I completed my third game for the Atari 2600 - SISYPHUS
More of a philosophical/existential joke than game, to be honest. You, Sisyphus, are condemned by the gods to roll a massive rock up a hill.
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| Every time you fail, the rock gets a point. |
(I made a mobile friendly web thing that played with the same idea before)
I used several community tools to pull this off - it's written in batari Basic (consulting Random Terrain's extensive documentation page)... I used my own PlayPal 2 and PlayfieldPal-bB for the graphics... my "IDE" was the Atari Dev Studio for Visual Studio Code, I used the Atari 2600 Label Maker for a semi-authentic looking frame (for some art I bought from shutterstock) In some ways the newest/most interesting tool was using the emulator Stellerator to put an in-browser version playable online.
Christian Speckner, creator of Stellerator, actually uses my first Atari game FlapPing (née JoustPong) as an example embedded demo
Stellerator has detailed instructions, but isn't 100% clear on "how do I just make a simple webpage loading an external .bin ROM". The example demo embeds the ROM as a base64 string, but here is the javascript that includes an XMLHttpRequest to load the byte array from the .bin, my additions in bold.
<script src="stellerator_embedded.min.js"></script>
<script>
{
// Shortcut to avoid typing out the namespace
const Stellerator = $6502.Stellerator;
// Create the stellerator instance
const stellerator = new $6502.Stellerator(
// The canvas element
document.getElementById('stellerator-canvas'),
// The URL from which the web worker will be loaded
'stellerator_worker.min.js'
);
window.addEventListener('resize', () =>
stellerator.isFullscreen() || stellerator.resize());
(async function(){
const response = await fetch('../sisyphus.bin');
const image = await response.arrayBuffer();
const byteArray = new Uint8Array(image);
stellerator.run(byteArray, Stellerator.TvMode.ntsc);
})();
// Expose the instance for tinkering.
window.stellerator = stellerator;
}
</script>The .js files are available in a zip file from the github page.
My Sisyphus embed page has minimalist HTML, the FlapPing Demo is a little more robust about resizing and with more instructions.


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