A Homebrew Draws Near!
A blog series by @Scrobins
Episode 19: Montezuma’s Revenge
Introduction:
Many of the stories behind the homebrew games shared here began years before their publication or even any real development, like Trophy by Gradual Games. Some celebrated homebrews are ports of beloved games from another time, like Ultimate Frogger Champion, among several of KHAN Games’ works. And sometimes these two narratives come together as a game with a long history is re
Yet another space invaders boardset on the bench, this time it isn't a deluxe boardset. After hooking it up it would boot to only showing one invader, not making it any further than that.
First thing I do in a case like this is double check the ROM strapping so I can hook up the test ROM. This one was configured for 9316B mask ROMs, so I was able to just drop my test ROM in with no issue. From there, the test ROM told me the the exact issue, it was RAM C.
Before I flat o
Finished the museum's inside, except for two things:
programming the raisin room activity, and
composing and putting in museum background music.
I'll compose the music tomorrow and work on the raisin room stuff on Friday.
I had to move the score's position to the right because it was interfereing with the rooms that went up. After four or so excrutiating hours, Stupidman can walk freely around the museum.
More work on Act 2. Tidied the museum up a little...
And began the insides of the museum:
I'm not going to work on this tomorrow because it's my birthday tomorrow so I don't want to get angry on my birthday. I plotted the inside of the museum. I made a map of what I want the inside to look like:
The plan is to use six types of room, each with their own collision detection boundaries so Stupidman doesn't go over the walls. So each "T" style room will be the same (the
Genre: Basketball
Publisher: Milton Bradley
Total time played: 1.5 Hours
Short review: A primitive basketball game featuring 2 of the NBA’s all-time greatest players.
Interesting links related to Jordan Vs. Bird One on One
Written Review – Arnpoly Soundtrack Video Playthrough An Interesting Work Around
Old video games always were always trying new things to portray sports in a way that hid the limitations of the primitive hardware. Many of the early NES sports games were
Put in the act 2 introduction tonight. Stupidman arrives at the museum.
Next, I'll put in the museum's inside. Stupidman has to arrive at the room where the raisin is kept. But which room is it? Stupidman doesn't know. Because he's stupid. So next, you'll help him find the raisin room. The museum's inside will look and feel like Adventure for the Atari 2600. Instead of dragons wanting to eat you, it'll be Ming vases floating around and if you touch one, you'll lose a lot of points. But
Fatal Frame, otherwise known as "Project Zero," or simply "Zero" in other parts of the world is unlike any other horror game series I've ever played. Now granted, I haven't actually played very many horror games, I'm usually a bit too much of a chickenshit for them... but I first discovered Fatal Frame early in my childhood, and it's been permanently seared in to my brain ever since.
The concept behind the series is quite simple. You explore an abandoned, haunted location full of hosti
In the final installment of a 3 part audio play we find out how everything is connected and who Terry, the towns gravedigger, really is. If you have heard last year's audio play you may even notice a bit of a connection. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental Keep up with everyone: Matt
Homebrews to play for the Halloween season Is that even a thing?
Find out in the episode as we talk about that along with several games and off topic items, including Die Hard and James Bond.
Audio Podcast version: https://anchor.fm/deadeye-bit/episodes/HiF-009---Homebrews-for-Halloween-e198rv2
Joining me in the episode are my fellow Homebrew Team Members on Video Game Sage, talking about Halloween 85/86, Scare Carts, Spook-o'-tron, Micro Mages, Curse of Illmoore Bay, Sacred Line, an
On the bench today was a Space Invaders Deluxe that I had grabbed off the pile. This one had unfortunately been a parts unit, as someone had taken several parts off the board, probably to fix another Space Invaders board. It was also pretty dirty, so I had to give it a bath.
After washing the board, my first thing was to attend to the missing parts. It was missing a 9316 (Really a 74161 counter), a 74ls04, and an Intel 3245. The intel 3245 has become a bit more difficult to get a hold
Began work on act 1. (I'm calling them "acts" instead of "levels" because it seems more like an interactive play than a video game.) The score starts out at 999,999 and ticks down each second you are playing it. In the end, I may have to make it 9,999 instead of 999,999, but for now I'll leave it as is. Here is Stupidman's Stupidmobile cruising down Main Street of Faketown.
To simulate scrolling, the tree moves from right to left. It's funny how only one small tree doing that makes it
Last repair from today's pile of Centipede boards. This one kept on resetting when it loaded the initial mushrooms.
One thing I noticed is that all the legs on the ROMs were corroded, so first thing I did was clean them using TarnX as the legs were made from silver. Just as a note, the easiest way to tell whether or not the legs are silver are if they turned black from corrosion. Normal EPROM legs will not do this.
