New Hombrew Game Dungeon Gladiator

Exender2 · May 30, 2010

Hi All,

Attached is a new Homebrew 2600 game. It is called Dungeon Gladiator it is basically a two person combat game similar to the various karate games of the early to mid 80’s era. Screen shots are attached below(if I did it right this is my first post).

Specifications

Size: 4k

Format: NTSC

Players: 2 (no single player)

Controller: Joystick

Kernel(s): 1x

Known Working Emulators: Stella (UNIX, Windows)

What’s in the release file:

Docs

-> DG_2600_ReadMe.txt: Text file with detailed play instructions and battle strategy.

-> dgManCover.JPG: A manual cover/game flyer that I like to think may have been handed out at E3 1983

Rom

-> DG2600NTSC.a26: Rom file for Stella with .a26 extension same as bin file

-> DG2600NTSC.bin: Rom file for Stella with .a26 extension same as a26 file

Screens: Screens shots in this folder png format.

Sources

->dg.asm: Main source file (6507 assembly).

->DGMedia.asm: Resource source file, contains graphics, playfields and sounds.

Some History & Post Mortem

First of all, a big thanks to all of you on the Atari age forums. While I never had time to be active on the forums it was your tutorials and posts on these forums that made of the difference. Had I known how difficult programming the 2600 would be I may not have ever tried to begin with? Many times it felt like teaching a mule to ballet dance in theory it is possible but… Having finished (mostly finished no game is ever really complete is it?) a game for the Atari one can really respect the talented programmers of that era; I had the Stella debugger they had graph paper.

This game took approximately 6 months working part time to complete from the first tutorial to the last assembly. Play testing was completed several months later due to life just getting too busy. The play testing was done on an emulator and I do not know if this would work on the actual system. I suspect there might be a timing error or two that Stella was forgiving of and the actual hardware would not be. This project was most likely too ambitious for 4k however as first project I figured all the rest was enough without having to deal with bank switching. I would have loved to have been able to explore some AI, as well as improve the motion and animation.

While the game balance appears to be okay the main complaint I have is that the matches are too short. Sadly my life has become too complicate and there is no time in the near future for anymore Atari programming etc. I have released the source in case anyone wanted to play around and take it any further, you just never know. Thanks again!

Dg2600.zip