It had been a long time since I used my Nintendo Switch. Since I just got a Switch game for my birthday a week ago, I thought I'd turn the thing on and play it some more. It needed an update. I was expecting a long one since it had been a while, so I went to the bathroom. Came back and it was already done. So anyway, the game I got for my birthday is Kirby: Star Allies. It's 2D! Great to know that there are still 2D platformers being made today. It had been some time since I was following a Ni
I decided since I was in a Channel F-y mode to work some more on my Channel F game. I made it so the ship doesn't shake violently once it reaches the lowest and highest points it can go. It just stops and waits for you to move the correct direction now. A lot better. If you have your MESS installed and want to play it via emulator, you can get the lovely rom here. It's still kind of hard, at least I think so. What do you think? Once it stops threatening ice and snow (well, it hasn't yet. Actua
Everyone loves it. So I've decided to put it in my game. A lot of work these past few days. I got a life counter in. I got bad food (vegetables) in. The plan is to put four types of "junk" food items and four different vegetables in. So far I have pizza slice, cookie, Brussels sprout, and cucumber in the game. What's left is to do the following:
+ add a game over screen
+ add a title screen with lovely music
+ add an Altoid powerup
+ add a second food coming at you
+ speed the game up at
So I put one of the songs I wrote into Windows Media Player. It immediately changes the artist to Billy Joel and the album title and cover art as well. Even though the artist name is stated as "Eating Plants Disgusts Me" and the length is over 3 hours. I highly doubt Billy Joel recorded a three-hour-long song ever. And this isn't the first time. It takes one word of the title and searches and replaces it with some dumb thing that isn't even remotely related. As a result, there are a few songs wi
So I woke up at 4 pm. I got about 14 hours of sleep. I kept having weird dreams and I kept waking up from them because a couple of them were scary weird dreams. After I got home from my birthday party (you'd think I would have the party at the house where I live, but no.) I was back to work on my Game Gear game.
Now the score counter works. And I made several minor changes to the digits in it. The numbers 3 and 5 in particular weren't very clear so I made them a little better. And I also mad
Even though I have been semi-actively searching for new to me games for it, I have been neglecting on playing and programming for my Game Gear. Looking at the files, the last time I had done something on it was September. It seems like longer than that, though. So I went back to work on where I left off on my newer GG game: Face-It.
This time around, I put in a cookie that moves from left to right on the screen. That's it. But that took about 45 minutes because I had to design, draw, convert
We've been building up for this day. I spent most of it sleeping. I did wake up in the morning, but then went back to sleep. I woke up at about 7pm or so. I had some chicken. I choked on it. That was fun. My sister brings all her leftover food she fixes over here. I don't like chicken that much, but I'll eat the rest of it anyway. Because hey, it's food. No trick-or-treaters any more. We live in a old folk's place. Well, it isn't technically, but there are a whole bunch of them around here. So w
So it had been 7 months since I last got myself an Intellivision game. It's kind of hard to get one you don't have when you have 93 of them. New to my family of INTV games is Diner, the sequel to Burgertime. Man, it's hard. It's a lot like Crystal Castles by Atari, but instead of collecting crystals, you kick meatballs down to the bottom of the screen. Of course, they have to stop at every level so you have to keep kicking them until they get down to the bottom. And also, of course, they have to
So I read the Wikipedia entry on DVD and I still have a few questions. I've been making an animated cartoon series. I have a DVD set of an old cartoon that used to be on Saturday mornings. It has each season on DVD. Each season is 13 half-hour long episodes. Not only that, it has bonus content on it. I did the math. (13 x .4, for 20 minutes) That's 5.2 hours. Add in the bonus content and it's about 6 hours on each disc. Reading the article, it says that the commercial DVDs are DVD-ROMs. So wha
I made the collision detection between the fly and the bee's stinger, but something was bothering me. Starting at screen 4, the fly suddenly got slower. I tried a few things that didn't work before I had an idea: "Why not call the moving part of the code twice in the slow areas?" I thought. So I did. And lo and behold it worked out well. The fly sped up. Which meant I had to speed up the bee since he was going slow since the fly was going slow. And now the game works well. But now I am out of id
There was an angry-looking yellowjacket caught between the sliding glass doors and couldn't get out. I tried to help him but he was too stupid to figure it out. So he's probably still stuck in there. But it gave me an idea for a screen for Frank the Fruit Fly.
