quote:

So i don't have a coders brain, but i would like to have one. But this would propably kill my artistic brainparts. Hehehe...

That's funny. I doubt I have 1/8 the artistic talent you do, but I also worry about frying my brain delving into this stuff. And yet I want to see inside the Ghost in the Machine. There's a huge metaphor there deep inside the computer. There's a quite apt analogy with the human brain. When you see the computer in terms of 8 or 9 registers on a processor (that's about all there is on the 6502 that runs the old Ataris, Commodores, and Apple II's) plus memory, there's not much hiding from plain sight. You have about 28 or so commands you can give those registers, and each is extremely simple. They're like "take this number and put it in the X register" and then "put the X register into the memory location being held in the Y register." And "If the zero flag is set on the processor, do it again." And that's about it. But you might do that 10,000 times a second...or more. It's roughly similar to the individual neurons of a brain that, individually, do (seemingly) rather simple things. But what emerges out the other end with billions of these small things acting in rapid succession is the game of Pacman...and the human being who is able to play it.

And Nancy Pelosi suddenly makes sense. She has a "C" register that gets loaded with data...a lot. About a million times a second. What emerges is tyranny and control-freakness.

But I really would like to hit the lottery. And not so that I can stop working. But I'd like to set up an exclusive club. It would be a place with wall-to-wall video game cabinets, leather chairs, a bar, coke machines, and a big screen theatre. Members only. No fees. You simply have to enjoy retro gaming. There would be modern gaming too but (and I cracked my brother up when I told him this) no fucking karate games. None.

I would allow Donkey Kong and Mario. World of Warcraft? You bet. But no mindless endless stupid karate-type games. And, really, now that I come to think of it, I wouldn't allow Mario in the club. No stupid jumping-little-funny-guy games. Most of you here would be invited as members. I would expect many wouldn't accept, but exclusivity is a two-way street. And you'd have to fucking park your iPhones and text-messaging devices at the door. My club would be a place to escape from the world and enjoy the company of people who enjoy good atmosphere and just fun stuff....and enjoy a bit of the obsessive-compulsive stuff which is why there would be at least two Robotron machines.

Did I mention the free popcorn? Thalo could class the place up with some of his recipes.

For all you geeks at home, here's the first bona fide assembly language program that I've written from scratch. It does little other than test the indirect addressing technique of the JMP command. An explanation of that stuff is here.

This is the source code listing; that is, it's exactly what I typed into the Atari Assembly Editor "cartridge" (running in the Atari800MaxX emulator):

quote:

05 ; LIST #H1:JUMPTEST.SRC
10 *=$0600
20 LDA #$60 ; LSB OF JUMP ADD
30 STA $0650 ; LSB STORED
40 LDA #$06 ; MSB OF JUMP ADD
50 STA $0651 ; MSB STORED
60 ; DO THE JUMP
70 ;
80 JMP ($0650) ; JMP TO $0660
90 ;
95 *=$0660
0100 ; STORE SOMETHING IN $0660, 61
0110 LDA #$05
0120 STA $0670 ; THERE'S A 5 HERE
0130 LDA #$03
0140 STA $0671 ; THERE'S A 3 HERE
0150 .END

The indirect addressing method of the JMP command uses the two consecutive bytes located at the address in the parentheses ($0650 in the above) as the address to jump to. So "JMP ($0650) uses the one-byte (8 bits) number located at both $0650 and $0651 and combines them to create a 16-bit address. A 16-bit address is needed to access the total of 64k of addresses available to the 6502. As brother Smithz surely remembers, with the 68000 he didn't have to do this combining. That's the nature of a 16-bit processor, but the 6502 processor in the Atari 800 is 8-bit. The largest integer (whole number) you can store in an 8-bit single byte is 255 (along with zero). The largest integer you can store in 16 bits is 65535. (The "0" is the 65536th number....take 2 to the 16th power and you get 65536 but 65535 is the largest actual integer above zero.) That's one reason this 6502 processor is a bit hard to program.

So basically lines 20 to 50 pre-load the $0660 address into memory slots $0650 and $0651 by taking each half of that $0660 address and putting it in those two addresses ($0650 and $0651). To add to the joy, you put the last byte in the first slot ($0650), and the first byte in the last slot ($0651). The computer then reads the two bytes of data ($60 and $06) at those two consecutive memory locations and makes a 16-bit address out of it ($0660) and then "jumps" the program to that address and does whatever it says at that address, if anything. Given the way you have to handle memory addresses, is it any wonder why this kind of stuff is so difficult?

