Hey all...
Well, seeing as this thread wonders about the neubies out there, and
since I am one, I thought I'd speak up.
I actually found [stella] first, and only found the AtariAge forums
recently. After giving myself a crash-course on microcontroller
programming in the last year or two, I decided to try my hand at a 2600
homebrew. A little googling on the matter turned up some links, among
which were Kirk's 101 document, the Stella .pdf, the dig archives.
Kirk's document was my first real exposure to what was really going on
here. And of course, it mentions the [stella] list. So I joined and
I've been lurking a few weeks. It's been interesting.
I like the list because it's easy to follow along, and because AtariAge
gets blocked by the proxy at work. :-(
So as long as I'm speaking up, perhaps you'd like to see what my
neubiness has been up to... I tossed a link to my current test program
here:
http://shatterscape.com/projects/2600.htm
Basically, all it does right now is let you fly a little spaceship
around the screen a la Asteroids or Space War. It warps pretty cleanly
from the edges of the screen back into the opposite edges. It uses a
basic template I found in the list archives and it uses the battlezone
subpixel routines from Kirk's Cookbook pages.
I have a few questions, actually, so if anyone has any thoughts...
1. The warp from edge-to-edge is pretty smooth, but it still looks like
there's one position where it blinks out. I can't figure out why.
2. As the ship rotates clockwise, notice when it gets to the 3 o'clock
position, the bottom of the screen seems to lose a scanline. As it
rotates through 9 o'clock, it comes back. Why?
3. I'm sure it could benefit from the skipdraw algorithm, but I still
can't find an explanation that makes sense to me. And am I better off
just having "upside-down" bitmaps instead of flipping them over in code?
But what do you guys think of it so far? I'm pretty happy with the
smooth control.
I think ultimately, I'd love to try and build a Star Control type game,
with a larger galaxy to fight in that sort of auto zooms when the
players get close enough together. Maybe let the players select
different ships with different properties (notice, all the ship's
flight dynamics are in variables - easy to change!)
So, hello!
-Rich
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