Atari 5200 Homebrews 2002 Impressions

[+Cafeman]

Many have received their copy of both Castle Blast and Haunted House at last week's CGE show.

 

It would be interesting for us to get some talk & discussion over these games, don't you think? Personally I don't own either cart yet myself but I've played their pre-release versions a few times.

 

Also, there were demo's of Koffi: Yellow Kopter, Swordquest: Airworld, and Adventure II at CGE2k2 that some of you might have gotten to try out at the AtariAge booth.

 

Let's hear some impressions! This is the 20th anniversary of "PAM", the Atari 5200 SuperSystem! The first homebrews ever for the system have been released! Talk talk talk! [/cheerleadermode]

[DEBRO]

My comments probably don't count but...

 

I got my copy of Castle Blast. I love the packaging. O.G. got Atari style boxes done too. I like the game but I haven't played my copy yet. I've played it soooo many times during the development cycle BTW, has anyone found the Easter Egg yet?

 

I saw Haunted House at the AtariAge booth but didn't play it. I turned the machine off and back on to see the splash screen (I wonder why ). When I saw it in the 5200 I just got out of a keynote and was walking around to soak in the event before the next keynote (I attended all of them).

 

I did see Adventure II on the 5200 before the show started Sunday. I looked really good. I think the graphics were outstanding for a first generation homebrew. I didn't stay long because I went to set up for the Sunday morning keynote. Warren did say in his session that he wanted to see the progress of Adventure II but I'm not sure if he got around to see it.

 

I asked some people after the show and during what they thought about the 5200 games and I was a little disappointed. It seems that the interest in homebrew 5200 games is not very high. Most people I talked to didn't even know that new 5200 games had been produced. It seems most were there to pick up 2600 games. The homebrew market may be saturated right now too. There were a lot of games released at the CGE (we may be looking at a crash for 2K3 ) and the 5200 ones may had fallen by the way side.

[NoahsMyBro]

Speaking of saturating the market, consider me a case-study for the market.

 

I am currently saddled with a couple of balance-carrying-credit cards. I got my first credit card in 1987 or '88, and until this summer I'd never carried a balance before on any cards (aside from the occasional forgetting to pay a statement).

 

I've already sent in payment for Thrust+ SE and QB:SE, and am waiting for them to arrive. I intend to send off a $25 check this weekend for the DP 7th Edition.

 

I also just emailed Randy to reserve copies of Space Treat & Marble Craze ($55), and very much want to get HH3D & Super PacMan for the 5200. I don't even know the price for them. About an hour ago I sent off a reservation/order request for Mental Kombat ($49 + shipping).

 

And I can't think of them off the top of my head, but I know I've passed up many homebrews this year and last. I want them all, but I'm already a little out of control and I simply can't afford everything. Hell, I don't even have time to play most of the games. I figure once I retire I'm set as far as electronic entertainment goes.

 

I wanted Castle Blast, but had to pass it by; ditto for the Cuttle Cart, Intellicart, Ms. Space Fury, Tsunami, BattleSphere Gold, etc...

 

I'm actually hoping Koffi & Adventure II don't come out for a long time. I very much want to get both, but just can't afford to yet.

[OldGuru]

Spending a lot of time at AA booth at the show, I felt that most of the interest was around the 2600 homebrews.

 

At AA booth was a setup of 2 5200 and 2 7800 (playing 2600 cartridges) consoles. I thought that most of the interest was around the 7800 setup. Don't get me wrong, many people stopped by the 5200s setup and played both the demos and the released titles.

 

As far as the individual games are concerned, I thought that HH3D was a very nice game with nice graphics consdiering the short development time. This game, appeared from "nowhere" and made it as CGE2K2 release. Impressive!

 

Advanture II has a great looking graphics which really reminds later generation systems. I'm just curious to know if the compression code is complete so all the graphic can fit into one 32K EPROM. Definitley looks promissing.

 

Koffi has a great game play, graphics and sounds. It is my favorite game for the 5200 so far. The game play is not trivial though and requires some basic understanding of what needs to be done and how to do that as well.

 

OG

[+Cafeman]

Alan's compression routine is definitely in and working, although I don't fully understand it yet.

 

IIRC, we have 16K set aside for the screen graphics. With the compression routine, I believe we can fit nearly 80 screens into the game max! However, we won't have that many, I think 50 screens is a safer goal. It all depends on how we use our character sets too, and this game will have much more use of sound than 2600 Adventure did and that takes ROM space too.

