Category: Uncategorized

  • Commodork vs. Atari Nerds : Common Ground?

    A few days ago we received a nice message from Rob O’Hara, the author of the the book Commodork.  Rob had written in response to this blog entry, the first one that I wrote when starting this site last December.   I mentioned then that while I liked his book, and…

  • The Punk Rock Group’s Retro Madness

    In a bloglines.com search for Atari 800 (yes, I have THAT much free time tonight), I came across this very interesting band called The Punk Rock Group. Check out their music section for some Devo inspired retro-low-fi music hilarity in songs like Atari 800, Video Games and Toby Keith. Also,…

  • Midnight Flash Game Design #2: Public Domain Music For Flash, And A Challenge

    To continue from my last entry , I am trying to finish a Flash game in 27 days. This probably does not sound very hard, but these “days” actually equate to about 27 hours of programming time. Subtract all the time I take to write these blog entries, and time…

  • Advanced Flash 8 Game Programming: A Finite State Machine Game Loop.

    One of the most unorganized things in my games are the actual game loops. The game loop is the meat of the game and although it usually starts off to be a pretty simple select case statement running inside of an interval, once I get fully involved in a game,…

  • Atari Timeline: 1975

    1975: Atari releases Compugraph Foto Machine Atari, Inc. introduces the COMPUGRAPH FOTO, a coin-operated machine that printed life-sized pictures on computer paper for customers. .The machined weighed-in at an astronomical 950 pounds! It contained a combination of an impact line printer, a computer, and a closed-circuit TV. Advertised as Durastress’ 1975: January 31: Atari/Kee Games…

  • Guitar Hero : Air Guitar Stance Poll

    I’m very curious.  How do you others play “Guitar Hero”?  Do you playing sitting down like Keith Richards,  standing up swinging your arm like Pete Townsend,  “machine gunning” like Nigel Tufnel, or do you just feel like an idiot while playing?  Take the public poll here: http://www.8bitrocket.com/forums/Default.aspx?g=posts&m=30&#30 (no need to log-in to…

  • 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,…

  • 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: 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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 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…        

  • 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 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…

  • Retro Blaster is coming

    Right now, Steve is putting the final touches on the technical design for our 8bitrocket.com site. It won’t be spectacular looking, but that is because we want a pretty basic site.  While he is doing that, I am finishing up my latest game called Retro Blaster. It is basically Asteroids,…

  • Zamboozal Poker Dice PC-DOS (1995)

    The 1995 Version of Zamboozal Poker Dice Written in Borland C++ for DOS.