This is going to be a platformer game where you will traverse a bunch of underground rooms looking for keys and other items to help you proceed to new areas. Think scaled-down metroid-type gameplay. The goal (obviously!) will be to find your brother who is being held captive by Chinese poachers who are going to cut off his you-know-what and sell it on the black market.

Anyway, here’s the latest WIP build. Not much to do yet except jump around a few rooms, but the game engine and physics is mostly complete as you’ll see.

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=145482

This is a simple 1 player game where you try to keep the alien from stealing all of your planetary barrier.

You’ll need to run it with a Atari 2600 emulator or install it on a writable cartridge for use on Atari 2600 console.

Discussion: http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=145539

http://www.tacticalneuronics.com/content/AtariStripOff.asp

This is a simple 2 player game where you try to score goals. Oh yeah, you also have a gun. 🙂

You’ll need to run it with a Atari 2600 emulator or install it on a writable cartridge for use on Atari 2600 console.

Discussion: http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=145539

http://www.tacticalneuronics.com/content/AtariKeepAway.asp

For those of you who haven’t played it, this game has elements of Pitfall, Adventure, and Jungle Hunt. The object of the game is to return Blackbeard’s skull to your ship. To do this, you must collect two map pieces and the shovel. Once you have the map pieces, and ‘X’ will appear on the screen where the skull is buried, and you’ll need the shovel to dig it up. You’ll also need the torch to explore the caves in the game. Several enemies will make completing your mission difficult including cannibals, poisonous frogs, birds, and snakes. If you can find the sword, you’ll at least be able to defend yourself. Like Adventure, there’s a bat that likes to steal objects and drops them off on other parts of the island. As with Pitfall, there are deadly pits for you to fall into…

The player can run, jump, crouch, and sword fight. Push up to draw your sword (if you have it) and push fire to jump. Lives are on the lower left, health on the lower right, and inventory is at the bottom. You will lose the sword and the skull when you die and these will go to random locations.

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=145790

Tank combat game, running from the VCS RAM.

Release notes:

Got it! I forgot I did not use tsx to get #$FF into X any more, so I set the stack pointer to 1 so I could save a byte by doing a tsx instead of the ldx #1. I think this will be the final version.

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=143694

Some more Pandora news from it’s official blog.

Quote:

Hi there,

forgive me for not posting any updates for a loooong time – first I have been rather busy with shipping out 200 WIZ (and I’m just one single person doing all that), then there’s the typical daily work like managing the File Archives, checking the boards… well, and I have to do all this in my spare time since I (like anybody else in the project) still has to earn some money as we can’t live from the Pandora.

Anyways, I’ve just been able to check up everything that happened and where the status is, and during the last weeks A LOT of good stuff has happened.

Shall we start?

1. The boards

We had to fix one minor fault a few weeks ago and already received and tested five new ones – and the good news is: They’re ALL working fine (no soldering problems, all our hardware tests were sucessful). So we got a 100% rate from those.
We’ll do more testing, but the planned first mass production run (100 boards which will actually be used for final Pandoras) is on July 13th, though it might be a few days earlier or later. Of course we’ll try to get some pictures of the first 100 boards for you.

2. The analogue nubs
You might’ve read that there were some problems with the analogue nubs. Well, they had serious firmware problems and the company went bankrupt… so we had two problems: We need to pay TWICE (the new company we got has to be paid again) and the firmware had to be fixed. Both has happened already. The new firmware is already there (Pickle showed the new nubs in a video) and it is working without an problems. Another issue solved 🙂

3. The Keymat
It was pretty perfect already, however, the pressure and gaming controls could be enhanced. So we did that – and the new version is already at the moulding company, so the new mats shall also be finished very soon. As there were some keys misaligned, we used the time to fix that up, too.
If you want to know what exactly happened: wider holes around screw pegs, made game button cups wider to make them softer, slightly more travel to 1mm, keypad buttons raised 0.5mm, a couple of other little guide holes moved.

4. CE and FCC
CE tests will happen as soon as I get a finished board and prototype case, which should happen while the case moulds are being done, so there’s no time problem. I’ve got a few CE testing companies around the corner where I can just drop-by and test everything. We shouldn’t have a problem with FCC either – as we only need FCC if we sell WITHIN the US. We don’t do that yet, we sell from UK and Germany, so FCC is not necessary. It WILL have to be done once there’s a US based reseller, but that’s nothing to worry about for the first batch.

5. The case
That’s our only issue for now, we’re still working on fixing minor issues. It really does take a long time making something near perfect – and that’s what we plan to do. Another problem is that neither CNC nor SLA cases are good enough to check if everything fits perfectly. Don’t worry, there’s already a solution for that.
The only thing we had to fix is the height of the DPad (so it works better) and the hinge. The rest was already pretty good. So we most probably won’t need another CNC case, just another DPad which can be done within a few days. We hope Dave will be ready will all that fixes until next week. Yeah, we know that’s a long time… but because of the financial crisis (once agin…) a lot of guys at Daves work lost their job and he now basically has to do twice the work at his daytime job, leaving him less time to work on the Pandora case. We’re really really grateful he does work on it making it perfect.
Now, onto the solution I mentioned above: The moulding company offered their help. Together with the final model data, they will receive basically a complete Pandora (all parts, LCD, hinge, board, keymat, etc.) and will check before moulding that everything will fit. They are very experienced with stuff like that, so that does help a lot. The downside is that this adds a few more days (moulding now takes approx. 45 days instead of 35) but it will ensure that everything fits and we don’t have to start all over again.
That time frame also does allow us to do CE testing and change some stuff if need be without losing any time.

