Tidbits

I seem to have been neglecting this lately.  I’m a week overdue on a programming/testing post, and it’s almost getting to the point where I’m late on a video game history lesson.  So, to prove I’m not dead, here’s a few bits of here and there.

First, if you’re in Washington, you have less than a week left to Approve Refererendum 71.  I already have.  Have you?

Now, back to games and things.  Here’s a few of my latest acquisitions.

 

This one should require no introduction or explanation.  Tengen Tetris.  I spoke about this game several times in previous entries, alluding to the legal fight between Atari and Nintendo, but always in passing.  Now that I actually have a copy, I’ll have to devote an entire article about it.  That’ll be in the future, but for now, to illustrate its awesomeness:  Two-Player Cooperative Mode.

The second notable acquisition is a Japanese Famicom game called Metafight.  Well, it’s actually “Something-Something Metafight”, but I don’t know Japanese.  The cover has some generic anime characters, one of which looks angry.  None of that really matters.  I’m not really into Japanese things and I’m not really into anime or stuff like that.  And I don’t have a Famicom system.  So, then, you ask, why would I go out of my way to buy a Japanese anime game for the Famicom?

This screenshot might help you figure it out.  It at least might look a bit familiar to you.  Maybe.  Can’t quite place it?  This’ll do it:

Metafight is the Japanese version of Blaster Master. ((And if you don’t know what Blaster Master is, well, you just need to play more NES games.))  There is no opening story sequence in Metafight, which automatically means that the plot for Metafight makes far, far more sense than the “My pet frog jumped on a box of radioactive waste in my backyard and went down a hole and I followed it and found this bad-ass hyper-agile tank in the underworld and I proceeded to fight lots of nasty creatures in my bad-ass hyper-agile tank in order to rescue my radioactive mutant pet frog and save the world from the radioactive mutants that live under the Earth’s crust” plot that Blaster Master tried to have.  Of course, since Blaster Master changed the story from whatever angry anime guy was doing to something stupid about a mutated frog, they had to change the tank ignition sequence to be in a cave, instead of Metafight’s futuristic tank garage.

But enough about that for today.  It’s time for robots.

It’s been a while since I’ve visited the land of the video game playing robots, but I assure you, I have been thinking about them.  I think the next time I get back into them, assuming I ever do, the first thing I’ll do is organize the codebase.  It was built to get it to market, but not built for future expansion.  If I want to keep going with this, I’ll need to rewrite large sections of it and separate the movement interface and screen capture plumbing from the game specific recognition and logic code.  Although it won’t be quick, that should hopefully be reasonably straightforward to do.  From there, I’d like to work on improving the control of the paddle.  A few weeks ago, I think I may have improved the precision of the controls, but I still haven’t tested it out.

At any rate, I think Pong is the wrong game to try to develop precision controls.  The trajectory projection gets in the way of making sure the paddle is moving exactly where I want it to go as fast as I can get it there.  The paddle might very well be going where I want it, but by the time it gets there, that’s no longer where I want it.  So, I think I’m going to have to try another game to tune the paddle controls.  Right now, I’m leaning toward Kaboom! as the game of choice.  It should have easy to program recognition and logic (Bomb drops straight down, move to catch bomb, repeat), and it will absolutely require precision, accuracy, and speed.  Runner up is Indy 500, but I think the pathfinding and collision avoidance knock that one out at this point, not to mention the 360 degree driving paddle.  An interesting side-note is that pretty much whatever paddle game I choose, I’ll have to deal with something I didn’t care about in Pong:  The button.

Beyond the paddle, to really get things done on the Atari 2600, I’m going to need to be able to control a joystick.  I have several options, of course.  I can try some alternative controller, like the button operated Starplex or the gravity operated LeStick, but really, or maybe try to build my own controller, but really, to claim that I built a robot that can play an Atari 2600, I have to build something to handle a good old CX40 Atari Joystick.  That’s probably not going to be easy.  The controls won’t have to be as precise as the paddle, since there’s only nine options, however, it’s going to involve control on two axes that are somewhat dependent on one another.  I’ve had thoughts involving double arms that push or pull, a swing arm with a piston, a gantry crane like setup, and something that rotates and can push the stick, and none of those ideas seem any good at all.  I’m sure I’ll think of something.