space car '78 release

I had originally expected, even when thinking of targeting a dozen or more platforms, to create several Atari 2600 games before tiring of it ... but I have been researching the Atari 8 bit recently and I am keen to get to this platform sooner rather than later... so this is the end of the Atari 2600 work for a while.

spacecar78 (NTSC).a26
spacecar78 (PAL).a26

control car with joystick (left / right) - I wasn't happy with driving controller support, so backed out on that.

title screen

select difficulty
50 / 60 Hz (PAL only)

some road...

some more road...

still more road...

name placeholders...

plausible names for future games to come, some will happen, some will not...

• sploort! ‘76 - maybe more of an art piece than a proper game (Atari 2600 / Atari 8 bit)
• splitting hairs '77 - a mysterious thing (Atari 8 bit / Mega Drive)
• dart ‘78 - sliding (Atari 2600 / Atari 8 bit)
• v-type ‘78 - vertical shooter, maybe a pun in the name too (Atari 8 bit)
• cage ‘79 - capture them (Atari 8 bit)
• greed '79 - before it's too late (Atari 8 bit)
• h-type ‘79 - horizontal shooter, don't think this one is a pun (Atari 8 bit)
• balance ‘80 - balancing the various challenges of life (Atari 8 bit)
• the tranquility of solitude '80 - just a title for now (Atari 2600 / Atari 8 bit / Mega Drive)
• triffids '80 - survival (Atari 8 bit)
• blockotron ‘81 - shooter (Atari 2600 / Atari 8 bit / Mega Drive)
• froth '82 - nothing / everything (Atari 8 bit)
• lucre ‘82 - get the money (Atari 8 bit)
• fanorona ‘82 - fanorona (Atari 8 bit / Mega Drive)
• jarndyce '83 - hopper (Atari 8 bit)
• bloody shambles, of course '84 - driving / shooting (Atari 8 bit / Mega Drive)
• leech boy and tick girl '84 - just the name for now, inspired (tenuously) by real world events (Atari 8 bit / Mega Drive)
• creep '85 - maze thing
• perpetual man child '89 - runner (Atari 8 bit / Mega Drive)

space car '78 progress...

I haven't been working on this much... slowly making progress
Too many other things to do, games to play...

spacecar78-alpha-NTSC.bin
spacecar78-alpha-PAL.bin

title screen

select difficulty, 50 / 60 Hz

some road...

some more road...

still more road...

platform 3 - Mega Drive

I haven't been going forward with spacecar '78 as quickly as expected for various reasons - one of which might be the arrival of platform 3 the Mega Drive.

The EverDrive cartridge allows loading of mega drive binaries from SD card and is the easiest method I found to allow running my code on the Mega Drive.

At the current rate I might not get to programming the Mega Drive for a year or two - at least I can use it for "research" during that period :)

Mega Drive II

EverDrive MD

SIO2PC USB action shot

SIO2PC USB action shot

next game - space car '78

Sio2pc USB - Atari 8 bit peripheral emulator

Another recent arrival from lotharek in Poland - connect the serial port of an Atari to a PC USB port to emulate Atari peripherals - disk drives, cassette player, printer (text).

This will probably be the easiest way to execute my code on the 8 bit hardware.

Sio2pc USB