I was rudely interrupted by a power outage for six whole days. I just now got the internet back for some reason. Yes, friends, I had no electricity between Feb. 13-18. Luckily, we didn't freeze to death thanks to the gas fireplace that doesn't use electricity. They said 90% of our area would be restored by tomorrow evening, so I was thinking we would fall into the unfortunate 10%. But shortly after 4 p.m., the power miraculously returned! But there was a problem: I had no internet.
But that
When I was making my Bert game, I thought of it as an exercise, a warm-up on how to code for the Kid's Controller. So, I've decided to try to make the 'lost' sixth CCW game, Count's Castle. This took two hours:
While good, it wasn't centered. Another 90 minutes of figuring stuff out, I finally had it centered. I also made it a little brighter.
Well, as centered as it could be. You'll notice extra black on the right side. I tried making the C's four pixels wide instead of th
If it has anything to do with art, I like to do it, but the results are, well, bad. I was looking at some of the Atari 2600 manuals. The white ones with pictures at the center of the screen that look hand-drawn and sketchy, yet amazingly life-like. I wondered what I could do with Uncle Hairy's Nosehair.
In the center is Uncle Hairy, (looking unintentionally a lot like Butthead), pointing to his nosehair. The hand with the scissors is the nephew (you) as he is about to cut the nosehair
...It's the only channel worth watching. All the other ones have boring coverage of you know who being you know whatted. Since I had been programming the Channel F the past few days, I decided to plug mine in and see if it still works. It does. I'm thinking of perhaps selling all my Channel F videocarts except my Multicart and my copy of Trimerous. I have a few rare cartridges (#23, #25, #20, to name a few) but I don't really need money right now.
I also have been playing a lot of Dr
As my Quest of the Cranberry game grows, it became apparent that the password code part was not going to go well where it was. So began the quest to move it to a position and not break anything. This only took 15 minutes. So if you play version 51, it might look no different than version 50, but it isn't so code-wise. I moved the password code part which was at the beginning to the end of the game's code. Thus, I hope to be able to add more code to it for more levels and not have it break as eas
I mixed up the pass code (pass number?) a little bit. Quite literally. I jumbled some numbers around to make it harder for people to know which digits pertain to the health part of the pass code. And, with help from e5frog, I think I got rid of that bug I was talking about in yesterday's blog. But it does mean you might have to type all ten numbers before you know if it's valid or not. And I also had to move some code around to get the stuff I had working before but quit working back working aga
I found a lovely bug pertaining to the passcode system of Quest of the Cranberry.
What's that number to the left of the five? You tell me. Normally, the player would only see this bug if he were just randomly inputting numbers for entering a passcode in the hopes one would find one that works. But apart from that, I did make the beginning of level 3 okay.
I am wondering whether to drag Craig lower while he's swimming (like in Super Mario Bros.) and the player would have to
So I put in a fireball in Quest for the Cranberry. It took tons of hours, but I finally did it. I don't know how I did it or what was wrong, but it kept doing strange things when it got to the fireball screen. Freezing was the most popular thing, followed by making the % sign weird colors for no apparent reason. I was going to make a dragon the source of the fireballs, but it looks like I can't do that. I'm going to start on level 3 instead. Like I said before, level 3 will be underwater, which
I am back working on Quest of the Cranberry for the Channel F. Last time I got discouraged because something wasn't working right. Well, I worked on it for a couple more hours and finally the dumb thing started working right. In order to move the sprite up or left, apparently I MUST do this:
lisu 3 ; move x position right 2
lisl 1
lr A, S
ai 2
lr S, A
lisu 3 ; move y position up 2
lisl 2
lr A, S
ai 254
lr S, A
I was trying to m
Fixing more bugs in my Game Boy game I'm working on. Found a really weird one but I have been unable to replicate it. It didn't impede game play, so that's good. It was just the word "TIMER" showing up when the boss was around. And it only happened once. Made a fourth background.
It's swirls. You probably can't tell, but the swirls are made up of two different colors. And this is my highest score so far:
1,120. I think I got to wave 5 that time. I'm amazed I can put this co
So I went back to work on Flies! for Game Boy, which I thought I had finished, but I found a few bugs. Took me about five hours. I added some stuff, removed some stuff. I added a new background. The game now chooses a background randomly at the beginning of each wave. I noticed that the bees always moved in from the bottom whenever the bug bomb wears off. I changed that. I also found an interesting bug where if you pause and unpause the game when you begin wave 2, it does weird things. I think I
So I finally found the CD-ROM of that program that let me make videos and DVDs. I had to reinstall it. That took about an hour. And I couldn't just leave it on its own because I had to keep clicking on buttons that kept popping up. I got done with the program installing and took it for a spin. It works just as I remembered it did before it quit working for some reason (this was when I had enough and decided to factory-reset the entire computer.)
