So last night I worked on the hamburger game. I designed a little bit of level 1. I made it so the milkshakes change patterns every 20 points. And since I'm wanting there to be more than one level, I moved the specific code for changing level 1 shakes' attack patterns into bank 1. I am imagining the in-game code being one block of code, with changes every level which are controlled by moving to different banks. Like for example, Level 1-specific code is in bank 1. (The in-game and title screen c
I guess it's just me having an odd TV is all. e5frog sent me a picture of how my game looks on his NTSC TV. But as a result of this, I've more centered Killer Heads of Lettuce so the action takes place more in the center of the screen. Just in case this gets released. Also, I'm wondering why all the other retro consoles show up okay on my CRT TV. For example, I've just started working on a new Odyssey 2 game. I put it on my TV and it displays well. And another thing I noticed. I think it's
I just got the boards today and the game works fine on 16:9 TV sets, but part of the score is not going to show up on 4:3 ones since I accidentally made the score show up more to the right than it should have been. Lesson learned. I will try to center stuff more next time so it will be usable on all TV types. Here is a picture of the game on a 16:9 aspect ratio TV. Putting the board together for mine was a real chore because I had to figure out how the springs fit on since they got unattach
A huge thanks to Kurt Woloch for answering my post about simplifying a bunch of code I had. It made a big difference and I was able to add some more stuff to the Killer Lettuce game. As a result, most of yesterday was spent working on the game. A big problem I had was with the lettuce's bullet. It froze on the screen. No matter what I did, it stayed there sometimes at the right side of the screen and didn't reset. I went to sleep with that problem. I woke up this morning late, at about noon. I
I couldn't tear myself apart from working on the game again. So I added lives. And a life counter. So when you get hit, the burger crashes downwards and a life is subtracted once he hits bottom. So you get four lives to start with. I had a terrible time with this. Total time spent with lives: about 3 hours. My primary problem was the score was flickering once the burger hit bottom. But I moved the burger's final y position during crashing to onscreen and the flickering went away. So it isn't ver
Since I learned that the Game Gear can only have 8 sprites in a row, today's work involved taking 8 pixels off the "paused" sprite to make room for a 1-digit life counter. As a result, the game now says "pause" instead of "paused." Another thing I also learned is that pressing button 2 on the Game Gear Everdrive starts the most recently loaded game. I didn't know that. That will save a bunch of time later. A thing I want to do is have the strawberry milkshake shoot at you as well. But I don't
So I spent the better part of my waking hours today trying to put words in the GG game. Letters didn't really want to work, so I put phrases in instead. But somewhere along the line, I broke collisions. It started detecting what I thought were false collisions. But while playing on the Everdrive, I saw something I didn't see with Emulicious: an extra rogue 8x8 strawberry milkshake sprite part pops up for a fraction of a second sometimes right after the sprite goes away when you shoot it. Me s
So I worked on HERTS (Hamburgers En Route To Switzerland. Funny acronym I made) again. I was having trouble making the milkshake's y position go up and down. It kept thinking there was a collision when in fact there wasn't. After many angry outbursts, I had an idea. Perhaps it was thinking there was a collision because the 2 parts of the milkshakes were overlapping. So I separated them more, one pixel up moving up and one pixel down moving down. That worked, except for if you fired while the s
You know what? I used to enjoy looking through eBay and seeing what Dreamcast games sellers are selling. But then, one day, someone started selling "Custom" Dreamcast games. For example, what kind of DC game has Mario in it? But then, more and more and more stupid fake Dreamcast games started appearing. And apparently, people seem to not care and they actually BUY them. But now, it's become really hard to look at Dreamcast on eBay and see an ORIGINAL game. And I doubt there's anything I can do
I don't know why I keep making games about food. I guess it's because I'm hungry all the time? Well, at least it was healthy food (tomatoes, lettuce, celery, etc.), that is, until now. I've transitioned to meat. This is the "secret" Game Gear game I was working on. I've decided to unveil it now because, well, I'm stuck. Not with the code, but with the game play. Right now it just seems, well, boring. I need to spice stuff up. But how? Right now, you control a flying hamburger as it is going to
So I was at the store. I saw a few 7800 titles. I thought to myself "Hey, I have a 7800. Maybe I should get them." So I did. I came home, looked in the garage for my 7800. Finally found it. As it turned out, I already had the three carts I bought. Oh well. But on the upside I do have a working Atari 7800. The power button is a bit sticky though. On the downside, I don't have a 7800 controller for it. So I'm looking for one. Right now I'm using a 2600 controller, but I want to have an official 78
So I finally got some sprites to display on the screen for my new Game Gear game I've been making. A quite unconventional way though. For example, there's a 16x16 sprite on the screen. To display a 16x32 sprite, I had to cut the sprite in half and then repeat the code twice. Which is better than the way I had it before, which was wasting 8 tiles. So now I think I can have two enemies on the screen at the same time along with the player and the thing he fires. Which would be quite good, as I thin
So I have been busy again with the Game Gear game tonight after sleeping almost all day. One of the things I wanted to do is have a sfx play on channel 2, since it isn't used in the song. But I tried and kept trying because I thought I wasn't doing anything wrong. Frustrated, it dawned on me: Since channel 2 had no data in the song (channels 1 and 0 did), it must be silent all the time. But why, I wondered, could I write data to channel 3 and have that work? So anyway, I tried my best to make
