Author: itvbadmin

  • Indie Game Showcase: New Star Soccer 3 – the best $20 I’ve spent in a LONG TIME!

    Do all the fancy controls of the Fifa series confuse, frustrate or annoy you? Do you value playability over fancy rendered realistic images of Ronaldo’s bald head? If you have any interest in Soccer, or role playing games, or sports game for that matter, New Star Soccer 3 might be…

  • Flash: Fixing getTimer() To Stop (Some) Game Cheaters

    The one and only Flash Guru Jobe Maker posted this story on his blog today: Cheating – Controlling the Speed of Games Externally Jobe Writes: From what I’ve heard this technique will not slow the Flash frame rate, but rather affects the return result of getTimer(). As you probably know,…

  • The Atari History Timeline: 1973

    1973 March: Pong Is A hit!  By March of 1973, Pong  was deemed a bona fide phenomenon for Atari Inc..   They had sold 8000-10000 machines, and would eventually sell upwards of 35,000.     In one year, Atari made a little over $3.2 million dollars.   However, there was a black side…

  • Jobe Makar’s Blog

    Jobe Makar, one of the premier authorities on Flash game programming, and one of the geniuses behind the Electro-server multi player Flash server has started a blog that ANYONE interested in Flash game programming or Flash programming in general should check out. Jobe is the real deal, and besides knowing…

  • The Atari History Timeline: 1971-1972

    1971: Spring : Bushnell Creates Computer Space  Nolan Bushnell created the first coin-op video game in his daughter’s bedroom in 1971 while working for Ampex.  Inspired by Steve Russell’s  Space War,  a game he played on the DEC PDP-1 at the University of Utah in the 60’s,  Bushnell worked on…

  • Advanced Flash 8 Game Programming : Using Actionscript to loop mp3 files. Plus free music for your games!

    While I am in the process of completing the next lesson for my Advanced Flash Game Programming set of tutorials, I have decided to take a little break and create some music loops for my games. Yesterday, via snail mail, I received a little gem I purchased called Magix Music…

  • Yet Another forum .NET: A Very Easy To Install And Use .NET Forum Application

    We just added new Forums to 8bitrocket.com and it took 3 hours. That’s 3 hours from downloading the source, to skinning and configuring it for us. We used the open source Yet Another Forum .NET and we are very pleased. I have been looking for a decent, easy to integrate…

  • Is Silverlight A Flash Killer? Hardly…Unless You Want Built-In 3D Support

    Microsoft recently announced the beta of Silverlight, their obvious stab at taking market-share from the Adobe Flash Platform. As a die hard Flash developer, I was very interested to see just what Silverlight could do, so I decided to download the beta and try out some of the examples on…

  • Advanced Flash 8 Game Programming : Pixel level collision detection Part III (or let’s start a real game)

    In Part 1 – Advanced Flash 8 Game Programming : Pixel level collision detection I discussed the very basics of doing Pixel level hit detection with the bitmapData object. In Advanced Flash 8 Game Programming : Pixel level collision detection Part II (or let’s add Bitmap animation caching) I added…

  • Advanced Flash 8 Game Programming : Pixel level collision detection Part II (or let’s add Bitmap animation caching)

    In Part 1 – Advanced Flash 8 Game Programming : Pixel level collision detection I discussed the very basics of doing Pixel level hit detection with the bitmapData object. In this second part, I am going to add one more small feature that hopefully will improve the performance of your…

  • Wii Opera Browser: A Storm In A Tea Cup?

    I’ve been creating a few demos of Flash games designed for the Nintendo Wii Opera browser, and writing a few blog entries about the process for the past few months. I even convinced the people at my Day Job to create a section highlighting all the games we currently offer…

  • Advanced Flash 8 Game Programming : Pixel level collision detection

    I had to take a little break after finishing Retroblaster to unwind before I started making games again. I plan to re-write my game loop and much of my game code in this public forum for a couple reasons. One is the selfish need of a cathartic outlet, and the…

  • Final Wii Browser: Thoughts Redux

    Last week I complained that the final version of the Wii Opera Browser did not support anything greater than Flash 7.0    Now it, it turns out, that this was neither Nintendo or Opera’s fault.  This information was brought to my attention earlier this week by fellow deveoper Chris Cutler (the…

  • Final Wii Browser: Thoughts

    The “final” Opera browser was released for the Wii yesterday, and after using it I have mixed feelings. They added and fixed a few things that must be noted: better interface more responsive button clicks better performance However, one glaring omission is support for Flash 8.   With tons of Flash…

  • PC Games are Dead!

    That seems a little sensational doesn’t it? Well it is exactly how I feel right now. Even if you don’t take into account the abject failure of Vista or the re-emergence of Nintendo, there are reasons why I feel the PC games are dead. I am even one of those…

  • Dear John (err, I mean Final Fantasy)

    Dear Final Fantasy , Final Fantasy , do you believe in love?  I hope you do, because I think then you can understand just what I have found. I have found true love and its’ name is Paper Mario. It is the perfect game. We’ve had some good times Final…

  • Ode To An Unreleased Game: Atari 5200 Asteroids

    Ode To An Unreleased Game: Atari 5200 Asteroids Prototype lifestyleSitting on a shelf somewhereWaiting to have life They programmed me toLaunch the 5200Into hearts and minds My graphics are greatAs if you were in the arcadeBut with no vectors I am unwieldlyI cannot be controlled I’m a maverick I am…

  • Retro Blaster High Score King, Contra, Super Mario, and Burnout 3, etc

    A very cool dude named Jason has submitted the current high score (other than mine) for Retro Blaster. It stands at 99,734,135. Send me your scores as a PNG,/JPG/ BMP/GIF screen cap and I’ll post them too. I have been searching the local stores for a copy of Konami Arcade…

  • Web Round-Up. Cool Retro Gaming stuff on the web.

