Second reading tip on Wired today! An interesting about the Atari2600 hardware and hacking techniques, that the programmers used back in the days. Basically they had to use to the freely designed techniques, because the hardware had no frame-buffer. The programmers became “real-time riders of the videobeam”.
“The Atari VCS had a miniscule 128 bytes (that’s bytes) of RAM, not nearly enough for a frame buffer. So programmers had to generate graphics literally in real time, drawing on the screen as the television screen’s electron gun was passing over the tube.”
The article is wrapped around a new book from the MIT Media Lab, called “Racing the beam“, completely dedicated to the Atari 2600 hardware, written by media studies professors Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost.
More about this interesting technique and the book at Wired.
Well designed playfield in interesting colors.
Yesterday I found an old game, that I’ve played when I was a kid. In fact, it was the third computing-game I’ve ever played in my live. Back in the days I didn’t really got the gameplay, because the instructions were vague und the gameplay somehow complex (for the young boy, that I was). Nevertheless I remembered that ill colors and the cryptic gameplay years and years, but just could not remember the name of this game anymore. And since resources on the Commodore 16 are not that popular (all hail the C64), I had problems finding the name or asking someone, who could have known. Yesterday the day came. The name if the game is “Oblido” and the whole experience is just better than drugs. Game starts immediately.
Detail: This is you shooting and the enemies in the “Sin Bin”
You aim is to “sort tiles” into special fields. At the border enemies running around at random, some can shoot - you have to be careful with them. You can push the tiles against the enemies or shoot, in order to send them back to the “Sin Bin“. If you got hit by one enemy, you loose time. Precious time. Because you have to sort all tiles to the according place before time is running up. Most interestingly the game features various elements from different games, but mixes them all together in a great manner. You can sense elements from Pac Man (the enemies), Sokoban (pushing tiles around), even boardgames (the design of the play-field) or Boulderdash (your overall mission, time limit) etc…
I’ve played the game yesterday for hours (yes, the game is addictive, too) till I managed to finish the level. Well, and figured out, that there is more than only one level! This is where it gets really hard. Simply a great game, lost in the tunnel of time. If you got reading till here, I have something for you. Over at Commodore16.com you can play the game directly in the browser.
This game was published by Mastertronic, a company, that got lots of games on the market for cheap money. Most of the games from them were good, addictive, fair. No milestones, but just great small games. I recently took some inspiration from them for my own games I am writing at the moment over at scnclr.de. You can read more about the glory history of mastertronic at guter.
A fresh new Indie-Gamesstudio from Cologne (One More Games) released their first iPhone app, called Frankenface. It is more a toy than a game, and the idea is pretty simple, derived from childhood play-stuff: You take pictures of the people around you with you iPhone. Then you can mix the faces by changing eyes, nose and mouth of the individuals. Quite fun, especially your face will also be part of the game.
An ongoing series of small robot-explorations.
Deep and hissing beauty by Tapes. When 60s library music clashes properly Dubwise with skanking subs, hi-current powered drummachines and a heap of MAX-MSP madness. The result will simply make your ghettoblaster weep with joy…
I am not sure, if you already seen this. Playpower somehow wants to do similar, than the one laptop per child project (OLPC). But - instead of providing cheap and educational laptops, they want to use 8-bit gaming systems. And it looks also very interesting.
The Playpower Foundation is using a $10 computer as a platform for 8-bit learning games in order to improve educational access for millions of children around the world. Motivated by the availability of this radically affordable platform, our goal is to design and discover high-quality 8-bit learning games and make computer-aided learning affordable for people everywhere.
About the technical details: The Playpower Platform will be basically a keyboard with mouse and 1Mhz processor that connects to a TV screen and takes plastic-encased chip cartridges that plug directly into the keyboard. The cartridges will use the 1980’s era 8-bit Nintendo Famicom cartridge form. One single cartridge can contain hundreds of software titles and it seems, that modding of old cartridges will be also possible.
The creators are sure, that 8-bit systems can be interesting enough, to engage people (I think they are right). With that slow and old machines, you are not able to let multimedia-applications run, or even higher sophisticated programs. Even building icons, that represent something, can be challenging. We all now that from the past. But also know, how much fun is hidden inside this constraints. As the project is meant as a educational project, they think developing own software. But here lies the drawback, because they say “there would be a lack of finding developers”. But, they propose a special framework, that could be interesting:
The issue with developing new content for the NES/Famicom TVC is that it requires assembly coding, which is a difficult and specialized skill. This makes it impractical to follow a traditional model of paying hired developers to produce new content, especially as this would limit both access to production and the variety the of resulting products. Therefore, our goal is to develop an open-source 8-bit programming kit that will make it far easier to program learning games. To accomplish this we plan to build on nBASIC, a high-level framework for building assembly code that uses BASIC programming conventions. Combining nBASIC with the complete documentation of the NES forms the core of our open-source programming kit. This simplified programming environment will aid developers from around the world in building or modifying their own 8-bit games, creating an ecosystem of 8-bit content to support regional languages, local educational needs, and diverse cultural expression.
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