Monex is my second game, and the timeline turned out pretty neat: I started working on it on June 23, 2005, and finished it exactly two months later on August 23, 2005—nice coincidence with the dates, right? 😉
Even though it spanned two calendar months, looking back at my developer’s log, I actually spent a total of just 23 days of active coding on it. I think it turned out really well, and I’m definitely starting to feel much more comfortable with assembly programming now!
As for the game itself: it’s a logic puzzle where you control a “mover” to shift and group tiles together based on matching colors or values.
You can find more details about how to play in the manual below. The completion date was pushed back quite a bit, mostly because I had a tough time track-down a musician. Luckily, Poison reached out to me and took care of the game’s soundtrack!
One quick tip: I included an interlace mode in the game, which makes the bricks look way cleaner on a real Atari screen. You can toggle this feature on or off by pressing the SELECT key while on the title screen. It is turned off by default.
Used Software
Here are the programs I used to build this project:
- PC:
- Atari800winPLus 4.0b5
- Code-Genie 4.05.18
- XASM 2.6.0
- Atari Fontmaker 1.1
- RealDraw PRO 2.45
- Atadim 2.04b
- AtGr3
- AtariPalette
- ACD Photo Editor 3.1
- Graph2Font 3.4
- bmp2gr15
- mpe2pmg
- HHD Hex Editor 2.0
- Atari:
- Marco Pixel Editor 2.1
- BeweSoft Superpacker
- CMC 2.0+
- Dos 2.5
On October 18, 2005, I successfully updated Monex to address a couple of issues. Fandal reached out and alerted me to a specific in-game bug, which is now fixed. At the same time, I went ahead and properly optimized the code for NTSC systems so our friends overseas can play it without the timing going entirely out of whack (you can read more details about the changes in the manual).
Screenshots:
Download “Monex V1 1” Monex_v1_1.xex – Downloaded 1907 times – Download “Monex Manual En” monex_manual_en.txt – Downloaded 1757 times –
Monex is my all time favourite game on the little Atari plus the music is brilliant as well.
The presentation of your games right down to the logo are some of the best i have ever seen in games made for Atari.
Never saw this game until Fujiama last year. Today I found my todo list again and I have to say it’s really great.
The only downside (as in most games unfortunately) is that are is no in-game manual, so I had to crawl the net first.
Great intro logo and music also!