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About this blog

My thoughts on everything.

Entries in this blog

I suck at drawing.

I guess I work okay with coding and stuff, but when it comes to drawing stuff for the games I want to work on, well, I just plain suck at it. I tried to give the face on the title screen a major uplift. I gave him all sorts of new features: Eyebrows (hairy ones), lips, chin, eye veins, etc. This is what it ended up looking like. I'd like to ask someone for help. Who here can make a good title screen? There are limits I have to adhere to, like the number of different individual 8x8 tiles mus

atari2600land

atari2600land

Tougher

So I tried making an Intellivision game. I knew my skills were rusty as I hadn't done any in a long time, but geez. I guess I should just keep doing all the various things and not go weeks without skipping programming a console I know how to program for. I was trying to figure out what to do with the Fast Food game for the Game Boy. Then it hit me: Games usually get tougher and tougher the more you play a round. I figured this should be true with Fast Food as well. So I made it so the only spe

atari2600land

atari2600land

Three foods

So I did a bit of coding before I went to sleep. I got three foods in the game now. But I discovered a couple of bugs. #1 - when the score reached past 255, it went crazy. I discovered this was due to me trying to add different types of variables together. Which I don't understand why it wouldn't go crazy before it reached 255. So I changed food speed variables from a char to an int (which the score was) and the problem went away. I went to sleep and woke up. I'm trying to switch my life aroun

atari2600land

atari2600land

Moon mouth

So I decided to have the mouth floating around on a different planet. After designing my own moon world, I decided it looked really crappy, so I stole an image from the moon on the internet and Game Boy-ified it. Went to sleep at 11am and woke up at 11pm. I went to work on the game again. I successfully got a second food item to appear. But I don't know about a third. Well, I know how to do a third, and a fourth, etc. But the randomness of the y position would be a big problem. Right now I've

atari2600land

atari2600land

I shouldn't have to do this

For decades. Not just years, decades, people could freely record stuff off of TV. And then suddenly, the new cable boxes have forced people to not record stuff off of television any more. My question is why do this to people? The only possible way they could lose ANY money is if people record stuff off of TV and then sell it. And yet, I haven't seen little if any of this happening. For decades, people didn't have to do this. Just now with our "improved" technology, Comca$t and kin force you to g

atari2600land

atari2600land

Fast Food for GB

This is for all the people who have wanted to play Fast Food while going to the bathroom after eating fast food but didn't have a TV in the bathroom. I am busy making Fast Food for the Game Boy. I had 8x8 sprites but they were so tiny on a real Game Boy it was hard to see what they were, so I bumped up the size to 8x16 and they look better. I have been at work on the title screen. I wanted to have 7 food choices (and the evil pickle) to be chose at random by the computer, but somehow ended

atari2600land

atari2600land

January 1

I had a fun day. First I attempted to make a new Odyssey 2 game, but it didn't work out. Then at about 4am, I went to sleep because the cat wanted food and was acting crazy. I woke up about 12 hours later. Then I was cold, so I went back to bed. I didn't expect to go to sleep, but I did and woke up 4 hours later. So I spent most of the day asleep. The stupid fireworks ended at about 1am or so. So what do I have to show for myself? All I did today was think up of a Tom Swifty. Mine? "I had to p

atari2600land

atari2600land

More frequent mint.

So I discovered that the mint getting code for Fatso 2 wasn't working properly. I eventually solved it by instead of using the variable names, I just used their addresses instead. So instead of this: mov r1,#titlescreenchar I used this: mov r1,#02fh Since I put the titlescreenchar variable in the #02fh position at the beginning of the code. I don't know why, but that worked. Fortunately, all the changes were made just for the mint section and not the entire game, which part 1 has

atari2600land

atari2600land

2 days' worth of coding

And all I have to show for it is a lousy Altoid. Yes, I put in a mint in the game. You'd think it would take a lot less time, but everything went wrong. I actually had to give up the first time, but I worked on it today and I did it. First, I thought I had it done, but the game wasn't working on a real Odyssey 2, which I dug out from the garage to test this on. Then I got the mint in the game, but then it stopped coming after a certain unknown point. Then I though it was done again, but I tested

atari2600land

atari2600land

Borderline fun.

So I worked on Fatso 2 again today after sleeping until 1pm. I went to sleep at about 10:30pm last night, so it's no surprise I woke up as late as I did, especially with all the stress of it being Christmas and all. I added two new foods: the peanut and the dreaded pink pickle. Nothing happens if you eat the pink pickle now, but you'll lose a life from the life counter I haven't put in yet. I also added some blue borders. I figured I should put them in so the player knows how far up and down he

atari2600land

atari2600land

Fat Tuesday

So when I got home from my sister's house to celebrate Christmas, I decided that I wanted to work on Fatso 2 for the Odyssey 2 again. Stuffing your face full of Chex Mix makes you think of your game you made if you made a game about eating junk food. So after a few tries, I had it down good adding another random junk food item on the screen. I also made two of them move at a randomly chosen speed. I also made it so that the faster the food is when you eat it, the more points you get. But there w

atari2600land

atari2600land

Frank on Christmas Eve

So I had a hard time working on this game for a few hours last night. I got up at midnight and went to work. Today's thing was adding a level intro screen and little tune to accompany it. Most of the time was spent figuring out why the game wouldn't start if I set the beginning screen to screen #1. I must have copied and pasted the screen 3 beginning code (which worked) and replaced the threes with ones a few times. And then there was the part before that where the little tune I made wouldn't wo

atari2600land

atari2600land

Stupid!

