peteym5

I got my copy of Venture in the mail and thought I would give my first impressions for anybody on the fence about purchasing it.  Again, I was only able to spend about an hour and a half with it last night, but I thought it would be nice to start a discussion on this new homebrew.
Packaging: it came well packaged in a large box with plenty of packing materials. The instructions are a single laminated sheet and you get the cartridge in a white half size style box with the art and screenshots attached to the front and back respectively.  I like the fonts and the color of blue used on the cartridge and packaging, but I do wish the manual could be stored in the box with the game. You could do it, but your going to crease and ruin the laminated sheet. But overall the packaging and shipping experience is good. 
Cartridge: I like the labels and the cartridge seem to be in the style of ataris 7800 and 2600 games. You have a top label with the name of the game and the front label with the box art and relevant information. I really like the design and it feels like a good quality product similar to any "official" release from the 80s. 
Gameplay: I played the 2600 game in preparation and this is a vast improvement. You have 3 game modes (arcade and 2 challenger modes), a choice of control styles and number of players. The graphics are true to venture and while I don't think anybody would call them revolutionary,  they do look good!  The sound effects are punchy and have impact, and I like the tunes that plays. 
The gameplay feel much tighter than the 2600 version and I see little reason to go back to that one after trying this one. I will post a full review in a week or two but I'll continue to put my thoughts here until then. I'll post more in depth thoughts about gameplay tonight after work as I've only tried one mode so far.  If you have any questions please ask. 
Oh and thank you to everybody at video61 for putting this game out!  

https://youtu.be/mUcD4PIin14
This is the latest Work in Progress I have done for Jungle Quest. I have added collision detection, character dying, collecting enough Gems to open up an exit to go to another level.

Yes, it is designed to help authors and can be used as a tool for story telling.
 

https://github.com/PJM-NCC-70511/Text-Adventure-Game-System-Atari-FastBasic
This is my next Fast Basic Sample that is my text adventure game system with two programs, an editor and a player. The program has been ported back to the Atari 8-bit and compiled with Fast Basic. It was originally written in BasicXE, ported to IBM-PC MS DOS. I lost the BasicXE Sources many years ago, but had the QBasic Source that is not far from Fast Basic. There were some differences I needed to work around and save memory. Like the string storage of using 256 characters for each string variables. That works against the requirements of this program and consumes the needed memory. Therefore, I wrote a custom memory storage ML routine that transfers text data to fixed memory locations. If I need just to store names, just designate 16 bytes per each character or name. There are opening and closing paragraphs that introduce the game and closes the game. The editor has a string field editor that lets you insert and edit text.. The game data is similar to common databases, where you have text and numeric fields to store all the information. In this case, the data is stored in arrays. You need to go into the editor to set the memory configuration for both the editor and player. You can set the memory Parameters for a 48K, 52K, 64K, or 128K computers. Smaller memory amounts will only let you have less stuff inside the game.
Right now, there  are no plans to get this work on a cartridge. Fast Basic has an 8K limit currently, and the programs compile to 24K each. Bank switching is almost impossible to figure out with compiled program code.
I apoligize for lack of commenting and not using more descriptive variable names. After all, it was originally derived from an Atari 8-bit source code with limited memory available. 
 
 
 

Latest Jungle Quest Work-in-Progress video. I have the moving platforms working in the game that is using animated font characters. This is one of the things I am adding to make the game different from Pittfall. I am planning on many more additions and changes. If anyone would like to see something in the game, please comment below.
 

Jungle Quest For Atari 8-bit Work in Progress For July 31, 2022. Some Progress has been made with the game after many years. Now have the main character running around and climbing ladders. Collision Detection works. You may post your comments here or on Atari.IO for a quick response from myself or Video61. Posting on that other Atari forum will not get a response from me there, but on here or Atari.IO. To respond to an earlier comment, the reason why this game had been put aside for many years is that I had been busy with many other Atari game projects. Also, when I decided to come back here, I decided to revamp the programming with all the techniques I learned after putting this game aside. It did take me some time to port over my player/missile multiplexer and align with the scrolling action. 

Jungle Quest For Atari 8-bit Work in Progress For July 31, 2022. Some Progress has been made with the game after many years. Now have the main character running around and climbing ladders. Collision Detection works. You may post your comments here or on Atari.IO for a quick response from myself or Video61. Posting on that other Atari forum will not get a response from me there, but on here or Atari.IO. To respond to an earlier comment, the reason why this game had been put aside for many years is that I had been busy with many other Atari game projects. Also, when I decided to come back here, I decided to revamp the programming with all the techniques I learned after putting this game aside. It did take me some time to port over my player/missile multiplexer and align with the scrolling action. 

Does anyone know of a Sprite Player / Missile Data Editor directly on the Atari 8-bit. Should be able to encode the data, so it can be used within the source code of programs. I have several Font Editors, but those are geared toward 8 pixel high cells.
 