So to test if this actually happened, I put some instructions starting at memory location $0660. Lines 0110 to 0140 do that. A "5" is stored in memory location $0670 and a "3" is stored at memory location $0671. I can then use the debugger to run the program and then to peek into those memory locations ($0670 and $0671) to see if they have been changed from zero to 5 and 3. It did so this obviously works and the jump command worked.

Line 95 tells the compiler to specifically put the code starting at line number 0110 at memory address $0660. (The dollar sign signifies a hexadecimal number.) If I didn't do that (as I found out through trial and error), the instructions starting on line 0110 would get put wherever they just happened to end up in memory depending on the length of the program. When assembling the program, the line numbers basically go away and you're left with a list of consecutive memory locations that make up the program. You'll notice that line 10 tells the assembler to start the very first piece of executable code at memory location $0600. But the instruction given on line 0110 would only actually be assembled into memory location $0600 by chance if the program just happened to be that long.

The "LDA" means "load the accumulator." The 6502 chip has various registers that you use to create, store, move, and manipulate the data. It's all "one at a time" stuff. You're always dealing with the very smallest thing you can do at a time. So you first load (LDA) some number in the Accumulator, then you store (STA) that number that's located in the accumulator to a memory address. Brute force, baby. Now you know why the true geeks have to shelter themselves away and be social retards. This crap takes a lot of brainpower and time. And that makes me...err...at least half a retard at this point.

Brother smithz, you'll be interested to learn that I just won Robotron 2024 on eBay for the Atari 800. I've collected a couple other cartridges lately since getting into the retro craze. I've got a rare (and technically undistributed) Pac-Man Jr as well. That's a tough game but a great game. I also recently acquired the Atari 800 version of Atlantis. I (brothel, really) had it for the 2600 VCS but I wanted the 800 version because it's one of my favorite games. The graphics are better on the 800 and it plays just a little different. I also acquired Pole Position. I forgot how much fun this racing game was. The graphics are primitive by today's standard, but the game play is great. I also recently got Donkey Kong just for the heck of it. I read an article about the brilliant game programming who wrote it so I just wanted to play it. It's not one of my favorites but I got it cheap. I got Robotraon 2024 really cheap. $4.99 including shipping. I also have Ms. Pac-Man and River Raid coming. I won them on eBay and they're in the mail. Brothel introduced me to River Raid. It's surely one of the best games on the 2600 and it's even better (I've played it in the emulator) on the 800. Ms. Pac-Man is a very good game unto itself although, obviously, it's got that girly theme going. But, according to Wiki, this game was originally a bootlegged knockoff of Pac-Man called Crazy Otto. Midway bought it and themed the sprites and graphics to Ms. Pac-Man.

Can't wait to try my hand at Robotron. This is basically unplayable (for me) in the emulator using the typical PC gamepad. The same with Jr. Pac-Man. But with an Atari joystick, you can really make those tight moves. I'm going to assume that this will apply as well to Robotron.

Cool, Brother BN. The question is how is the control scheme of the 800 Version? Two Joysticks or One?
And is it really called "2024"? I would think it's 2084 (yeah, i'm a pedantic person :-)

Regarding Retro-Gaming, here is a pretty good article about milestones in 3D-Gaming.

It's just one joystick I'm pretty sure, smith, which means you have to fire in the direction you're traveling which is a difficult thing to do whatever game you're playing. That kind of control setup puts you closer to the thing you're shooting at. That can be dangerous and often is.

Yeah, it probably is "Robotron 2084." My mistake. Don't mind anyone being pedantic when it comes to the important stuff like retro gaming. I have to keep reminding myself that, technically, it's "Jr. Pac-Man" and not "Pac-Man Jr." I've always called it by the latter name. I also have to remember that, like Spider-Man, there's a hyphen between "Pac" and "Man." If we get this stuff wrong, there's no telling what could happen. I also wonder too whether the machine I have is an "Atari 800xl," an "Atari 800XL," or an "Atari 800 XL." I'm still not sure.

Thanks for that cool article. I'm going to read through that. I love that kind of stuff. Brothel bought this real cool book on the history of video gaming last year or so. It's chocked full of stuff like that.

And it's "smithz" with a small "s".

Re: Battlezone from that article:

quote:

Original versions of Battlezone had the player viewing the action through a periscope attachment; because of this it’s often cited as being the first virtual reality game.

I remember that version. My first exposure to that game was on a Washington State Ferry where they had one of those stationed for a long time. And it was one with the periscope. The game was hard as hell to play, but it was definitely cool.

Zaxxon was always one of those games that seemed like a great idea, looked extremely cool, but never played very well. Marble Madness, however, I thought played much better.

