Game Ideas: Major Havok & Red Baron 2600

[killersquirel]

Hello,

 

I was talking about this in the 2600 forum and I figured I would bring it up here. I recently played the prototype game meteoroids (proto of suicide mission) and was again blown away by this game. I remember playing it years ago and I forgot about it.

 

What is really impressive is that it always shows your score and the stock number of ships you have left in your reserve at all times. The graphics are doen in a dot style that is similar to vector graphics (somewhat). Why aren't more games made in this style?

 

I think it would be great for any homebrewer (I don't know how yet) to maybe make a conversion of some other vector games in this style. For example Major Havok type game would be great, or perhaps a battlezone, red baron type of game. Maybe a pinball game? What do you think about this?

 

-mike

[wrenchien]

to be honest, battlezone was already made by atari into a cart.. in some regards it's actually better than the arcade game since it's closer to a rendering of the tanks in 3-d rather than in vector.. with the sprites swapped to bigger sizes as needed, a ufo that looks much more colorful, drone tanks that actually look cooler... the movement with the joystick is smoother and more instinctive, the skyline, which is a static playfield thing, is colorful as well and looks like physical mountains...even if the res is low (and on what atari game, was the resolution of graphics truly very, very high) .. it's so much nicer to play and look at than a bunch of green lines. and even the destruction of your tank, represented by the screen going haywire akin to a computer console breaking down... is actually kinda more final than a mere cracked playfield screen.

 

you could try to remake battlezone via vector like graphics.. but compared to the atari cart it wouldn't look as cool.

[NovaXpress]

I think it would be great for any homebrewer (I don't know how yet) to maybe make a conversion of some other vector games in this style. For example Major Havok type game would be great, or perhaps a battlezone, red baron type of game. Maybe a pinball game? What do you think about this?

Why not? Because you'll get sued by Inforgrames, that's why not.

[Robert M]

Here's the deal as I see it. The game you are referring to is a SuperCharger game. It makes those graphics by taking advantage of the fact that a supercharger has 6K of RAM to hold the program and any data the programmer wishes. Normally a cartridge is limited to the stock 128 bytes of RAM that come with the VCS. By storing the screen data in RAM, supercharger games can get more done per scan line because the code spends less time figuring out what to draw, and simply loads the next location in RAM into a register. Hence, better graphics. Okay, that explains the better graphics.

 

Now, why don't homebrewers do the same thing? I see 2 main reasons for this. One, it would require a custom cartridge circuit board and a completely new bankswitching technique. No one has shown the interest to date to put in the effort to design such a board. Second, personally one of the reasons I enjoy dinking around with the VCS is that it has only 128 bytes of RAM. The added challenge of limited resources makes it "fun" for programmers such as myself to write code for it. I think that is the same reason you see more homebrews for the 2600, than the 5200 or 7800. Yes, those systems have more resources, so they can do fancier games, but at that point why not just switch to a modern system and write your game in Java or Flash. IMO.

 

Cheers!

[bjk7382]

One, it would require a custom cartridge circuit board and a completely new bankswitching technique.  

 

Or if this wasn't done, it would only be playable for SC and CC owners, which severely restricts the salability.

 

How did Atari put the SC Rabbit Transit on a cart? Reprogrammed it, or made a special circuit and bankswitching technique?

[Thomas Jentzsch]

How did Atari put the SC Rabbit Transit on a cart? Reprogrammed it, or made a special circuit and bankswitching technique?

According to CloneSpy, the game had to be heavily reprogrammed.

 

And any different result would have really surprised me.