Beef Drop, Qbert, Frogger, Tubes

[supercat]

Unfortunately, there's no way to both respect the copyrights of an artist and provide for competition, so the music industry continues to get away with exhorbant prices.

992138[/snapback]

 

Not quite true. Once a sound recording of a piece of music has been commercially released, anybody who wants to can record and sell their own version if they pay a fixed per-copy fee to the composer (until today, it was 8 cents for songs up to 5 minutes, and 1.6 cents per minute thereafter) and comply with a few restrictions, including but not limited to:

 

-1- No lyrics other than those (if any) in the original piece of music.

 

-2- No other speech, sound effects, etc. except as in the original.

 

-3- The recording must faithfully reproduce the original melody, subject to the limits of the selected instrumentation (if someone wanted to release a recording of a piece of music played on a toy xylophone, they would be allowed to adjust it as needed to be playable on such an instrument).

 

-4- The work may only be sold as a sound recording, not incorporated into an audiovisual presentation or other work.

 

-5- The person producing the recording receives a copyright only on the recording itself, and not on any underlying musical work. For example, if I arranged a piece of music for toy xylophone, anyone else could use my arrangement by making payment only to the original composer and not to me.

 

Despite the restrictions, there are many works of music recorded under comulsory licenses.

[Bruce Tomlin]

I see that this has quickly degressed into a copyrights debate. Ha ha.

 

Anyhow, a few things:

 

* That label, yeah, I really don't like it. While I'm not hating its existence, I just simply don't like it. I was thinking something more on the order of that old Windows screen saver with the 3-D pipes.

 

* Boards. Well, I had some real life get in the way, but basically, if Albert or Kenfused had been more enthusiastic about it, I probably would have gone forward with it already. I'll try to see if I can't get it sent out for a board run Real Soon Now, but whatever.

 

* Tubes. Well, you know what, it is mine, all mine, and what it is, too. (apologies to Anne Elk)

 

See, if I could make a living wage off of doing this, I'd quit my day job and go for it. Hell, if my mortgage was paid off and all I had to pay for the house was taxes and insurance, I'd probably go for it anyway. But I can't. $5 per game through AA won't make it, and I did the shareware thing years ago when there wasn't an internet for people to download your stuff, and the idea of having to ship stuff again at $20-$30 each not only isn't enough money, but it's a pain in the butt, and cuts into programming time too.

 

Heck, even if it would just get me teh chixx0rz, I would consider it.

 

And whining about homebrew games doesn't help. If someone isn't working on his game (and it's his game, by the way), it's going to be for reasons much bigger than any whining can help with. Whining for updates is generally annoying, too, since if there was an update, the guy doing the homebrew would probably tell you here first.

 

And if you want music with it, well, here's a suggestion.

 

* The 7800 is a pain to program. There, I said it. Technically it's interesting, and it's good that now people have had a chance to explore it, and with a lot of work you might be able to make something that looks good, but now that I've tried my hand at Colecovision programming, it's like night and day. I'm not the first one to get tired of 7800 programming either. Harry Dodgson switched to Lynx programming long in the past. He did recently come out with a 7800 game after all, and who knows, maybe I will someday, too.

 

But I'm lovin' the ColecoVision, my first assembly language was the Z-80, and I've got an actual ICE (in-circuit emulator), so I if I run into a problem, I can breakpoint and single-step and trace and all that cool stuff. I can even map memory into it from outside the cartridge range, and replace the BIOS with RAM if I feel like it. And I've figured out a couple of TMS9918 wierdnesses by poking the I/O ports directly from the keypad.

 

* Ports. While I don't really have a problem with a port if someone actually works on it and produces something (which Kenfused and Eduardo do quite well), I'm getting tired of "the dreamers" who say "let's port this to the 2600, that would rock!" and "let's port that to the 2600, that'd be so k3wl!", usually referring to famous games with the original company still alive and well and ready to defend their trademark, and then never lift a finger toward actually making it happen.

 

And what about coming up with original ideas anyhow? Anybody can say it would be cool to port some famous game. It takes actual effort to come with your own original ideas. But you know what? When you're done, it's yours. You don't have to worry about Taito or Konami or Enix or Atarigrames or anybody. Who knows, you might even have the next Alien Homonid on your hands.

