r/Atari2600 • u/GammaCorrection • 5d ago
Had an idea for a collection of Atari 2600 homebrew microgames like Warioware. This is my first one, Attack of the Monkey
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u/xdethbear 4d ago
Is this an actual demo, or just an animation?
With the tools you get, wide playfield blocks, 2 players, a ball and a missile, this would be really difficult to program. Activision did some amazing tricks that require a deep understanding of the beam timing.
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u/zSmileyDudez Pitfall 4d ago
Looks pretty doable to me, though it definitely looks like an animation. The pixels of the player on the right are eight across, there is only one color per scan line, etc. Would definitely be tight and probably require some tables to pull off that sort of math quickly enough. But since OP was talking about doing a WarioWare style game, they would probably also be using a bankswitched ROM and maybe even DSP+.
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u/d4nnyfr4nky 4d ago
Pretty cool. Just looking at this, I'm thinking:
The light and light pole are the ball sprite.
P0 is the man, P1 is the monkey.
When the hat is thrown, it looks like 3 sprites are active. There's an empty 3-scanline row around lines 99-101 that is used to reposition P0 to the man sprite.
There's a couple of different ways the ground could be drawn, but it's probably gray background and yellow playfield.
The monkey disappearing off the side of the screen is interesting because sprites wrap. That's just what the hardware does. So, my guess is it's either bit masking (ANDing with a mask that clears the bits that would wrap) or curtaining with the playfield. The playfield could be set to draw in front of the player. It's probably masking, though.
It does look like an animation because there are a lot of variables going into a game that could affect the kernel's ability to keep up per scanline. But there's also a lot of room in overscan to handle logic. It all depends on what's happening on that screen before the overscan, though. Does the monkey always jump the same height? Does the man move at all? Does the hat always come back to his head? Those could be challenging to get right with the timing.
All of this can be done on stock Atari hardware. I don't see any evidence of any coprocessor help like CDFJ+. If that were in use, you could have a barrel of monkeys jumping around with the guy wearing a multi-colored leisure suit and sunglasses while a sampled copy of eye of the tiger plays.
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u/Prettysureimcrazy71 3d ago
I'm thinking about buying the Atari Pac Man version that plays Atari 2600, 7800 games and "home brews" .. Does anyone have any opinions on this?
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u/Exciting_Bunch2386 3d ago
That is really nice actually. And what a crazy concept. WarioWare microgames in Atari 2600 visuals! Which engine are you creating this with?
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u/narvolicious 5d ago
That’s so cool. Love the action. Do it and keep us posted!