So most of the time today was spent sleeping. I slept until 3pm, which gave me a total of 13 hours of sleep. While I wasn't sleeping, I worked on my Jaguar game, Aaron the Aardvark. Mostly little things, like making the walking animation for the aardvark work correctly, redefining borders - mostly of collision detection boxes, and assorted very minor details. I have over 300 Atari 2600 games. Yet I've always been envious of photos of other peoples' NES collections, the whole long rows of games
After announcing on this blog a few weeks ago I was making a music project here, I have been working on it almost daily. The only thing that changed is that in the beginning I used a keyboard to plot out notes. That has changed so now I just use the software I use to make the MIDI which is the sound of the piano anyway. I finished the first song and am halfway into the second one. Oh, and I changed the name of the "artist" from "no" to "uncle jim's barnyard fun." What prompted this change? I f
So after a few hours of trying some other stuff, I devised a way of making this game have more "random" cards. But using this method, the cards must be "shuffled" after every hand. Here's how I am doing it right now. Pick five cards from "random", making sure they're all different. Then, depending on what the player selects, get 0-5 more "random" cards, again, making sure they're different from the ones already dealt. Repeat process over and over again, once for every hand. Should I make it so
So I noticed a few things: #1. The last redealt card was always the ace of hearts. Wanting to change this, I apparently accidentally broke the game. It took a few hours to fix it. #2 - If the player hit the deal button while the win/lose song was playing, the note held into the next hand. This was an easy fix, though, compared to the other one. I must have playtested the stupid thing a half-dozen tries before I finally tested it for 10 minutes and it seems to be working okay. I noticed that my
So I think I finished the game after working for a few hours putting a saving card option and redealing option in. You can opt to keep some or all of your cards. After pressing deal, it gives you new (random) cards and your final hand. I think I solved a few bugs because I had the card numbers in the redealing part of the code backwards. It would help immensely to have them in the correct order. Because they weren't, it kept missing pairs. Anyway, if you have Mednafen or a FlashBoy, please tes
So after a whole bunch of hours programming, I finally have the beginnings of a video poker game. It took a while to get it just right. A few problems were in the way. One was that it kept giving me two king of clubs sometimes. I think I have that problem gone now. Another was sometimes it was ignoring pairs. Again, I think I have that problem gone now. The next step in programming is to make a hand icon and make it allow players to keep cards and then redeal the cards they don't keep and the
So I figured out that I do not understand Craps in the slightest after attempting to play it on Golden Nugget Casino 64. So I am not going to make it for the Virtual Boy. Instead I will attempt to make a version of Video Poker. Here's what I have so far: And this was a challenge. It kept wanting to give me a straight, but I finally did what I wanted it to do. Next I will make a hand icon and make it press the "keep" button to keep the cards you pick and then redeal the ones you don't want.
I made a 35th room for Castle of Doom. Hey, that rhymed. Anyway, I had to redesign it a couple more times to make it harder. Because it's the hard half of the game. And designing a hard level is hard. You don't want to make it easy, and at the same time you don't want to make it impossible. Testing the level is the hardest part. This is where you find out whether it's possible or not.
Remember, the more you hold the fire button, the higher the guy jumps.
I did NOT want to get up today. T
I've decided to continue work on Castle of Doom. I am wondering if I have room for an even 50 levels. And an ending. After all, defeating all those levels you might as well get one. How special it is depends on how much room the rest of the levels take up. Right now I have 35 rooms in there and 1,444 bytes left in bank 2, where rooms 27 and beyond are stored. Levels 1-26 and info are in the first bank, along with the "engine." So I figure if I can fit 26 rooms in a bank, then I SHOULD have room
So I was looking for something I thought had been gone for a while. But I wondered how I would have played my Genesis without the RF switch. I looked in the garage, I looked in the pantry. It wasn't in there. Angry and defeated, I just gave up and bought another one on eBay. And then I went to the bathroom. That's where it was, hiding in plain sight, waiting to be found. Argh! I got a Genesis game and the Game Genie at a store. I wanted to see whether they would work or not. The Boogerman game
I went to work on My History Teacher Ate Lemons. I was finishing up level 2 when I noticed that when you had the fire button pressed down when you defeated the giant lemon boss, the dumb sound sounded like a theremin. I tried isolating sounds but that didn't work. The only thing I could do was insert PLAY NONE and then directly after that, insert a command to play the defeated lemon ditty. That worked. And it's the only thing that is going to work. And that took a few hours to learn. So now u
So I went back to work on my Pokemon Mini game I was working on because this guy on eBay told me he had a Pichu Bros. game he'd give me a great deal on. Except I had to pass on it because I already have it. So that got me thinking about my Pokemon Mini game I was making. Does the shading on these clouds look cool or stupid/weird? It's easy to change, so be honest. And I went to update the page for it, but the é and copyright symbols weren't working any more. They changed the pages I used to go
I have an idea. The idea is make this new Intellivision game I started work on, make a version of Yum for the Intellivision, make a third game I haven't thought of yet, and put it all together and call the thing "Triple Fun." I figure the games aren't going to be very large, so I can just make three 16k games and put them on one ROM along with a title/game selecting screen. I don't know about the Lemons game I started for the Intellivision. I kind of lost steam on it. I want to finish it, but
