So I slept all day again. Went to sleep at 7 a.m. and got up at around 7 p.m.
I decided to take a look at my flying burgers game for the Atari 2600. I decided the hamburgers had to go since it made the French fry green sometimes. So I had to change it to another junk food that was just one color. But what would that be? I thought for a second and came up with the potato chip. So instead of the game Flying Burgers, it's now called Potato Chips En Masse. Here is a picture of level 1: Mouthwat
I'm going to stop making games for the Atari 2600. Reason: Jitteriness. I try and try to make the scanline steady but eventually it drops to 261 or goes up to 263, I played the stupid Fly game for 15 minutes, thought it was going good, until the scanline went up to 263. Since I'm sick of trying various things to try to make the scanline steady, I've decided to stop programming in assembly Atari 2600 altogether.
You'd think a game about fruit flies in 2k would be easy, but nooooo. God for
I have been working on a new Atari 2600 game, this time in assembly. I went to test it on my Atari 2600 with my Harmony cartridge. It worked, the Atari 2600 worked, my game even worked, but there was a whole bunch of graphical "garbage" (for lack of a better word) on the screen. I had hooked up my Atari 2600 to a Genesis switch box. Then I decided to try to not plug it in there, and instead plug it in directly to the TV.
What a difference it made. The picture was clear. I don't know
The latest version of Potato Chips En Masse will always be on its website I just made yesterday. I intend to fully finish this game even though it probably won't be released anywhere. I guess my games like "Uncle Hairy's Nosehair" aren't good enough. Or too weird or too gross or something. So I decided to make a game about junk food. It's not gross. I just had a Whopper from Burger King yesterday and it wasn't gross. It was delicious. The Whopper is the best fast food burger out there. But back
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
I decided to start work again on my fly swatting game for the Atari 2600. I figured since I couldn't make the scanline stable, I could try making it in batari Basic so it would be. Unfortunately, this led to the deletion of the banana. I couldn't chip away at the banana with basic since I can't use no_blank_lines and pfheight together for some stupid reason. So I just got rid of it. In return, I made it so if you don't swat the fly in a little bit, the game ends.
Also unfortunately I
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
...unless someone finds a bug in it. I'll hook up my Atari 2600 and play it on that tomorrow to test for screen jumpiness. But for now I achieved what I wanted to do with this game: Make a 6-level game where potato chips shoot at onion rings. Although the potato chip was supposed to be a hamburger but I couldn't put in a hamburger because of the missile changing colors to correspond with the color it's currently sharing with the burger. Although the 2600 Mario Bros. programmer didn't really care
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
After adding a few things to my 2600 game, I'm calling it finished. The only thing to do now is see if anyone runs into a bug and then try to fix it if one does. I took a few minutes to hook up the Atari 2600 and try it and it works just fine.
My poor Atari 2600. When I flip the black and white switch to color, the system restarts and I get back to the Harmony menu screen. I'm using a 4 switch model. I am so sick of Xfinity ads. All of them. They advertise waaaaay too much. So m
While I was working on my game this morning, I had an eyeache. It got so bad I had to stop what I was doing, run to the bathroom, and vomit out all I had eaten since when I woke up at 10 p.m. This was at about 6 a.m. About an hour later, I had to quit. It seems like the only thing that makes my eyeaches go away is sleep. So I tried to take a little nap. It took about an hour to go to sleep because I wasn't really all that tired yet. Sure enough, when I woke up, I felt better.
Continu
So finally someone struck up a conversation with me about my 2600 game Fruit Fly Fun. @vitoco suggested I make the banana disappear like the fly was eating it. That didn't take very long, about half an hour or so. But it screwed up the scanline count. I worked and worked, and went to sleep unsuccessful.
