So I got to thinking about my Golf game. I attempted to try to put in a title screen while browsing for info on any way to make a black sprite. While I never did find out how, I did run into the bmp2blit program, which basically converts a .bmp image into something that can be displayed with a Channel F. So I tried it. I finally got it to work, but the colors were wrong. I don't know why. After trying to solve this with no luck, I just decided to change the .bmp image to wrong colors so it would
Good news: I came up with an idea for a one-player Odyssey game. How many of you Odyssey owners out there have cart #7? Because this game needs it. This happened last night. So six2 is on hold for now, again, as I would like to release a one-player Odyssey game. I call it "The Semi-Impenetrable Fortress of Doom." I could just as easily have called it "The Penetrable Fortress of Doom," but that doesn't seem as ominous, plus I like the double i there. Not many game titles have double i's. The only
I am going to get the overlays done for the Odyssey game I am making. I have the dice, I have the cardboard squares (like deeds in Monopoly) cut out. All that is left to do is get the overlays made, the manual sheet printed out and the boxes bought and then I will be able to send the game out. Each copy will be $20. But I am only making 9 available for sale (ten copies total, but one is for me since I have an Odyssey.) So that's where that is. There was a big thunderstorm today. It's hot in my
Got an idea for a screen for Frank the Fruit Fly. Implementing it was really hard because it was a case of copying and pasting part of the code of a screen and then adapting it to suit the screen number you are working on. Which took an hour of yelling and cursing and trying to figure out why the button presses weren't working. But I finally figured it out. I do find it quite odd that I'm making a game for the Pokémon Mini that has nothing to do with Pokémon. The last time we left Frank, he wa
Two nights ago, I had a dream idea. Sometimes I get an idea for something to do while I'm sleeping. Sometimes they're good ideas, sometimes they're bizarre. This fell into the bizarre category. I dreamed I was trying to make a crossword about apples. I was only half-asleep as I was trying to figure out the word placements and stuff. I told my mom about my dream and we spent the next few minutes trying to think of words containing the word "apple". And then, last night I dreamed it again.
I got a new (well, as new as a console from 1976 can get) Channel F console in the mail today. And I am happy! I can now play Tic-Tac-Toe on it. I can play just about anything I want on it (that I have anyway). But I did find out as I suspected, my Alien Invasion cartridge does not work. But other than that, I am happy. Sounds come out of the machine. My Kevin Vs. Tomatoes game makes noises. It's lovely. It came with the owner's manual, which is huge. And also, a little notice that talks about
So I've been spending a long long time with INTYBasic these past few days. First I was going to create a game kind of like Castle of Doom only with a top down perspective. But I couldn't get the guy to move correctly. So then I thought "4-Tris is now in the hands of trolls who charge $500 or so on eBay, how about I make an obtainable version of that?" So that's what I've been doing today: Making a version of Tet**s on the Inty. Mine is called "Oh well." And since the well is only about half th
So I just bought another Channel F on eBay. Let me explain. The first one I bought a couple of days ago is the first model. The one I just bought now is a model 2. Plus it has a joystick. And it's in Phoenix, so it doesn't have quite as long a trek over here as the other things I bought. Plus it is free shipping. You can't beat free shipping. As a result, I may have a spare Channel F to keep just in case one breaks. My Odyssey 2 broke and I'm using the spare one I had and I don't have any spares
I thought my MIDI I had made of Dream Theater's "The Count of Tuscany" was awful sparse, so I am trying to remake it. The first time around I had just copied the sheet music into the MIDI making program, but as it turns out after listening to the song, there's a lot more notes that are missing from the sheet music? How many? I'm almost up to the original's size after just 1/4 of the way into the song. I actually had to give up once due to the stupid software (and the complexity of the song). B
...Well, new to me anyway. I finally got fed up with my semi-functioning one that I bought one off of eBay. I've always wanted to play the version of Tic-Tac-Toe. I don't know the problem of the Channel F I have now, but the buttons are screwed up and I can only do games 3 & 4. Or perhaps that is what it is only on Cart #1. See, it's so screwed up I can't figure out what its problem is. So if the one I bought comes and works properly, I'll be very happy. I took the Channel F apart and tried
So I hooked up my Jaguar and turned it on with the Jeff Minter game in. Red screen. I tried a few more times. Red screen.I unhooked the Jaguar and put it in through the VCR. Red screen. I tried another game, Pinball Fantasies. Red screen. I actually got Evolution: Dino Dudes to work, so I put Pinball Fantasies in again. Red screen. I tried blowing on the cart. A few more times and I got Pinball Fantasies to work. And eventually the Jeff Minter game works now too. I hadn't turned the Jaguar on
So I worked a little bit on my Golf game for the Channel F. But I got to thinking that "Golf" is a really generic title. Perhaps I should name it something different. So I'm thinking about what to call this game. I can't think of anything good. The only thing I can think of is "Back 9 Golf." Or perhaps "Hitting the Links." "Tee Time." Nah. Does anyone have any suggestions? If so, reply to this or PM me. Right now I think it's about two-thirds of the way finished. I got most of the game engine
I've been sleeping too much lately. Yesterday I went to sleep at about 6am and didn't wake up until 8pm. But then I was able to go to sleep at midnight and stay sleeping until 4am. Then today I went to sleep at about 6am and woke up at 6pm. And I feel like I could sleep for another 6 hours if I felt like it, and I do, but I don't know if I should. I'm back working on Aaron the Aardvark for the Jaguar again. Clint is doing some more backgrounds for me. Right now he's working on an underwater scen
I worked on Golf for the Channel F again last night. Today it was about adding borders to the game. This was something I wanted to do from the beginning, but I couldn't quite get it working. But now I did. I thought it seemed kind of odd that there was no border, so I set out to make one. It was really hard. I had to redraw the guy to make it work. It's kind of hard to explain why because I don't quite understand it myself. I really want to go to sleep. I will probably fall asleep once my head
Version 18 was the the one I was having trouble with, so i figured I'd give up on it. This was a few weeks ago. But then, a few weeks later (today), I was determined to get to the root of the problem I was having. What I wanted was to get the ball close to the tree without thinking it was water when it was done moving. I found the problem.