    If you are new to emulation, or just want to replace some old roms or emulators you have lost, Digital Press has a nice selection of older emulators and roms. This is one of the few places on the web where you can still find a section of roms for…

  • Retro Blaster Update, Buffalo Love machine, Pixel War II

    I have Have been busy fixing bugs and tweaking settings in retro Blaster. The most significant change I have made was suggested by my old pal, Ian Legler. He suggested that I add a user selectable setting to adjust the quality of the graphics. I have added this option now…

  • Home Computer Wars Alpha Mission

    Description The first in a series of classic style shooter games in which you attempt to change history to make the Atari 800 the dominate computer system of the 80’s…by force.

  • Retro Blaster High Scores

    I have finally had a chance to play my own game all the way through and beat IRATA without cheating. My top score is 973,441,870. I have also found that even though I have put optimization upon optimization into the animation sprite map caching, it still cannot compensate for the…

  • Retro Blaster RC1 is complete!

    Retro Blaster  release candidate 1.0 is ready to play. All of my changes in the last few hours have had to do with speed and playability. The game still slows a little (a lot on some older machines) on the levels with the most objects moving, but it’s a HUGE improvement…

  • Retro Blaster Beta 1.0 is up!

    Thanks to everyone who helped me beta test .90. It has taken me a full year to get to this point. When you work full time and have a wife and young son, it is very difficult to find time to make a game. Anyway again, thanks to Steve Fulton,…

  • Retro Blaster Beta Release!

    Jeff sent me a beta release of Retro Blaster and I have posted it.   You can play it right now and start blasting everything in your path.  If only I would tell you what the link is…        

  • Free Jigsaw Game Engine (2007)

    Free License Game Engine

  • Wiicade Releases Wiimote/Flash API!

    The fine people at wiicade have created an API for Flash that will allow programmers to test for ANY button press on the Wiimote!   The A,B,+,-,1,2, and the direction pad are all available, as well as the pointer from the Wiimote.   To test this API, I took one of my unposted…

  • Carded!

    OK, so I was at Target on Friday looking for cheap games in the marked-down section (red price-tags!) and I found a copy of “Big Mutha Trickers 2” for $2.49. Since I have a weakness for trucking games, and $2.49 is my ‘buy it now’ price-point, I had to get…

  • The Asteroids Evolution to Retro Blaster

    My first video game true love was Asteroids. I think the game must have satisfied some internal, mental need to keep things cleaned up. The Sisyphusian nature of this electronic task was enough to make me pour quarter after quarter into the machine in an attempt to just earn one…

  • My First Breakout-Style Game

    Creating Brickbasher (just added a few days ago, but programmed in 2004) was one of my first eye-opening experiences programming small garage games. I have been a fan of Breakout style games since the age of 8 (read about the story here) when I first sampled the classic Atari 2600…

  • Balloon Pop!

    So, if you have looked at our Work In Progress page you will notice that we have a lot of half-finished games and ideas that we plan to someday come back to.   To be honest, the list on that page really only scratches the surface.  I probably have 2 dozen…

  • Nintendo Wii Flash Development

    So we are just starting to experiment with Flash games designed specifically for the nintendo Wii.  I started this process on Dec. 24th, the day the Wii opera Browser was downloadable. That day I got the first version of Fireworks Blast ready to work on the Wii.   Thge first thing I…

  • Haiku: Breakout 2600

    Breakout 2600   Hypnotic death notes Each block wails an 8-bit tone Blinks out then silence   Burrow A Hole Through Your color-banded shield Watch ball go ape-crap   Difficulty B Paddle too tiny. Back to Difficulty A   One last little block Yes! I cleared level two What? No…

  • A different approach to path finding.

    I spent the last week working on jStar. After researching and working with a* for the last few days, I came to the conclusion that while very powerful, it was slow and overkill for my arcade-adventure, shoot the robots game. Also, since the player is constantly moving, the recalculations using…

  • Path finding…sucks!

    Ok, so I can count all of my previous experience programming path finding algorithms on two fingers. The first was in high school when Steve and I had a very rudimentary computer class instead of typing. One of the basic programming tasks we were asked to perform was to make…

  • Pixel Art, Game Design, Legos, and more

    Even before we owned a computer or game console, Steve and I were designing games. All the way back in 1978 I was borrowing graph paper from my dad and designing pixel art of space ships, baseball games, and what not. Computer graphics design was a brand new field, and…

  • Garage Launched Games!

    Garage Launched Games! If you haven’t read Steve’s first blog entry, you should take it in. It describes how we started making games (or at least how we started to want to make games), and gives you an idea of how little time we really have to make games in…

  • Retro Gone Berserk. Christmas is over time to start again.

    Over that last few days working on the game has been a learning experience and an exercise in frustration. I finally found a halfway decent running animation to use as a template. It came from the 2600 version of Miner 2049er. Having finally found a decent animation, I dug into…

  • Retro Gone Berserk Day Two – When you can’t draw, you improvise

    Today I had time to work on the very very basic Flash version of the demo game. I have decided to make it as close to Bersek as possible for this first tech demo.  I currently have a room generated and a player running around the room, controlled with the…

  • Retro Gone Berserk Day One

    I was able to squeeze in a little work on the new game between trips to various shopping centers for Christmas presents. One thing I wanted to research is how collision detection is done in these overhead perspective retro games. I fired up the Atari 800 KRAZY Shootout first to…