[rfk-dev] Atari 2600 question resurrected

[Dave]

On Fri, 10 Jan 2003 jeremypenner@shaw.ca wrote:

> Speaking of ports and such..
[snip]

> So, here's my proposition to you, the robotfindskitten consortium.  
> Say you have roughly 3 or 4kb of NKI text to play with.  Compression
> is entirely out of the question (I don't care how fast the algorithm
> supposedly is, when 3 pixels are drawn in the time it takes for 1 CPU
> cycle, it's not fast enough).  Assume the word "robotfindskitten" is
> about as long as a line of text can possibly get (chances are it's
> about 6 letters too long, actually), and you have at most 6 lines of
> text on a screen.  There would probably be a limit of 256 NKIs, total,
> as well.  (I will be more specific with the exact specifications once
> the actual text engine is completed.)  Can we produce a list of
> interesting NKIs that follow that constraint?

Personally, I'd reccomend coming up with new NKIs with some having
something to do with the Atari legacy (ie "What Would Jack Tramiel Do?"
and "It's Yorgle, the Yellow Dragon!").  

Your mockup seems to suggest using a hash mark for the robot all the time.
Have you considered using something simpler to save on memory?

> Anyway, it's still in its very early stages, but I'm excited about it
> and it promises to be a lot of fun to develop.  Figured I might as
> well let the RFK community know.
> 
> (By the way, any idea when all the cool RFK shwag that's come out in
> the past couple of years is going to get posted to the website?  Can I
> volunteer to make an update? =])

Yes, would someone PLEASE update the website?

-- 
David Griffith
dgriffi@cs.csubak.edu