Even after cleaning the legs, the game still would not boot, so th
This isn't going to be as much of a log, but I had a centipede on the bench with really quiet and distorted sound, it ended up just being a bad LM324 preamp at K10. The way I troubleshooted this one was literally by stacking a known good one right on top of the bad one. I did a little video to showcase exactly what I am talking about:
Edit: just to emphasize how common of a failure this is, I worked on 8 centipede boards today, 3 out of the 8 had a bad/failing LM324. It's g
This was probably one of the quickest repairs I've ever had. I got a pile of Atari Centipede boards I needed to test and get up and running, what's nice about that is that I can swap things around quickly.
First board I looked at had corrupted graphics. The game was running just fine, but the sprites were all wrong. Some were fully corrupted and most were completely wrong.
So with centipede, it has two 2516/2716 equivalent ROMs for storing the sprite data. They are located at F7 a
I worked some more on this last night and this morning, creating the cutscene before level 1. I made two songs. One is a little deeledeedle-type one for the Crisis Phone. The other one is a more serious sounding problem for when the mayor is describing the problem. Then Stupidman hurries to his Stupidmobile. But since I haven't done that yet, it just loops to the beginning of the level 1 cutscene once Stupidman exits the right side of the screen. I tried to make it go back to the title screen, b
The guys welcome special guest Wes from Reel Talk: A Movie Podcast for the 4th annual unappreciated horror movie episode. Each of the guys brings some intriguing movies. Wes and Jason find they love 1970's vampire twins and Matt reveals why he really skipped Luke's wedding. Keep up with everyone: Matt Video Game Blog Movie Review Facebook Group Movie Review YouTube Channel Luke Luke wrote a novel, Into the Wallwood, you can buy it HERE Jason Follow his art page on Facebook - Jason Shepard Ar
After making Hamburgers for the NES, while I was asleep last night, I dreamt some ideas for an NES version of a superhero I made up a long time ago. Presenting Stupidman! He is a superhero, but he's also dumber than a pile of bricks. The subtitle is "A Date To Remember." This is because someone stole the world's oldest raisin from the museum. (Yes, I know, it's raisin, but not date. This is intentional.)
So a few hours of work later, I have a title screen. I still need to compose music for
The second installment of a 3 part audio play that will be released this October. All 3 installments revolve around strange stories in a small town narrated by Terry, the towns gravedigger. This installment features the story of a serial killer. Disclaimer: Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincident
Genre: Shooter
Publisher: Hudson Soft
Total time played: 40 Hours
Short review: A vertical and horizontal shooter that is easy to pick up and nearly impossible to master.
Interesting links related to Starship Hector
Full Playthrough (19min 16sec) Soundtrack This Won’t Take Too Long
This was my first time playing Starship Hector. When my random number generator told me this was the next game I needed to play I immediately went to find TMR playing through the game on YouTu
I'm jumping around from project to project again. Someone made me remind myself that I tried to make a port of Hamburgers for the Atari 2600. So I decided to resume work on it. I have two levels working now. Level 1 is the Big Rock Candy Mountains and level 2 is the Chocolate Cave.
Right now I can alternate between the two by changing the value in a variable in the code called "Level" to 1 or 2. What's next in work on my game is to make the game start on level 1 and then switch to lev
I got back to working on Save the Puppies. It's a game I've been making for Game Boy. Just to see if I could, I attempted to make this a 64k game. This time, I had success in making a bankswitched Game Boy game. Although I don't really know what I'll do with the extra room. Perhaps make 50 levels worth of gameplay with it?
Worked on it yesterday, trying to make it compatible with GBDK-2020. I managed to do that. Then I played it on a Super Game Boy. It had obvious audio issues, which, with
The first installment of a 3 part audio play that will be released this October. All 3 installments revolve around strange stories in a small town narrated by Terry, the towns gravedigger. This installment features a story of Nate, a new boy in town who meets a girl and her dog while walking in the woods. Keep up with everyone: Matt Video Game Blog Movie Review Facebook Group Movie Review YouTube Channel Luke Luke wrote a novel, Into the Wallwood, you can buy it HERE Jason Follow his art pa
The U2000/U5000/K7*00 series of monitors are some of my least favorite monitors to work on. They produce a nice image when working, but that's the tough one, they have a lot of flaws. For example, they drive the neck transistors really hard, causing them to get really hot and singe the neck board, which makes it a nightmare to replace the transistors because the traces pull right up. It also has a pretty flawed design with the vertical deflection circuit. The way it derives the voltage for the t
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