Work in Progress: 2600 Cookbook

[kisrael]

I started work on 2600 Cookbook, what might end up being my biggest contribution to the 2600 homebrew community.

 

http://alienbill.com/2600/cookbook/

 

is the URL. So far I cover 3 topics: Music Basics, Asymmetrical Playfield Graphics, and Cycle Counting. (the latter is basically just a reference to Nick Bensema's document.)

 

The format is "Cookbook", just like O'Reilly's Java and Perl Cookbooks...I think it's a great way to learn how to do things, because each topic is very focused, and by having them all in one place, you can browse it and get ideas about what's possible and feasible.

 

Most topics have 5 sections:

Problem: short summary in the form "You'd like to" or "You want to"

Solution: brief outline of the solution

Discussion: the meat of the explanation

References: links to stella list or other documents related to the topic.

(Most documents that aren't [stella] links have local mirrors -- I hate linkrot...)

Example: A brief complete program, ready for assembling in DASM, with the "releavant bits" (as opposed to the usual boilerplate) all highlighted in red

 

 

So, I'd love to get some feedback on the format (which like I said, I've found super friendly in the past) as well as possible contributions from anyone who'd like to chip in.

 

Here are some topics I'm thinking of:

-joystick/player movement (lifted from 2600 101)

-exact horizontal positioning

-subpixel "fixed point" motion

-16 bit math review

-comparisons (at Philly, Ronen Habot mentioned using some Macros

for various >, <, >=, <= type compares...that might be

a good idea, I spent a lot of time looking up the boiler

plate for those...)

-read a paddle (need to learn)

-.skipDraw (need to learn better :-) )

-that combat missile trick

-48 Pixel sprites

-some tricks to know how much ROM/RAM you have

-symptoms, macros, and fixes for dealing with page boundary issues