Back in the golden times of 1991 everybody was chasing after the record for creating as many hardware or software sprites as possible. My never released contribution to this was called NetBalls. Here is the download of the executable.
Somehow the source got lost and though I always wanted to incorporate this effect into a real release, the missing source kept me from doing this. Then, in spring 2009, I attended a meeting of the ABBUC Regionalgruppe Frankfurt for the very first time. I booted a disk with my old unreleased effects and showed it to the party people. When they saw the effect, they were quite impressed and asked I a could complete it. So I decided to just disassemble the executable and put it all into my brand new WUDSN IDE in order to make it my first production every build in my own IDE. The real proof of concept so to say. The decision where to release it was also quite obvious: After all those years of absence I wanted to tell all the Atari people in Germany that I am back, so I decided to go for the intro competition of the issue 99 of the ABBUC Magazin So once again it was important to complete this production in time, because there was a fixed deadline on 2010-12-06. Our club manager need the binaries by then to have enough time to create the more than 400 copies of the disk magazine. So I had everything ready by that day and thought: Let's test it on the real machine - just in case.... and it didn't work. I had been very proud to have used the full 240 scan lines to find out two things. First, this is not a real achievement in multicolor mode, it simply works. Second, is it not possible in hire mode, causing the hires up-scroller to end up in a completely distorted screen. It was running fine in the emulator simply the synchronization effects of the TV set are not emulated. So I had to revert the hire up-scroll back to 239 scanlines in a hurry. I even had to send my wife and my daughter to go an see Santa Clause without me just to finish the production. Recently there has been some good input from Rybags regarding the 240th scan line, so maybe there will be an update in the future.
