Cafeman

My work on Adventure II XE is wrapping up and I don't want to work on it beyond May. After that I'm anxious to work on a new idea for 5200 homebrew (which will also eventually be an A8 port too). I have a bunch of ideas and they all have already been started with designs, graphics, and some code. I will let this poll help me determine which game I actually do. Here are a few quick blurbs about each game to give some kind of idea of what I have planned. Note that when I do start one of these, I will eagerly accept graphics contributions - my mockups are merely that, mockups which *could* be done on 5200.

"Koffi: Twin Kopters" - the first KYK was done in 2002 and was my first homebrew and will always be kind of special to me; I've always had ideas to make a sequel, adding stuff that I didn't put into the original. The sequel would be called Koffi: Twin Kopters because there will be a 2-player simultaneous mode like seen in Joust - Player 2 can opt-in whenever he wants to, or you can just play it as a 1-player game. The 2 Kopters will be able to collide with one another, yielding coop or cut-throat gameplay. Changes planned: Kopter doesn't immediately die if lightning or fire hits him, but instead loses an amount of water in his tank. If not enough water, you will lose a life - kind of like Sonic's rings. There will be Pinball-style score multipliers and a power-up or two that you can either grab or earn.

"Koffu-Koffu" - think Baku-Baku style gameplay but using Koffi's world and characters - water will drop, fire will drop, seeds/plant food will drop. Try to grow the tree branches to the top and rescue any animals from spreading fire too. Split screen, 2-player simultaneous.

"Vertical Shooter" - this idea is a basic vertical shooter along the lines of MegaMania. Some of the enemy ideas I had so far: classic sci-fi film images such as different UFO's, Cylons, Berzerk-style robots, or Star Wars/ Star trek homages, but also weird stuff like Mr. Yuck heads, dinosaurs, or other ideas that maybe AA will help me with.

"Detective Powers" - see attached mock-ups. Graphics will not be the same as this early mockup but it gives you an idea. Holmes will need to keep his "Detective Powers" charge by correct deduction or finding items like a bowler hat or pipe, etc. This one will take more effort that the other homebrew ideas but it also has more already-done code.

http://www.6502.buss...ruction-set/and

I thought I could replace code like this:

Ptr1 = $50 ;zero page low byte
Ptr2 = $51 ; zero page hi byte

ldy #$02
lda (Ptr1),y							   ; 5 cycles
AND #%11111100							 ;2 cycles
sta (Ptr1),y							   ; 6 cycles, total each group = 13 cycles each

with this, saving cycles. Doesn't seem to work. Can I use AND to take the contents of the accumulator and directly mask it to memory in this way?
Ptr1 is on zero page as is the next byte, Ptr2.

ldy #$02
lda #%11111100			 ; 2 cycles
AND (Ptr1),y			   ; 5 cycles, total each group = 7 cycles each

Read this: this happened to one of my 2 accounts (my son's).

http://www.thesun.co...yber-fraud.html

We haven't had the X360 hooked up for at least 2-3 months. But we noticed Xbox live purchases being charged to us so I started to check things out, and it turns out hackers took over the account, changed the secret question to Chinese or Japanese, and started to slowly buy Xbox live points. I called the MS Xbox live service and started an fraudulent charges claim.

In the meantime, I went in and removed the auto-resubscribe setting.

I hate hackers. Unless I get refunded by MS (I expect to), I'm out of almost $100.

Playing Bob's Moon Cresta reminded me of something I'd thought of earlier concerning vertical shooters from the Atari days. It would be cool for 3 (sets of?) people to all develop the same homebrew idea , for 2600, 5200/A8, and 7800. And a shooter would be simple enough and fun enough that we wouldn't have to devote TOO much time to such a project.

Any homebrews interested in talking publicly about such an idea? If we agree to the same idea and general game design, then we could set a goal date several months or more in the future, perhaps with monthly check-ins where we'd post at the least a screen shot or picture for everyone to see and comment on.

