RE: [stella] the B. Watson's problem...

["B. Watson" <atari@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 22 Aug 1993, [iso-8859-1] Nicolás Olhaberry wrote:

> 
> Hi B!
> 
> I´ve been looking at your rom, it looks good so far. It has a great tie
> fighter, by the way.
> 

Hehheh.. The tie fighter is the only graphic that came out looking just
the way I wanted it to... I suppose I'll have to call it something else
in the game manual though, the way LucasFilm has been lately about their
IP (perhaps a Cravat Fighter or a Windsor Fighter?)

> One thing that I´ve noticed is this:
> 
>    10BC  AD9602              LDA TIM64T
>    10BF   D0FB                 BNE $10BC
> 
> Are you really trying to read TIM64T or it was just a mistake? Either way, I
> would like to know what would happen with this read on a real VCS, because
> PCAE doesn´t seem to care and returns the timer value.

OOops! No, that's a bug (should be LDA INTIM of course)...

Glad to hear the game works on PCAE, I haven't had time to dust off the
win95 machine in the corner and hook it up (Linux has DOS and windows
		emulators, but running an Atari emulator in an OS emulator
		never seems to work :)

> 
> And since we are in the subject, which PIA registers are accessed with the
> addresses 283,29D,29E and 2A2?
> 

Uh, dunneaux... where do you see that? I'm using the vcs.h from Dark Mage
(which was missing a couple of missile registers, HMM0 and HMM1 I think)...
I don't use those addresses in my source code, and they don't seem to be
in the vcs.h... Will have to disassemble it myself to see what you're
seeing... possibly distella got confused about what was data & what was
code?

(Open question to the list:)

While on the subject... the link on Nick's site for the Linux distella
binary is broken, and so far I haven't found a Linux version anywhere else
(or the source code)... anybody have one? Either a binary, or (preferably)
the source?

Anyway... since I posted the bin, I've done a bit more work on it...
the player ship can now fire a laser beam once every 2 seconds, and part
of the ship changes to black when he does, and slowly `charges' back up
to its original (rather ugly) color. Also I added a status bar at the
bottom, which will eventually show little spaceship icons for the number
of lives left, and which has an energy bar that currently just shrinks
away to nothing and starts over...

The idea is, the enemies will fire back (at which point it'll become a
		game, not a demo)... for every frame that the enemy laser
touches you, you lose 16 points of energy. The enemy laser will last
maybe 8, maybe 16 frames, so it'll hurt a lot if you just sit there and
take it... and your laser costs 64 points to fire, and won't fire if
you have <64 energy to begin with. You regenerate one point of energy
every (how many? 1? 2?) frames... dead enemies disappear of course,
and when they're all dead, the level ends (and I have to figure out how
		to make the next level harder)

Anyway, the current bin is attached to this message, with a working
player laser and the energy bar made of asymmetric playfield (which
		I just learned how to do in the process of doing this)

Let me know what you think... and if any title for the game occurs to
you, let me know that too (Only thing I've thought of is `Laser Wars'
		but I don't know if I like it)

B.

---

If a trainstation is the place where trains stop, what is a workstation?

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