 

Did you get to hear the pulsating sound in the Adv II demo that I hacked in? It's on the Fire Castle screen where the dragon is -- was the sound turned up? Anyway, I happen to think that's a cool sound the 5200 can make. The sound is in Koffi too.

[+Cafeman]

What about Airworld? I've never seen it in motion. How far along is it?

[Alex]

The 2600 is simply a vastly more popular system than the 5200, so this is natural. I do think that as more titles come out for the 5200 the interest will increase.

 

If someone could produce an affordable 5200 controller or adapter to replace the standard sticks, that would help a great deal. Wicos and Masterplays are just too expensive and difficult to come by. We had a prototype 5200 controller that had been converted from a 2600 controller with a second button added - if someone could efficiently produce those, it would help I think.

 

I'd also love to see a 5200 built into a smaller case.

[calamari]

I hope that my 5200BAS example roms don't count as homebrews LOL.. well except DEBUG52, I rate that one pretty high! I made it myself though, so I could *possibly* be biased

 

calamari

 

p.s. The compiled ROMs are available here:

http://www.azstarnet.com/~jeffryj/5200exam.html

and DEBUG52 is at:

http://www.azstarnet.com/~jeffryj/5200bas.html

[Big_Mo]

Unfortunately, work and other considerations made it impossible for me to go to CGE. I was looking forward to seeing what these 5200 titles looked like running on actual systems rather than emulated. *sigh*

 

Just looked at the Adventure II commemts and development page...seems like that's going in a very different direction than the Adventure type game I had in mind. I'll be curious to see if the final play mechanic is fun or if it'll suffer from Indenture-itis!

[+Cafeman]

I trust Big Mo will let us know if it isn't fun.

 

In other news, I received my copy of Ronen Habot's Castle Blast today in the mail!

 

The first thing I thought was that the box was VERY NICE. George Reese made it and he's been working with me on possibly making boxes for Koffi -- I am impressed by the quality. Nice thick cardboard for the box, better thickness than those later-gen Genesis boxes I think.

 

So I sat down to play the game, and I had a BLAST (snicker) getting to level 6 and then finally dying. I love the music in this game. After a while I don't dare chase the UFO because those diagonal beams always get me. I found my hand cramping up from the 5200 controller; need to dig out the Masterplay. And I do get a kick at seeing "RWL S/N 005" when I press the Asterisk Key.

 

Here's what I hate about Castle Blast -- get ready here comes my criticism! After you are done with a game, you must press RESET to start over again. I hate this because my controller's RESET button doesn't work anymore, at least not well.

 

Because of this, I made the '1' key in Koffi another RESET button.

[calamari]

Sounds like you need a trak-ball.. the buttons work great on it

 

calamari

[Big_Mo]

I trust Big Mo will let us know if it isn't fun.  

 

Heh, you betcha! As the former "Gaming on the Go" reviewer for the late VG&CE magazine, I was known as a brutal but fair reviewer.

 

Personally, I hope it's a fun game. I was really disappointed in how badly done Indenture was. It was all maps and no interaction. [Jo Anne Worley] "Booooo-ring!" [/Jo Anne Worley]

 

I couldn't say this before -- due to non-disclosure forms and all -- but now I can... One reason I stopped persuing my 5200 Adventure type game was that for a short while Infrogrames had a spin-off company called Atari Labs that was right down the block from where I work. They were looking into how to repurpose the Atari IPs for modern devices. My company was in talks with Atari Labs, so I decided to pitch my game mechanic to them as a way to do an updated Adventure. Sadly, Atari Labs was shut down a few months back, so that was that. SIGH!

[+Cafeman]

I never played Indenture, in fact I only heard about it recently here at AA. (alcoholics anonymous?)

 

Usually it is spoken of in a more favorable light.

 

Sorry to hear about your plans falling through. You still have some designs for an Atari 5200 Adventure game, are you going to just let them sit & whither away or get busy coding and make another "Adventure II", different from ours? Of course, it would be inadviseable to call it the same name as ours.

[tyranthraxus]

The 2600 is simply a vastly more popular system than the 5200, so this is natural. I do think that as more titles come out for the 5200 the interest will increase.  

 

If someone could produce an affordable 5200 controller or adapter to replace the standard sticks, that would help a great deal. Wicos and Masterplays are just too expensive and difficult to come by. We had a prototype 5200 controller that had been converted from a 2600 controller with a second button added - if someone could efficiently produce those, it would help I think.

 

I'd also love to see a 5200 built into a smaller case.

