Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: If you know of an arcade auction between here and St. Louis that's coming up, let me know. If I found a working game that I could get for under $300 including shipping, I'd probably buy it regardless of what game it was.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:Allrighty. In terms of getting my stuff together, I have subscribed to the Stella mailing list, downloaded DASM and a few other utilities, and found a couple PDF files that seem to be called "Programming the 2600" and so forth.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: The balls, I take it, are sort of like the missiles in the player/missile graphic system for the 8-bit? Can the balls be combined to form a third player sprite?

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: If you're able to put a tombstone where the player gets run over (which would be dynamic: who knows where the player gets splattered), wouldn't you also be able to put a power-up just sitting there as well?

Ice Cream Jonesy wrote:

Bruce wrote:Remember you have 128 bytes of RAM total on the VCS, which would make the mix-and-match monsters very hard if not impossible. Although if you did it as a Supercharger game, you'd have 6K....

I think that I would probably be inclined to go for the mode that offers the most memory. I'm a memory whore (pimp?) that way. Unless it's tougher to get the game on a physical cart, that is. Ultimately, if I get goin' on this, I'd want to be able to play it like you can with LOTR, on the true hardware and such.

bruce wrote:Well, that's unique in and of itself. I meant use both of the 2600 "players" (i.e. sprites) but have one controlled by the computer. Makes sense to have them both under real player control, though (one driving controller, one joystick?).

Or, each five seconds that the player on foot survives, he gets faster; you don't want to reward him for getting run over. As a super-undead he has some time limit before he reverts. That sounds like fun.

Power-ups would be cool. Remember, though, that you have (on any given horizontal line) two player objects, two "balls", and a playfield background. Is the power-up going to be a player sprite (in which case you have flicker if both players and the power-up are on the same scan line) or part of the playfield (in which case you need to have it only appear sometimes).

Yeah, although in <i>Death Race</i> the tombstones aren't ablative. Just impenetrable barriers. That's easier to do.

Remember you have 128 bytes of RAM total on the VCS, which would make the mix-and-match monsters very hard if not impossible. Although if you did it as a Supercharger game, you'd have 6K....

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: Let me ask you this, regarding that Death Race game: I've neither seen the movie or played a game called Death Race. However, is the following at all unique? :

o Two players, like you said, one in a car and one on foot.

o The guy on foot starts out as a slow-moving undead. Like an (urk) zombie or skeleton. As the player in the car runs him over, he upgrades into a faster form of undead.
o The guy on foot can get power ups where he becomes a super undead creature, like a lich or vampire or something. He can then chase the car.

o Eventually machine guns are added to the car, and maybe shields for the guy on foot

o This all takes place in a graveyard
o As the crosses appear, like as you noted, they form barriers, like how the centipede parts did in Centipede

So the thing'd basically be a cat-and-mouse kind of game, a sort of Pac-Man but inside a cemetery. And I think we all know how much I like games in cemeteries. Anyway, has any of that not been done before? I fear that the Death Race people already thought of all this, in which case, kudos to them.

I'm gonna have to find a Tac-Scan ROM or something... hadn't heard of that one before.

bruce wrote: Wacko: Don't know it.

Karateka: wasn't an arcade game. Maybe you mean Karate Champ? There was a late-period Activision karate game, but I never played it.

Games never ported:

Star Castle: The layout makes it really hard--Yar's Revenge is about as good as that gets.
Satan's Hollow: A possibility. Basically Galaxian, plus the bridge-building aspect.
Tac-Scan: *was* ported. Port *BLEW GIANT GOATS*. Which is too bad because the original game was terrific.
Chiller: the Atari's graphics aren't really up to it but it'd be funny
Death Race: Probably quite doable. In fact, start with Grand Prix as your base and use the driving controllers. Use one player for the car, one for the running guy, and put a cross on the playfield when you hit him.
Dance Dance Revolution: Yes, I'm almost serious. The basic game would be pretty easy, since you just float arrows down the screen to a soundtrack, and there are plenty of sound demos. Make it work with the joystick, and then build a DDR pad for it, which is just a joystick with big pressure contacts instead of a stick.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:I
However, while I am punching copyright in the face, I was trying to think of games that never made it to the 2600. The list I have so far, of stuff that would be worth trying to port: