New 2600 homebrew by Champ Games

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SpiceWare
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Joined: April 8th, 2015, 7:04 pm

New 2600 homebrew by Champ Games

Postby SpiceWare » May 15th, 2019, 4:34 pm

Screen Shot 2019-05-15 at 1.28.22 PM.jpg
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Screen Shot 2019-05-15 at 1.31.09 PM.jpg
Screen Shot 2019-05-15 at 1.31.09 PM.jpg (101.91 KiB) Viewed 1515 times

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ActRaiser
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Re: New 2600 homebrew by Champ Games

Postby ActRaiser » May 15th, 2019, 5:47 pm

That's an Atari 2600 game?

OMG! That's awesome

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Stalvern
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Re: New 2600 homebrew by Champ Games

Postby Stalvern » May 15th, 2019, 6:40 pm

Here's the video itself. The game starts at 1:04:25.

It's mentioned at 58:27 that the game can only be run from the Harmony flash cartridge, due to its use of something called CDFJ. Not being a 2600 programmer, I don't understand any of the information about it that I've found, but it's clearly the only thing making this game run on a system with 128 bytes of RAM.

SpiceWare
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Joined: April 8th, 2015, 7:04 pm

Re: New 2600 homebrew by Champ Games

Postby SpiceWare » May 15th, 2019, 8:07 pm

Stalvern wrote:use of something called CDFJ.


DPC is the coprocessor/bankswitch scheme that made Pitfall 2 possible. Harmony/Melody has a driver that supports DPC so you can play Pitfall 2 on it. Supports 8K games with 2K ROM of Display Data(basically the graphic data).

We made a new version of DPC, called DPC+, that unlocked the extra resources of the Harmony/Melody. It supports 24K games with 4K of ROM/RAM of Display Data and the option to offload game logic to the ARM (which gets 512 bytes of RAM for variables and stack usage). Display Data is copied from ROM to RAM when the Atari's turned on, and since it's in RAM it can be changed on-the-fly as needed so way more flexible than DPC's ROM based Display Data. DPC+ is used for Stay Frosty 2, Space Rocks, Scramble, and a number of batari BASIC games.

We tried making BUS for even more advanced games using Bus Stuffing, but it failed on a number of consoles so we abandoned it. More info on BUS starting with my reply at the bottom of the first page of topic Bosconian clone comming to the Atari 2600!!!

We took what we learned from BUS, applied it to DPC+, and came up with CDF which stands for Chris, Darrell, Fred. Chris (cd-w) wrote the driver for the Harmony/Melody, Darrell (SpiceWare, me) designed the driver and implemented it in Stella, Fred(batari) created the hardware. CDF supports 28K games with 4K RAM Display Data (no longer copied from ROM) and is optimized for games using ARM code (such as it now gets 2K of RAM for variables and stack usage). CDF is used for Draconian, Mappy, and Super Cobra Arcade.

John needed 1 extra "Jump Datastream" for one of his projects, Wizard of Wor or Zoo Keeper(I don't recall which), so we made a variation of CDF with 2 Jump Datastreams instead of 1. So CDFJ = Chris, Darrell, Fred, John. I'll be using CDFJ for future projects as well, such as Frantic, Timmy!, and SpiceC (like batari BASIC, but uses C for the game logic).

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VideoGameCritic
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Re: New 2600 homebrew by Champ Games

Postby VideoGameCritic » May 15th, 2019, 8:16 pm

Any idea when this would be available? I'd love a review copy.

SpiceWare
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Re: New 2600 homebrew by Champ Games

Postby SpiceWare » May 15th, 2019, 8:39 pm

I do not. Per John the games about 90% complete. My understanding is he'll be posting something on AtariAge in the near future, possibly a demo ROM. I'll post a reply here when he does.

Had you had time to check out Draconian yet? It's my port of Bosconian, complete with speech samples. Link for the ROM's at the top of this post.

lynchie137
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Joined: November 15th, 2016, 6:46 pm

Re: New 2600 homebrew by Champ Games

Postby lynchie137 » May 16th, 2019, 12:57 pm

ActRaiser wrote:That's an Atari 2600 game?

OMG! That's awesome


I know, right? It looks almost as good as the NES version. Which is pretty amazing when you think about it..

SpiceWare
Posts: 149
Joined: April 8th, 2015, 7:04 pm

Re: New 2600 homebrew by Champ Games

Postby SpiceWare » May 16th, 2019, 1:42 pm

John's posted the Champ Games - Galaga 2600 topic.

It is about 90% complete with just a few bugs to be fixed and bells & whistles to be added.
...
We are planning on releasing a playable demo ROM sometime in the near future once a few bugs are fixed.

SpiceWare
Posts: 149
Joined: April 8th, 2015, 7:04 pm

Re: New 2600 homebrew by Champ Games

Postby SpiceWare » June 12th, 2019, 3:53 pm

There's now a link at the top of the Champ Games - Galaga 2600 topic to the demo ROMs.


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