 

Yeah the 2600 is just a far more popular system. So you have to be pleased with what is being done. Adventure II and Airworld are cool sequel ideas. I hope they turn out well. At least there is some stuff

being done, the 7800 hasn't seen a lot of action... yet!

 

But I think the biggest problem is of course the controller issue. There

needs to be a cheap alternative. While other systems have crappy

controllers at least they do not break down with the speed at which

5200s do! Unfortunatly I don't think that is possible to do it cheaply. So

think the controller issue will keep the 5200 community small. Unless

you have a real love for the system few casual retro-gamers will want

the hassle or expense of dealing with the joysticks.

 

John

[calamari]

I don't think the controllers have too much to do with it, honestly.. IMO the 2600 controllers are more uncomfortable than the 5200. At least the 5200 stick has a range of motion. Also, back in the day, my parents went and bought the 5200 Wico sticks, so we were all set. No, controllers are just a scapegoat for hating the 5200.

 

There's something else going on here. 5200 was our family's first system. Lots of people already had 2600's. The real reason behind lack of 5200 popularity is that most people never owned a 5200 or had one growing up. Why why one, when you already had a 2600 and tons of games? Then, even if they changed their mind and wanted to they didn't have much of a chance to, because shortly after it came out it was already dying.. my parents went to every store in search of new games (they played the system a lot too ), and couldn't find them. IIRC, this wasn't even a year after they bought the thing.

 

At least for me, the 5200 is my favorite system because that's what I grew up playing. The Channel F is my second favorite system because that was my first big find, and then the rest. Most 2600 games look & play like crap, IMO... but I suspect that argument has just about as much merit as comments about 5200 sticks

 

calamari

[Big_Mo]

I never played Indenture, in fact I only heard about it recently here at AA. (alcoholics anonymous?)  

 

Usually it is spoken of in a more favorable light.

 

Personally, I find Indenture to be a prime example of how NOT to update a game. They copied Adventure exactly, then added a ton of additional screens to it. Trouble is, there was no gameplay added to it. The game simply adds a zillion needless screens to it -- in which to hide a half dozen vague objects that you have to assemble. There's nothing much happening, so 99% of the gameplay is navigating endless screens looking for objects and numbers and hoping you figure out what to do with them.

 

Sorry to hear about your plans falling through.  You still have some designs for an Atari 5200 Adventure game, are you going to just let them sit & whither away or get busy coding and make another "Adventure II", different from ours? Of course, it would be inadviseable to call  it the same name as ours.

 

As I've told you in email, I'm not a coder, so I never planned to code the game myself. My part was to design the gameplay, the screens, and blueprint the game flow...which is what I did for a living for years. If I find a good programmer who wants to do it and is serious about doing it right, I'd gladly pull out the designs.

 

As to the name, I never intended to call it Adventure 2. After all, that was Atari's name. I'd only use such a name if it was a licensed sequel.

[+Cafeman]

It sounds like, from your description, that Indenture is the equivalent of modern-day 3D platformers which are huge because you must tediously collect enough 'things'. Not enough platforming and action and adventure, and too much collecting. Perhaps this collecting mechanism grew from Atari nuts trying to get every label variation for every game on old systems?

 

Adventure II is not fully realized in design yet. We as a team have much more to discuss as to where it will go, but already I can say that it won't be Adventure with more screens, or Adventure with prettier screens. There are changes in gameplay, antagonists. All in all hopefully the essence of the classic Robinett game will still be there. I have not heard, I wonder if he ever did make his way to the booth to see our demo of the game? I wish more could have been done for CGE2k2!

 

I also detect a hint of disapproval that we've entitled our homebrew "Adventure II". It's not Adventure 2 btw. There was talk of copyrights and such right here at AA and in the end, we agreed that the name Adventure is hardly anything to worry about concerning copyright. But who knows, maybe I'll receive a letter like Snider-Man did and change the name. Hmm ... Super Square Sunshine, perhaps?

 

Well, back to typing in all these animal frames into Koffi ....

[Big_Mo]

I also detect a hint of disapproval that we've entitled our homebrew "Adventure II".

 

Well, don't worry. No such slight was intended. You said that if I did my game that it would be inadvisable to call it Adventure II. I simply replied that it was never my intention to call it "Adventure anything", for the reasons stated. My game concept has a name -- one which owes more to Homer (not Simpson) than Warren Robinett -- but the "cover" name when I first came up with it was "Son of Square".

