dmanning23 Posted October 20, 2023 Share Posted October 20, 2023 (edited) A samurai duel for the Atari 2600 Inspired by the writing of Musashi Musashino, the art of Hiroshige, and of course Bushido Blade, the grandaddy of all one-hit-kill swordfighting games. Link: https://github.com/dmanning23/BookOfFiveRings Hey yall! I've been working on this homebrew Atari2600 game for a hot minute. It's finally done, and I thought I'd share it with the wider Atari community. You can download BookOfFiveRings.bin from the link above for the latest version. You'll need a buddy to play, it's 2p only, but it's worth it, yall will have fun I'm currently working on some fancy faux ukiyo-e artwork for label art and would love to do a physical release at some point, but for now I'd love if anyone has any feedback. Cheers! Edited October 21, 2023 by dmanning23 13 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
guppy Posted October 21, 2023 Share Posted October 21, 2023 I like minimalist fighting games, like this, Outlaw, and Surround. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LatchKeyKid Posted October 21, 2023 Share Posted October 21, 2023 Do you have to do something special to download and play it? I clicked on the github link and right click/save as on the BOFR bin file from 3 weeks ago and it gives me a fatal error in Stella. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dmanning23 Posted October 21, 2023 Author Share Posted October 21, 2023 45 minutes ago, LatchKeyKid said: Do you have to do something special to download and play it? I clicked on the github link and right click/save as on the BOFR bin file from 3 weeks ago and it gives me a fatal error in Stella. Whoops, the links in the post weren't quite right.... I changed it to link straight to the "releases" page, the BookOfFiveRings.bin from that page works 👍 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Albert Posted October 21, 2023 Share Posted October 21, 2023 1 hour ago, dmanning23 said: Whoops, the links in the post weren't quite right.... I changed it to link straight to the "releases" page, the BookOfFiveRings.bin from that page works 👍 I've given you permission to edit the first post. ..Al 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LatchKeyKid Posted October 21, 2023 Share Posted October 21, 2023 4 hours ago, dmanning23 said: Whoops, the links in the post weren't quite right.... I changed it to link straight to the "releases" page, the BookOfFiveRings.bin from that page works 👍 Thanks and it worked this time. It may sound strange but I like what you did with the mountain background switching colors and leaving gaps in the playfield to maintain continuous colors. Is the game done? If not, do you plan to use any balls/missiles whether as such items or just asthetic flourishes to the characters? 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dmanning23 Posted October 21, 2023 Author Share Posted October 21, 2023 35 minutes ago, LatchKeyKid said: Thanks and it worked this time. It may sound strange but I like what you did with the mountain background switching colors and leaving gaps in the playfield to maintain continuous colors. Is the game done? If not, do you plan to use any balls/missiles whether as such items or just asthetic flourishes to the characters? Thanks for playing, and for the feedback! I thought about adding more features, but I feel like it's in a good spot. I'm calling it "done" unless someone points out any glaring issues. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
glurk Posted October 22, 2023 Share Posted October 22, 2023 I'm a programmer, and I can't help myself... I looked at your source code, and saw a whole bunch of possible optimizations, and a lot of free space already, so I optimized it and made it into a 2K game instead of 4K. I only had to free up around 256 bytes or so... Hope you don't mind... BookOfFiveRings.bin Hopefully, I didn't break anything. I did this mostly for my own amusement, I like optimizing 6502 code.... 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dmanning23 Posted October 22, 2023 Author Share Posted October 22, 2023 12 hours ago, glurk said: I'm a programmer, and I can't help myself... I looked at your source code, and saw a whole bunch of possible optimizations, and a lot of free space already, so I optimized it and made it into a 2K game instead of 4K. I only had to free up around 256 bytes or so... Hope you don't mind... BookOfFiveRings.bin 2 kB · 9 downloads Hopefully, I didn't break anything. I did this mostly for my own amusement, I like optimizing 6502 code.... Nice! Did you make a fork so I can get an idea of what changes you made? Yeah, this is my first atari2600 and 6502 project, so I was learning as I go 😅 Whats the significance of getting the size down to 2k? Were 2k carts cheaper or something similar? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
glurk Posted October 22, 2023 Share Posted October 22, 2023 Back in the day, 2K carts were significantly cheaper, yeah. That changed later on. But this was almost 2K anyways, like I said. And I saw a lot of stuff like: LDA addr CMP #0 BNE label And that CMP #0 is unneeded, the LDA sets the flag already. I didn't use git at all, I just downloaded the source zip and worked on that way. And I only optimized as much as necessary to get it below 2K, more optimizations were / are possible. Just something I enjoy doing. I didn't really comment ANYTHING in the source, so I didn't want to post it... 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+ZeroPage Homebrew Posted October 24, 2023 Share Posted October 24, 2023 ZeroPage Homebrew is playing Book of Five Rings on tomorrow's ZPH stream LIVE on Twitch, hope you can join us! Tue Oct 24, 2023 | LIVE @ 6PM PT | 9PM ET | 1AM GMT+1Day WATCH LIVE: https://www.twitch.tv/zeropagehomebrew/ WATCH LATER: https://youtube.com/zeropagehomebrew/ Games: Cargo (WIP | 2600) by donnerkuh @donnerkuh Jutland Skies (WIP | 2600) by Mirsad Sarajlic @kikipdph Walls of Nibiru (WIP | 2600) by Jonas Carlsson @Lillapojkenpåön Book of Five Rings (Final Version | 2600) by Dan Manning @dmanning23 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dmanning23 Posted February 1 Author Share Posted February 1 I threw together some cover art for this game: 5 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dmanning23 Posted February 10 Author Share Posted February 10 Wow this is awesome! Big shout out to the guys at AtariAge, this project turned out great! 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+atari2600land Posted March 23 Share Posted March 23 How do I play this? The fighters all move around by themselves with weird sound effects playing. ??? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+atari2600land Posted March 23 Share Posted March 23 Also, both versions have a bug at the start. Sometimes it doesn't happen, sometimes this happens to one player, sometimes both. There's scrambled graphics for a few seconds and then it straightens itself out. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+atari2600land Posted March 23 Share Posted March 23 I played this on my real 7800 and it plays good. So something must be wrong with Stella. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+ZeroPage Homebrew Posted March 24 Share Posted March 24 23 hours ago, atari2600land said: How do I play this? The fighters all move around by themselves with weird sound effects playing. ??? I just loaded the game in Stella and it did this as well. I usually keep Stella with Developer mode on for developing and testing games. When I turned off developer mode the game acted normally! There appears to be an issue with the game that developer mode is triggering that causes the game to play on it's own and possibly cause the graphic corruption you're seeing. I unfortunately don't have the time today to troubleshoot it but you can turn off the developer options one by one to see which one (or more) is causing it. This will help the developer narrow down the issue and possibly update the game to ensure that it won't have this issue on certain iterations of Atari 2600 compatible consoles. - James Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dmanning23 Posted April 8 Author Share Posted April 8 On 3/23/2024 at 2:35 PM, atari2600land said: How do I play this? The fighters all move around by themselves with weird sound effects playing. ??? Yikes, yeah I can take a look. I only ever used Stella right out of the box, I'll poke around at the settings and see if I can reproduce the bug. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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