Sad to say, I was cleaning out my room and wondering what if any I could move to the garage/pantry area instead of it being in my room. The Intellivision got moved to the garage. Now all I have out are the NES, Atari 2600, N64 and SNES. I got bored, so I began playing with IntyBASIC some more, trying to find some inspiration for a project. I'm wondering if I can speed up the speed of the Intellivision thing I've been working on. The fastest setting I have might be too slow. I don't really want
I was bored, so I began making Yum, my boring Channel F game, for Game Gear, in the hopes that it will fare better on it than the Channel F. Since the Game Gear has two buttons, I've decided to make pressing button 1 close the mouth and button 2 opening it. The guy is also a lot more colorful and I (finally) made the score 6 digits. So later what I plan to do is in addition to opening and closing the mouth, get breath mints for temporary invincibility. You must open your mouth for it to work. Al
I found my NES Game Genie. This after I was looking for it because I wanted to try a game with it. Unfortunately, they don't work with the top loader, so I had to get the older NES in here. It still works great. And the NES Game Genie still works great even after all the decades I had spent playing with it. I wanted to beat the level 4 boss from Kirby's Adventure. So I tried. If you gave me a million years to try even with a Game Genie, I could still never beat the stupid thing. Controlling Kirb
Here's a first. I've decided to give up on this game. Not because I'm having trouble programming it, but because it's not a very interesting game to play. So I guess I'll chalk it up as a learning experience and move onwards. I did get two items on the screen at the same time. It took about an hour to do. While testing it though, I wasn't very interested in playing it. I guess intermittently pressing fire isn't very interesting. Maybe I'll make this game part of another game. Like what Fairchi
So I have been working on Yum for the Channel F. It got so anger inducing I wanted to quit and just stop working on it. The problem was either the teeth were flashing once, or the lips got erased on the guy's mouth. But somehow, at 6:30pm last night I finally got it working. Way past my bedtime, but I tried to go to sleep after and laid there for about an hour before i gave up and got out of bed for half an hour. Tried again and it took another half hour to get to sleep.
Woke up 12 hours lat
I've been working on Aaron the Aardvark on Jaguar after finding out that my Channel F game freezes after you die 8 times. Yesterday had me putting in new backgrounds for the game designed by Clint Thompson. It makes me wish I had a skunkboard, but if I look on eBay, they're all about $400 or so. My game is about 1.33MB. I learned yesterday from him that the limit is 1.9MB. I guess all these fancy images are big in size. My ultimate goal is to have the game in the AA Store so I can play the gam
Here is a picture of my latest Channel F project after I decided that Quest of the Cranberry was too ambitious for the Channel F. I decided to do something simpler, so I'm going for simpler things, like this. It's kind of like Fast Food, but the giant face's mouth closes if fire is pressed, otherwise it's open. The idea being to eat the candy and avoid the rhubarb. I'll have two items on screen at once. The hardest part will be randomly choosing either a rhubarb or candy piece. In other news,
After two attempts taking a few hours, I've decided if it's going to be a difficult piece of poop and not obey my commands and instead reset itself, then I have no choice but to give up on the cranberry project and do something a bit less complicated. Anyone have any ideas? Apparently I can't do what I want, and apparently it goes off in a different direction and does something entirely different THAN WHAT I TELL IT TO DO. It just angers me! Oh well, I guess it's just back to composing my song
I decided to put some rain in the Cranberry game. I got it moving good, but a lot of time was spent trying to get the left over stuff gone when the raindrop reset. I finally decided that my cool slanted raindrop I designed was not going to work, so I reduced it to a line. I wanted to put something in the game besides the blueberry to make the game harder. I think I finally succeeded with that. Each time I tried to cross the rain screen, about 10% of my health came off trying to dodge the rain. A
I went to work again on the game. It took a long time to do what I wanted. I think the problem is the game kept crashing when I exited the first screen. I think it was due to me having too much code in the game. I am beginning to think that such a game might not be possible on the poor Channel F. I deleted some unneccessary code from the game. I got what I wanted, but the cranberry was moving at different speeds on different screens. Disgruntled, I went to sleep. I woke up the next morning (Ye
I think I figured out how to make 4k games on my own. I went to the VES wiki and took a look at some of the disassemblies of commercially released games. I noticed something. A 2k game did not go above the address A0fff, while the bigger ones did. I went back and inspected my own code. I noticed the signature:
org $ff0signature: .byte ".chris read 2018"
I thought the ff0 was A0ff0. So I thought to myself, "Well, what if I changed that org statement?" So a few attempts later, I got a
So yesterday I worked on the Cranberry game some more. I made the changes I talked about in yesterday's blog. I made it so there's a screen type. And I made it so the screen type is the thing based on deciding what goes where instead of the screen number. This will save a lot of space, so instead of having two long things of code to decide what to show when, I'll only have one. I was still bored, so I decided to put in the health monitor. I fiddled around with different ways to do this, includ
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