An 8-bit road less traveled: Great Atari 800 Games Part I
Great 8-bit home computer games didn't start and end with the C=64 in the 80's. Classic 8-bit computer games were enjoyed on many other computers, the Atari 800 being arguably the premier computer gaming platform in the USA for about 3 years (1980-1982). This dominance ended when the low cost and slightly more powerful, mass market C=64 hit discount retail shelves. But, there were more than 5000 Atari 8-bit games released during the 80's and beyond. Many of which were outstanding. Of course many people have heard of or remember games such as Zork, Mule, Star Raiders, and Ball Blazer. But do more than a handful know that the Atari 800 was the original machine of many great future Commodore ports? Do they also know that the Atari 800 had many great original games that never made it to any other machines? As a side note, and as an ironic twist, do many Amiga fans know the Atari 8-bit computers were designed by Jay Miner The same Jay Miner who would go on to create the Amiga Computer when Commodore bought Amiga Corporation out from under former Commodore President and new Atari owner, Jack Tramiel? (whew!)
A couple years back, I started to create a database of all the Atari 800 games. I planned to play every Atari 800 game in emulation and give each a 1-10 rating, write a sort description, and compile release date and publisher / developer information. While I never got to play ALL of the games ever released, I did try about 1000 different titles with the Atari 800 Win Emulator I continue to try games with the emulator and add them to the database, but I don't have the same free time I once had. Based on those ratings, what follows are some of the lesser known, but still great Atari 8-bit computer games.
Fort Apocalypse
Synapse is one of the great lost companies of the early 80's. They took some pre-existing basic concepts and created advanced versions that far surpassed the games they were based on. Fort Apocalypse is a 4 ways flying helicopter shoot-em-up. It was released for the C=64 and Atari 800 in 1982 and also as an XE Game System title in 1986. Steve Hales wrote the Atari version as well a as the classics Slime and Dimension X before the demise of Synapse in 1984 (yet another company supposedly put out of business because the Tramiels decided not to pay their vendors and contract developers). This is a game that Steve says was inspired by the movie Blue Thunder and owes at least a part of it's origin to games like Choplifter and Defender. The game is suitably different from those, enough so that it is a classic in itself, as it included 4-way underground chopper movement in an action/adventure setting.
The object of the game is to traverse the underground "fort", destroy enemy installations, ordinance, aircraft while rescuing hostages and keeping an eye on your fuel. Fuel can be replenished by landing on "fuel" platforms. You must patiently wait for your chopper to refuel while enemy attack from all sides. Technically speaking, this is an examples of a great looking, playing Atari 800 game. I remember buying this one from a Big Ben's record store in Van Nuys (while visiting my grandma). Steve and I took turns reading the back of the box and the instructions the entire day and ride home. Still, after all these years, I seem to have forgotten just how difficult the Synapse games were as this one is a real bitch to play.
(Above: Fort Apocalypse being played with the Atari800win emulator. )
Halcyon Days Interview With Steve Hales
Atari Mania Fort Apocalypse Page (Rom download available).
Rally Speedway
Rally Speedway was released by Adventure International in 1983 (and later ported to the C=64). It's a game not unlike Mattel Intellivision Auto racing, but much easier to control. I never had this title when I was a wide-eyed child of the 80's, but I remember seeing ads for it in Antic, Analog, and Electronic games. I was a big fan of the Intellivision game, and always wondered how a similar game would play out on the Atari 8-bit computers. Written by John Anderson, this racer is fast, hectic, and fun. You push the stick forward to start your car, then use the left and right directions to steer. The car accelerates automatically, and the button is used to brake. I wish more developers understood that steering left and right AND pushing UP and down for accelerate and brake is an impossible task (I wish all of the Atari ST / Amiga developers in the 80's had played this game).
Two players can play on the screen at the same time, If one of the player is too slow, his car will magically "catch up" to the leader car so the game stays competitive even if one player is much better than the other. It features two courses, and many game play option such as road conditions and top speed of the race cars . It also has some hilarious animations when your car crashes. I find this game fun. but very hard to play at top speed. I must just be too old for these games now.