Six hours later (I only got six hours of sleep last night!) I woke up and it was very hot. So hot that I couldn't go back to sleep. So I decided to get up at about 6 or so. I then pro
So I was looking for an AC adapter for my Atari 2600. I found something that I thought was what I had used before. So I plugged it into my Atari 2600 and turned it on. Nothing. I thought perhaps I fried my Atari 2600, but I didn't smell the usual "burnt electronics" smell that occurs. I was trying to test the colors of my potato chip game on an Atari 2600 since the colors on my 7800 made the mountain look hot pink, which wasn't correct. So I went to sleep and woke up 12 hours later. Digging arou
Last night, my eye hurt. I went to sleep at about midnight or so and woke up at around 10 a.m. So I've been awake all day. I plan to go to sleep at around mindight again (earlier if I can't stand it any more) My eye doesn't hurt any more, but I still feel kind of sick. What doesn't help is a giant rash on your butt that you can feel hurting whenever you sit. I made 11 out of the 12 pages of Stupidman issue 2. I just need to think of something to put on page 12. So I remembered the (really stupid
With all this talk about Zyx, I decided to go back to the Atari 2600 and work on my Zyx in ASM project I had started. I thought "I wonder if I could do this in just 1k." Reminiscing about the old 1k/2k/4k minigame compo, I went to work on it. I updated some code. I put in use of the reset switch. I then compiled, hoping it would all fit there.
I have 318 bytes left. That should be enough to put in at the very least sound effects.
I debated a long time over white or black ba
So I kept having to give up on the fly eating just one bit of the banana and then flying away. I woke up after 12 hours of sleep and had an idea. What if I were to just make the flying away code run only after the fly had eaten a bite? Before, I was making it part of the main code, which I think was making the scanline uneven and running too much code. So I decided to attempt to make it so it only runs when the code is running the eating part. I think it works now. Sort of a "duh" moment now whe
I thought to myself, "Wednesday was going to be good weather wise, why not work on this some more?" It took HOURS to get the scanline problem fixed for now. Every time I add something, I need to redo the dumb scanline so it's a steady 262. Sometimes it takes an hour, sometimes more. This time it was more. But I finally got a box (the ball) moving left in a "random" lane. I now have 355 bytes remaining.
They're still threatening us with a "winter storm" with ice and crap tomorrow (no sn
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
OK. So I am mostly done with "Oh Well," the first game in my Going Bananas cartridge. I want to put 3 1k games in one cartridge along with a 1k menu to choose between the games. Pressing the reset switch at any time will take you back to the menu. But I'm getting ahead of myself now.
We here are poised for a big ice storm Thursday with the possibility of power outages due to the 1/4-1/2 inches of ice we're expected to get. I don't want to be almost done with something only to have th
It's 1 a.m. What are they showing on the Weather Channel at 1 a.m.? A show called "Retro 8's Live", which is a show that's like the old "Local on the 8's" show but it's the old '90s style and they input the actual weather in it and it lasts one hour. The ads are jarring when I come back from the '90s style stuff. So, what's on at 2 a.m.? Something called "The Weather Channel." I don't know what it is. I looked recently on 2 a.m. and it was a really cool looking weather report for one hour. Now i
So I worked a long time last night on this game. I went to sleep at 5 a.m. and woke up at about 5 p.m. I turn the news on and they're threatening us with a freezing ice storm. The furnace gave us an error message this morning (computers!) but it gave up scaring us and started working again. If the power does go out, we have a gas fireplace to keep warm. But I hope it doesn't come to that.
I worked on Zyx 1k some more today and put everything on yesterday's list in the game. With 1 by
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
I found my Kid's Controller overlays for the Sesame Street games. I knew I had a Kid's Controller around here but it was hiding from me.
I attempted to make an overlay for Bert's Pigeons. Does anyone have the correct dimensions for these so I can make them better?
So I went to sleep at about noon and woke up at around 2 a.m. When I woke up, I saw something blue in a box. I went over to it and the Kid's Controller was in there.
I tried to embed the picture but it told me that
I began rework on Bert's Games again. The problem wasn't my code, it was how I was running it (if that makes any sense.) I fixed it, but then had to work a couple more hours to get the scanline steady at 262. I haven't tested this on my Atari 7800, which I have decided will replace my Atari 2600 as a means of playing Atari 2600 games yet though. But I have a game like the bonus game in Donkey Kong Country like I wanted. And I have over 600 bytes left, so if I think of something else fun I could
So I figured "What can I do with paperclips?" Then I thought of the 3 card monte game. Or where you put a ball under a cup and then shuffle other cups around and you have to keep track of which cup the ball is under. But I couldn't draw three cups shuffling independently on an Atari 2600. What to do? I then thought of the bonus game in Donkey Kong Country where a token keeps shuffling back and forth between some barrels while being visible and at the the very end it becomes invisible and you hav
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