>>Yes, they're too fast. I've also tried to enable sprite-replication for the
>>balls - looks great so this feature will be added sooner or later.
>
>So, you'll have to hit several balls on each line? That would add
>some difficulty (that could be a good thing). Will the balls bounce
>off each each other (that would be neat, but would probably cause
>flicker) or just go back and forth as a group?
Sprite-replication could only make them go back and forth as a group (think
the cars and other stuff in Frogger that come in groups of two or three.)
>Sounds like the way the ship in Asteroids accelerates to me. Perhaps
>the difficulty switches should control the rate of acceleration?
>(Faster being harder, I think.)
That'd be more of a game-speed switch than a difficulty switch, but it's an
idea.
>watch on the "second board." Are you planning on adding any
>randomness, or will you depend on humans' inability to precisely
>repeat the same actions twice to do it for you?
I have a random number generator that works pretty well. At power-up, it
always initializes to the same value, but if you call it once every frame
whether you need a random number or not, you'll have a pretty darn random
number by the time the user presses Reset.
>Am I correct that the 2600 reset switch actually has to be recognized
>by the software for it to do anything? In other words, you could
Correct. The 2600's CPU is a 6507, which is a variant of the 6502 that has
8k address space and no interrupt lines. Reset only does what a game makes
it do. This is also why not all games respond to the color/BW switch -
it's not programmed in.
>If I keep reading this list, I'm going to have to take a crack at
>programming. I'm sure the Nexus would suffer for it. 8) If anyone
>thinks discussion of game design in off-topic to this list, just let
>me know and I'll move it to private e-mail. (I'm sometimes do it
>accidentally anyway due to the way follow-ups are set.)
Not at all, I think.. we've finally unraveled most of the hardware
mysteries and can move on to actual game design.
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