At 05:00 PM 1/5/99 -0700, you wrote:
>the Pitfall II custom chips, Supercharger RAM, or that little
>squitch of RAM included in some 16K cartridges. And current
>emulators already support all of these enhancements, though nobody
>right now is programming new games with them
This hearkens to the BIN vs. WAV debate. It seems developers prefer to
write games they can burn on ROMs and aren't really satisfied with Starpath
audio delivery methods (tape, CD, BIN). The physicality of the ROM seems
more important than the features of the two media.
However, technically speaking, I think a 64K version of a Supercharger
would be more efficient and more useful than a cart design that did the
same but had to be manufactured for every individual unit of a game.
It makes sense with ultra-upgraded 2600 hardware to deliver data via some
other medium, in this case, Starpath audio format, but it could just as
easily be a serial or parallel port.
I think that the Karate game is a good case study in how far 2600
programmers may be willing to go in the memory department. There is
certainly merit in Haiku-like 4K ROM programming, as games like Oystron
attest to, but to me, what excites me about 2600 development in 1999 is
what can happen when you take advantage of the low cost of memory and the
fileserver PCs we now have next to our 2600s (with Supercharger) and apply
these modern tools and advantages to the 2600 and see what happens.
You never could release a 256K ROM or a multiload Supercharger game with 99
loads for the 2600 during its lifespan. Now we theoretically can for
little cost. I'd love to see what kind of game would result, what kind of
kernels might be possible, and how much game depth could be added this way.
Could you write a Zelda game with a lot more graphical punch and depth than
Secret Quest?
Could you write a text RPG that is larger than the old Apple II ones?
Could you write a decent Lode Runner clone?
Could you write a River Raid like game that instead of using a polynomial
generator, actually spooled data directly from ROM so you could have a lot
of custom sprite shapes rather than just some simple primitive shapes?
==========================================================================
== Glenn Saunders --3D Graphics / Videography / Web development-- ==
== krishna@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/1698 ==
== Stella@20 video page http://users.cnmnetwork.com/~krishna ==
== President - Lightwave Toaster Flyer group of LA ==
== http://home.pacbell.net/alchemy1/html/ltf.html ==
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