RE: [stella] Generic kernal or just build a game?

Subject: RE: [stella] Generic kernal or just build a game?
From: stella@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2004 22:00:49 -0600
Kirk,
> (And man, having done my own game, I *really* can appreciate the
> sheer genius of some games that before I considered mundane and
> blah...)

After reading the Stella programmer's guide, your 2600 101, and many other
docs, I suddenly had *that much more* respect for Activision in particular,
and what it'd done for gaming.  Their games had a way of making the 2600
seem a trivial thing to program.  Little did I know (or really care) about
the genius behind them.  But isn't that what game programming is about?

> Like, today I fired up Wizard of Wor, dumped an AVI in PCAEWin,
> and took it frame by frame in Animation Shop (easiest frame by
> frame I know of).  It looks like 6 enemies take turns flickering
> through 1 sprite!  But I never thought of it as a super duper
> flicker game.  (I wonder if Adventure suffers from its light background?
> I know color can play a big role in perceived flicker, but I'm not
> sure of the details)  But I liked the # of enemies in it, that really
> makes the game.

WoW looks pretty flickery on my monitor.  There's probably better
persistence on a television.  Still, it's great fun. :)

> Tron Deadly Disks, an old favorite of mine (because it feels so
> symmetrical, like the enemies are just computer controlled versions
> of me, practically) is probably doing some relatively subtle motion
> restraint so each enemy gets its own horizontal area...but I barely
> noticed that - if ever - when I was just an atari gamer instead of
> an atari coder

No kidding.  It is subtle... and very clever.

> When I get some freetime, I'm really going to dive into old Atari
> ROMS, try to see what tricks I know and what ones still make me go
> "how the hell did they do THAT"...

Which disassembler do you use for this?  Please tell me there's a magic one
that names labels and comments code...

mainGameLoop      bit plyrStat    ; Appears to check if player health is
gone
                  bpl killPlyr    ; Yep, I was right
                  php
                  jsr dynAssem    ; Huzzah!  This old trick again!

-Lee


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