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[Release] Bell Hopper


Tjoppen

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Sorry for the thread necromancy, but I just heard of this game today and I have to say that Bell Hopper is the first game in a while that actually gets my blood pumping! Within a few tries, I was able to get my score up over a million (EDIT: 39.3 million now). Thank you so, so much, Tjoppen, for the NTSC port (wow, my Harmony really is becoming the only cart I use)! Can't wait for The Byte Before Christmas!

 

P.S.: Might I also say that Nyantari 2600 is spectacular. :)

Edited by TheHoboInYourRoom
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  • 8 years later...

Happy Holidays! ZeroPage Homebrew will be playing Byte Before Christmas (Bell Hopper) on tomorrow's (Fri Dec 25) stream LIVE on Twitch at 12PM PT | 3PM ET | 8PM GMT! Hope everyone can watch!

 

Games:

 

 

230908794_20201225-LetsPlay.thumb.jpg.9c8a648fe09cc36d35053cb39d0caf35.jpg

 

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  • 10 months later...
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On 12/16/2023 at 7:20 PM, ComputerSpaceFan said:

Hi there, forgive the necro-bump but My Arcade just enabled paddle control support on their Atari Gamestation Pro this week and although a bunch of great homebrew ROMs now work in it, Bell Hopper does not. The rabbit just goes to one side of the screen and stays there. Any ideas why and if this is patchable?

Hi, coincidentally this old game of mine came up in conversation recently so hopefully I'm not too late in replying. What is the actual hardware on this machine? I bet there could be many reasons why it isn't working.

 

Also the forums switching to requiring email rather than username for login almost made this account impossible to log into.

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Oh and also, how do demoscene productions run on that machine?

 

Do you have a 2600+? It just uses Stella, so I imagine it should work. I wonder what the Atari Gamestation Pro uses.. Based on some videos, MAME maybe?

I don't see the purpose of these machines when you could just use a Raspberry Pi or an old laptop, or a real machine + Harmony

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4 hours ago, Tjoppen said:

Oh and also, how do demoscene productions run on that machine?

 

Do you have a 2600+? It just uses Stella, so I imagine it should work. I wonder what the Atari Gamestation Pro uses.. Based on some videos, MAME maybe?

I don't see the purpose of these machines when you could just use a Raspberry Pi or an old laptop, or a real machine + Harmony

Hi Tomas (ignore my reply in YouTube since you have now replied). I don't have a 2600+ cuz the Gamestation Pro is better for my needs. If it's not possible to get Bell Hopper to recognize the Gamestation paddle no worries. Awesome game for those who can enjoy it.

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3 hours ago, ComputerSpaceFan said:

Hi Tomas (ignore my reply in YouTube since you have now replied). I don't have a 2600+ cuz the Gamestation Pro is better for my needs. If it's not possible to get Bell Hopper to recognize the Gamestation paddle no worries. Awesome game for those who can enjoy it.

I'm not sure what emulator the Gamestation runs, so it's somewhat hard to figure out what might be wrong. If you could figure out what it uses that would be great. Seems the hardware landscape gets worse for homebrew devs as we now have to take into account all this oddball hardware.

 

I mostly used Stella and a mouse when developing, and the light four-switch "Darth Vader" plus the 2600jr for real hardware testing. Not sure what the Flashback 2 uses for hardware, maybe some form of reimplemented TIA + 6507? If it's FPGA based then maybe there's a firmware upgrade. Other games using 12-digit displays, especially with early HMOVE, might also be good test beds. Demos too.

 

Seems to me the best way to play 2600 games is still the original hardware + flash, or a regular computer running Stella with suitable USB controllers. Atari actually seems to make a decent wireless joystick+paddle combination controller that works with Stella. There are some other paddle controllers on the market as well - no need to give Atari any money.

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This discussion about modern hardware and wireless controllers also makes me wonder if it'd be worthwhile to make a wireless paddle controller. It should be possible with either an RF or IR link, and a digital potentiometer on the receiver side connected to the controller port.

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18 hours ago, Tjoppen said:

I'm not sure what emulator the Gamestation runs, so it's somewhat hard to figure out what might be wrong. If you could figure out what it uses that would be great. Seems the hardware landscape gets worse for homebrew devs as we now have to take into account all this oddball hardware.

 

I mostly used Stella and a mouse when developing, and the light four-switch "Darth Vader" plus the 2600jr for real hardware testing. Not sure what the Flashback 2 uses for hardware, maybe some form of reimplemented TIA + 6507? If it's FPGA based then maybe there's a firmware upgrade. Other games using 12-digit displays, especially with early HMOVE, might also be good test beds. Demos too.

 

Seems to me the best way to play 2600 games is still the original hardware + flash, or a regular computer running Stella with suitable USB controllers. Atari actually seems to make a decent wireless joystick+paddle combination controller that works with Stella. There are some other paddle controllers on the market as well - no need to give Atari any money.

It uses Stella, but not a current version at present.

 

22 hours ago, ComputerSpaceFan said:

Hi Tomas (ignore my reply in YouTube since you have now replied). I don't have a 2600+ cuz the Gamestation Pro is better for my needs. If it's not possible to get Bell Hopper to recognize the Gamestation paddle no worries. Awesome game for those who can enjoy it.

@ComputerSpaceFan If you are willing to upgrade your firmware with my patch, I have Bell Hopper working on the GsP with paddle.

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Oh it's just a detection failure? Is it not possible to set what controller "mode" to use on a per-ROM basis? Stella sure allows that, but maybe the Gamestation integration doesn't. I suppose a separate directory for paddle games is a reasonable fix. Won't help with games that use a combination of paddles and joystick though, which I've had some ideas around.

 

This just leaves the Flashback 2 issue, but I'm going to chalk that one up to an incorrect TIA implementation. Still, would be interesting to see how other titles that display text using similar techniques fare. The demo 2600 BC by Genesis Project might be a good test ROM since the greetings text uses a very similar text display routine to mine.

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29 minutes ago, Tjoppen said:

Oh it's just a detection failure? Is it not possible to set what controller "mode" to use on a per-ROM basis? Stella sure allows that, but maybe the Gamestation integration doesn't. I suppose a separate directory for paddle games is a reasonable fix. Won't help with games that use a combination of paddles and joystick though, which I've had some ideas around.

 

This just leaves the Flashback 2 issue, but I'm going to chalk that one up to an incorrect TIA implementation. Still, would be interesting to see how other titles that display text using similar techniques fare. The demo 2600 BC by Genesis Project might be a good test ROM since the greetings text uses a very similar text display routine to mine.

It's possible, sure, but only via scripts at this point.  Stella's configuration is not entirely accessible, and we haven't been able to get .pro files working either, AFAIK.  Hopefully we'll be able to update Stella at some point in the near future.

 

Currently, the Gamestation uses an older version of standalone Stella for paddle games, and a more modern RetroArch based version for joystick based games.  This is probably because the people who assembled the software for the GsP had difficulties getting their paddle to work properly with RetroArch Stella.

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4 minutes ago, fluxit said:

Currently, the Gamestation uses an older version of standalone Stella for paddle games, and a more modern RetroArch based version for joystick based games.  This is probably because the people who assembled the software for the GsP had difficulties getting their paddle to work properly with RetroArch Stella.

What a mess! :( 

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8 hours ago, fluxit said:

Currently, the Gamestation uses an older version of standalone Stella for paddle games, and a more modern RetroArch based version for joystick based games.  This is probably because the people who assembled the software for the GsP had difficulties getting their paddle to work properly with RetroArch Stella.

This explains some things. But it also solidifies my point about not buying these things. Set up a RetroPie or something instead.

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