The 10 Best Homebrews to Date

[Dr Manhattan]

With all the recent additions to the Atari Age store, does anyone have any new suggestions to add to this topic?

[ianoid]

Allia Quest is one of my favorites. Anyone else check that one out?

[+sramirez2008]

Star Castle Arcade!

 

https://atariage.com/store/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1046

[LidLikesIntellivision]

My favorites in Alphabetical order

 

Conquest of Mars : great sound, challenge, satisfying ending

Haunted Adventure Trilogy : many places to explore, deep and interesting. Much better than originals Adventure and Haunted House

Juno First : intense, challeging and fast action, impressive game

Lady Bug : Beautiful, great port, much better than pacman or ms pacman.

Medieval Mayhem : Best multiplayer game, fun and addicting, much better than Warlords

Space Rocks : great to see, fun and challeging to play, much better than Asteroids

Star Castle Arcade: as Juno First, challeging and fast action, impressive game

Stay Frosty 2 : best platform game for the 2600, fun and beautiful to see.

Thrust+ : very addicting and fun.

Toyshop Trouble : as pressure cooker, it has all the fun and better sounds!

 

Almost entered my list:

- Seaweed Assault : great concept, game and sounds. (lost its place to Star Castle because Star Castle is more challeging)

- Ultra SCSIcide (lost its place to Medieval Mayhem because MM has a great multiplayer)

- Princess Rescue (lost its place to Stay Frosty 2 because I feel SF is better suited for Atari)

- This Planet Sucks! (lost to Thrust+ which has more variety and replay value)

- Epic Adventure (lost to the deeper experience Haunted Adventure Trilogy offers)

 

 

Of course, I didn't play every homebrew game enough!

If Boulder Dash was available, it would make the list too.

[Mr SQL]

 

Maybe because they're thinking of this?

 

Seriously, though, I'm glad to see Oystron finally get 2 mentions. Homebrewing has been going on long enough that you kind of have to judge them on a sliding scale. Those in the earlier days had a harder time of it than these days. The tools were not as good, the cart hardware was not as advanced, and the 2600 hardware itself was still not fully understood. People thought they knew everything there was to know about it then, but over time it seemed that there was a pooling of knowledge that raised everybody's boats. But I think some of the earlier homebrew efforts have been overshadowed by the larger carts with special features, as cool as they are to see.

 

The soft blitter chip in these 6K homebrew games overshadows larger carts with special features:

KC uses 1981 SuperCharger technology and is the only game to render full screen tile mapped virtual worlds - BoulderDash is the only other game to do tile mapping on the 2600, and it has been criticized for only using a tiny portion of the screen.

 

StarBlitz is the only Atari game with interactive full motion video at 30 FPS, and is the first homebrew ever to deliver high speed fluid animation that does not cause an unpleasant double vision effect.

 

You can see this by comparing StarBlitz to Thrust which has a bad double vision effect at smooth animation speeds, or by comparing it to StarBlitz Impossible City which also has a double vision effect.

 

It would be awesome to see a full screen sequel to BoulderDash, and a Thrust sequel that doesn't get blurry.

 

The soft blitter chip took a long time to write in Assembly and is essentially a relational database core; I encourage other programmers to explore it and use the functionality directly or get inspired to write a blitter for one of the larger carts with special features to make even cooler games!

 

It's tremendous fun to push the VCS! BoulderDash and bB were both inspirations for me

[+sramirez2008]

My favorites in Alphabetical order

 

Conquest of Mars : great sound, challenge, satisfying ending

Haunted Adventure Trilogy : many places to explore, deep and interesting. Much better than originals Adventure and Haunted House

Juno First : intense, challeging and fast action, impressive game

Lady Bug : Beautiful, great port, much better than pacman or ms pacman.

Medieval Mayhem : Best multiplayer game, fun and addicting, much better than Warlords

Space Rocks : great to see, fun and challeging to play, much better than Asteroids

Star Castle Arcade: as Juno First, challeging and fast action, impressive game

Stay Frosty 2 : best platform game for the 2600, fun and beautiful to see.

