Arlasoft

Superb, thanks! I'm sure I would have figured that out eventually but the whole point of using the tool was for something quick and dirty, title screens are such a chore! Adjust the scanline counts either side to centre it vertically as well.

No I mean the background editor tool that generates the assembly...I've made two games in a week in 8bitworkshop so I hope it works

Assembly. I've seen this tool working for other people in posts from a few years ago, so I don't know if it was broken since then.

This is the .asm file generated by the editor, inserted into a blank project. hmm.asm

It's a project for this tool, which should theoretically output a 6-sprite kernel for the image: https://alienbill.com/2600/atari-background-builder/

This is the project from atari-background-builder, 48 pixel player, colour per scanline. If I download the generated abb.asm file, and add the appropriate labels/ZP locations, it is either garbled or rolls the screen - can't remember which, the mono version just didn't seem to be updating the sprites in time. Just putting the kids to bed so will show what happens in 8bitworkshop later on. toptom.abb.json

Unfortunately I haven't found a kernel that can render it yet! When I export it from https://alienbill.com/2600/atari-background-builder/ the image is garbled 😶

I've had this game in mind for the 2600 for ages, so it's nice to have finally got round to doing it now I've got to grips with the machine on a basic level. https://arlagames.itch.io/stepz-2600 Will now take some time to plan a larger project. I had started a port of the arcade game The Glob but don't think I can find a way to have elevators, enemies and collectibles without flickering sprites, which I'm not keen on.

Not sure if something changed in the 48-pixel mono kernel but when I paste it into 8bitworkshop (Javatari) the image is corrupted? I also tried the colour kernal a few days ago and think that was rolling the screen. https://github.com/1888games/bgbuilder

Thanks I'll give it some thought. I need to look into the HMOVE after WSYNC on every line, I tried it and P1 obstacles just glitched horribly so didn't look at it any further - next game I'll build it in from the start.

The only thing I'm not happy with is the P1 obstacle sprites glitching/ghosting on the left side when a double/triple wide sprite moves in from the far right. I mitigated it happening with repeated sprites by spawning them as single and then upgrading to two/three copies as the sprite moves further to the left. Similarly as they leave the screen on the left, they are switched down to 2 and then 1 copies and shifted back to the right by the distance between them. Is there a trick to having expanded or repeated sprites move in smoothly from the right side without ghosting?

Thanks, I'll try and tune in!

Yeah I've seen that in a lot of the disassemblies I've been studying, just been lazy

After spending the past few years writing C64 & Fairchild Channel F games, I finally got round to giving the 2600 a go. This is my first attempt so I kept the scope deliberately small and knocked this up over the last few days. It's a bit rough round the edges but I've learned enough from the project in terms of what is possible to begin planning something more ambitious. Currently NTSC only, will add in PAL compatibility and an original tune in the next few days. Instructions and some more rambling here: https://arlagames.itch.io/toptom-2600 Top&Tom.a26

Looking forward to this, I'll definitely be more inclined to write more games if I can easily test and play on real hardware.

New game for you, pretty simple but good fun, even against the CPU. https://arlagames.itch.io/fnvader

I've got the code to some of my games on Github. Here's one: https://github.com/1888games/TentsAndTrees_CF If you look in scripts/chars.asm, you can see where I've set up tile data. First a table of pointers to each tile's data, then the tiles themselves. Then in scripts/draw.asm there is a function DrawTile, that hardcodes the width and height to 5 before calling blit. These values could always be read in dynamically instead. All the game code in this project is in main.asm (naughty programmer, all my subsequent games were much more modular...) In there you can see whenever I do 'pi DrawTile' I first load: BackgroundColour into R1 ForegroundColour into R2 X into R3 Y into R4 TileID into R5 (the position of the tile data in the list of words called 'tiles') Once you can display one 'tile' or 'char' on the screen you can move onto displaying a series of them. Channel F is a very tricky system to cut your teeth on, the CPU is very quirky and drawing stuff to the screen is very slow. Even if you've done assembly on other simpler chips like the 6502 or Z80 it can still get confusing.

Great stuff!

Haha, let me know what you're working on next and I'll steer clear In the end what I did was group words with the same starting letter into groups of 32 (or less). Not only did it save about 1KB, it meant I could: - Get a random number between 0 and 49 to determine the group....i.e. A2, H1, S3. - Used that index to look up the first letter from a table, store that as letter 0. - Have a table of words pointing at the label for each group of 32 words. - Double the group index to get the address for the group. - Get a random number between 0 and the number of words in the group - 1. - Multiply by 4 to get the index of the first letter, read off the four remaining letters as letters 1-4.

https://github.com/1888games/Wrdl-F/ By the way I came across a weird bug, when switching to the next word I was just going to clrscrn and redraw the screen. But whenever I called clrscrn it would clear 85% of the screen in the correct colour, and then revert to black and white for the last 10-ish rows.....ever seen that before?

Just on the school run, will upload version with bug fixes later. EDIT: new version up which should prevent the score going below 0, handle soft reset, and use an actual blank char instead of randomly targeting ROM.... Also now shows you the answer when you fail to find it in six guesses. I'm sure there'll be other little bugs, I didn't really want to spend more than a day on this!

Looks like your version of Mess fills empty ram with FF instead of 00.

Ah nice, I was gonna ask if/how I could go above 8K but didn't bother There is a lot more space on the sides in the actual game, just a screenshot to fit itch.io's silly requirements. I'll add an actual blank char for the spaces, I was just lazy and pointed to an ID that I hadn't set up

https://arlagames.itch.io/wrdl-f

I feel like doing another Channel F project in the next 6 months, when I've got some bigger C64 projects done. What game(s) would people like to see? I have a few ideas for games I fancy doing that could work: Utopia (ported line-by-line from Intellivision) Dr Mario Berzerk Tapper or....something original?