I liken the early years (the Atari years specifically) to the so-called "Cambrian explosion." It's where evolution tried out dozens of basic body types and then eventually settled on a relatively few (four-legged or six-legged creatures, for example, were big winners). Video games were like that too. And then it all got condensed down into two game types: The Mario-like "do a lot of jumping around and collecting shit" games and the "mindlessly hit and kick each other" karate-type games. There's obviously more game types than that, but that's two of the big ones. Well, it's really cool playing some of those extinct game types on the Atari 800 (or Commodore 64, or Atari 2600 VCS, or various old arcade games that will play on the MAME emulator). There's nothing yet that has come along to replace them. They can obviously throw more pixels at the screen these days (this is analogous to how it is in movies), but there's a dearth of creativity in the core concept and gameplay of the games. When you didn't have the capability to bamboozle with bobbles and trinkets because of today's high-speed processors and other hardware, you had to be particularly creative. And they were. A lot of schlock games were produced too in the early age of video games. But many good ones that still stand the test of time and have not been bettered.

BN, I'm just pedantic regarding Robotron, other stuff (like my name) is not important. :-)

Smithz, you might find this interesting. For 40 bucks I bought (on eBay where it comes with an extension cable for the serial port) this Atarimax Universal SIO2PC/ProSystem interface. Basically it's a way to hook the Atari 800 to a PC and use the PC's hard drive, printer, and other stuff. I don't think the software works on the Mac, so it's PC-only at this point. The main benefit (at least for me) isn't necessarily having several megabytes instead of just 180kb or so of storage (per Atari floppy disk). It's the ability to play all these downloaded games on your Atari using the whole retro CRT tv and obviously Atari's own joysticks. Emulators are fine but the games don't always look or play the same (and obviously it would cost a fortune to buy them all on cartridges or commercial floppies). And along with running the games right from the PC's hard drive (the interface just sees the PC's hard drive as a big floppy more or less), you cal also burn these downloaded games (which usual come as various exe, com, bin, and ATR files that you can find on the internet) onto a floppy (got some of those recently on eBay as well) that you can then boot up directly without aid of the PC.

Theoretically, you can also go through the PC using that dongle-interface-thingie and access the internet. But I don't think I'll bother with that. That's a bit too retro.

BN, that's great stuff. Putting some life into old computers by adding technology of today. Heartwarming!

Oh, did i mention that i bought an external USB floppy-drive for my mac. Pretty useless for "pro"-stuff, but fun to send discs to friends. We play the game "What fun can be squeezed on a single 1,4mb disc". Also heartwarming.

quote:

Oh, did i mention that i bought an external USB floppy-drive for my mac. Pretty useless for "pro"-stuff, but fun to send discs to friends. We play the game "What fun can be squeezed on a single 1,4mb disc". Also heartwarming.

Do not mention "floppy drives" or "Zip disks" around thalo. It tends to drive him bonkers. But I like the idea. If I could attach a zip drive to my Atari, I might. And the damndest thing is, someone actually makes a cartridge for the Atari that gives it a USB interface:

quote:

The ABBUC USB cartridge is a professionally produced USB host adapter for the Atari 8-bit computers.

The software for this cartridge is currently in very early beta development, but already understands keyboards, joysticks, steering wheels and other simple USB devices.

Auch du lieber und ausgezeichnet. Can Zip drive support be far behind? Imagine hooking a standard USB gamepad to the Atari. I'd be back at Square One just like playing in the emulators. But just the ability to hook up a standard keyboard to the Atari would be outstanding. The keyboard on the 800 XL (800XL?) is very hard to type on.

Full retro: A cartridge USB thumb drive. How cool is that?

Brilliant!

Also lots of fun: http://www.labelmaker2600.com/

That's very cool, herr smithz. Someone did a very good job making that work. And I'm sure it's actually sometimes useful. There are still a few people out there making original games for the 2600.

I'm not quite sure how effective this is, but look at the Hacked Roombas.

Trout Terror! ROTFLMAO! I want that one! I am Trout Terror.

Smithz, here's some info on Robotron from the guy who created it:

quote:

Where did the "Robotron" idea come from?`

The basic play of "Robotron" was programmed in three days. The game was inspired by the immortal arcade robot game "Berzerk" and the game "Chase" on the Commodore PET. The prototype was a "Defender" game with a "Stargate" board and a couple of Atari 2600 joysticks screwed to the control panel. Originally, "Robotron" was going to be a passive game with no firing. You killed the robots by making them walk into the electrodes.

The grunt robotrons were the first enemy designed. Actually the electrodes were first, but they don't do anything except kill everything that touches them. The grunt AI was extremely basic: plot the shortest path to the player and seek out the player until either the player or the robot is dead.