Frank's next obstacle is a beehive. Now he must pass it without getting stung by a bee. The bees are chasing Frank and want to sting him, but thankfully they don't move very fast. I was able to figure out how to make the game start on
I added a cat to get past in the game. It took a really long time to code. I tried last night and I just gave up. I tried this morning again and I had to give up again. I finally tried to do a simpler version of what I was going to do. And just like that, the original version of the cat screen was completed. I had a bad case of insomnia last night. I guess those melatonin things quit working. I was up until 3am coding this thing. It wanted to ignore lines of code and do what it wanted to do. Wha
I've decided to return to working on Frank the Fruit Fly for the Pokemon Mini. No reason, really this time, besides looking for something to do. I read somewhere that once the ROM size reaches 64k I have to do something different to it. Right now, the ROM is only 17k, but I want to make this be a full-fledged adventure game like SMB or something with hidden stuff and solving puzzles and stuff. All the released Pokemon Mini games are 4MB, so that's what I want to do unless I can't figure out how
So apparently I was trying to cram in too much for the poor Odyssey 2 can handle and it gave me flickering walls at the top of the screen. It does that when it's not happy. I tried moving the walls down, but this didn't help. So instead of continuing work on a crappy game where the walls flicker when the alien gets hit, I've decided to just give up. Which is sad because I was actually enjoying working on this. I guess this gives me more time to work on some of my other projects like Castle of
So today's waking hours were spent getting the collision detection in the game for the guy's bullet. Oh, he now can shoot and move around in four directions in case you don't frequent the Odyssey 2 part of the AtariAge forum. But when all men were shot it was supposed to get all new men to shoot, but it kept wanting to freeze and glitch out when I put the code in to do that. But finally I got that solved. I still don't know why it happened, I guess it was due to the stupid page limitations. Yo
I'm working on Killer Heads of Lettuce for the Channel F again. Man this game is hard. So my job is to try and make it easier. I made it so the lettuce heads speed up at 50 points instead of a random speed up/slow down. And even then, getting to 50 points was hard even though the lettuce heads were slow. Though that may be just from me being a poor aim. A few things I had worked on prior to this was making the screen size smaller. I notice when I made Kevin Vs. Tomatoes that part of the score do
So I'm thinking about possibly porting the Atari 2600 game "Room of Doom" to the Odyssey² after seeing it in DoctorSpuds' blog entry. I think it would work well except for this change: The "doors" would always have to be open. The grid does not support such tiny openings in it. So I went ahead and made a real-life mockup (a picture of an actual binary I made) and I think it looks good. The guy is sprite 0, the dinosaur will be sprite 1 and the guy's bullet will be sprite 2, and the guard's bulle
So I went back to the store and said the second copy didn't work. So she let me choose another game since there weren't any other copies left of the one I wanted. I chose Atari Anthology. I think you know why, since it's my username and all. I take it back home and lo and behold, it starts working. I guess it's either Atari charm, third time's the charm, or it hated Namco Museum. I'm just happy it FINALLY started working. I was beginning to think it wasn't going to work at all.
So I bought an X-Box at the game store a few days ago. I put the X-Box disc in and it wouldn't work. I went back to the store and said the game wouldn't work so they gave me another copy of it. I went back home and that didn't work either. I put in an audio CD I burned to make sure it worked at all. It worked. I put in a DVD, that "worked" (It said I needed an adapter for it to run.) But the games, nope. I don't know if I just got two really scratched up games and the lady there wasn't very know
I have been busy with the Odyssey 2 lately. Reading the booklets, playing the games, that sort of thing. It is interesting though how even though the Odyssey 2 never really made much of a dent into Atari, it sure does have a good homebrewing scene. Why do you think that is? When I started programming Odyssey 2, it took me a few tries to figure out what I was doing, but I got the hang of it pretty quickly. That's not to say it's easy to program for, what with all the page division crap they put
So I finished the second song (MIDI) on my album and converted it to an MP3. But when I went to add it into Windows Media Player, it said it was 27:05. I was like "What?" All the other Windows programs that play music said it was around 27 minutes as well. So I went and started up Nero. It said a more sane time: 26:25. Which is what the MIDI program I programmed the music in said it was. Why is Windows Media Player then saying it's 27:05 when it's actually 26:25? I've had discrepencies in musi
I'm happy that the rodents are gone. Not only that, the big huge spider I mentioned in a status update left yesterday morning. So with everything gone and nice, I decided to work on Castle of Doom again. I was originally going to have a level that looked like a snake since I went to Game Crazy today and got Wildsnake for the SNES. I already had it for the Game Boy, but I decided to get it any way just to help them stay in business. I'm so nice.
What the level ended up like is the blog entry
So my sister is moving away from her boyfriend because he turned into a meth addict. He was admitted to the hospital tonight apparently even though he claimed he had worms boring into his eyelids. So I guess that meant my sister and nephew had to come over here before they could move into the new house. My house has so many boxes of stuff you'd think we were moving. Well anyway, they came over here tonight. And along came the rest of the pets. The dogs are in a kennel. The cat has been here fo
Every time I hear the word Jaguar I think of the Atari Jaguar. This lady on Jeopardy! said she was in a cage and there was a jaguar that pawed at her face. Even though she was talking about an actual jaguar, I still couldn't help but think of the Atari Jaguar. I had to uncapitalize "jaguar" while typing that last sentence. Anyway, I went and worked on the Jaguar again. I was having quite the time with the UFOs. It just so happened that even if you put in a 24 bit image with 5 colors in it, it
Yesterday I was so sleepy all day. So I slept for most of it. That meant since I woke up at 6pm, I was awake all night. I have no idea why. I have been taking melatonin to help me sleep, something I just tried about a week ago. I don't know if that had something to do with it. I usually go to sleep at 1am. Right now it's 4:40am and I just got sleepier. So I worked on Castle of Doom last night. I got it so there's 162 bytes left in bank 1. And I added a nice title screen song that loops instead o
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