Kickman for 2600 found and RELEASED!!

[Isaiah Austin]

1 hour ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

Ah, that's what I have seen before too. You have to disable randomizing the CPU's PS flag too. The developer forgot to clear the BCD flag.

I was having the same problem, too. Now that feature's disabled, the game loads properly every time (like it should)! Thanks!  

[hizzy]

5 hours ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

Ah, that's what I have seen before too. You have to disable randomizing the CPU's PS flag too. The developer forgot to clear the BCD flag.

 

Thanks, Thomas!

[chewy]

so what youre saying was there was something in the proto that had to be tweaked or modifiyed in order to become vcs compatabile?

[chewy]

i do not know about your computer terms and words and things- but i can tell you this: in the CD (compact disc) world, we have flags too, but they are "PE" flags, to tell us if the cd has pre-ephasis of not. So is that what happnend in the vcs it wasnt picking up the proper start flag so thomas and crew unflagged it?

[chewy]

do we all agree this is the best vcs find in a quite long while, this is a good arcade port: the benchmark of vcs

[Nukey Shay]

1 hour ago, chewy said:

so what youre saying was there was something in the proto that had to be tweaked or modifiyed in order to become vcs compatabile?

The prototype in this case was a source code listing (basically a text file), not a Rom cartridge.  Using an assembler resulted in a binary file which did not conform to the 6507's standard (4094 bytes instead of 4096) and did not include the programs' start vector (the 16-bit address indicating where to begin execution, which needs to be present as the 4093rd and 4094th bytes).

 

Thomas simply cut a couple of the zeroes present in the explosion bitmap, and added the start vector to the file...as some other method (like program optimization, or byte-sharing among bitmaps) would be more-invasive to the original code.

 

Clearly, more optimization would have been necessary prior to release to correct the odd file size and display issues...but there is no way of knowing what those optimizations might have been.

[Nukey Shay]

BTW swapping the program snippets at the ends of page $FE and $FF would allow the game to keep the 2 bytes that were cut from the bitmap, but that would be more-invasive.  There are a LOT of other obvious candidates for trimming the file down to provide space for program tweaks (such as sharing identical code between routines, changing short JMPs to unconditional branches, altering JSR/RTS combos to be JMP, etc).  Programs typically undergo several byte-crunching sessions during development.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Yes, the code is far from being done and optimized. But like you explained very nicely above, doing that myself would change the original code too much.

 

BTW: We found another way to fix the ROM, which keeps the two now lost bytes intact. But that won't start reliable on Harmony.

Edited October 26, 2019 by Thomas Jentzsch

[+Psionic]

Well, this certainly would explain why CBS would've needed Balaska to work on the code before they could release this game, even if nothing within the game program itself needed to be altered.

For what it's worth, the intro screen rolls on my 24" Sony Trinitron CRT (KV-24FV12 manufactured Jan. 2002) but I have a 13" Panasonic (CT-13R1V manufactured Nov. 1997) that tolerates it just fine.

 

On 10/25/2019 at 12:44 AM, CRV said:

Bally was also working on games for the Atari 8-bit computers, Intellivision, and ColecoVision.

Yes, the ColecoVision port of Tapper was supposedly done there, for one.  And obviously many of the Astrocade games were done internally, although a number of them were produced by Action Graphics and Dave Nutting Associates.

[Tempest]

Finally got my review up.  Of course these things always have to be found when I'm on vacation: http://www.atariprotos.com/2600/software/kickman/kickman.htm

[+Omegamatrix]

2 hours ago, Tempest said:

Finally got my review up.  Of course these things always have to be found when I'm on vacation: http://www.atariprotos.com/2600/software/kickman/kickman.htm

Any chance you can take eight more vacations this year?

[Tempest]

There's more to come.  I have several more protos to review.

[chewy]

[chewy]

wait wait wait yea thats what you said so thats the master copy there IS no proto------------------

 

so the floppy still played or was able to be read, after all this time-----are those 3Ms known for holding up? wow what luck

Edited October 27, 2019 by chewy

[chewy]

THE MASTER COPY!!!!!!!!!

 

[Greg2600]

16 hours ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

Yes, the code is far from being done and optimized. But like you explained very nicely above, doing that myself would change the original code too much.

 

BTW: We found another way to fix the ROM, which keeps the two now lost bytes intact. But that won't start reliable on Harmony.

But.....could you put paddle support in said rom?  ??

4 hours ago, Tempest said:

Finally got my review up.  Of course these things always have to be found when I'm on vacation: http://www.atariprotos.com/2600/software/kickman/kickman.htm

Great as always!