(Above: Rally Speedway being played with the Atari800win emulator. )
Youtube.com Rally Speedway Video
Atari Mania Rally Speedway Page (Rom download available)
Montezuma's Revenge
Montezuma's Revenge was released by a couple different companies in the 80's. Parker Brothers released and Atari 800 cartridge version, while the original Utopia Software Disk version was published in 1983 (a year earlier). The Parker Brother's release is a 16K only version (a 5200 game that can only be played via emulation) and it eliminates many of the features of the 48K original. Contrary to Wikipedia, this game was originally released for the Atari 800 (they list every system but). This ancient tomb exploration game was written by Robert Jaeger (at the tender age of 16!) and released in 1983. It was also released for most other game and computer systems of the time.
In the game, you guide your hero, Panama Joe, through a series of ever more difficult rooms collecting treasure, solving puzzles, and avoiding traps and enemies. Equipment and keys are found along the way to help Joe in his quest to score as many points as possible.
It's a pretty fun game. I liken it to close to Pitfall II but with many more puzzles, enemies, and treasures. The game has 100 rooms to challenge the user, and I am not good enough to get by more than 5 or 6. This is another game that I have marked to play again some time and I hope to find that time soon. I remember that we had a pirated version of this game (the real one, not the 16K Parker Bros. version). I think I even mapped out most of the rooms back when we had summers worth of free time.
(Above: Montezuma's Revenge being played with the Atari800win emulator. )
Youtube.com Montezuma's Revenge Video
Atariprotos.com Montezuma's Revenge Page
Atari Mania Montezuma's Revenge Page (Rom Download available)
Mr Robot and His Robot Factory
In 1993, Datamost released Mr Robot and His Robot Factory by Ron Rosen and Robert McNally for the Atari 800 . This is another gem that I remember having in the 80's. It was blatant rip off of Miner 2049er, but with much better visual and sound effects. This one was also ported to the Apple II (McNally) and Commodore 64. Ron Rosen was a very accomplished Atari 800 programmer, so I assume this was first published for the 800 and ported over. His other 2 games, Pacific Coast Highway (frogger) and Rosen's Brigade were technically outstanding if not derivative of other works (like Mr Robot).
This is a very fun, but difficult, game with 22 levels to frustrate even the best platform gamer. The coolest part of this game was the level designer included. It allowed you to create up to 26 more levels to play. The object is to collect all of the power dots on the floor of each level. You must avoid mean looking fire balls, climb ladders, jump on to moving platforms, navigate escalators, etc. It is very similar to many other games of the time, but is a quality release and probably not well known.
(Above: Mr Robot and His Robot Factory being played with the Atari800win emulator. )
Atari Mania Mr Robot page (Rom Download available)
A new version was released in 2007
That's it for part 1. There are many many more Atari 800 games to go through. In the mean time, fire up the emulator, visit Atari Mania to obtain roms, and instructions (if available), and have an 8-bit blast.
Sploder Game: Fantastic Journey
OK, here is my last Sploder game with the current engine. It's called "Fantastic Journey". Travel through a human body to fight of disease and infaction in the legs, arms, heart, brain, etc.
Play Below:
Hilarious "History Of Flash ActionScript" Video
Legendary Flash developer Scott Delamater produced this video last year for Flash's 10th anniversary. If you were there from the beginning, you'll understand just how much Flash has grown in the past 10 years.
Check out the video here.
My Second Sploder Game: Sploder Pac-Man
Sploder: Making My First Game : Death Cavern X1
I just finished my first "game" using Sploder. I suppose it is almost identical to most "first" Sploder games. It includes a massive, intricate playfield, and some randomly placed obstacles and pick-ups. You can play it below:
Making a game in Sploder is very easy. It includes a very intuitive playfield designer that a lot like the polygon creator in Flash. The basic playfield contains about a dozen "points". You can pull and move those points to re-shape the playfield. As well, you can click on any line, and new point will be created that you can use to further modify the playfield.
