Blogs

chriswords

Long time readers of my blog have noticed that sometimes I like to do and make crosswords. I attempted to make one. I called it a "chrisword" because it wasn't that good of a crossword. So I decided to try to make it better with a differing black square layout. Something else I wanted to do was make a 15x15 crossword with less than 60 clues. The very first Chrisword has 58 clues. http://www.atari2600land.com/crosswords/15x15/chrisword1.pdf I fought for a long time with Libre Office t

atari2600land in personal stuff

19 hours ago

Six² update for May 29, 2023 (Magnavox Odyssey)

Tomorrow is the day my overlays get mailed to me. When they arrive and if all is well, then I will "soon" after put a Marketplace thread about taking preorders. I went back to a little bit of video game work. This time I tried another attempt at "Burgers To Go" for the Pokemon Mini. My last attempt, the first one, ended in disaster and fiery flames. But I thought "Why?" It's such a simple concept. So I tried again. I think I have the beginnings of something that will actually work. Well, i

atari2600land in Pokémon Mini

May 29

Interest fading

I'm beginning to have fading interest in programming video games. It seems like too much work. I love working on my stuff...if I love it. I don't like it if I have to force myself to work on something I don't want to do. So I don't. Something new has taken up my time lately: Music composition. I have found myself in the middle of making an album of sorts. I like making music. It's something I've been doing ever since I was a young adult. I still have some of the first songs I made on

atari2600land in personal stuff

May 28

Superhero Man - level 3

So I worked on level 3 today. Got it working. I went back and fixed a bug pertaining to level 2. Well, not really a bug, but it was something I noticed while replaying the game. Superhero Man's legs and feet were kind of wonky. So I decided to fix them. His legs no longer stop moving when he stops walking. They both are on the ground, so he's standing. Same here for the raisin room. Next is level 4: The grocery store. Superhero Man needs to find the bar

atari2600land in Game Boy working

May 27

Superhero Man!

One of the things I didn't like about working on "Ran-Over Possum Man" was the name. So I tried long and hard to think of another superhero name. Then it hit me. Most every superhero has the "man" suffix: Superman, Spider-Man, Batman. So why not just say he's Superhero Man? So that's what I am doing. This involved changing all instances of "Ran-Over Possum Man" to his new name. Even the Super Game Boy border. When that was done, I tried to make a new level. But I couldn't make the stup

atari2600land in Game Boy working

May 26

Bubsy Bobcat Fan Blog

Cruiz'in the Galaxy - Happy Towel Day! - May 2023

Happy Towel Day! Celebrating Douglas Adams who wrote Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. (HHGTTG) I dare say, if you like the lunacy of Bubsy, you'd like the off the wall turn tropes on their head comedy like this book series. I have a shot of the Infocom game that originally introduced me to the HHGTTG series.... This is the same company that Bubsy creator, Michael Berlyn, also wrote Cutthroats and Infidel for. And I believe I have

doctorclu in Bubsy Bobcat

May 25

Ugly Uppity Umpire - level 24

It is not the "Uppity Ugly Umpire," it is the "Ugly Uppity Umpire." I made level 24 today. Solving it proved very difficult, but doable. Making it solvable was also hard. The key was to slow the underwear down. But it still is difficult because the ghost is chasing you as well. I don't think I'm going to be able to make 100 different levels all by myself. So the new plan is 50. So I'm about half-way done with the game. I also worked some more on the Celery program for Channel F, f

May 25

Uppity Ugly Umpire - level 23

I worked a lot on UUU these past few days. Saturday especially. What I was mainly doing was making the code more efficient. I put in some functions instead of switch statements. The game works exactly the same as before, but the code is much more efficient. I made a couple more levels for the game. The big challenge in programming this was trying to make the underwear enemy in the middle move diagonally. But I eventually did it. Steve left. And my new razor came. It doesn't

May 22

Boo

Outlaw Me!

People have seen me on @ZeroPage Homebrew not so long ago. I usually hate hate seeing myself in photo/video. But overall I think that show went OK and I've re-watched myself in that "episode/show". It went OK; I think I made an interesting interview subject. Anyway, I just stumbled on this photo of myself, which is actually one of my all-time favourites. Here I am in the middle, with a couple of motorbike riding buddies -- deep in the bush/outback in Tasmania a few years back. Just don't cro

Andrew Davie in Personal

May 20

Uppity Ugly Umpire - level 21

I think this is the hardest level yet. The ghosts move around in a square pattern. This was the hardest part: making sure they do. I had to check boundaries over and over again and make sure they weren't being crossed. And then I had to make sure the level was solvable. I eventually found a way to solve it, but it did take a while. That's why I said it may be the hardest level yet. I worked on it because I was fat and I was trying to get my mind off eating and the fact that

