat! Would like to play an Atari version with better RNG (as it stands the seed appears to be the same each time with no manipulation of the seed). As for the thread topic at hand, I'd personally like to see Puyo Puyo! I think it'd be possible to create a 30hz display with some flicker to display both player's boards. I guess the only real complication there would be adding the character portraits, though that's just aesthetics and could probably be discarded.

Before Balloon Trip, before Bird and Beans, before even my awful version of Doodle Jump, there was Divekick. This homebrew was originally made back in 2018, when I was first learning how to make 2600 games. As the name implies, it's an extremely barebones adaptation of the video game Divekick for the 2600, which is a fighting game that uses two buttons: a "dive" button, and a "kick" button. Here, pressing up on the joystick acts as the dive button, and the fire button acts as the kick button. Your goal is to kick your opponent before they kick you. If the timer runs out, then the player who's closest to the center of the screen wins that round. The game is best of 9, so whoever wins five rounds first wins. The download is below, but be warned that I have made no updates to it aside from fixing the scanline count. The game is blatantly lacking polish; there are no sounds, the player sprites are ripped from Berzerk, the jump arc is unnatural, the list goes on. Regardless, I felt it was worth posting, given that it was my first homebrew and I never released it. divekick.bin

I don't believe the CPU dies because the bullets collide- by making the two bullets overlap in Stella, there wasn't much of an effect on the CPU. They're likely just walking into the water. If anyone is able to recreate this bug, then please post evidence here.

In an Atari game, assuming you perform the exact same inputs down to the frame, then you'll get the same result. Most game software generally makes use of a pseudorandom number generator to introduce random events into a game. Essentially, the game starts with an initial "seed," and when a new random number is needed, the "seed" is passed through an algorithm to create a new "seed." Obviously, this isn't actually random. To increase randomness, Atari games will often reroll the seed on every frame, even if a random number isn't needed on that frame. Additionally, the algorithm may take player input into account when generating a new seed. In most modern games, the RNG's initial seed is usually the system's current date and time, down to the millisecond, which usually creates enough randomness to be unnoticeable. As such, the methods described above are less common there.

The ROM itself is pretty tightly packed, to my understanding. I'll admit I didn't dive into much aside from how the pieces are generated, but it looks like there's no bytes left in the default ROM. I had to change some things around to allow for the asymmetrical piece layout. Also, I've uploaded a new ZIP with the source code of the randomizer below. Feel free to write your own variants of the randomizer. ChessRandomizer.zip

So yesterday I had the weird idea of hacking video chess to give the player a set of random pieces. After about a day of poking around the source code, I was able to trim it down to allow for eight extra pieces to be stored in ROM. Using this modified ROM, I wrote a program that randomizes seven of the pieces in the back row of each set of pieces. As you can see, the pawns and king are still present, but otherwise, both teams have a different set of pieces. I tried randomizing the front row too, but this caused so many weird bugs that I had to settle just randomizing the back row. If you'd like to try the randomizer yourself, both the modified ROM and the randomizer itself are in the ZIP file below. The randomizer is a java program that replaces the pieces in the modified ROM with new ones. It takes a single optional argument; an integer seed for the RNG. Once the file is unzipped, just run the randomizer, and then copy vchess.bin into your ROMs folder. ChessRandomizer.zip

Did something happen? I wasn't able to tune in. EDIT: nevermind, posted before seeing everything else. I'll need to investigate this further, but it seems like there might have been some foul play in the voting. I'll admit that I have used my twitter account in the past to encourage friends to vote for my games, so I guess I'll refrain from doing that in future competitions so it doesn't get out of hand like it seems to have here...

Ultimately it's just a desire to move on to new things, really. Perhaps it's selfish, but I'll probably return to this someday when the time is right...

Ultimately I think I just incorrectly judged how most people would be playing the game. While I was testing I tended to play the game pretty fast; I tended to run out of blocks to stand on pretty quickly, hence why the coin was added. Judging from the gameplay I've seen from others, most people play pretty differently, preferring NOT to destroy many blocks. The issue here is that it takes forever for the game to speed up if you play it like this. If I were to do the game over again I would've tied the speed up to the number of blocks that fell rather than the score. The "speed up" in general is also pretty jarring... Balloon Trip also has this issue, but I wish I was more patient with the code so I could've made the difficulty curve more gradual...

Wow, can't believe I completely missed this one... I'm sure some people are wondering what the heck happened since the last update, but to be perfectly blunt I can't help but feel a little disillusioned looking back at this game. I feel like I made the primary mechanic a little too esoteric, and the difficulty curve is really bad. I'm not sure if I'll ever go back and try to fix some of these problems, since I'd rather explore new ideas at the moment... if nothing else, it served as a valuable experience in game design.

Someone earlier in the thread mentioned the Jakks Pacific plug and play systems as being the "last hope" for Atari collecting- funnily enough, that's exactly where I was first exposed to 2600 games as a child. I'm 20 now, and I absolutely believe the system has some value; I don't think I would've started making homebrew if I felt otherwise. I feel like people I know tend to dismiss the more arcade-like games that the 2600 tends to offer. I've even seen early NES games, like Balloon Fight or Donkey Kong, get dismissed as repetitive. Given that these sorts of games make up a large portion of the pre-Nintendo library, I suppose they just don't see much value in collecting them.

Very impressed by this. There's a lot of moving objects on the screen for a 2600 game. Plus, there's music too! Given that some of the rocks move extremely fast, maybe allow the player to move faster by holding down the fire button?

Weirdest one by far would be this bug in Tumble Temple. When a block falls onto the one of the towers spanning the height of the screen, the whole screen freaks out and you lose instantly. Upon looking at the code after the livestream, apparently I had forgotten to check the bounds of the playfield array in RAM, so it overwrote other parts of RAM. While not entirely related to the subject at hand, both Tumble Temple and Cannonhead Clash have a couple of bug-turned-features. In Tumble Temple, the ability to run across one-wide gaps was not originally intended, it was just a quirk of how gravity was handled. Cannonhead Clash has the implementation of the fireworks, specifically its sound. Originally I was going to use the shoot sound effect for the sound, but what I got was a mix of the shoot and charge sounds. I liked it, so I kept the sound; that didn't stop me from accidentally patching it, and then having to reimplement the bug...

The PAL60 and SECAM60 versions of Balloon Trip are finally here. Should've done this to begin with, but better late than never I suppose. balloontripPAL60.bin balloontripSECAM60.bin

I didn't make a PAL version of Balloon Trip. Unfortunately this game was made before I had the sense to use constants for my color values. I'm currently pretty busy with school right now, but I'll see if I can make a PAL version soon. Frankly, it's long overdue...

This sucks. My condolences go out to those who are affected. Hopefully this is dealt with quickly...