 

* and I know damn well that a 7800 cart can support a megabyte. I better know, since I made an actual circuit board that could do it. The issue of cartridge size was that people wanted Dragon Warrior on a 2600. Even a mere 128K bytes is non-trivial when you have to read it through a 4K window. And then there's the simple issue of scale: just keeping track of 128K worth of game assets is not trivial either.

 

Or maybe it was where I was talking about cartridge issues with a Colecovision port, and someone didn't figure out my all-to-obvious hint. Because, after all, it's k3wl to port to the 2600 and 7800, but the idea of a Colecovision port won't even cross some folks' minds.

 

So has anyone done any actual, uh, I don't know, um, work, on porting Dragon Warrior to anything yet? I didn't think so.

[EricBall]

I've stopped reading wishlist topics because that's all they are. I've said it before, and I'll say it again:

As much as I would love to see homebrew ports of well known & loved games, wishing for them isn't going to make it happen. The only way any of these will be created is if you make them for yourself. No one else is going to do it for you because no one else has the same passion about your favorite game.  So come join the fun; all you have to lose is your free time.

 

I also agree with the value of making an original (or even semi-original) game. One problem with ports is they will always be compared to the original. It's much more rewarding to do something new which will be judged on it's own rather than being compared.

[Cybergoth]

Hi there!

 

So has anyone done any actual, uh, I don't know, um, work, on porting Dragon Warrior to anything yet?  I didn't think so.

 

Why discourage a newbie? Unlike many others, MayDay is actually really learning to program the 2600. When Dragon Warrior is his 2600 dream game, he may post about this as much as he wants, that's what the Homebrew discussion board is for.

 

I also fail to see any relation between his Dragon Warrior ambitions and any of your abandoned 7800 projects?

 

Greetings,

Manuel

[vdub_bobby]

So has anyone done any actual, uh, I don't know, um, work, on porting Dragon Warrior to anything yet?  I didn't think so.

 

Why discourage a newbie? Unlike many others, MayDay is actually really learning to program the 2600. When Dragon Warrior is his 2600 dream game, he may post about this as much as he wants, that's what the Homebrew discussion board is for.

Not to pile on, but Mayday has done some work towards porting Dragon Warrior to the 2600: he has done some work towards converting the sprites.

 

And there is something to be said for creating original games as opposed to ports, but every homebrew author is just doing this stuff for fun; they are doing what they want to do. If someone likes programming but doesn't like designing games, why shouldn't they port known games? To each his own.

 

The wishcasting is a little annoying, perhaps, but it can spark things. My interest in porting M-4 (to the 2600) was sparked by one of Manuel's polls in the homebrew forum and the accompanying discussion; who knows what will spark a homebrew author's interest?

[Cybergoth]

Hi there!

 

If someone likes programming but doesn't like designing games, why shouldn't they port known games?  To each his own.

 

I like the challenge of porting. Doing an original game seems to be much easier, since you can just tweak the game design until it meets your programming skills

 

Greetings,

Manuel

[Bruce Tomlin]

So has anyone done any actual, uh, I don't know, um, work, on porting Dragon Warrior to anything yet?  I didn't think so.

Why discourage a newbie? Unlike many others, MayDay is actually really learning to program the 2600. When Dragon Warrior is his 2600 dream game, he may post about this as much as he wants, that's what the Homebrew discussion board is for.

 

I also fail to see any relation between his Dragon Warrior ambitions and any of your abandoned 7800 projects?

First, since when was it "projects" plural? There's Tubes, which I would say is officially abandoned, and there's the circuit board project, which is completed, with actual working prototype boards made, and which only needs to be manufactured. Which takes money. And from the people for whom it would be worth getting boards made, Kenfused, one of the few who actually has a finished game that would need boards, or Albert, who would want boards to sell homebrews, I'm not seeing any interest at all that would make me want to put my own money or time into ordering a production run of boards. You wanna throw in a couple of Benjamins and pre-order a few dozen boards to see it get done?

 

And I see a big difference between Tubes and the Dragon Warrior port: I never promised that Tubes even could be finished. I had an idea, and I knew from the start that it might not even work out, but I took it as far as I could. This happened all the time at Activision back in the day. In fact, I wasn't even sure I wanted to ever announce Tubes in the first place, since I already knew then that someone would whine if I couldn't go any farther. And who knows, I might even work on Tubes again... as a ColecoVision game. But there's only one of me, and my ColecoVision RPG project is actually going somewhere, so it gets priority for my Copious Free Time.

