So hey, here's extended footage of my latest Atari 2600 game... and the first since 2005's Solar Plexus! It's called No Quarter, and it's exactly what it will give you as you scramble for coins, ducking and dodging the drips of a diabolical acid rain storm. Grab a coin and return it to the left hand side of the screen for big points... collect $1.50 and you're off to a new stage, with a new brick arrangement and gaps in the floor. Be sure to jump them! You don't want to know what may lurk inside...
I'm really proud of this. It's way better than Solar Plexus, and it was built to fit in an 8K cartridge, without ARM chips, without "vibe coding" (didn't think teledildonics was appropriate for this game anyway), and with a whooooole lot of help from the AtariAge community.
The planned title screen for No Quarter,
with a moth flying out of Byron's hand.
The portrait of Byron was flickery and
chomped up a lot of memory, so it
had to be scrapped.
Mike Saarna (the namesake of the "Saarnac pit" in the fourth stage) gave the game a voice with his sound library, and Karl G ("we're going to see G, over THERE!") provided the routine that plays those sound effects. JWeirer resurrected his title screen maker at my request, and while I couldn't make the screen as elaborate as I wanted in 8K, it's still pretty sharp. Albert Yarusso and the hosts of ZeroPage Homebrew offered some helpful suggestions to make the game more fun and fair, and Duane Alan Hahn, aka Random Terrain, gave me a chance to hit the ground running after a twenty year absence with his exhaustive online guide.
On the lower rungs of special thanks are Fred Quimby, the creator of Batari BASIC who seems to have ceded its development to Saarna and Hahn, Jeff Minter and the late Satoru Iwata, for their games Headbanger's Heaven and Money Wars, and Howard Scott Warshaw, for no other reason than giving me the golden opportunity to take a swing at his most infamous game. (You'll know it when you see it.)
It was fun making this game. My ColecoVision and Master System games take about a month and a half to make... No Quarter was functional in a week, and moved up to "pretty damn decent for fifty year old hardware" in another week and a half. The beauty of the Atari 2600 lies in its simplicity... it can't do much, but what it can do it does very well, and simple changes that take maybe a line of code can have a profound impact on the gameplay. A lot of the modes in Combat were achieved just by hitting switches in the TIA. Boom, now you've got three planes instead of one!
Also, while No Quarter is a Batari BASIC game, I've gone to great lengths to keep it from looking like one, resulting in a professional quality Atari 2600 title that looks like you could have found it on a store shelf in 1982. I don't use ASM and will never be able to harness the full power of this system, but I've done the best I could with the tools available to me, and I'd say that was more than good enough.
One more thing! To the guy/girl/bot/general annoyance who keeps posting random games on my blog entries that have little to nothing to do with those entries, stop. Of course, you won't actually stop even if I ask nicely, so I've turned off anonymous comments to ensure you will stop. Sorry to everyone else! You're going to have to post with a Google account, or whatever's available, because schmucks will be schmucks.
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