Don't Lend Me Your Comb

Entry posted by atari2600land July 12, 2016

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Have you always wondered how the black lines appear on the left side of some of your Atari 2600 games? I found the answer: They just do. You don't program them in, they just happen. I was working on the Celery 2600 game, trying to see some sense of the code I was having. I made a loop happen where I point to different sections of the code instead of just having them happen one by one. And then suddenly, two lines appeared to the left. I got it down to one. After trying unsuccessfully to get rid of them, I just decided to mask them away by making the background black. I was also working last night, trying to get the vegetarian moving from left to right. I finally had that happen, but the rolling at the beginning of the program happened again. That's when I decided to make a more sensible main loop pattern. And while I had fixed the rolling, the black lines started appearing. So here's what the program looks like now:

The next thing I am going to work on is getting the vegetarian incinerator in the game. Since the dot of the eye I had to move to the whites of his eye, the vegetarian incinerator will be white, since the whites of Mr. Celery's eyes are missile 1. The vegetarian is player 0. This is getting harder and harder. I think the hard part for me will be understanding "random"ness and how to use it. What I'm envisioning is kind of like a cross between Grand Prix and Fast Food.