All of the following happened in less than one second. This message popped up on my computer saying that I had three viruses on my computer and I needed to act now. I saw there was an info box with an OK button and I wasn't going to click that. I tried clicking back on my browser, but nothing happened. So I tried clicking back about a half dozen times and it went back to what I was doing. So I acted now by getting rid of that stupid message I got for god knows what reason. That was the first

atari2600land

atari2600land

Castle of Doom - end

I have reached the end of Castle of Doom. I spent two hours programming an attempt at an ending. I hope it will suffice. I really want this to be in the AA Store the next time Al updates it. I plan to ask him after Christmas is over. The game has 47 levels. I was hoping for 50, but hey, 47 is my favorite number. And I was pretty burned out trying to think of new rooms for the guy to traverse. The maximum number of rooms I guess I could have is 63, but that would require the rom to be 16k, which

atari2600land

atari2600land

Castle of Doom - December 19, 2018

So I've been working on Castle of Doom a bunch after swearing off too hard programming. I'm going to continue work on Frank the Fruit Fly for the Pokemon Mini, as Pokemon Mini assembly doesn't seem to be too hard for me. Anyway, after posting version 51, I've been noticing that whenever it jumps back to the title screen, the scanline count goes above 262. I thought now is the time to do something about it since the game is almost finished. I also fixed a bug pertaining to levels where the bats

atari2600land

atari2600land

I give up

While trying to add stuff to Yum, it became apparent that there were so many problems too numerous to mention, so I quit. And not just Yum. I took a hard look at life, and the only time I'm happy is when I'm not working on a project that involves me telling a computer to do something and not having it do it. So I guess it's just back to me coding only for batari Basic. I need to finish Castle of Doom and some other game I was doing anyway. batari Basic is where I get the least angry, because I'm

atari2600land

atari2600land

I need a pixel artist to help me again.

I have been working on Frank the Fruit Fly again. Apparently I keep thinking of stuff I can't draw well to be in this game. This time it's an evergreen tree. It's odd though because I can draw them from far away, but not close up like this. The tree is about 50 pixels high. I tried to make it and this is the result: As you can see, it's not really all that good looking. It looks more like an arrow pointing up. Oh well, at least I don't need help PROGRAMMING the game. At least not this time. And

atari2600land

atari2600land

Yum for Game Boy

I worked a whole lot on this last night. I went to sleep at midnight. Couldn't get to sleep until 1am. Then I slept for about 14 hours. It's kind of sad when you wake up and realize the day is almost over. Anyway, I have changed the name of the game from "Eating" to "Yum". I enjoy looking at my old Nintendo Power issues (circa 1993 or so). Finding games in the Pak Watch section that never got released ("Mario Vs. Wario", anyone?) The object of the game is simple: To open the guy's mouth to eat

atari2600land

atari2600land

Eating Game Boy

Since I decided to give up on the Mr. Stick game, and that my batch of games from the first game I ordered came, I wanted to work on a follow-up game. So what I decided to do last night was work on my Game Gear game I was making and turn it into a Game Boy game. Work on this has begun. I spent a lot of time working to make the guy there have enough tiles to be displaying as well as have room for the alphabet and other stuff. The mouth is a sprite. I'm making it so pressing A opens the mouth and

atari2600land

atari2600land

Score!

So last night, I finally put a score in the game. I could make a longer one if I wanted, since the score is basically just showing numbers, like in my Game Gear games. I was so wrapped up in thinking that a score needed to be a variable that I forgot about that option, displaying numbers on the screen like that. So NOW I'll take a break because I don't know what to do in the game next. Of course I'll put in different levels, which require different colored background colors, but of what, I don'

atari2600land

atari2600land

Pea-brained

So I finally worked out a couple problems with my Commodore 64 game and now I can continue. One of the problems was solved fairly easily, while the other took quite a long time. In the end, I figured out what the problem was. And then I figured out how to stop it. That second part was the one I spent the most time on. The problem: The computer was registering a hit at the title screen, forcing it to go back to the title screen when the joystick button was pressed. The solution: Wait until the hi

atari2600land

atari2600land

Double digits

Milestone today. I got Congo Bongo for the Commodore 64 in the mail today. It works fine, the only issue is it's really hard. If you gave me a million years to complete level 2, I don't think I ever could. Talk about a sharp increase in difficulty! Anyway, my Commodore 64 cartridge collection now stands at 10. I am puzzled over my game I was making, I have an issue where some collisions don't happen. Sometimes the fry just goes right through the broccoli. Not all the time, that's what's really o

atari2600land

atari2600land

Collision detection fun.

It's one of those cases where the game looks exactly the same but the code is different. In this case a lot different. I noticed some stuff. Like how sometimes if the burger is touching the cloud and the fry hits the broccoli the broccoli doesn't disappear. So I slowed the game down a little. Didn't help. I saw something though. I wondered if I could determine the sprite collisions of more than two sprites if I used $D019. A few false starts later I got it working. Sprite 0 is the burger, spri

atari2600land

atari2600land

Christmas comes early

Got 4 packages in the mail today. Gee, what the mailman must think of me. I ordered these on separate days, and they all came on the same day. 4 Commodore 64 games, 2 Game Boy games and a 2600 repro were all added to "the collection." I was working on something until 2am, then I worked on my Commodore 64 game for a while. Went to sleep at about 3:30am and didn't get up until 2pm. I'm having trouble with a few registers. They are set once the game starts but if I attempt to change them due to w

atari2600land

atari2600land

Keep it simple

So I had some long convoluted code in order to keep the bits in $d010 under control. Then it occurred to me that I could probably just turn the bits on and off instead of changing the whole value at once. One Google search later led me to how to do this. I added the vegetable in, a lovely piece of broccoli. Thus leading me to only have 34 lines of code expanded instead of a lot more. My day began at 6am. While sleeping, I figured that Nine Inch Nails is never going to release a follow-up to the

atari2600land

atari2600land

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