After making your playfield, you then drop objects into it. The objects fall into 4 basic categories: enemies, power-ups, obstacles and collectibles. If you add a collectible to the game, it instantly changes your game into a "collection" type from a basic shooter. When you are done, you can save your game, test it out, or publish it. You can also get code to embed it in your site (like above).
The design of Sploder is simple, yet elegant. It is true that right now Sploder is more like a "level editor" than a "game designer", but it does show a lot of promise. There was one object that I avoided in my first game that I plan to base a future game around: the magnet. It seems to me that the magnet, coupled with a unique playfield, could be used to create some very interesting effects. Also, the collectbiles, coupled with the invincibility power-ups could be used to create a version of Sploder Pac-Man. I may just try that one next...
Sploder: A Cool New "Game Construction Set" Site
I just followed a banner ad from our site to this new Web 2.0 style "user created content" site named Sploder . Sploder is a site that allows users to create their own "games" and share them with people, embed them on other sites, etc. It's a really cool application that has arrived at just the right time.
The types of games that can be created (right now) are limited mostly to top-down 2D physics based shooters, but the possbilities of a system like this are limitless. I like that the creators of the application did not try to "bite off more than they could chew" with this first implementation. They have wisely limited the scope of the games that could be created, and focused on making an game design engine that fairly easy to use. The types of gamesthat can be created with Sploder is fairly limited, but if this is successful, I would expect to see tons of imitators that will push Sploder itself to add more and more features and games engines to their offering.
You can design and test your games right in the web interface. Almost all features are completed using drag&drop or click&drag functionality. Sploder have created a really nice interface for making these types of games, and they have proven that "user created content" in Web 2.0 does not have to be limited to embarrassing photos of your grand parents, or videos of kids getting beat-up by cops.
Midnight Flash Game Design #4: The Cold, Clammy Grip Of Reality
Well, my plans for working an hour a night on a game in June were completely thwarted by reality. After 3 days of development, a friend of Jeff and mine requested help to finish a project. We spent nearly 7 days helping to build this game for the Bridezillas TV show. We only worked for about 54 hours programming and debugging, but that was spread over a week, and with that development, and the ensuing issues with my family afterwards ("you spent the whole weekend working on that game!") I lost nearly 2 weeks of development time for Fireworks Blast Challenge.
This is the reality of Midnight Game Development. When you give yourself such a slim margin for error (27 hours in 27 days), anything that gets in the way has the potential to be ruinous. Right now, on June 28th, with 3 days to go, I have only spent 6 hours working on Fireworks Blast Challenge in the month of June. My dream of having a fun game completed by the 1st of July, that could become viral by the 4th, is almost completely destroyed. However, I'm still pushing to get something done.
In this build I have added the edited music loop (taken from the public domain music source I mentioned a previous entry) , added fancy background graphics for the night-time (modified from some royalty-free photographs), added a scoreboard, and limited the firing of Red,White and Blue shells to the [z][x][c] keys respectively.
You can play a demo of this build of Fireworks Blast Challenge here.
I'm now working on the next build that will turn this thing into a real game. The reality of this has also hit me pretty hard. Some of the issues I've discovered are:
1. Shooting as many fireworks as possible is fun, trying to hit targets turns the game into a sub-par "Missile Command"
2. The keyboard+mouse controls seem to work, but are difficult to learn. Adding mouse control turns the game into "Whack-A-Mole", which is something I'm desperately trying to avoid.
3. I want to have some "background" fireworks going off, timed to the music loop. To do this dynamically, it would require some kind of real-time audio spectrum analysis. This is not possible in Flash 8/AS2, but it is a feature of the Sound object in Flash 9/AS3. However, if I re-do the game in Flash 9, I will be set-back even further.
So there you go. I don't feel like a failure. I just feel like a victim of reality. The month is not up yet though, and if I give myself until July 3rd, I still have a chance to create a working, viral game. The next week will be very interesting for me.