May 19

EricBall's Tech Projects

portable retro gaming

After seeing it on a YouTube video, I've ordered an SF2000. Physically it looks like an SNES controller with a built-in screen. It includes emulators and full rom sets (!) for NES, SNES, GB, GBC, GBA, and Genesis. Unfortunately the SoC doesn't seem to have the power for SNES and GBA, but at less than C$30 (shipped) I'm not going to complain too much. And who knows, maybe the hacking scene will figure out how to improve performance. But it got me to thinking about the "perfect por

EricBall in MAME

May 16

Head in the clouds (part 2)

I was experimenting with clouds some more. I got this: The only downside is the insects got bigger. I sort of like the clouds. They're much better than the rectangle ones I made yesterday. So I modified some more stuff, mainly sprite borders, to make sure the game works like it did before. But with bigger insects. While bigger flies means better chance of swatting them, the flip side is you also need to avoid the bigger stinging bugs. I'm at the point where I think I can mo

Atari Jaguar Game Mascots

May 15

Soccer Kid / Kid Kleets

A yummy Golden Grahams breakfast, which Kid Kleets (Soccer Kid) always has to kick off the day! -------------- Tune in tomorrow when Zool Redimensioned is launched for the Playstation 4 and 5 ! (Original post here for images if you are reading on RSS feed) https://forums.atariage.com/blogs/entry/18541-soccer-kid-kid-kleets/

doctorclu in Soccer Kid

May 15

Head in the clouds

I thought to myself "What my fly swatting game needs is clouds." So I spent the last few hours not expecting to get anything done, but lo and behold, I actually got it working. I don't know if I'll keep them in the game or not since they're kind of square looking. But I did try to make the smaller clouds behind seem farther away than the clouds in front. Most of the time was spent trying to figure out how to not make the sprites not stretched out when they approach the clouds. But

(Insert stupid Blog name here)

May 14

Meet the new boss... same as the old boss

Every year around this time I blog about... Wait, is "blog" a verb? (Checks...) Okay. It is. Every year around this time, I write a blog entry about the annual student film screenings at the college where I work (CalArts). I'd been editing those shows for almost 30 years. Or rather, I edited the shows for each year, and had been doing that once a year for almost 30 years. I hadn't been editing the same shows over and over again for 30 years. That would

Nathan Strum in Animation

May 13

flies version 8

Just doing some finishing up on the game before the big heat kicks in. I fixed a couple more things and changed the score. I've decided I don't want to name the game "flies" any more. So I'm trying to think of a better name for it. "Swat Those Flies!" "Swat Team" (but there's only one swatter.) "Swat or Not?" "Pickle People From New Zealand" I tried version 7 on a real Atari 2600 and since all I changed were values for version 8 (shown), it should work j

May 12

Version 5 of flies

So last night I gave up. But then I thought "The game looks so easy, so why is making it so hard?!" I think the answer is when I wake up in the morning and look at code with fresh eyes, I can see stuff. Then as the day progresses, my eyes and brain turn to mush until it's around midnight working and not really understanding what I'm doing. Yesterday after my food was delivered, I went to sleep. That was around 11 a.m. I woke up at around 4 a.m. I was really sleepy. We're expecting a

May 11

flies!

I decided Flies is a good enough concept to stand on its own, so I've decided to move it to its own game instead of making it part of Going Bananas. The bananas are still on the screen. I've moved the setting from inside a house to outside on the grass. plans: The fruit fly will stay eating the banana and, if you have any points, you'll lose them for each second you don't swat him for eating a banana. There will be bonus points. They will start out at 9 points, and then mo

The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul

May 8

The Emulator Zone, Part II

Ok, so this time it was only 3 years since my last blog post. Bleh. Anyway, I've been back in the US since about a month after my last blog post, so that makes a little over 3 years. Anyway, here's a follow-up on my last post. Last time I lamented the fact that Virtual Jaguar still wasn't a fully compatible emulator. That much remains true, as I believe it hasn't even been updated since well before that post. However, there's a nifty little emulator called BigPEmu which has since co

Sauron in Emulation

May 8

Going Bananas update

I decided on the third game for this. I am going to attempt to put in a fly swatting game. After putting in the code to display the game and sprites, I have about 600 bytes left. So I will try to put that in 600 bytes. I first drew a table with a banana on it, but then I decided I couldn't do that because I also needed to put in the sprites as well. After I attempted to put the sprites in, I was left with this: The plan: So the flies are fruit flies and they move around randomly (like

atari2600land in bananas.

May 7

1/5 done

I would like to make Ugly Uppity Umpires have 100 levels. I don't know if I will actually think of that many level designs, but if I do, I'm 1/5 of the way there. This level was an experiment with the number of sprites I could display on the screen at once. There are 11 here (Ulysses is made up of four sprites.) I haven't gotten much sleep these past few days. I guess it's due to me wanting to stay awake being active with my various projects. I went and worked on my 2600 ga