Re: DVG Multigame and Clay's ADL Multigame

>Think of it this way - those who are hardcore hackers will probably just
>use mine unless they value one of your kits' advantages. I have no
>intention of making any kits or making it productizable. That's why your
>mod will still be quite attractive to everyone.

I suppose so. Only one way to find out. ;-)

>This is more than a disassembly. This is a disassembly and it has been
>modded so it can be relocated anywhere in memory. The other groovy thing
>about this is that you aren't confined to the 6000-7fffh region. You can
>add/delete/hack as you see fit.

Ahh, that's cool. I'd be interested to see that when you get it working, if
only out of idle curiosity...

>You also didn't have the ability to just make the code bigger easily. I'd
>rather study source code and mod it

Actually, there's pretty good expansion capabilities in my hardware. In
addition to the "normal" program area (6000-7fff) and VROM/RAM area
(4000-5fff) I have a 4K chunk at f000-ffff and an extra 1K of RAM at
8000-83ff and non-volatile RAM at e000-e1ff. There's a 2K window into EPROM
(up to 512K bytes) at e800-efff.

Atari would often play little games with using mirror addresses that can
cause problems for RAM wedges, so I made the SRAM "protectable" by setting a
bit in a register just to be safe, but if you're writing new code and/or
just make sure writes are qualified to the right region you could actually
leave all the SRAM areas "unlocked" if you had a game that needed a whole
bunch of RAM for something. Similarly, you can also "unlock" the VROM and
write new shapes to it (using the 2K window onto the EPROM as a source for
data). That way you're not limited to the shapes in the VROM-- could load
different asteroids shapes and after every level (ala Space Duel) or
something. (Actually, it can behave rather a lot like an old home
computer-- the 512K EPROM is just like a really fast disk drive, so it's
easy to "page in" new code into the SRAM as needed.)

It would be cool to use Neil's relocatable code along with my hardware and
"expand" asteroids-- have it add some new shapes and enemies after a while,
use the POKEY for new sounds, etc. Maybe some intermissions? (The
asteroids ship could wander into a game of Omega Race by accident... ;-)

>But in any case, you're welcome to whatever I create to use for whatever
>purpose you want.

Cool. Thanks. I think I'm going to go subject myself to some
ExidyMultigame hell for a few hours... ;-)

-Clay
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Received on Sat Mar 11 20:33:21 2000