Intellivision Celery

[intvnut]

I like the idea of the dual green label, but I'm wondering if "50 FT CELERY" might look better given how small the space is on the carts. My $0.02

 

Agree. The cartridge label gets small quickly once you start trying to put text on it.

 

The stalk of celery on the label catches your eye though!

 

 

I have a question about the extra space ($D000-$DFFF).

 

FWIW, you aren't limited to $D000 - $DFFF. If you change your ORG statement to, say, ASM ORG $C100, you can use $C100 - $FFFF, which is approximately 16K words (32K bytes) of add'l space.

[+DZ-Jay]

 

Yes and no. The .ROM format is the Intellicart / CC3 format. For games with a straightforward memory map, it's sufficient. It has several technical limitations:

• No support for Mattel-style page flipping. Games like World Series Major League Baseball, for example, cannot be represented in .ROM format without modifying the game to use Intellicart bankswitching.
• 2K word address map granularity, with 256-word "fine-address" boundaries within each 2K word span.
• Hard limit at 64K words.
• No support for patching via '[macro]' statements
• No support for config variables, such as 'voice = 1' to instruct emulators to turn on Intellivoice.

On the plus side, .ROM does specify a memory map and basic memory permission information (read/write/bankswitch/narrow); it's limited to the 2K granularity though. It also has some basic CRC checking built in, to detect corrupted files.

 

At one point, jzIntv switched to only supporting .ROM format. Even AS1600 only really supported .ROM at one point, and only generated .BIN via a "rom2bin" conversion internally, effectively. That limited the assembler output to what was representable as .ROM, including the address map granularity.

 

Eventually, I added BIN+CFG back to jzIntv because it's ultimately more flexible, and I needed it in order to support playing all games. WSMLB, Go For the Gold, etc. (That was many, many years ago now; pre-2006, at least.) Also, there's cases (admittedly baroque) where you want to be able to assemble stuff with finer granularity than .ROM offered. And, the assembler now supports Mattel-style page flipping, which raises the maximum theoretic ROM size to something like 768K words.

 

All that said, for most users, .ROM saves a lot of hassles. It's a reasonable default, especially in the context of IntyBASIC SDK. You can always switch to .BIN+CFG later if/when your needs change.

 

From your comment, it seems like the BIN+CFG is more flexible in the sense that a a command-line is more flexible than a GUI: it does basically the same things, but it supports a lot of esoteric and arcane "advanced" features that the regular person doesn't even knows exist and that most won't care for -- and some of those are early experimental features not always applicable any more.

 

At this day and age, I don't expect many home-brewers to be assembling Mattel sources of World Series Major League Baseball, so I think we're pretty safe sticking with the ROM format for the long run -- at least as it pertains in the Intellivision Programming forum.

 

And in a forum where people are pretty much learning how to program the Intellivision and often asking for help whenever they get confused with how to release their binaries, why add to that confusion? *shrug*

 

-dZ.

Edited August 23, 2016 by DZ-Jay

[+atari2600land]

Added a level. That makes 7 levels. When I make an 8th one, I will move the 7th one away from the $D000 part and start putting the levels in $d000. I think I have room for 7 levels to fit in 16k, and will put more in the extra area.

celery20160823.zip

[+atari2600land]

I think "The 50-Foot-Tall Stalk of Celery" is too long of a name, and I don't want people to get it too confused with the upcoming game I made that will be released for the Odyssey 2. So I'm taking suggestions on what to call this game.

[freewheel]

 

And in a forum where people are pretty much learning how to program the Intellivision and often asking for help whenever they get confused with how to release their binaries, why add to that confusion? *shrug*

 

Hm. It just occurred to me that this might be what Steve and others were talking about with my ROM files that I've sent out to testers. I'm pushing the "easy" memory maps to their limits, and didn't realize until just now that my compile scripts are actually running the BIN/CFG. Someone commented about having to deal with my ROM memory mapping manually and I had no idea what they were talking about. I almost have a hint of the problem now. Pretty sure I'm violating this:

 

 

2K word address map granularity, with 256-word "fine-address" boundaries within each 2K word span.

 

I think for us newbies, it might be *better* advice to just share BIN/CFG with the outside world if we don't know for sure. Or at least to make damned sure we test the ROM version first!

 

I suppose a better solution would be for an all-in-one format, like ROM, that has none of the existing limitations - I assume they exist because of the CC3's hardware limitations - If that's even possible. And yeah, I realize that would require support from the existing emulators/multicarts. Given that there's only one active emulator, and the modern multicarts aren't even out yet... get on it, Joe!

[freewheel]

And of course Atariage won't let us directly upload .cfg files. Sigh.

[Kiwi]

You can PM Albert and ask if he can approve .cfg extension for this forums.

[+DZ-Jay]

I think "The 50-Foot-Tall Stalk of Celery" is too long of a name, and I don't want people to get it too confused with the upcoming game I made that will be released for the Odyssey 2. So I'm taking suggestions on what to call this game.

 

I think the name is fine, it has a real sense of charm that automatically adds a bit of depth to the game. Besides, it can be fun when long names get truncated in menus...

Uh-oh! I don't think she stands a chance!

 

If you want a shorter name, how about "The Green Stalker"?

[JoeM_Intellivision]

Maybe "50' Celery Stalk"? Believe your title was 32 characters, dZ's was 17 characters & I believe mine 16 characters.

[timdu]

my vote is for

 

 

CELERY'S CHALLENGE

 

 

 

(pays homeage to Chip's Challenge for the Atari Lynx)

[carlsson]

The fact that the same company released two different games for different systems, using nearly the same name is nothing new.

 

Timdu's suggestion is great, as you already wrote it is a homage to the Atari Lynx game. Alternatively it could be Celery Celebration?

