StarGiraf (Atari 2600)

StarGiraf is an Atari 2600 space shooter featuring a mutant Giraffe with an incredibly long neck and the ability to shoot lasers. So it's definitively the "perfect beast" for space!

How to play

- Use arrow keys to move around, and avoid getting hit by the flying enemies.
- Press "X" to shoot lasers (you can hold down the button for continuous fire)

Looking for a challenge?

My best score is 6700, can you beat it?

A real Atari 2600 game

This game is an actual Atari 2600 game, designed for this great console from 1977. You can play the game in your browser here using an HTML5 Atari 2600 emulator (powered by Emulator.Js). But you can also download the game ROM file to play it on your favorite emulator, and on real hardware if you have a Flashcart. This game uses the "DPC+" Mapper, so I think only the Harmony and Melody Flashcarts are compatible with it for now.

About

This game was made in a week for the "Jeff Minter x Atari Game Jam". The goal was to make a game in the style of the talented Jeff Minter on the theme "A Perfect Beast". As Jeff Minter is known for his excellent arcade / space shooter games with abstract and colorful visuals, I started to think about what could "a perfect beast" be in such a setting. And who has an higher reach than a giraffe? No one! Obviously we need to have a mutant giraffe, so it can shoot lasers to destroy enemies. And so was born "StarGiraf", the perfect beast for arcade space battles!

I really loved the unique theme of this Jam (make a game inspired by a famous game designer), and I wanted to try to make a "Jeff Minter inspired" game on a retro machine, possibly one that Jeff Minter didn't release a game for it (yet :)). As Atari is sponsoring the Jam, and as I really love to develop games for the Atari 2600, I tried to make my best to make a "Jeff Minter-esque" Atari 2600 game.

Behind the hood

The game was programmed using batariBasic, a very powerful compiled Basic language allowing to create games for the Atari 2600. I used the very detailed and example-rich documentation by RandomTerrain, which proved very useful as it was my first time making a game using the DPC+ chip for this machine.

As the Atari 2600 can display sprites that can be as tall as the screen, it was a good fit for a very tall giraffe. Regarding challenges, the "starfield effect" is not a "regular feature" of the Atari 2600. It's actually based on an hardware bug / undocumented feature allowing to display a graphical object many times onscreen instead of a single time. Here it uses the "Ball" object, as it's possible to change its color every few scanline to create a "rainbow starfield" effect. This hardware trick was created by RevEng, and I thank him a lot for sharing it with the community. Here the game uses the "DPC+" variant, that is compatible with all the Atari 2600 models.

The DPC+ chip also offer some extra processing power enable another "Minter-esque" effect: the stretching messages displayed onscreen to congratulate and tease the player. The text messages are displayed using the Playfield, a regular feature of the Atari 2600. The DPC+ ease the "stretching" effect. And as the playfield colors are already changed every few scanlines to display the rainbow starfield, the same color gradient is also applied to the text messages.

Open source

The Atari 2600 has a rich and very friendly homebrew community, centralized on AtariAge forums. Without all the tools, documentations and help provided by this wonderful community, I would never have been able to make my own Atari 2600 games. So, as a thank you gesture, I like to contribute back to the community and open source my games as often as possible. Although the game was created in about 5 days, I spend an extra couple hours to tidy up and heavily comment the code, hoping it can help some fellow homebrew developer someday. Feel free to ask me if you have any question about the code.

You can download the commented source code from here