KevKelley

Ah. I’ll have to remember this as my wife wants to get me a Mac. once I have a chance this weekend I am gonna see what I’m missing and comb through the forums a bit more and pull out my 2600 to see if I can test with my Harmony cart. When I tested my file I did not get the same effect that @ZeroPage Homebrew experienced. If I get a chance and cannot figure this out I’ll post a video of what I experience.

I believe I had tried that but it looked a little different. I think it showed either COM1 and COM3. I tried either and it didn’t make a difference. I was not aware of the club so I will definitely look at that although I think I did come across some of those posts while I was looking for info to troubleshoot.

I had recently received my AtariVox+ and was curious about some of the process regarding the setup for PC. I had followed the steps in flashing the AtariVox firmware on the 2600-Daptor II. Now when I plug both the 2600-Daptor II and the AtariVox+ into it I hear over my headphones "AtariVox+ Ready." I had also made sure the Speakjet includes were located inside my bB and game directories just in case. I had also noticed that when I would load certain programs Stella would identify that there is an AtariVox recognized. But that is where I am not sure if I am missing something. When I run programs I don't seem to hear any speaking. I had even tried the sample program from this thread and even then I do not hear anything. Even on hardware I didn't hear anything. Am I missing something?

I am not that familiar with wiring for USB so looking at the schematic I didn’t know if it was something as simple as plugging two wires onto those two legs (15 and 16) of the chip. I just kind of looked at it quickly last night and wondered if making modifying an AtariVox into a USB AtariVox would be a simple endeavor or a little more to it than that.

So true. I based some of my earlier games difficulty progression on score and found it to cause more issues or be not as precise. Now I have a variable or two that tally things for me that will flip bits or trigger things to happen.

Just curious. Looking at the schematic, instead of using an adaptor, would one just wire a USB to the two pins on the chip and be good to go?

It took a while for me to understand some of the sample programs because of the dims or just how they were organized. I tend to only dim a few things and I also have a kind of glossary of variables I keep at the beginning for my larger programs where once I use a bit or variable I write it down and what it is used for. For me I have a easier time following the program. Sometimes I will revisit a program that I haven’t worked on in a bit and it takes me a second to decipher my code. one thing I did when I started was condense the sample programs so I can read more of the program in one screen because I found scrolling made it harder for me to understand. I know everyone is different so hopefully you find a method that works for you.

With the suggested edits from @Karl G above, having a statusbar, lives, and pfscore bars at the same time is possible. I included the files in the first post and here is a little screen of a possibility. The image is of an idea where at the bottom the indicators show your number of ships, health, primary, and secondary weapons. Of course this set up might not work for two players but as a single player shoo I am sure there are many other possibilities.

This is really cool and I cannot wait to try it. Although I have plenty of projects that require my attention I can imagine some cool uses for something like this, like having the lives and status bar to keep track of lives and health while the pfscores used as something like ammo or inventory. I imagine using separating the score and changing the numbers to be symbols. And if using something like SuperChip there are plenty of variables to do things like save inventory levels if you wanted to switch things. I already have some ideas. Lol.

Ahh. I was just looking at the various includes and I admit I was a bit unsure where to start.

Could you have an initial press start a counter in addition to denouncing and if the second press is made during that counter then voila - double tap?

That might be very helpful! I was just going to blindly poke around with just a vague idea of what to do. I figured several days of this and I might just learn what to do! Lol

I would imagine that since I use SuperChip, the loss of two variables isn’t terribly big deal.

Cool! That explains why when I changed the lives value the bar appeared. Could be a neat to play around with. In this game I was just looking for a longer statusbar. In my Red Light Green Light game I just made my own bar at the top of the screen but since in this game I use pfscroll I needed a bar to stand still. The possibilities of having a timer bar, life counters, and two other bars or counters seemed promising. I may mess around with this combo I. The future for fun. I love fiddling around with values and whatnot. Reminds me of when I was younger learning to program and doing the same. thanks!

UPDATED This post has included edited files to place in game directory. As mentioned below, DIM pfscore1 and pfscore2 to a variable in your program in addition to using the 6 lives and statusbar include to have both lives, statusbar, and pfscore bars. So I forgot to delete some lines in my program when switching over to 6 Lives and Statusbar and I noticed I got I got a bit of both in the process. Now I noticed things were not perfect. I ran into scanline issues and the lives did not appear so the status bar looked more like a cigarette (game idea??). I got this effect by simply defining the pfscore constant as "1." Now after some more playing around I was able to pretty much eliminate the scanline issues by reducing the pfres (I am using SuperChip RAM). I assume this is because of how the kernels are made and by keeping the pfres high and adding more and more stuff like the statusbar just screws things up. Now if I define the pfscore1 and pfscore2 I get the cigarette effect. If I comment them out I get my lovely little life sprites and a statusbar but I noticed that the pfscore2 section is kind of populated by seemingly random playfield pixels. I haven't dug too much into this but I was wondering then if it would be possible to keep both playfield bars, 6 lives, and statusbar? Or would that require minor kernel modification? I haven't figured out how to modify the pfscore bars yet. 2600basic.h 2600basicheader.asm

I completely missed this! My computer dropped down to the last comment but the fan looks awesome!

I immediately pictured a ceiling fan rotating, either by a missile sliding back and forth and changing thickness to appear as if it is spinning. This game idea is amazing and needs to be done!

You could flicker the missiles. I do that in my Red Light Green Light project. I basically use something like 8 variables per missile to draw, move, then save the coordinates each frame, alternating which is loaded. I used SuperChip RAM but I could imagine this would work some way in DPC+. I had never tried it but I wonder if using the stack would work just as well where instead of using the variables you just push variables to the stack each frame.

If you are trying to get an enemy firing but why less discernible pattern sometimes I may do something like have the code for the firing only activate if the enemy was within a certain range of the player. so if the enemy is moving vertically I may look to see if the enemy y coordinates are close to the player y. And if then it may fire. other times I may tie the generation of the random firing to something like a timer or a coordinate of something. I will play around with it and tweak until it just feels right.

I love all these ideas. Pretty neat how all these things can be used on a 45 year old video game system!

If I want a simple slow down I sometimes just alternate frames the horizontal movement moves on. like if w{0} then skip horizontal movement. otherwise I’d use another variable and dim playerx =playerx.a or something like that. Can’t remember all the details or if I’m missing something as I'm away from my keyboard

I remember this video and someone else had also referenced this project. I just thought of this when I saw the Intellivision Amico mention something similar and that was one aspect of that system I thought was interesting. I wasn’t aware of size limitations but it did sound like a cool weird thing, like the Aladdin system on NES or the Supercharger.

This is awesome. I love seeing the ASM equivalents of things as they help me learn and of course the trade off with saving cycles

And building on this idea couldn’t you have the collision detection and deletion be conditional on the color value of the playfield?

Ahhh. I didn’t know that. I assumed it was more than that. I suppose it would still be pretty cool for smaller games to have some kind of reader that you just wave a card in front of and play. I had seen USB readers so I assumed if it could run off a USB power supply it wouldn’t need much power. Just a fun little thought. Thanks!