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I've worked through all the 2600 programming books, including the authors. I've yet to start on anything of my own worth while. At one point I thought maybe I c

by kgwxd 3y ago

I've worked through all the 2600 programming books, including the authors. I've yet to start on anything of my own worth while. At one point I thought maybe I could start reverse engineering some games for some inspiration. Didn't get more than a few hours into it before I decided I'd just rather watch other people do great things with the 2600.

toast0 3y ago
I've considered doing something in this vein, and my thought is don't try to learn two things at once. Game design and game implementation are two different things; better to clone a game for your first several implementations, IMHO. OTOH, I'm not motivated enough to do that, either. :D
ddingus 3y ago
You may want to give Batari Basic a look. In the early 00's one enthusiast had the idea to make a simple BASIC compiler for the 2600. I was one of the early testers and the first thing I did was make a functional "BREAKOUT", bounce the ball off the bat to eliminate bricks in a wall game. It took a couple hours and was, I think, the first (and buggy) playable program authored by someone other than the language author. And it was fun! What the author did was kind of brilliant in that he packaged up several of the common tricks used to make games and presented them along with a simple BASIC. Variables, for example, were just bytes and or individual bits, essentially addressing bits in a byte like an array. J = %01101101 If J[2] = 0 then X = X +1 Here is a sample program to move a sprite around on the screen: x=50 y=50 main2 COLUP0=28 COLUBK=02 player0: %00011100 %00011000 %00011000 %00100000 %01011010 %01111100 %00100100 %00010000 %00011000 %00111100 %00011000 end player0x=x player0y=y drawscreen if joy0right then x=x+1 if joy0left then x=x-1 if joy0up then y=y-1 if joy0down then y=y+1 goto main2 On the VCS, a game is a loop that renders the display and in-between display frames, during VBLANK, one computes the next game state to be displayed, and it all runs at 50 or 60Hz, locked to the display refresh rate. The BASIC exposes the little bit of hardware to a programmer in a simple way that I found to be a lot of fun because the really hard parts of assembly language are not necessary, but can be written in-line just as easily as defining a sprite is: asm LDA J ASL ASL . . . end Any hoo, it was fun and surprisingly productive. I found I could knock out simple concepts in an hour or two.
- ddingus 3y ago
  I just now recalled the author of Batari Basic, and he is Fred Quimby. That bothered me, and now it does not. Fred did a lot of great work along with some others to create both Batari Basic and the Harmony cartridge, both of which mean mere mortals can have a little fun programming for the 2600.
diydsp 3y ago
Also if you have some acquired 6502 skills consider doing some c64 and appleii or even atari x00 projects. Then maybe go back to 2600. All are very constrained in their own beautiful ways but not as perverse as the 2600 :)

by kgwxd 3y ago

toast0 3y ago

I've considered doing something in this vein, and my thought is don't try to learn two things at once. Game design and game implementation are two different things; better to clone a game for your first several implementations, IMHO. OTOH, I'm not motivated enough to do that, either. :D

ddingus 3y ago

You may want to give Batari Basic a look. In the early 00's one enthusiast had the idea to make a simple BASIC compiler for the 2600. I was one of the early testers and the first thing I did was make a functional "BREAKOUT", bounce the ball off the bat to eliminate bricks in a wall game. It took a couple hours and was, I think, the first (and buggy) playable program authored by someone other than the language author. And it was fun! What the author did was kind of brilliant in that he packaged up several of the common tricks used to make games and presented them along with a simple BASIC. Variables, for example, were just bytes and or individual bits, essentially addressing bits in a byte like an array. J = %01101101 If J[2] = 0 then X = X +1 Here is a sample program to move a sprite around on the screen: x=50 y=50 main2 COLUP0=28 COLUBK=02 player0: %00011100 %00011000 %00011000 %00100000 %01011010 %01111100 %00100100 %00010000 %00011000 %00111100 %00011000 end player0x=x player0y=y drawscreen if joy0right then x=x+1 if joy0left then x=x-1 if joy0up then y=y-1 if joy0down then y=y+1 goto main2 On the VCS, a game is a loop that renders the display and in-between display frames, during VBLANK, one computes the next game state to be displayed, and it all runs at 50 or 60Hz, locked to the display refresh rate. The BASIC exposes the little bit of hardware to a programmer in a simple way that I found to be a lot of fun because the really hard parts of assembly language are not necessary, but can be written in-line just as easily as defining a sprite is: asm LDA J ASL ASL . . . end Any hoo, it was fun and surprisingly productive. I found I could knock out simple concepts in an hour or two.

ddingus 3y ago
I just now recalled the author of Batari Basic, and he is Fred Quimby. That bothered me, and now it does not. Fred did a lot of great work along with some others to create both Batari Basic and the Harmony cartridge, both of which mean mere mortals can have a little fun programming for the 2600.

diydsp 3y ago

Also if you have some acquired 6502 skills consider doing some c64 and appleii or even atari x00 projects. Then maybe go back to 2600. All are very constrained in their own beautiful ways but not as perverse as the 2600 :)