It was fun for about fifteen minutes, running the robots into the electrodes. But pacifism has its limits. Gandhi, the video game, would have to wait; it was time for some killing action. We wired up the "fire" joystick and the chaos was unbelievable. Next we dialed up the Robot count on the terminal. 10 was fun. How about 20? 30, 60, 90, 120! The tension of having the world converge on you from all sides simultaneously and the incredible body count created an unparalleled adrenalin rush. Add to it the mental overload of a truly ambidextrous control, and it was insanity at its best.

The basic magic of "Robotron" is the independent movement and firing controls. I was a great fan of the game "Berzerk," and the frustration of that and all other single joystick games, was that you have to move toward an enemy in order to fire in that direction. "Berzerk" had a mode that alleviated that somewhat in that if you held the fire button down, the character would stand still and then a bullet could be fired with the joystick in any direction. So essentially in that mode the joystick fired the bullet. I just put on a separate joystick to fire bullets.

How did you choose the enemies in "Robotron"? The balance is perfect.

The philosophy of enemy design was to create a handful of AI opponents as unique as possible from one another, with unique properties of creation, motion, projectile firing, and interaction with the player. The enemies would be deployed in a wave related fashion, with distinct themes for each wave. Some of the most interesting and deadly aspects of the enemies were bugs caused by improperly terminated boundary conditions in the algorithms. Often these bugs produced behavior far more interesting and psychotic then anything I conceived of. An interesting bug causes the enforcers to drift in to corners occasionally for a deadly rain of terror.

The recipe for individual wave mixes of enemies was guided by the theme idea, featuring a certain enemy in each wave, as well as the presence of a basic core element of grunts, enforcers, and electrodes.

What was the "Robotron" hardware like? Why was it so fast?

The "Robotron" hardware was a 1MHz 8-bit 6809 processor, with a custom image coprocessor also running at 1MHz. The amazing thing is this slow circuit had more image processing power than PCs until the early 90s. What made it so powerful was that the image coprocessor was one the first examples of what later became known as a bit blitter--popularized by the Amiga computer. In fact, several of the future designers of the Amiga, including RJ Mical, worked at Williams at this time [1982]. The coprocessor wrote two-dimensional objects to the bitmap with transparency, color paletting, color substitution, and other special effects.

This is good too:

quote:

Do you see retrogaming as just a fad or do you think it will in some way have an effect on the types of games being written?
 
For me the retrogaming movement is more than just nostalgia of misty eyed Gen X'ers. It's a reaction to the current graphical overkill, the simulation obsessed gaming environment of the late 90s. In our quest for absolute graphical realism, we have forgotten the basics of gaming. Look at "Virtua Fighter 3" vs. "Virtua Fighter 2." Unless you are a proctologist, you can't find a dimes' worth of difference in the gameplay. It is clear that the design team focused on the beautiful water effects, facial expressions, awesome backdrops, and 400 polygon, fully rendered loin-cloth animations. Have we as game designers become mere interior decorators, spending months on the reflection mapping of candlelight, or loin-cloth motion capture? Have we forgotten the essence of gaming which is to present the player with novel and original challenges? Once you've seen the interior decoration, there's no need to come back. You need a game in there.

 
That's me swinging my hand through the air in a big "high-five" to what Robotron creator Eugene Jarvis had to say. That was from a book now printed online called Halcyon Days. It's slightly creepy to me that one of my favorite games, M.U.L.E., was written by someone who had a sex change operation (man to women, Dan Bunten to Danielle Berry). Here's that interview. Maybe creepy isn't the right word. It's got an aspect of Monty Python-like "silly" to it as well as undercurrents of a Shakespearian tragedy. One of the comedy parts is the new name to go along with the new sex organs. Dan to Danielle. It makes sense and yet it's at least slightly silly. I guess I would be Bradleena if the urge ever came to lop off my balls (and I had the $30,000 or so spare change lying around to have the operation done…it seems to me that cross-dressing would be a whole lot cheaper). The tragedy in this case is very real. Dan (err, I mean "Danielle") apparently later regretted the sex change. Talk about a big "oops." Be he/she was a heck of a game designer and had a Bradleena-like attitude toward it: The logic and unique creative playability of the game was more important than the bobbles and trinkets of the graphics.

Here's the latest incarnation of Retro Central. I did a little cleaning up and reorganizing this weekend. It may not look like it, but trust me, I did. Those are brothel's marquees. He's collected a few over the years. If you stop by, the quarters are on me.