Still working on my Game Gear game. I got bankswitching working. I now have a 64k game. I got some data for the screen in bank 1 and got it to display in bank 0. I worked a tiny bit on the game play as well. I would like to reveal this game when I think I am finished with it and ask for feedback then. Until then, I want to make it a top secret project. I'm having to keep asking for help on the SMS Power! forums, but it is worth it. But this is so hard. I guess I could use the C compiler, but n
So I was working on my Game Gear game again today. I designed some new numbers for the score. But something was wrong with the 9 digit. It wasn't put in the game. So I wondered why. I went back to the bmp2tile messages to see if anything had gone wrong. It only read numbers 0-8. 9 was on the end and for some reason didn't get read at all. So I moved it one pixel to the left and tried again. Success. I don't know why that made a difference though. I used the Century Gothic font to make these nu
I'd like to have a future game look really good. In order for that to happen, I need to have someone with good drawing skills. Which is not me. So I'm asking for good help. If you want to help, here's what I want. I want a calm, meadow-like scene with mountains in the background. And now, the details: - the image must be 256 pixels by 192 pixels. Keep in mind that the extreme bottom and top of the image probably won't show up on the screen. - the image must have no more than 15 colors in it. -
Another thing that helps when I have an eyeache is to sleep. But my eyeache mysteriously went away at about 4am. I don't know why, but it did. So went to sleep @ about 7am and woke up @ 4pm. It was time to work on Castle of Doom. I left off on level 29. So I designed level 29: Part of me wants to save this level and put it on level 30 just to be silly. I had this interesting idea to put the number 29 in the level. So with paper and pen I designed a level that did. I had way more room left,
So with my eye hurting again, I decided to program the Atari 2600 some more. I worked on Castle of Doom. Today's update is just to see if what I had mentioned in yesterday's blog about size and space was true. Turns out it is. Right now I have 57 bytes left in bank 1 and 2,135 bytes left in bank 2. So that means I can put a ton more level data in bank 2. But I had to make it switch between bank 1 and bank 2 though. This meant having level data getting code in both banks. Once I successfully did
Finding something to do, I thought about that old Castle of Doom game for the Atari 2600 I made 26 screens of and stopped. Well, I picked it back up and made some improvements, like the guy is actually standing on the floor instead of floating above it. Couldn't fix the part where the guy can't reach the absolute sides of the wall, though. Castle of Doom is sort of like GoSub instead of a submarine, it's Bob and instead of the walls being deadly, they're solid. And instead of an octopus, you get
While working on Chris's Casino for Virtual Boy, it occurred to me that I think INTV was the only console back then with a roulette game. But it didn't have a slot machine game. So I'm looking to expand the Las Vegas game line with Las Vegas Slot Machine. I don't think the "Las Vegas" name is trademarked. And since there seems to be no TM next to the "Las Vegas" icon, I'm guessing I'm free to use it as well? So I am stopping work on the unusually hard VB casino game to work on this INTV casino
So yesterday I stayed up making the slot machine stop. I got it working on the Mednafen emulator, then I went to bed. Got up and found that the first reel wasn't working right on my real VB. So I had to spend about an hour fixing it. I solved the problem, but I still don't know why it happens. Everything in the code looks okay. Now with the slot machine, you press A to pull the handle and start it. It goes round and round for a few seconds until the first reel stops, then the second, then the
Why are some games so much more expensive than others? Take, for example, Jack Bros. for Virtual Boy. There's multiple copies on eBay, yet they're all about $500. So it can't possibly be rare if there's so many of them. When I got my TurboGrafx-16 years ago from the used video game store, I didn't ever imagine how much money the games would be worth and be so hard to buy. I have a decent-sized collection, but it cost money to do so. I have 2 dozen games for the game system. Last night I plugge
So whenever I lay on the couch and go to sleep on it, I have these weird dreams where I think I'm up and walk around and do my mundane stuff. Then I wake up and realize it was all a dream. I woke up at 11am to go back to sleep on the couch and be with the dog while Mom left. Last night, I decided to work on the slot machine some more despite me saying earlier that I wouldn't. I put in a temporary front to the slot machine so it wouldn't take up the whole screen. This took a long time to do sin
Today I began work on the slot machine portion of my casino game for Virtual Boy. And it angered me so much my eye began to hurt so I took a couple chewable bayers, and I hope that will work. What angers me though are two things: #1 - the fact that I did the same thing in a previous game and it works fine but doesn't now for some reason (new computer perhaps?), and #2 - Mednafen is a stupid emulaor that runs things perfectly but when you go test it on a real Virtual Boy it gets all screwed up.
I decided to test my casino game on a real Virtual Boy. Good thing, since there was a ton of problems I needed fixing. The screen was rolling like it was a PAL 2600 game on an NTSC console. Fixed that. Then the chip in roulette wasn't displaying correctly. It was flickering like the ghosts in 2600 Pac-Man, but only on the bottom row. So I redid the roulette table so it didn't go down as far and that fixed it. Hopefully I didn't break anything new in Roulette since the game's deciding whether you
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