[+DZ-Jay]

The fact that the same company released two different games for different systems, using nearly the same name is nothing new.

 

Timdu's suggestion is great, as you already wrote it is a homage to the Atari Lynx game. Alternatively it could be Celery Celebration?

 

You mean, Celerybration?

[carlsson]

With the title music being a cover of Kool and the Gang?

[catsfolly]

If you want to have lots of levels, you might want to think about optimizing the way your store the levels.

 

For example, If you put only data in your level descriptions, and wrote a general routine to read this level description data and set up the levels, I think you could make the level data much smaller.

 

Here is my concept of what level 7 would look like using this approach - it uses a bitmap to describe the maze, and tables for each of the peas and enemies:

	rem level 7 containing only data

level7:
	data $1003   '  level color

	Bitmap	"   ##   " ' 1
	BItmap	"#       "    
	Bitmap  " #    # " ' 21
	Bitmap	"#       "   
	Bitmap	" ###### " ' 41
	Bitmap	"#       " 
	Bitmap	" #      " ' 61    
	Bitmap	"        "   
	Bitmap	" # #####" ' 81
	Bitmap	"#       " 
	Bitmap	" # #    " ' 101
	Bitmap	"#       " 
	Bitmap	" ### ## " ' 121
	Bitmap	"#       " 
	Bitmap	"   # #  " ' 141
	Bitmap	"#       "
	Bitmap	"## # ###" ' 161
	Bitmap	"#       "  
	Bitmap	"   #    " ' 181
	Bitmap	"        " 



	data	64,64  ' celeryx,celeryy
	rem peas
        data	1,24,24 ' pea1 enable, x ,y 
	data	1,32,48	' pea2 enable, x,y
	data	0,0,0	' pea3 enable, x,y
	data	0,0,0	' pea4 enable, x,y
	rem enemies
	data	1,16,48,2,64	' enemy 1 enable, x, y, dir, limit
	data	1,88,48,1,8	' enemy 2 enable, x, y, dir, limit
	data	1,56,32,3,32	' enemy 3 enable, x, y, dir, limit
	data	88		' enemy 3 xlimit2
	rem finish
	data	16,80		' finishx, finishy
	rem speed
	data	33		' enemy speed

This would take around 50 words for level 7 , instead of around 400 words that the current implementation needs. (of course the general routine would take up some memory space too, but there would only be one routine to load all the levels.

 

 

Just a thought.

 

Catsfolly

[catsfolly]

Your title screen reminds me of "Tennis in Space".

 

If you start up Tennis in space and do nothing, the "zeroes" at the top of each green half of the tennis court will eventually "blink" - a little like the eyes on your celery stock...

 

<- click to animate...

 

 

Catsfolly

 

[+atari2600land]

I was wondering if there was a way to make the level getting data smaller. I don't know how to go about making the code that would read all the stuff and put it on screen, though. But I am interested. I need some help here.

Edited August 24, 2016 by atari2600land

[timdu]

I like the current title screen with the image of Mr. Celery and his blinking eyes. And the little intro tune that plays is catchy too. I think this should be kept as it is. Atari2600land spent a lot of his time coding this.

 

But maybe after all game levels have been completed, this could be at the end of the game: it could be a "Celery Celebration" as carlsson calls it..

And as DZ-Jay suggested... the ending screen could say "It's a Celerybration"

and the tune / music of "Celebration" by Kool and the Gang could play. ( Hopefully Kool and his gang do not visit this forum ) That would be a cool final screen.

 

Just my 2 cents... just throwing around some ideas that came to mind.

[+atari2600land]

I had some old GoSub code lying around. I studied it and how it made the rooms and all. I experimented for a few hours and what I did was basically converted the room data from binary into hexadecimal. I also put in a small code that converted the hexadecimal data into rooms. This freed up about 5 kb worth of space and I will be able to have room for even more rooms. So even though it should play and look exactly like the last version, a lot of time went into making it.

celery20160824.zip

Edited August 25, 2016 by atari2600land

[+atari2600land]

Celery's Challenge:

 

Edited August 25, 2016 by atari2600land

[+DZ-Jay]

Celery's Challenge:

 

 

Looks cool, but I have a couple of suggestions:

• For the label, you don't need to use a pixelated drawing of the celery stalk. It looks rather cheesy and rather than "retro" suggests amateur. If you're going to go for pixelated, go all the way and make the fonts retro as well.
• In the title screen, it would help if you give Mr. Celery Stalk a few vertical lines in a lighter green colour to represent the ridges of a celery. As it stands, to me it looks more like cute green squirrel (it must be the pointy ears).
• How about painting Mr. Celery Stalk in Yellow-Green rather than Green? Real celery is not such a leafy green colour.
• And while we're at it, how about if instead of "Celery's Challenge" you call it "Mr. Celery's Challenge," to give it some character? Or perhaps give him a first name, such as "Cecil Celery's Challenge," or "Celery Bob's Challenge."

 

Keep it up!

 

-dZ.

Edited August 25, 2016 by DZ-Jay

[+atari2600land]

I tried making the celery light green (color $0e), but I can't make the sprites $0e, so the celery can't blink.

[+DZ-Jay]

I tried making the celery light green (color $0e), but I can't make the sprites $0e, so the celery can't blink.

You can make the sprites light green. I forgot the proper code, but the CONSTANTS.bas file should include definitions for background and sprite colours separately. Use that.

 

dZ.

[+atari2600land]

How is this?

 

[JoeM_Intellivision]

Looks nice - keep up the good work.

Joe

[+atari2600land]

I wasn't trying to go for retro or amateur, I was just trying to draw a picture of a celery with the words "celery's challenge" over it. I guess I suck at drawing.