One idea I had toyed with was an homage to Activision's MegaMania. Now, since that game seems itself to be an homage to Sega's Astro Blaster, and to avoid Activision involvement, I was thinking of calling the game something that aludes to that game ("Astro.Blast.MMS?" MMS = MegaMania sequel). Waves of nonsensical things coming down the screen each with an initially maddening pattern. My ideas had classic sci-fi images like Creature (black lagoon) heads, a couple classic UFO and spaceship images, also Mr. Yucks and other things.

If any homebrewer wants to talk about such a potential project, reply here, we'll see where it goes. The thing that would be neat is seeing how the different versions turn out compared to each other. We could share some assets like sound and graphic data or other code methods to speed things up and keep the games seeming similar in play. If no interest is shown, I may develop the game anyway after my current project which I'm trying to button up now.

Classic Game Room HD had a recent review of Sega Saturn Virtua Racing. Mark the reviewer found it lots of fun and was very positive about it.

But SEGA Virtua Racing fans like me pretty much have loathed the game, programmed by Time Warner. I had to hook up the Saturn and play it through again - I've been playing lots of VR over the past half year on the Genesis and the PS2 version which runs at 60fps. I played it over the weekend and went through the entire Grand Prix until I beat the game (which I don't think I ever did back in the day). Here are my thoughts:

I remember now that the problem with TW's Saturn port of VR is that it in no way has the exciting fast arcade feel - that "feel" is lost. So initially the game is disappointing when playing the arcade mode. The sound options are poor -- you can't really tweak the volume of game sounds. The music that plays after checkpoints is loud, clear and pretty good stuff, but I can barely hear my own engine and even passing cars is a muted unimpressive sound effect. The frame rate could be better and the game has various clipping issues at times but you learn to ignore those.

But the game is still quite fun for what it is. For one thing, the tracks - even the new ones - are excellently designed. The colors are nice and the tracks have bumps and little jumps - depending on the weight of your vehicle, you'll catch air at times and cause the virtua graphics to wobble a bit when you hit the non-flat racing tracks - interesting! The Grand Prix mode forces you to race 10 laps as a go-cart, then a series of 4 or 5 other vehicles until you finally reach the F1 and then you can win the game if you achieve enough win points as you go. The Metropolis and Alpine tracks took me a while to beat with the F1 but I finally did place high enough to earn win points. That's one of the nice things about how this game is set up - you have ALL the tracks available, but you don't necessarily need to race the harder ones if you place 1st on all the easy and medium tracks and earn enough win points on those. You can abuse the save system if you don't place high enough and just re-load and race again.

I always thought the go-carts were pretty darn fun, but because they are the slowest vehicles - max speed is around 90 MPH - each of the 10 laps takes too long. Fortunately as you move up into the faster vehicles, the laps start taking only 30 to 40 seconds each and I really can't complain about the 10 laps any more. But still it would have been nice to have had an option to only race 5-lap races. To be honest, I needed all 10 laps to get familiar with some courses with each new vehicle and to catch up to #1.

Well, the game was quite enjoyable. racing the tracks with a new vehicle completely changes the dynamics. At first you may wonder if its possible to place 1st. But they you start to learn that you can make those tight corners while still going quite fast, you just have to learn the game's technique of turning hard with no gas and then carefully applying acceleration as you go around the curve.

So thanks to CGR HD, I did enjoy Saturn VR, which I had many times previously lambasted! Load times aren't as bad as I'd remembered, although it has the stupidest loading screen I've ever seen. AND ... its win-animation is hilariously bad. Virtua people on a winning stage with hula hoops around their necks as 'awards', then the one vr person takes off his virtua hat (blue ball cap in polygons) and whips it into the air ... it doesn't drop but proceeds out of the earth, into outer space and past a virtua astronaut! game ovah! I thought this bizarro ending was the icing on the cake for this initially unimpressive yet surprisingly fun and addictive game.

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