Book of Five Rings (Atari 2600 homebrew)

dmanning23 · October 20

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 by dmanning23

guppy · October 21

I like minimalist fighting games, like this, Outlaw, and Surround.

LatchKeyKid · October 21

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.

dmanning23 · October 21

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 👍

Albert · October 21

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

LatchKeyKid · October 21

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?

dmanning23 · October 21

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.

glurk · October 22

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....

dmanning23 · October 22

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?

glurk · October 22

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...