Endless Quest - Picked it up again

RSS Bot · July 14, 2008

This past year I finished my thesis, had a second child and moved on from my old job. Kids are crazy, the commute is long for ND. I drive 85 miles to work every day. That's probably nothing for CA or NY people, but it's a ways for this place.

Anyway, I've been feeling a bit nostalgic these days, which caused me to take a gander at some of the 2600 designs I did a few years back. So I started back programming for the 2600 again. Picking up where I left off, I started working on a kernel that would allow me to create a set of "Table Top" sports games. You know, like table top hockey.

I have become a bit rusty, and couldn't remember half the crap I once knew. However, Andrew Davies' 2600 Programming for Newbies helped me out a lot, and I found all my old links... and I have to say, the latest version of DASM, seems to be better than I remember it. I built it on my OSX Leopard machine, which I'm actually comfortable doing these days because I mostly work in HPC linux environments.

So I poured myself into it this weekend, probably risked pissing off my wife a bit. My 4yo daughter was a bit angry with me too as I slept in late... really late... as I was up all night working on it. This morning when I got up... I still had 1/2 hour before noon... I realized that I probably can't work on it as much as I did this weekend... So you know, not sure when I'll have another chance to work on the code again.

So I designed a pretty cool Table Top Quidditch kernel... or drew it out as a picture based on what I remembered about the TIA's capabilities.... and ended up having to drop half the features once I tried to implement it. I obviously didn't remember how limited it really is. Boy, don't ya just wish the 2600 sprites had x,y positioning? Well, I knew it didn't do that, but jeez it's so much harder to position sprites than I remember.

So anyway, here's a screen capture of what I was able to implement. Hopefully, I'll get a chance to work on it further sooner rather than later. What do you think? Has it really been six years since I first joined Atari Age. Sometimes I feel old.

Aaron

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