Thrust+ : very addicting and fun.

Toyshop Trouble : as pressure cooker, it has all the fun and better sounds!

 

Almost entered my list:

- Seaweed Assault : great concept, game and sounds. (lost its place to Star Castle because Star Castle is more challeging)

- Ultra SCSIcide (lost its place to Medieval Mayhem because MM has a great multiplayer)

- Princess Rescue (lost its place to Stay Frosty 2 because I feel SF is better suited for Atari)

- This Planet Sucks! (lost to Thrust+ which has more variety and replay value)

- Epic Adventure (lost to the deeper experience Haunted Adventure Trilogy offers)

 

 

Of course, I didn't play every homebrew game enough!

If Boulder Dash was available, it would make the list too.

 

Amazing list Most of the games you mention remain in my homebrew rotation. There's days where all I play are homebrews.

 

I would personally swap, the first two for Stratogems Deluxe and Seawolf, because I don't own Conquest of Mars or Haunted Adventure Trilogy.

[Butt_Rogers]

No love for Dungeon?

I haven't played all the games in this thread but I had a lot of fun beating Dungeon. Really cute game.

[+Andrew Davie]

BoulderDash is the only other game to do tile mapping on the 2600, and it has been criticized for only using a tiny portion of the screen.

It would be awesome to see a full screen sequel to BoulderDash

 

Say what? It's full screen already.

[BigO]

 

Say what? It's full screen already.

Bah, what makes you such an authority on the subject?

 

 

What is "tile mapping" in the context of 2600 programming?

[Mr SQL]

 

Say what? It's full screen already.

A full BoulderDash screen shows 200 tiles, you've zoomed in. It's an awesome port but you can only see half the display.

 

 

Bah, what makes you such an authority on the subject?

 

 

What is "tile mapping" in the context of 2600 programming?

 

Tile mapping is the Mario World stuff of the NES and should be impossible on the VCS; the sprite characters are mapped to virtual world tiles on or off the visible screen.

 

Andrew did it first with BD and is working on a BASIC to let programmers use the BD tile mapping kit

 

KC and StarBlitz are fully tile mapped and there's already a BASIC that lets programmers use the kit

[Thomas Jentzsch]

What is "tile mapping" in the context of 2600 programming?

I can only speak for Boulder Dash here:

• The visible screen only shows a small window of the whole level, therefore we have a buffer where each element of the level is stored with its id.
• Inside this buffer all the logic happens: elements are created, deleted, moved around and animated
• For displaying each element, we take the element id from the buffer and map it to a tile. The tiles are made of PF graphics and therefore are 4 PF pixel wide and 21 lines tall, we display 10x8 tiles. The tiles are drawn into a screen buffer, from where the display kernel reads the PF data.

The design of the tiles is completely free (except for the size), the colors are defined per level. Also our engine allows scrolling in all four directions by moving the display window. Additionally we can display two multicolored sprites.

 

Usually e.g. scrolling would be way to slow, but we have have implemented a number of tricks to minimize the screen buffer updates.

[Mr SQL]

Probably Andrew should describe the BoulderDash tile mapping since he wrote the tile mapping routines.

 

Why not apply what you learned working with Andrew to tile map Paradroid so you can have a tile mapped game too?

 

Tile-mapping isn't easy on the 2600, but if you learn how you won't need to put my games down to make BD seem better.

 

[gliptitude]

I'm not going to get caught on the criteria if the title of the thread is so straight forward. If it is homebrewed it is a candidate, regardless of format, availability, legality or even level of completion. We shouldn't rule out the best attributes of any program.

 

top two for me:

 

Juno First

Oystron

(Both of these seem completely inspired to me).

 

Others:

 

Princess Rescue

Thrust+

Starfire

Skeleton+

 

I'm hoping to include Zippy and Marble Craze but I haven't played those yet.

[Tartfox]

Zippy The Porcupine is definitely within my top 10 best homebrews- wonderful graphics, music and game play. It has it all. As a matter of fact, it ranks as THE best one for me.... since it's the only one I own.

Edited April 22, 2016 by Tartfox