 

As to Adventure II, I'd be pleased as punch if you come up with something good. We can always use good new 5200 games!

[Voltman3]

Well, as this was my 1st CGE- I had a good a good time.

My car tried to stop me- smoked the rebuilt tranny I put in,

but Budget rent a car came through

 

I met some great people, Geo Reese (Tunnelrunner) a long time

email/trade buddy was the first. Ronen Habot (OG) real nice guy !

BTW, he's NOT OLD ?

Of course Alex and Albert ! Great booth guys !

 

A few others- Crossbow - Tempest (he was burned out by the time

I ran into him) Sean Kelly & John Hardie too.

Awesome show, alot of effort goes into something like CGE.

Thanks everyone for a first rate weekend!!

 

 

I spent all my time there from open to close on both days.

I agree about most interest being in the 2600, but hey we know why.

So many new & proto releases were nice to see, I got several of them.

 

As someone pointed out, @ AA booth, the interest in the 2600 games

seemed to be enormous as expected.

I'm not a real big 2600 fan but I did indulge and got several

new releases. I couldn't resist.

 

But, it seemed to me, there were a lot of people checking out the 5200

setups as well. More than I expected. I suspect many people didn't know

about the new games coming out for it. They do now !

If the 5200 authors keep plugging away, I believe interest will grow.

Clays new PS/5200 controlller will help alot too I think.

Don't give up guys- keep writing new 5200 games and us gamers

will want them.

 

I played all 5200 Demos AA had-

Airworld - I think had 1/2 screens, I guess I wasn't to impressed,

can't remember what it was? Green/Yellow Castle ?

I do want to see more of it

 

ADV II - Nice graphics, the dragons are awesome looking !

 

Koffi Kopter - It's real fun to play, alot of things to do keeping

the player busy. Can't wait for it to be done ! It needs a manual ?.

 

Haunted House - not my style game, but I bought a copy.

I will have a copy of all new 5200 games no matter what

It's interesting and neat that it could be done so fast, good job John.

 

Castle Blast What can I say, I loved it. Ronen signed my box too!

 

It was also nice to see so many other systems there, many I've never seen before.

Dozens of Arcade games that were new to me as well !

 

Overall - I don't think new 2600 or 5200 releases will saturate CGE

in the future, we all will have alot more to choose from.

We will see games that we as kids- would have wanted ourselves.

It is the beginning of a new era, games for gamers, by gamers

 

I will be a repeat attendee of this event and hope to see you all there.

We had a great time !

[Tempest]

Tempest (he was burned out by the time  

I ran into him)

 

When was this? I don't remember ever being *burnt out*. Well maybe towards the end...

 

Tempest

[+Cafeman]

I just played a round of Castle Blast again. I got 2,980 points. Died sloppily 2 times because I was messing around. Points don't come easy in Castle Blast. Concerning its easter egg, I cleared all the ship's blocks, nada. I wonder if you roll the score (9,999) if something happens, I notice it only has 4 digits. I'm not quite 1/3 of the way to finding out.

[OldGuru]

I got 2,980 points

So you should have got an extra player at 1,000 points, didn't you?

 

Indeed, scorring many points in Castle Blast is quite tough. I wouldn't like to torture none of you guys by letting you play till 9,999...

 

Hint: The easter egg can't be found in the 1st level...

 

Good luck,

OG.

[+Cafeman]

Yep, I got the extra life at 1,000 points. Hint acknowledged.

[Phosphor Dot Fossils]

I agree with the earlier assessment that the controllers make the 5200 an easy target. I've got two working 5200 sticks and one Wico stick and keypad, and even with the old non-centering sticks I love the 5200. I'm planning on getting any homebrews that anyone puts out for it - I'll going to be sending my Castle Blast dough in pretty soon.

 

I stand by the theory I've always had, which is that the 5200 stalled in the starting gate because Coleco had Expansion Module #1 ready to go when the Colecovision launched, and not some time later, as was the case with Atari's VCS adapter. Coleco's box was in the stores side-by-side with the console itself, while at the same time all Atari had was a sketch in a catalog. If I had been looking to get either a 5200 or a Colecovision at that time, I would've gone with the Colecovision in a heartbeat - there was no real indication that Atari was anywhere even remotely close to putting its 2600-to-5200 peripheral on the market. And considering that many people had sizable 2600 libraries by 1982, Colecovision won that round hands-down.

[+Cafeman]

I got 2,980 points

 

Hint: The easter egg can't be found in the 1st level...

 

Good luck,

OG.

 

 

©RH