King Atari Posted January 4, 2003 Share Posted January 4, 2003 Great hack! I was goofing with Pac-Man too, just wantd to make Pac himseld look normal, I ended up turning his mouth into a square that would periodically disappear. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rob Mitchell Posted January 5, 2003 Share Posted January 5, 2003 Man .. Y'all are having so much fun with this ha**cking program .. I may have to try it out on Sprintmaster and Space War! Rob Mitchell, Atlanta, GA Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rob Mitchell Posted January 5, 2003 Share Posted January 5, 2003 I cannot get to http://www.kudla.org/hackomatic/ Is the page down? Rob Mitchell, Atlanta, GA Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
King Atari Posted January 5, 2003 Share Posted January 5, 2003 The only thing that has annoyed me (and this doesn't really have anything to do with the Hack-O-Matic) is that some games use the same sprite for both the good guys and bad guys (Ex-Double Dragon). By the way, expect to see "Fisticuffs!" coming soon, only from King Atari! (And if it goes well, there may be a sequel!) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raindog Posted January 5, 2003 Author Share Posted January 5, 2003 Sorry, yes, the page is down at the moment. I built my shiny new Athlon 2100 system without realizing my network card was an old ISA 3com card, so I'm off the net till tomorrow sometime It's GPL so anyone is welcome to mirror it.... of course, some people will doubtless be glad it's gone Rob Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raindog Posted January 7, 2003 Author Share Posted January 7, 2003 It's back now, for better or worse! (And my new machine is so spiffy...) Rob Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rob Mitchell Posted January 7, 2003 Share Posted January 7, 2003 Got it .. thanks! Rob Mitchell, Atlanta, GA Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rob Mitchell Posted January 7, 2003 Share Posted January 7, 2003 Hack-o-matic is interesting .. I was able to find the player graphics in both Space War and Indy 500 and successfully modify them for fun. But when I tried to load up Sprintmaster (16k) with the intention of modifying the cars to look like the Indy 500 ones, HoM locks up .. Any suggestions? Rob Mitchell, Atlanta, GA Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raindog Posted January 7, 2003 Author Share Posted January 7, 2003 Don't know if this is your problem, but a 16K game will take four times as long to load as a 4K one.... it's possible it could be running out of memory of course (being that I'm creating a canvas with 131,072 little black squares, each an object, to edit a 16K game ) but it seems to me if someone edited Jr. Pac-Man you should be able to do Sprintmaster. Rob Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rob Mitchell Posted January 7, 2003 Share Posted January 7, 2003 I donno .. I tried it at the office .. and no go with Sprintmaster DC. Rob Mitchell, Atlanta, GA Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PacManPlus Posted January 8, 2003 Share Posted January 8, 2003 Just for the record, HOM also works with TI99/4a images, Atari 5200, and Atari 7800 images! I've played with MunchMan and a few others Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cassidy Nolen Posted January 8, 2003 Share Posted January 8, 2003 how do u use the hack-o-matic Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMila75 Posted January 8, 2003 Share Posted January 8, 2003 I tried it with Gyruss. My hard drive cranked away for about two minutes before I gave up on it and shut the program down. I'm using a Celeron 300 with Win98. Should I give it more time to open the file? I was planning to give the enemy ships a little variety. Is there a way to change colors too? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
King Atari Posted January 8, 2003 Share Posted January 8, 2003 You cannot change colors, at least not to the best of my knowledge. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NE146 Posted January 8, 2003 Share Posted January 8, 2003 how do u use the hack-o-matic Look at page 2 of this thread for the "official documentation" from Raindog I mean.. come on Cassidy! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raindog Posted January 9, 2003 Author Share Posted January 9, 2003 With a Celeron 400 and 256MB of RAM, a 4K game took about 20 seconds to load. I have no idea how big Gyruss is but figure on a Celeron 300 it might take 10 seconds per K. Sorry, I know the loading is slow but it's pretty zippy on my new Athlon 2100 that cost all of $109. I don't know if it'll be possible to write a reliable color editor for Atari 2600 games because unlike sprite data, there's no way to tell just by looking which data is the color data. You have to look through the actual code to see where it's storing a value to a color register and trace back to see where that color came from. Since all the objects are reused so frequently in many games you pretty much have to do a little trial and error to see what your changes do. Even then, it can have unintended consequences - I got an email this weekend from Albert mentioning that my Space Invaders hack does some unexpected color cycling in 2 player mode, and I sure didn't do that on purpose. So I could probably write something that looked for all the places where a