Hi everyone,

The Odyssey doesn't have game cartridges but it does have something that looks similar, cards (sometimes called carts). One of the first "head-trips" when encountering the console is that these cards are not games but rather pluggable circuit boards that change the behaviour of the console and controllers. There are about 12 cards for the system and all the games use them.

Today's update brings Card 6 emulation to Magnavody. During development I uncovered a whole aspect to the console that I had not been aware of. The RESET button on each controller has TWO states: Pressed down and released. Up until Card 6 I was treating the RESET button as a single event, "pressed". That worked pretty well for the other cards and the games I knew about but for Card 6, holding down the RESET button is an important element of gameplay. It hides the player's spot. How cool is that? I'm aware of X-Men, the 1993 MegaDrive game that required players to press the reset button, but I'm not really aware of any of games and consoles where it was so happily integrated into the system.

Card 6 is used by classic games "Roulette" and "States". It is a pretty unique card. It hides the Player 1 spot, the wall and the ball. Only the Player 2 spot is on the screen. Holding RESET button hides the spot. Releasing the RESET button will "snap" the spot from off screen to the on screen location.

That's not the only update. The settings menu has been reworked to add more UI options, settings are now saved and there's some other small quality of life improvements.

Thanks for supporting Magnavody.

Regards,
Luke Miller

Changelog

• NEW CARD: Card 6 - No ball, no wall, no Player 1. Player 2 spot hides when reset button is held down and snaps when released.
  
• Add support for holding down reset button on controllers
  
• Add support for hiding player spots.
  
• Add support for snapping player spots from off-screen to their current location.
  
• Add new options in settings for hiding different on screen UI elements
  
• Update to Godot 4.3.x
  
• Change minimum ball speed to 0.01 (allowing it to be set to zero made the ball not move which might confuse newbies)

Hi everyone,

While I was making a retro game of my own last year, I went on a deep journey into retro gaming. I thought I knew all the main players -- from the Amiga, the PC, Nintendo, Atari, Sega -- but there were a few I had not heard of: The ZX Spectrum, a marvellous little machine from the early 1980s in the UK. The unbelievably cool Vectrex, a vertical vector-based console, also from the early 80s. And finally, the Magnavox Odyssey, the grand dame of all home video consoles, from 1972.

It's just been the most amazing voyage of discovery getting to know this console, its history and how it works. Its whole approach to game design -- that the electronic component is just one element of a larger physical game -- is so interesting to me. Hybrid games are a hot topic in game design TODAY. Table top games that have mobile apps or computer controlled pieces are popular at the moment, as is augmented reality and virtual reality (well...) ... but here we have a game console from 1972, the very first one, and hybrid games are a fundamental design feature.

Today Magnavody brings emulator support for Cards 1-5. That means that if you have the pieces for any game that uses Cards 1-5 (which is a lot of the original bundled games such as Ski or Haunted House), you can use Magnavody to play them.

Additionally Magnavody now has basic support for installing and simulating homebrew games. Yes, there is a small but interesting homebrew scene for Odyssey. Mostly short run printings of overlays and instructions. Many of the homebrew creators provide digital copies of the game pieces and when formatted correctly, Magnavody can use those digital copies to simulate the game. This is a very early implementation so I don't actually expect to see any homebrew on it soon. It requires the games to be bundled up correctly for Magnavody (in a zip file with a game.json). If you've made homebrew for Odyssey, let's get in touch!

You can see below Peacekeeper Command-O, a nifty homebrew game from 2018, running below:

Finally, this version reworks the gamepad inputs to solve a bad juddering problem. It also rebalances the keyboard and gamepad inputs to make gameplay feel better, although it is a delicate dance between making it feel good and trying to authentically recreate the weird dial behaviour of the original controllers!

Luke

Changes

• NEW CARD: Card 2 - No ball, no wall, just Player 1 and Player 2 with no collisions.
  
• NEW CARD: Card 4 - No ball, no wall, Player 2 spot hides on collision with Player 1 spot.
  
• NEW CARD: Card 5 - No wall. Ball hides on collision with Player 2 spot. Player 2 hides on collision with Ball spot.
  
• Add initial support for multiple overlays at once (eg for Peacekeeper Command-O).
  
• Add initial support for installing homebrew games from ZIP files.
  
• Update pin info for Cards 1, 3 and 5.
  
• Update lots of technical information in the documentation.
  
• Rebalance keyboard and gamepad inputs to make it feel better to play.
  
• Rework keyboard inputs to allow multiple keypresses simultaneously (allows diagonal movement).
  
• Rework gamepad input to fix any shuddering issues.
  
• Reduce controller sensitivity.