I agree line numbers were also a major issue with earlier Basics. Programmers tend not to include comments to save memory. Plus some basics can execute GOTOs faster than GOSUB RETURN. All you see if GOTO 3000, without knowing what happens at line number 3000. This is also known a "spaghetti code."  When I learned about structure programming in college, my whole world of game making changed. It is also other Basic's available for the 8-bit that changed things like Turbo Basic XL, Basic XL, Basic XE, and recently Fast Basic. 
 

Here is a video for everyone to enjoy. Comment and discussion here.
 
 
 
 
 

I can tell anyone looking to programming. YouTube in recent years has become a great resource about this stuff. In any programming languages. Rather if it is on older or new machines. There are 3 building blocks. 
Sequence: List of tasks in order desired to be done.
Selection: Doing tasks if conditions are true or false.
Iteration: Doing a list of tasks that can be repeated. May do it while or until one or more conditions are true or false.
 
 
 
 
 

A few years ago, I had a discussion with a few friends about taking old stock NES controller or similar pads, create a 7800 compatible board and plug, and resell them. There is a site selling these for $10. But that is already adding a lot to the final price after the mark up. You always have an option to have someone 3D print some also. A lot of this will depend on your potential market. I did searches and see there are many shells for the xBox, Playstation, and other systems. You may need to cover up the unused holes.

https://www.retromodding.com/products/nes-controller-shell?variant=41029607096476&currency=USD&utm_medium=product_sync&utm_source=google&utm_content=sag_organic&utm_campaign=sag_organic

7800 Basic does. Actually 7800 does not have line numbers as it is a cross platform compiler that you edit code with a text editor.
 

This has been a topic since the later 1980s. Is that using GOTO's in Programming is bad. At least unconditional straight GOTO statements. The theory is the more GOTOs a program has, the more bugs it has and the harder it is to fix something if it is not functioning correctly. I know the default Atari Basic, makes it hard to write programs without using them, because you need to do IF-THEN-GOTO to execute code that takes several lines if a condition is true. Also need GOTOs to create Loops in Games or other programs. I know Basic XL, Basic XE, Turbo Basic, and Fast Basic include statements like IF ELSE ENDIF, REPEAT UNTIL, WHILE WEND, DO LOOP. These reduce the need of GOTOs. With Atari Basic, I need to use GOTOs with IF statements to simulate the function of a Block IF. This is also happening with Atari 7800 Basic.  
 
 

7800 Basic does. Actually 7800 does not have line numbers as it is a cross platform compiler that you edit code with a text editor.
 

You would first need a custom board with Pokey mapped at a location for programs to identify it.

If Atari or GCC put it into the Atari 7800, it would had been on par with the Nintendo NES and Sega Master System. The Atari 7800's weakspot was the sound and music. 

If Atari or GCC put it into the Atari 7800, it would had been on par with the Nintendo NES and Sega Master System. The Atari 7800's weakspot was the sound and music. 

A few years ago, I had a discussion with a few friends about taking old stock NES controller or similar pads, create a 7800 compatible board and plug, and resell them. There is a site selling these for $10. But that is already adding a lot to the final price after the mark up. You always have an option to have someone 3D print some also. A lot of this will depend on your potential market. I did searches and see there are many shells for the xBox, Playstation, and other systems. You may need to cover up the unused holes.

https://www.retromodding.com/products/nes-controller-shell?variant=41029607096476&currency=USD&utm_medium=product_sync&utm_source=google&utm_content=sag_organic&utm_campaign=sag_organic

There were also programs that compressed hard drive partitions and acted as a hard drive. I heard stories about people loosing the whole partition and there were viruses that wrote random data and scrambled the compressed data and the user loosing their stuff forever.
 

Found this. Someone published this SoftRAM program claiming it uses compression and re-arranging stuff to double RAM on a Windows system. But did not use any compression.
Now I was able to increase amount of memory available on cartridges with compression and what I did actually worked. 
 
 

There were also programs that compressed hard drive partitions and acted as a hard drive. I heard stories about people loosing the whole partition and there were viruses that wrote random data and scrambled the compressed data and the user loosing their stuff forever.
 

Found this. Someone published this SoftRAM program claiming it uses compression and re-arranging stuff to double RAM on a Windows system. But did not use any compression.
Now I was able to increase amount of memory available on cartridges with compression and what I did actually worked. 
 
 

I understand it was suppose to have the original Antic/GTIA chip to make it backward compatible, but have an extra display chip (one for Atari ST) for modes with more onscreen colors. 

I need to emulate an Atari 5200 Bank Switching Cartridge format in either Atari8004Win and/or Altirra. I know both are programmed in C, which I only learned and started to use within the last year. I don't have a lot of experience with the language at the present time. So I am looking for some C programming GURUs to assist me on making some additional entries in possible bank switching schemes. I hope there are some fluent C programmers on here.