Bill Kendrick's Entries
for the NOMAM 2018

This is a kind of piano simulator, providing about an octave-and-a-half of notes you can play, using the top two rows of the keyboard (numbers for black keys, and QWERTY... for white keys).

It uses all four voices of the Atari, and is smart enough to re-play an already-playing note using the same channel. The notes fade out, and you can press the "S" key to toggle sustain (making them fade out more slowly).

Although I'm sure I've got the "SOUND" values for notes sitting on a sheet of paper somewhere from my Atari BASIC programming days as a child/teenager, I ended up using a list created by Bobby Clark and posted online.

In the end, even with an on-screen keyboard chart, and 3 lines of credits at the bottom of the screen, the entire program actually fits in just six lines of code.

I'm not actually sure what the first game like this was, but a great game like this was made for the Atari 8-bit, and won 4th place in the "games" category in the 2016 ABBUC software contest.

The objective is to build a building as high as you can, by dropping each floor/level on top of the rest of the building. If you don't line it up exactly, you'll lose some of the building's width, beginning on that floor. If you miss completely, the game ends. It gets increasingly fast as you progress.

A 2-player game of Dots and Boxes, played with one joystick.

The game consists of 5x5 intersections, allowing the creation of up to 16 (4x4) squares. Each player takes a turn positioning the cursor ("X") within the spaces between intersections, and then choosing which face of the intersection to add a line ("^" up, "V" down, "<" left, or ">" right).

Player 1 is green, and player 2 is blue. The "X" cursor and directional choices will appear as the player's color when it's their turn, and lines added to the grid appear in the player's color.

If a player completes the fourth side of one or more squares during their move, they capture the square. A "!" symbol, in the player's color, will appear.

The game doesn't end on its own, but when you've completed, just tally up how many squares each player captured, to see who won (or if it was a draw).