deater78

it's a 4k ROM

making steady progress, have 18 different scenes you can view. There should be enough ROM to fit at least 60 or so

working on some more art for the new engine. Each image is 448 bytes, and for it to work it has to compress down below 256 bytes so it can't be too complex. The viewing pool scene I had to hack a lot of the detail out before it would compress small enough

so you have all convinced me to see if I can expand this. I'm trying with an E7 bank-switch cartridge (16k ROM/2k RAM). Data for each screen is about 500 bytes, and I'm going to compress the data with ZX02 compression and then decompress to RAM. So far the data compresses pretty well. I got decompression working, it was interesting hacking it to work when the read/write addresses are different. I'm going to try to implement enough of Myst island that you can follow the speedrun route (for those who don't know, you can speedrun the actual game Myst in around 40s or so without leaving the main island)

the Apple II version has 800 images totaling about 400k of graphics. Although in the end it's not really the cartridge space that would keep me from attempting a more complete version, for this I was generating a custom kernel for each image to maximize the colors/design and that's a lot more labor intense than drawing 800 bitmaps was. Game logic wise it might be doable, I was surprised how few bytes of game state there is for the complete game.

Hello I was curious how much of Myst I could fit in a 4k cartridge (I ported all of Myst to an Apple II on three disks a few years back). It turns out not much, but it was fun to try. [update] Version 2.6 is a 16k E7 ROM with a fully playable subset of Myst. You can get all 4 endings, solve two puzzles, walk around the main island, and complete the typical speedrun route Web page about the project (including link to source code): http://deater.net/weave/vmwprod/myst_vcs/ You can get the ROM here: http://deater.net/weave/vmwprod/myst_vcs/myst.e7 There's a manual to help you play through here: http://deater.net/weave/vmwprod/myst_vcs/vcs_myst.pdf Plays fine in stella, MAME, and real hardware using harmony cartridge. Currently does not play on javatari due to a (reported) bug in E7 cart handling.

had to release a v1.5 because I wasn't initializing everything to 0 at boot, and on real hardware it was causing the title screen to come up weird. The new version works fine on both real hardware and on stella in developer mode. On the plus side by initing everything to zero it actually freed up ROM space because I could take out some explicit LDA/STA initializations later on

Just released v1.4 which I'm going to call the final version unless anyone finds some issues with it. I hope there aren't any bugs as I'm right at the edge of being out of ROM and I've already had to pull a lot of tricks to make it all fit. There are now 8 levels, but they repeat (with less time available each time it wraps). I added speed boost power ups, though they are a bit different from the original game this is a port of. Getting more than 2 of them makes things go really fast so there's some strategy to getting them (you can drop your speed by running into the pulsing walls). There's also now a 50 point bonus for finishing the level without hitting any walls.

released v1.1 which now has 8 playable levels. Still need to clean up the code a bit.

I've been working on an actual 2600 version of the parody "Secret Collect." flash game by the Homestarrunner people. It's currently playable, though only two levels. I have plans to fix the timing so it glitches a bit less on actual hardware, and hopefully I can squeeze the game data enough to fit at least 4 levels in. You can see a video / get a ROM image here: http://www.deater.net/weave/vmwprod/secret_collect/