6. Software
Software and drivers are already VERY advanced. Mostly everything works fine, only WiFi is giving some issues. The hardware is fine, lowlevel tests with WiFi do work, but it doesn’t work yet within the Angström image. If we can’t fix it until the Pandora is ready, it will be fixed with an (automatic) firmware update, don’t worry.

So, I hope I could show you what did happen. Of course, there were a lot more boring things going on (organizing between all the companies, signing NDAs, talking about licenses, etc.) but I think I did post the most interesting parts here.

Basically, to put it in a nutshell:

Board: Finished and working
Keymat: Finished and in production
Analogue Nubs: Issue solved, nubs tested and working fine
CE Testing: Pending (will be done during case moulding)
Case: Last fixes being applied, should go to case mass production company by next week

That’s it for the status report, thanks for reading… and even more thanks for KEEPING with us 🙂
Comments like “We will rather wait a few days more but get a perfect device” has been what lead us to all those fixed – we could have gone into mass production with those minor flaws, but it should be a gaming console, so gaming controls shouldn’t only be working but working perfectly. Thanks again!

http://www.openpandora.org/blog.php

Here comes some more hot information about the Pandor directly from the official blog.

Quote:

Hiya, it’s EvilDragon again.

I got some more fresh news, and those are not about delaying or anything like that.

As you have all read, the only driver problem is WiFi. To put things short (and as they are pretty complicated), here is what was our problem:

There’s a closed-source driver available for the WiFi chip, but we didn’t at all want to use it (hey, we’re OPENPandora, not ClosedPandora). Then we found an OpenSource project for that WiFi chip – we used it and it worked well at the beginning (you might remember some WiFi testing videos).
But that driver was poorly coded – and it did have more and more problems. We can’t even get to work it anymore with the latest Angström image, only with our testing rootfs (which is good, as we do know that the hardware is fine.

Well, DJWillis wanted to take on the WiFi task – and it’s already looking really good. He found another driver which should work way better – and it already compiled with our latest kernel.

So basically, that WiFi issue MIGHT be solved faster than we thought. There’s still a lot of work needed, but this has been a HUGE progress.

I’ll keep you informed.

Thanks to http://www.dcemu.co.uk for the news head ups!

http://www.openpandora.org/blog.php

‘Parallel Worlds: Combined’ is a new platforming game strata8 is currently working on. In it, there are various ‘worlds’. Each world will have it’s own levels, characters, and enemies, and music. It features a unique camera system, realistic AI, fantastic levels and music, and, of course, my own ‘Jelli’ world, designed entirely by the author himself. Extra worlds, levels, and character suggestions/submissions are very much welcomed in the ‘Parallel Worlds: Combined – Forums’.

http://forum.palib.info/index.php?topic=7298.0

A new beta release of PALib is here, it’s a programming library useful for mostly game coders.

Changes:

PAlib] Compiled with devkitARM r26 and libnds 1.3.5
[3D Sprites] The infamous viewport bug has been fixed.
[no$gba] no$gba has been updated to 2.6a as this is the only version that emulates correctly the inner workings of libnds (FIFO).
[iDeaS] iDeaS has been updated to 1.0.3.1.
[Directory structure] The whole directory structure that the library part of PAlib uses has
been changed so that it follows the standards.
[PA_Makefile] A new user-friendly pre-compilation warning & error system has been added that checks for common mistakes.
[Template] The template has been made more newbie-friendly.
[HelloWorld] This example has been rewritten with the same newbie-friendly code that the template uses.
[EFSlib] This library has been made compatible with devkitARM r26.
[PA_IO.c] This file was removed due to uselessness.
[PA_Locate()] This function was removed. There are better solutions.
[Wifi] An example on how to download files with ky_GetURL() has been added (WifidswifiDownloadFile).
All credit goes to Kumyco who let me use his code.
[PA_GetHTTP()] As this function was broken, it was removed from PAlib. Use ky_GetURL() instead
(look at the WifidswifiDownloadFile example)
[Keyboard] The keyboard now supports the whole US-ASCII character set. The four characters “{“, “}”, “|” and “~”
were added, the first three replacing “[“, “]”, “” in capslock mode. The visual representant for the apostroph looks
no longer like an acute accent.
[Keyboard] Added key repeat functionality for uppercase letters and symbols.

http://forum.palib.info/index.php?topic=7048.0

Sprite NitroFS is supposed to be come a sprite library. For now it can can only load sprites from FAT/NitroFS.

Discussion: http://forum.palib.info/index.php?topic=7423.0

https://sites.google.com/site/tomdevsndshomebrew/