Commodork vs. Atari Nerds : Common Ground?
A few days ago we received a nice message from Rob O'Hara, the author of the the book Commodork. Rob had written in response to this blog entry, the first one that I wrote when starting this site last December. I mentioned then that while I liked his book, and it was similar to a story I wanted to tell, I would have had much more content about programming. Rob wrote to explain why he cut much of that content from his book.
Rob is an unabashed Commodore fan, while Jeff and I are Atari fans through and through. After 25 years of feuding, can Atari and Commodore fans now get along? Here is a section of Rob's message where he describes why he wrote his book Commodork, and why it might not have contained as much information about programming as he would have liked.
Greetings guys! I just ran across your website while Googling for the title of my book, "Commodork". Thank you for your kind words about my book; I really appreciate it. For years I had a nagging desire to "tell my story," but it wasn't until after I released the book and began reading reviews and getting e-mails from readers that I realized that I had really told "our" story ("our" being all of us who were there). Before I released the book I was naive enough to think that my story was unique; it was only after receiving the umpteenth e-mail from readers from other continents thanking me for telling "their" story realized just how many of "us" there were out there.When I began writing Commodork I threw all my ideas down on a piece of paper and just began writing. When I read these stories back I noticed a common theme (piracy) and so that became the thread that I hung the entire narrative on, more or less. As a result there were a few "mini threads" that I ended up dropping from the book, strings of stories that weren't long enough for a chapter of their own and didn't really flow together with the rest of the stories. (On a side note, before I released Commodork I felt like the book was too long which is why I dropped some of these "threads". In retrospect, almost every single person who's reviewed it has commented on how short the book is. Hindsight, and all that.) Anyway, one of the threads that I cut out of the book was my stories about programming. I, like you guys, was amazed the first time I actually made a computer "do" something with a few lines of BASIC.... (Rob continued to described his many programming exploits)
Anyhoo, I've rambled on long enough. Thanks again for the kind words, I'm glad you guys enjoyed the book. I look forward to scouring every inch of your website; I've really enjoyed what I've read so far this morning.Rob "Flack" O'HaraPS: Atari sucks.
Whaaa? It was going so good, and then he had to add that last line! Still though, I think we can get along. Atari or Commodore? At this point, who cares? The only thing that really matters is that Rob and Jeff and I many 1000's of others like us, all learned that we could "create" things with these early computers. Our common ground is that we learned to love computers at a time when writing your own software, tools, and games for it was almost foregone conclusion.
So yeah, we can get along, and we can bury the "Atari vs. Commodore" hatchet.
...but that doesn't mean I can't send him a picture of toilet seat labeled "Commode-Door 64", just for old times sake, does it?
Commercial Gaming Sites Start Adding Wii Browser Game Support
Most internet savvy Wii owners know that the instant start-up, Wiicade.com has been around as long as the Wii has been around, offering simple to semi-complex games designed to work well with the Wii opera browser. However, Wiicade.com is not the only site that has games targeted for the Wii Opera Browser. We at 8bitrocket.com have been doing it since the the day the browser was released in December, and many of the biggest gaming sites on the internet are now starting to add support for the Wii Browser to their already robust web gaming offerings.
This week, Cartoonnetwork.com announced that they would be specifically targeting Wii Opera browser users with a selection of new games coming soon. However, there are several sites well-known sites that have already been providing Wii opera Browser support for many months now. CandyStand.com, one of the first and most diverse gaming sites on the internet has surreptitiously added Wii Browser support. You can't find anything about it on the homepage, but if you try this url: http://www.candystand.com/wii/index.doyou will find a nice little selection of games that work well on the Wii Browser. Up and coming web games site Hotwheels.com has done something similar as well.
This can only mean good things for indie web game developers that are targeting their games for the Wii Browser. The more mainstream the support gets, the better the chance that your games will be seen and played, and the better chance you might someday see some kind of compensation for your work. No promises though.