lisu 6 lisl 6 lr A, S ci 2 bz four_seven_1
This little bit of code checks the type of obstacle (tree or water) and then if i
I changed the title screen of Frank the Fruit Fly. I explained you can press the B button to put in a password (passnumber?) or press A to start anew. I also made the title screen song a little longer (it's now about 25 seconds long.) So the picture to the left is what I have for a title screen. And now I'm bored. What do you think about the new title screen?
So after a ton worth of more work, I think I finally have the button pushing problem solved in the password screen of Frank the Fruit Fly for the Pokemon Mini. Also, today is my half-birthday. I want cake. I was looking on the Wayback Machine's archives. I looked up atariage.com/forum/. In June 2006, I was doing this blog. I've been doing this blog shortly after I joined and it's been 13 years since I joined. Out of curiosity, I looked up atari2600land.com, my website. There it was, a snapshot o
Changed the title of the game to "Going Banana." I wanted the score to appear on the title screen, so I had to reduce the amount of tiles by a lot so I could fit the numbers and alphabet on the title screen. It now looks like this: I also added a third ghost because I thought the game wasn't hard enough with just two ghosts in there. The ghosts are now deadly. What I want to do next is add a few lives for the guy and maybe some in game music and pause function. I don't know, it seems like
So after a horrible coding session where I wanted the monsters to obey the walls, I had to give up because it wasn't going very well. So, a few hours passed and I said to myself, "OK, they can't obey the walls, so why not make them ghosts?" So here are the banana ghosts, moving through walls around the room. The backstory is that the ghosts are guarding the magic banana that, when touched, moves to a different location. All poor Steve wants to do is eat the thing because he's hungry. I went
After hours and hours of programming, I finally got things the way I wanted in the game. It took an extremely long time to make it so the guy doesn't keep the walking animation going when he hits a wall. I had to make lines and lines of code for him to keep doing the walking animation when he hits the wall and moves along it. So now my code is 505 lines long. And yet I still have 6000-7FFF to fill up. A lot of space, which is good, because all I did gameplay wise was make the guy able to get the
At least he has plenty of bananas to eat. But he can't quite eat them just yet. I put the man in my new Game Boy game I'm making. it took HOURS to get the movement just right because Game Boy has no automatic collision detection code. Then I decided to have 8 way movement. That took a few more hours to get right. Then I decided to have the guy's walking animation stop when the player isn't moving him. That took a long time as well. So this is what the Game Boy game looks like so far. The
I'm making a new Game Boy game called "Going Bananas." I spent last night on the title screen, trying to make it play a fairly decent rendition of "Yes, We Have No Bananas." Today I designed the playfield (as if it were a 2600 game.) There is a guy going around the screen collecting bananas. It's sort of like Alien Greed, but replace the cartridges with bananas, and the alien with a guy. The banana appears randomly on the screen and the guy goes and gets one. Once he's got it, another one pops u
I have a Super Scope. One of the few people in the world with one, I guess. I am going to get it out of the garage tomorrow and see if it still works. I want to make a SNES game. I want to make a game for the Super Scope. I could just as well make it for the ActionMax, but I've done two games for it already. I want to do something new. There are too few games for the Super Scope I think. And in shooting games using a gun for retro consoles in general. I know, I want to make a niche game that onl
So I thought I'd work on my golf game for the Channel F again. But what could I add? I had thought about trees before, but then I thought since they're green on top and the background is green that wouldn't work. But now, I bit the golf ball and added a couple of trees to hole #4. I had to make the game decide whether the ball hit the water or a tree. I was having trouble again until I realized I hadn't changed the code to tell it it was on hole #4. So now I can go ahead and change it so it ca
One of the biggest problems I had to overcome in making this giant mouth deadly was how do I get a collision between a tooth and a sprite. I eventually overcame this problem with this solution:
if rocketx>48 and rocketx<120 then goto dying
It's not pretty, but it works quite well. Yes, it was another day of coding. Well spent or not? You decide. Now I'm bored and sick of coding for the day. And I only woke up at 11am. I only spent a couple of hours on this.
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