I am interested in releasing a small run of stand-alone hardware boards of the skull demo (as seen on ZPH!).  That is, you plug into your '2600 and let this run in a loop for your next Halloween party or Dungeon Fest. Whatever. A small run of, let's say 20 boards. I think they'll cost me in the order of $15 each, give or take, for manufacture and I'd like to make a few $ on top of that. Then there's postage from Oz.  So realistically it would be about US$25 to-your-door for a standard-size PCB that can be inserted into any combat cart and played on any fully Atari-2600 compatible machine.

Here's a "limited" FREE DEMO download of the skull animation everyone appears to be raving about. This will run on a Harmony cart on real hardware, or in the Stella or Gopher emulators. As a courtesy to me, I request you do not distribute or post the binary elsewhere online.

Essentially this is an abandoned "rage quit" animation from another game. Brilliant animation with bizarre 3D effect, but not the right thing for that game. As a stand-alone it makes an awesome demo of what can be achieved on the Atari 2600.

This version is limited so that I can have the option of selling a few "unlimited" versions on cart later, should I decide to do that. So for the first 10 seconds or so, everything behaves as expected with the skull fading in and out and doing its thing. But after that, you need to hold down SELECT+RESET on the console for the skull to be displayed. On Gopher this is F1+F2 and I'm sure Stella has something similar. I figured that was a "fair" balance between letting those people who wouldn't throw me even a crumb have a binary to check out - and for me to be able to offer something later on a bit more attractive.

Let me know if you'd buy an non-limited version on cartridge. I'd like to know numbers.

As another courtesy, I would love some feedback in this thread to let me know what you think and perhaps even the reaction of people you show it to. That would be rewarding for me.

Yes, I'd buy a looping version of this. Perfect Halloween decoration.

I'd buy a ChronoSkull cart.

If you sell carts of this, an option to change the color scheme would be nice, as would the addition of mood appropriate music.  You could make a version that reproduces the same skull effect from 5200 Countermeasure.  Or what about a variant that's similar to the old Analog magazine program called Paperweight which simulated the hardware being shorting out!

I would say that a couple of these images on a cart would be great, the skull is awesome. You might make the images selectable for individual loop or slide show where it just changes every so many during full static to the next image.

That looks cool!  Count me in for a cart!

I'd likely be in for one of these. Although I'm not really sure how much it would get any actual use. My wife and I tend to shut off the lights and hide at the back of the house watching movies on Halloween so it 'appears' no one is home LOL!

I would love a demo copy please.

Quote from: scumation on 25 May 2024, 10:39 AMI would love a demo copy please.

The free binary is available for download in an earlier post in this thread.

I really like this, wonderful stuff.

A suggestion - I'd say that maybe a change of colour and variation in animation via game select and the difficulty switches would be nice.

Quote from: JetmanUK on 11 Jun 2024, 11:57 PMI really like this, wonderful stuff.

A suggestion - I'd say that maybe a change of colour and variation in animation via game select and the difficulty switches would be nice.

My first reaction was "yeah, nah" which in Oz means "no, definitely not!"

However, thought I'd give it a go. The issue is that there's one colour per scanline, and the static background and skull all use exactly the same colours. But, just on a whim, I randomly changed the palette colours and this is the result.  Subtle, but definitely works!  Green eyes

At the moment it's late and I'm not exactly functioning well. But I have no idea how this actually manages to make the eyes only green(ish) and not affect the rest of the graphics too much. Demonic!

Doesn't look nearly as good in the light of day.  So, no - B&W it is.

Ah, I liked the green eyes.