 

Saying that you want to port a well-known game gives a standard of what your final result should should be and do. There's no chance that the basic design and gameplay won't happen to work out in the end. There may be a chance that the technology won't work, but that should be known very early in the process.

 

Not to pile on, but Mayday has done some work towards porting Dragon Warrior to the 2600: he has done some work towards converting the sprites.

Sprites don't help much if there's no kernal to display them with. You can make all the sprites and artwork you want, but without code, or someone who is commited to making the code for you, you'll be going nowhere fast. Also, if you're going to "convert" sprites, you have to know what your final system will be, since every 8-bit system has completely different limitations. And a really important point here is that the first project of a "learning" "newbie" shouldn't be porting an 80K (I checked) NES game to the 2600, which only had one official release back in the day larger than 16K, by folks who were experts at the 2600.

 

You can actually sort of play Tubes. It's been said as much in this very thread. But you can't play a bunch of converted sprites. You have to start writing code some time. I came up with some generic tiles and sprites for my ColecoVision RPG thingy, then I rolled up my sleeves and got a basic display engine working before I wasted any more time on artwork. In the six weeks since I started, and less than a month since I first announced it, I've gone light years farther than the Dragon Warrior 2600 project. And I've had a full-time job and holiday obligations during that time.

 

I know that I could port the MSX version of DW to ColecoVision if I wanted to, including translation, (presuming I could get it to use less than 1K of SRAM or add cartridge RAM, which I'm sure I could), but I won't, since there's no point. When I'm done, I'll have spent months of time, and all I'll have to show for it is the adulation of a few fanbois (all male), five bucks each times a couple dozen cartridges, and maybe even the unwanted attention of SquareEnix. If someone wants to play the game, they can damn well play the NES version, which is a lot better than any 2600 port could be.

 

I don't have a problem with people doing ports. I only have a problem with people talking about ports, with no chance to make it actually happen.

[supercat]

And I see a big difference between Tubes and the Dragon Warrior port: I never promised that Tubes even could be finished.  I had an idea, and I knew from the start that it might not even work out, but I took it as far as I could.

992373[/snapback]

 

Any objection to my picking up the idea of tubes sometime and making a 2600 port? Might be interesting, though I'm not sure I'm up to it technically, yet.

 

Also, sometimes games can be abandond and later picked up. Strat-O-Gems was abandoned in 1994, but is now a released cart.

[vdub_bobby]

Sprites don't help much if there's no kernal to display them with.  You can make all the sprites and artwork you want, but without code, or someone who is commited to making the code for you, you'll be going nowhere fast.

True, but that doesn't mean anything. The reverse is true as well; a kernel doesn't help much if there are no sprites to display.

Besides, sometimes sprite work should be done first, since it would be a waste to spend a month writing a kernel only to find out that it isn't possible to scale the sprites down acceptably.

And a really important point here is that the first project of a "learning" "newbie" shouldn't be porting an 80K (I checked) NES game to the 2600, which only had one official release back in the day larger than 16K, by folks who were experts at the 2600.

Maybe. My first 2600 project, as a complete noob, was a horizontally scrolling platformer with sort-of parallax background scrolling. If I had been looking for advice at that point, I imagine that most experienced 2600 coders would have told me to start with something a little simpler; a little easier. And maybe they would have been right; I did abandon the project (Running Man) after about two months of work with just a demo to show for it.

 

On the other hand, that abandoned project was recently resurrected as Reindeer Rescue; perhaps that work wasn't for naught after all?

[ZylonBane]

Besides, sometimes sprite work should be done first, since it would be a waste to spend a month writing a kernel only to find out that it isn't possible to scale the sprites down acceptably.

"Acceptable" on the 2600 is an almost infinitely flexible concept. We're talking about a system where one of the most-beloved games represents the player as a SQUARE.

[vdub_bobby]

"Acceptable" on the 2600 is an almost infinitely flexible concept. We're talking about a system where one of the most-beloved games represents the player as a SQUARE.

True, but when you're talking about a port, "acceptable" is a little more strictly defined.

 

And, ultimately, "acceptable" is whatever the programmer finds acceptable.