game writes to color registers and traces it back and lets you pick from a color palette to change the data it's reading from, but the results could be nasty and you're really better off learning a little about programming than trying to point and click your way through it. Anyway, I wrote Hack-o-Matic as a way to entice more people to try messing with Atari games, not as a universal game construction kit. If you enjoy hacking sprites but find that you want to go further, you should do what most of us did and visit The Dig and start gathering your arsenal of 2600 coding tools and documentation. It's incredibly gratifying once you actually get your first bit of code working. Rob Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Atari freak 1 Posted January 10, 2003 Share Posted January 10, 2003 If you enjoy hacking sprites but find that you want to go further, you should do what most of us did and visit The Dig and start gathering your arsenal of 2600 coding tools and documentation. It's incredibly gratifying once you actually get your first bit of code working. I'm still mad that I can't get the disassembler and assembler on XP I changed compatibillity and everything but it didn't work! I would to take a stab at it (I know it's really really hard so no flaming!!!!!!!!!!!!) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
snorlaxnut Posted May 27, 2003 Share Posted May 27, 2003 Has anybody had any problems getting Hack-O-Matic to work on Windows ME? I read every post in this topic and then tried starting it every way I could. I even waited more than 2 minutes for the program to show up, but nothing. Did anybody have any problems getting it to work? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ATARI TROLL Posted May 27, 2003 Share Posted May 27, 2003 None here! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Inky Posted May 27, 2003 Share Posted May 27, 2003 I tried it on a 7800 rom on win XP 400 MHZ 256 MB, and it was eating up 168 MB of ram (!) Let it go for 5 minutes withou loading it up. Will try at home later. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
snorlaxnut Posted May 28, 2003 Share Posted May 28, 2003 Well I tried again and it still doesn't work. Maybe my computer just doesn't work with it. It was worth a try. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raindog Posted May 29, 2003 Author Share Posted May 29, 2003 I've heard you need some kind of "win98 mode" in XP (or maybe it was 2K) for HOM to work, but I've never actually tried it under Windows myself, just crosscompiled the .exe for Windows users. That 5 minutes to load stuff is pretty sick though. My old machine was a Celeron 400 with 256MB as well, and Jr. Pac-Man would load in a minute and a half or so. How big was this 7800 ROM, anyway? Maybe if it's really huge you may need to fall back on showgfx/editgfx That said, there must be a way to write HOM to be an order of magnitude faster. Tcl is just such an evil language. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dan Iacovelli Posted May 29, 2003 Share Posted May 29, 2003 it works for me on win xp. I was wondering what is the size limitations for use the hackomatic? I tried doing tempest 2600 it crashed, and I tried pitfall2+ and that crashed. Dan Iacovelli Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ATARI TROLL Posted May 29, 2003 Share Posted May 29, 2003 trying using it from a disk snarl! I had some problems with it then saved the program to a disk and save the hacks on my hd when im done! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Greg Zumwalt Posted May 29, 2003 Share Posted May 29, 2003 I've used HOM quite extensively. I presently use it under WinXP SP2. (Formerly under XP and XP SP1) It works without needing Win98 compatability. Although, I can't speak for Win2k. I also run it on another computer under Win98se. I have loaded 32Kb ROMs without problems. I do not know its limits. Although, it is supposed to in theory, be half of the physical RAM available. I decided to perform a test. Under WinXP SP2 with 2Gb of RAM and a 1.8 GHz AMD CPU I have loaded a test file. The result shows some degree of error trapping envolved, as the program will not load files in excess of 64Kb. 64Kb is also the largest 2600 ROM size, including the S.P. cassette games merged. The testing, on this computer, demonstrate an average 1Kb/second translation. Hence, a 4Kb rom will translate very fast, and a 64Kb rom takes just over a minute. Hope that helps. I have yet to have any issues loading a 2600 ROM. I have however noticed, and reported, with confirmation from the programmer, a bug that prevents the program from working properly if: The main executable is too deep in the directory tree. For example, the first time I set it up, I put it into c:Atari2600ToolsEditorsGraphicH-O-M and it refused to work properly. The prorgam was built with a little known language that has a few limitations. When I move the H-O-M folder to c:HOM it worked perfect. The developer of the software used to make the program, also notes that long file names, and filenames with non-alphabet characters, can also cause problems. In my VaderMatic documentation, I went into all of this and notified this group of those finding. Of course, you may also just have a corrupt file. Try downloading it again. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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