Kurt_Woloch

Here are my times for this week (May 14th through 20th)...

Atari 2600:
Space Rocks - 7 min.

And that's it... Space Rocks was the only game I played this week. The game has got pretty far by now, greatly reducing flicker as well.

Other than that, I put many hours into analyzing the BIOS and two games for the Videobrain with the goal of better understanding how the hardware works and is to be programmed. I think I found out most of what I wanted to know, and I've managed to put together a "Hello World" cartridge image for the Videobrain which also plays some music. This is a first for me since I never programmed the F8 processor before, and never programmed for the Videobrain either.

The differences are pretty obvious... from what I can remember, Pengo has different (simpler) maze structures than the released version, and Millipede was made by a different company than the released version. I can't remember the exact differences, but there are probably different graphics, differents sounds and slightliy different gameplay logic. Oh, and a different title picture of course.

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Here are my times for this past week, May 7th through 13th...

Atari 2600:
Muncher - 2 min.
Space Rocks - 10 min.

Odyssey^2:
GoSub - 3 min.

TI-99:
Demon Attack - 5 min.

I have to admit that I didn't play much at all this week because it has been a very busy week. On Tuesday, I went to a meeting of people living in rented flats by Sozialbau, on Wednesday there was a meeting at work in the afternoon and the monthly TI-99 meeting (that's where I played Demon Attack), on Thursday and Friday there was hot weather, so I went swimming, and today was Mother's day, and we did Karaoke at home.

"Muncher" is some kind of homebrew, but I can't recall what it does exactly. "Space Rocks" is a new homebrew Asteroids clone which has come a long way. GoSub is a WIP, an Odyssey^2 version of the Atari 2600 game by the same programmer. There's not too much there yet, only 4 mazes where you have to reach a chest with a submarine that doesn't stop when you center the joystick, and isn't allowed to touch the walls. Finally, Demon Attack is the TI-99 version of one of Imagic's most successful games. In the 5 minutes, I made the "boss" on the first attempt, so I didn't play again.

But I think it's surely possible to use a TMS9900 for controlling elevators... the only problem is that you need some RAM in addition to that because it hasn't got any registers built in.

Here are my times for this past week (April 30th through May 6th)...


Atari 2600:
GoSub - 4 min.

Commodore 64:
Space-Pilot II - 440 min. in 6 sessions

Online (non-eligible):
Police Pursuit - 13 min.

The main game I played this week is "Space Pilot II" on the Commodore 64. This game seems to be matched to my current skills, and I got noticeably better at it, but didn't beat it yet.

Then I replayed an online game named "Police Pursuit" just to remember what it was, and I tried the Atari 2600 game "GoSub" because its maker, Atari2600land, now works on a G-7000 / Odyssey^2 version of it, but is currently running into coding difficulties.

Other than that, I tried to emulate the Videobrain computer, but although I ran some games, you can't really call that "playing" because the emulation still is somewhat broken, and I didn't know how to properly operate the games, so I don't list those times.