Back in 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 an actual release, the missing source code kept me from doing this. Then, in the spring of 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. They were impressed when they saw the impact and asked if I could complete it. So, I decided to disassemble the executable and put it all into my brand-new WUDSN IDE. To make it my first production of every build in my own IDE - the actual proof of concept. The decision where to release it was also quite evident: After all those years of absence, I wanted to tell all the Atari people in Germany that I was back, so I decided to go for the intro competition of issue 99 of the ABBUC Magazin So once again it was essential to complete this production in time because there was a fixed deadline on 2010-12-06. Our club manager needs the binaries by then to have enough time to create more than 400 copies of the disk magazine. So I had everything ready by that day and thought: Let's test it on the machine - just in case.... and it didn't work. I was proud to have used all 240 scan lines to discover two things. First, this is not a real achievement in multicolor mode. It simply works. Second, it is impossible in hires mode, causing the hires up-scroller to end up in a completely distorted screen. It was running fine in the emulator; the synchronization effects of the TV set were not emulated. So I had to hurry to revert the hires up-scroll to 239 scanlines. I even had to send my wife and daughter to see Santa Claus without me to finish the production. There has been some excellent input from Rybags regarding the 240th scan line, so maybe there will be an update.