Midnight Flash Game Design #3: Calculating Distance And Handling Keyboard Input
As I continue this project of creating a game in 27 days (hours), I have realized that my "one hour a night" estimate is almost perfectly on target. The first night of programming all about trying to fix the obvious problems with the original "Fireworks Blast" demo.
My first task then, was to make sure that all shells, no matter how high they are being fired, travel at the same velocity. For test purposes, I have set the velocity to 10 px per game loop cycle. I created a "Projectile" class, and had it calculate some important values when after being instantiated. The first thing each Projectile needs to know is where it is going. I use the variables finalX and finalY for this purpose. Secondly, it needs to calculate how far it is going to move on each movement cycle, in both the x and y directions. This is where I had the original bug. I solved this my using the the following Mathematical formula:
Math.sqrt(xd*xd + yd*yd)
In this formula, xd = the distance between the the first x value and the last x value, while yd = the distance between the first y value and the last y value. The full set of code to setup these values for calculating movement of the Projectile is here:
var xd:Number = finalX - this._x
var yd:Number = finalY - this._y
var Distance:Number = Math.sqrt(xd*xd + yd*yd)
fuse = Math.floor(Math.abs(Distance/Velocity));xunits = (finalX - this._x)/fuse;
yunits = (finalY - this._y)/fuse;
xunits and yunits are the values that I will update this projectile on each movement cycle. They have been pre-calculated here for efficiency. Fuse is how many cycles this Projectile needs to move at Velocity to reach finalX and finalY . This original bug I had was keeping this value fixed, no matter the distance the shell was being fired.
The second problem I had to fix was the keyboard input. Since the players will be firing red, white and blue shells , I needed to create an easy to remember keyboard scheme. I chose the [Z], [X] and [C] keys to launch the basic fireworks, and then added the [SPACEBAR] to launch the "super fireworks".
The first thing I needed to do was to let my game class (named "Show") listen for the keyboard.
public function Show(par:MovieClip) {
Key.addListener(this);
}
Next, I needed to add support for listening to the proper keys. I also needed to make sure players could not hold-down the key to launch multiple fireworks on purpose or by accident. I did this through a variable named keywait. Keywait is a simple counter that constantly counts up. If it is over 5, then the player can launch a firework shell. This would is 5 frames right now, but will most likely be changed when the game is optimized.
Here is my function for capturing the key presses and firing off the proper color shell;
function onKeyDown() {
if (keywait > 5) {
keywait=0
var keyval:Number = Key.getCode();
trace("Key code:" + Key.getCode());
switch (keyval) {case 90:
trace("Z");
if (score1.getRedshells() > 0 ) {
fireMouse(_root._xmouse,_root._ymouse,Stage.width/2, Stage.height,0xFF0000);
score1.setRedshells(score1.getRedshells()-1);}
break;
case 88 :
trace("X");
if (score1.getWhiteshells() > 0 ) {
fireMouse(_root._xmouse,_root._ymouse,Stage.width/2, Stage.height,0xFFFFFF);
score1.setWhiteshells(score1.getWhiteshells()-1);}
break;case 67 :
if (score1.getBlueshells() > 0 ) {
fireMouse(_root._xmouse,_root._ymouse,Stage.width/2, Stage.height,0x0000FF);
score1.setBlueshells(score1.getBlueshells()-1);}
break;case 32 :
if (score1.getFlairshells() > 0 ) {
fireMouse(_root._xmouse,_root._ymouse,Stage.width/2, Stage.height,0xFF6600);
score1.setFlairshells(score1.getFlairshells()-1);}
break;}
}
Here is my function for moving the projectiles and updating keywait so another one can be fired. This function is called every cycle as part of the main game loop.
function fMODE_PLAY_GAME () {
moveProjectiles();
renderProjectiles();
keywait++;}
I've created a demo of this version. I've already started on the next version. This one will include the music and backgrounds necessary to create the 5 different levels for the game.