BN, very nice article about Robotron, a perfect description of the feeling: Mayhem, Adrenaline Rush, Insanity. I also really like the sound effects Williams used these in many other games, but in Robotron they fit so well it hurts.

Man, now i want to play that game.

What I thought was particularly interesting, herr smithz, is that it was loosely based on Berzerk. And I love the idea that he basically bolted down two Atari joysticks. Crap, I think that's the way to play it if I could just find a way to make it work with two joysticks. That would take a LOT of programming expertise, but it's not impossible.

Also, I had no idea that by pushing down and holding the joystick button in Berzerk that you could shoot in a certain direction and not move in that direction. I tried it on the emulator and it worked. Cool. There's something I like about that game. This makes it a bit easier to play.

Herr smithz, the Robotron 2084 cartridge for the Atari 800excel came today. (XL?) Yep. That's the game I remember playing, although I have played a few seconds worth in the emulator a time or two. It gets hard fast. It's certainly a frenzy, which is another game you may remember.

You can play one or two player, alternating turns. What's also interesting is that two people can play at the same time. The left joystick can be used for moving and/or shooting. It can do both. The right joystick (even when it's not Player Two's turn) can be used for shooting and seems to override the shooting of the left joystick. I haven't quite yet charted out the exact details but suffice it to say that you can play this game cooperatively. I had my nephew doing the shooting and I was doing the moving and we got up to 73,000. You could, of course, bolt two joysticks to a table or something and using it like the arcade version of Robotron. That's surely what they intended. I guess you could C-clamp them to the table or something. It could be done. But short of doing that, at least you can have one guy shoot and one guy move because trying to do both is extremely difficult. And odd as it may seem, it does work to have one guy move and the other guy shoot.

Going APE.

Just this past Wednesday I finally got the Atarimax "SIO2PC" interface device that I had ordered. I got the serial one. I would have spent a tad more and got the USB version if this worked in OS X, but apparently it does not. It pretty much works as advertised although I had some initial problems getting my Atari 1050 "enhanced" density drive (not true dual density) to work. I had to set it as Drive #2. I understand the principle of dip switches. What I wasn't aware of is how tricky and complicated Atari made theirs. There is a second dip switch hidden directly behind the front one. You can't see it from the front. You just have to know it's there. There are no markings in the plastic. Nothing.

And now for the "Miracle on Customer Service Street" portion of this story. I usually can figure these things out myself, but after an hour or so of trying just about everything, I threw up my hands. I now decided I had to take the dreaded "customer service" option. I gave the manufacturer of the device an email at around 3:00 that afternoon figuring that, at soonest, I'd probably have first contact from them the following Monday and then it might be days of back-and-forth to figure it out....if it ever got figured out. To my surprise, about five minutes after sending the technical support request I got an answer that included some very precise instructions. After a couple more quick exchanges of emails (where I learned about the dip dip switch), the customer service guy got it figured out for me. A true hero. Nearly an extinct species.

So basically what this thing does it make your PC look like an Atari drive (or several drives) to your Atari 800 computer. This is useful for running the thousands of (now) free programs for it. Yes, you can run them in an emulator, and there are some good emulators out there, but it's not quite the same thing. Using this SIO Jack thingie you can run those downloaded internet files on the Atari using good-ol' Atari joysticks on a good-old CRT. You can also burn actual real, live floppy disks from that downloaded internet stuff if you want to. That's what I've been doing. I don't yet have a spare PC to dedicated to the Atari Retro Station, so I'm just burning a few floppies of my favorites. The guy down the hall may build me a free bare-bones PC for the purposes of having a dedicated PC for the Atari.

Of course, that SIO Jack is also good (and this is surely one of its primary purposes) for copying software from floppies and making a PC file that you can then share with friends or run in an emulator. The hardware, however, is just a small part of the picture. It's really the bundled software that makes all this possible. You can have up to eight virtual drives. You can boot the Atari off of one of these drives and the data throughput is much much faster than from a physical floppy. And that's not all. Act now and they'll throw in a set of steak knives. Actually, the bonus I ran into -- and how cool is this? -- is that I can use my 1984 Atari 800 to print to my 21st century laser printer. I think if the computer itself had any idea it was printing to something so hi-tech, and not the usual old dot matrix printer, it would wet its pants. But, sure enough, this device and the software allows this and more. Act now and you can use it access the internet via your PC. I also understand they're planning an option so that you can run and control a nuclear power plant, all from the keyboard of your Atari computer.

Anyway, there are just hundreds, probably thousands, of games and stuff out there. You can run it in an emulator just fine, but many games work better with joysticks and you just get more of the retro experience (yes, there is such a thing) playing it on the real thing. It's amazing that people are actually making this kind of stuff.