My students' Atari VCS games

[buddpaul]

Hey all. As some of you know, I've been teaching with the VCS at Georgia Tech for a while now. I finally managed to get all of the games my students have produced over the years posted to my website.

 

 

....by-the-by....you have a REALLY COOL site. Content-wise and design-wise.....extremely cool stuff.

 

Paul B.

[+Random Terrain]

If you could post the .bin files instead of zip files, the games could be click on and played immediately. People my not want to download them and keep them forever, but they might want to at least try them once.

[ibogost]

....by-the-by....you have a REALLY COOL site. Content-wise and design-wise.....extremely cool stuff.

 

Paul B.

 

Thanks!!

[ibogost]

If you could post the .bin files instead of zip files, the games could be click on and played immediately. People my not want to download them and keep them forever, but they might want to at least try them once.

 

I hear you, but my intention is to show the games in the context of their creation. The students have included additional material beyond the .bin that helps frame the game. Anyway, the bigger problem is that it would be a ton of work to get them up again in bin format and linked . But I'll keep it in mind.

 

Soon there will be a cartridge version of selections of these games, so that'll be another way to get them.

[+batari]

If you could post the .bin files instead of zip files, the games could be click on and played immediately. People my not want to download them and keep them forever, but they might want to at least try them once.

Stella will open happily open zip files and begin playing the .bin inside. I suppose you'd have to temporarily associate zip files with Stella in order to click-and-play, but if you are playing a few dozen in succession, it might not be too cumbersome.

[+batari]

Soon there will be a cartridge version of selections of these games, so that'll be another way to get them.

If you are looking for a good board, I will suggest the 64k boards I designed for the 2007 Xmas cart. Easier to build than the standard 32k boards, more suitable for compilations (as bankswitching hotspots don't overlap with normal code and data areas) and, of course, twice the size I think Albert has a few left...

[supercat]

If you are looking for a good board, I will suggest the 64k boards I designed for the 2007 Xmas cart. Easier to build than the standard 32k boards, more suitable for compilations (as bankswitching hotspots don't overlap with normal code and data areas) and, of course, twice the size I think Albert has a few left...

 

For making compilations of 4K games, they're probably good (if the bank E/F behavior is taken out of the PLD). It is necessary that bank-switching instructions only be performed within the first 2K, other than in certain special circumstances, so they may not be a perfect general-purpose solution.

[+Random Terrain]

Stella will open happily open zip files and begin playing the .bin inside. I suppose you'd have to temporarily associate zip files with Stella in order to click-and-play, but if you are playing a few dozen in succession, it might not be too cumbersome.

I didn't know it could do that. I clicked on one and it played right away. No more downloading zip files unless I want to keep them! Thanks for the info!

[+batari]

If you are looking for a good board, I will suggest the 64k boards I designed for the 2007 Xmas cart. Easier to build than the standard 32k boards, more suitable for compilations (as bankswitching hotspots don't overlap with normal code and data areas) and, of course, twice the size I think Albert has a few left...

 

For making compilations of 4K games, they're probably good (if the bank E/F behavior is taken out of the PLD). It is necessary that bank-switching instructions only be performed within the first 2K, other than in certain special circumstances, so they may not be a perfect general-purpose solution.

I believe all of the games here are 4k, so that shouldn't be a problem. According to the ATF16V8 datasheet, it is designed to start up with all registers high, so it would start in the last bank, but I wonder how well that would work in practice. It would be nice if one could simply concatenate a bunch of 4k games without modification and write a simple menu to select the games.

[+ZeroPage Homebrew]

We'll be checking out some of the programming projects of the students of @ibogost! We'll be playing Push, Atario Party and BreakBack, on today's (Tue Jul 7) ZeroPage Homebrew stream LIVE on Twitch at 11AM PT | 2PM ET | 6PM GMT! Hope everyone can watch!

 

Twitch Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/zeropagehomebrew/

 

Games:

• Unholy (2020 Exclusive WIP Update) by Leonardo Santiago (@Leonardo Santiago)
• Push (2007) by Sarah Clark
• Atario Party (2007) by Jabari Brown, Deep Chakrabarty, Jacob Paul
• BreakBack (2005) by Max Anderson, Michael Boyce, Patrick Jarrett
• Chase It (Demo) by Alan W Smith (@accousticguitar)

 

(SET VIDEO TO 1080P60 FOR FULL QUALITY)

 

 

 

Edited July 8, 2020 by ZeroPage Homebrew