Anyway, the point is I can make DVDs a
I like designing fonts. A long time ago I had a font program that let me import pictures into glyphs. Well, a few years ago, I remembered that old program and decided to hunt for a similar one. Lo and behold, I had to pay to make my fonts be actual fonts. So I did. It was around $30 or something. And after making a few test fonts, it sat on this computer unused. Until tonight. I made a font. It's called Squaresville. You'll see why if you download it. I have attached it here just in case you wan
So it took a lot of hours of programming. Woke up at 2 when it began snowing. Worked and worked and took a break to watch Jeopardy! at 7. Went back to work and now it's almost 9 and I have it: a game where you can shoot. The red dot is where you shot at on the screen. I took that sample code, worked a lot on it to match my title screen. I tested my code with a real XE Light Gun and it works good. This will have to be at least a 4k game since I only have 246 bytes left as it as a 2k game.
I have an idea for a light gun game for the 2600. 2 were ever made, and only 1 was released (Sentinel). I want to make #3. I spent a couple hours fiddling around with a title screen, trying to make it just right.
It's a game where you shoot flies. I can make this 4k if I need it to be. I don't really care much about file size, I just want to make a working gun game for the 2600. It does nothing at this point, the score increases by 1 every frame and the life counter decreases by 1 eve
I've worked on Uncle Hairy's Nosehair a lot since Saturday (sounds disgusting, I know. But unfortunately, nosehairs are a fact of life). I spent most of my waking hours the past few days on this game, fixing stuff and trying to make the game better. I added the music back in. If the nosehair demon gets the box, 10 points will be subtracted from the score. The demon no longer zigzags when he's walking towards you or the box.
That last thing took some work to get right. And I still did
Last night I worked a ton on Uncle Hairy's Nosehair, trying desperately to make it a game. One of the things I did to change it was make the nosehair demon go towards the box when it pops up. And if he gets it, the score would decrease. Eventually I had to drop the decreasing score upon the demon getting the box due to scanline issues. But that's later. So I programmed that in there. And I needed to get rid of 48 bytes. So the obvious choice of what to ax was the music. But I wanted it to do som
Not that I care when the weekend is. I slept all morning today. Went to sleep shortly after midnight because I couldn't sleep, and then woke up at about 2 p.m.
I worked on Hamburgers En Route To Switzerland.
I'm beginning to think that it shouldn't be hamburgers since I already made a game about waffles on the Intellivision (not to mention peas and carrots as well.) Something not food related heading to Switzerland. BUT WHAT? My eye began twitching again and it will not stop and I
I made a small Atari 2600 program to aid me in one of my music projects. Even though I don't know if I'm going to be able to burn it or not. What I've done is make songs of various insane lengths (the longest one I've done so far is over 7 hours long.) I just got off the keyboard after playing it for an hour. I usually don't play it for that long, what I do is stitch together recordings of me playing the keyboard for 30 minutes at a time, various lengths, and call it a song.
In a son
A box full of Quiz Wiz stuff came today. Four of the booklets I got did not have matching cartridges. But anyway, I did get 13 new to me cartridges and books. And, yes, another console. This one is different. This one is gray. I'm figuring this is a later model since the later cartridges were also gray. I was asleep for most of the morning. I got up at 9 a.m. and was still sleepy so I went back to sleep on the couch. And woke up at noon. It's almost 1 p.m. as I'm writing this. I really need to g
So I put a web page up about the music I mentioned in yesterday's blog. I mentioned my mouse broke. So I went to Wal-Mart to get a new mouse. I had no idea there was such a thing as a fancy gaming mouse. I was looking at those, which cost anywhere between $40-$80 before I found the regular mouses (mice?). I pondered whether I should get one with a cord or without. The one with a cord, the cord was only two foot long, which I feared would be too short. So I went with the wireless mouse. It came w
So I have been working on another project. I had a font called "Vivaldi" I had been using for it. But when I reset my computer a few weeks ago because it was acting horribly, I had lost it. I hadn't worked on it since before that happened, so I was unaware that it would look crappy. It replaced Vivaldi with Comic Sans MS. So I was on the hunt for a new font that looked like Vivaldi because apparently I needed to pay to use it for some reason.
I found a new font on dafont.com called "
I just finished question #150. The number of questions I need is 1,001. How much have I done?
a.) 5%
b.) 7%
c.) 12%
d.) 15%
The correct answer is d. Well, if you round up a little. It's actually 14.9%. It's really, really hard thinking up of questions for this thing. Luckily I'm not confined to a certain subject, like Nature & Animals, or Mystery Places (which is really just geography.) I have to go to the second page of answers I found out. The first page had answer
I decided to get the Intellivision out of the garage because it's been cold and I wanted to see if it still worked okay. Right now on the floor of my room is a Saturn, a Channel F, a GameCube, a Dreamcast, 2 Atari 2600s (I need to put one away), a 7800, an Intellivision 2, and an N64. So about half of my collection. After multiple searches in the garage, I still can't find my Atari 800. I doubt I would have parted with it because I found the game cartridges for it. Needless to say, I will be put
This morning I worked on Xybort. I added an enemy ship to shoot at. I also added some custom sound effects.
Next, I'm going to work on the enemy ship to move. But I guess this isn't going to be a very thrilling game. It needs something. I'm wondering whether I should add stuff to not shoot at that also moves. Putting the sound effects in was hard because I had to shut off the sounds manually since I put in non-BIOS sounds. This required two sound effect timers: One for the ship shooti
Like us on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
AtariAge on Instagram
Watch us on YouTube
Chat on Discord