[Nukey Shay]

Yes...every other frame is mostly empty except for (any) falling balloon and score.  The score, un-dropped balloons, and player (with or without balloons) are shown on the alternate frames.  So there is plenty of cycle time to poll the paddles.  The un-dropped balloon loop is busiest at 67 cycles.

 

The program also does not utilize the X and Y index registers very often, so some heavy optimizations are possible to save romspace.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

9 hours ago, Greg2600 said:

But.....could you put paddle support in said rom?  ??

 

I could, but I doubt I would.

 

Anyway, Nukey seems to be already at it.

[Foxsolo2000]

13 hours ago, Tempest said:

There's more to come.  I have several more protos to review.

Any hints as to what we can await?

 

[Tempest]

20 minutes ago, Foxsolo2000 said:

Any hints as to what we can await?

 

Nothing unreleased or anything like that.  Lots of beta versions of existing games.

[Foxsolo2000]

11 minutes ago, Tempest said:

Nothing unreleased or anything like that.  Lots of beta versions of existing games.

Ok thank you for the update.  Appreciated.  Looking forward to reading them.

 

[+Psionic]

I spoke with Dick Balaska today about this game.  As I suspected, this was developed at Bally Midway not Roklan.  According to Dick, when the game was handed to him it needed some work mainly involving code optimization but he doesn't remember specifics.  I told him about the source code that was found and the problems with the resulting binary.  He doesn't remember the game having these issues even when he started working on it, and it certainly wouldn't have had them when he was finished.  Either way, the code that was found is most likely a very late WIP that Alex was still working on when he left Bally which had not been touched up by anyone else yet.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

That fits. The code is indeed not optimized at all.

[+Psionic]

2 hours ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

That fits. The code is indeed not optimized at all.

So that means with some optimization it should've been reasonably easy to squeeze in a very basic title screen of some sort, which Dick says he seems to remember doing.  While it's definitely possible that this game could've been simply cleaned up a bit and released in its current 4K form, after playing it for a bit it's hard for me to believe that CBS would've done this.  The first couple CBS releases were only 4K, but by the time they would've been publishing this game, 8K was not just an option but pretty much the standard.  All of the later CBS releases were 8K, and of course a few of them utilized RAM Plus.

Not only is the game missing a title screen and the (possibly) problematic Pac-Men are present, but more importantly the gameplay just seems lacking.  Where are the challenge racks?  Does more than one balloon at a time ever fall?  Or have I simply not played far enough into the game?  I can't help but think that your earlier assessment was probably correct (that we should see this as a 50% complete 8K game rather than a 95% complete 4K game).

[Tempest]

11 minutes ago, Psionic said:

So that means with some optimization it should've been reasonably easy to squeeze in a very basic title screen of some sort, which Dick says he seems to remember doing.  While it's definitely possible that this game could've been simply cleaned up a bit and released in its current 4K form, after playing it for a bit it's hard for me to believe that CBS would've done this.  The first couple CBS releases were only 4K, but by the time they would've been publishing this game, 8K was not just an option but pretty much the standard.  All of the later CBS releases were 8K, and of course a few of them utilized RAM Plus.

Not only is the game missing a title screen and the (possibly) problematic Pac-Men are present, but more importantly the gameplay just seems lacking.  Where are the challenge racks?  Does more than one balloon at a time ever fall?  Or have I simply not played far enough into the game?  I can't help but think that your earlier assessment was probably correct (that we should see this as a 50% complete 8K game rather than a 95% complete 4K game).

Here's my take on this given what we know.

 

This was a first release candidate which Alex did for Midway.  It was only 4K because that was standard at the time and he squeezed what he could into it.  After Midway decided not to get into the home game business they sold it to Roklan who offered it to CBS.  CBS decided that it needed a few tweaks (title screen, code optimization, etc.) so they tapped Dick Balaska to do it.  After Dick made the changes (I'm curious if he got it into 4K with some optimization, I'd guess yes), CBS decided that they didn't want to release it after all since the arcade game wasn't a hit and there was the issue of Pac-Man licensing. 

 

To me the game was mostly there, it just needed some minor code optimization and a title screen.  Yes it's missing the bonus round, but most 2600 ports of the time stripped out extras like bonus rounds to save space.  It is a bit simplified (I never saw more than one balloon fall), but I don't think this indicates that it's incomplete.  It's just a simple 2600 port.  Look at how many features other 2600 ports of the time were missing.