So for all of yesterday and today I have been working on a 2600 project which is frustrating the crap out of me. I hope to make this into a game that I can actually play and stuff but for now, I've been laying the foundation for it. While I'm wondering if I can do it in 2k, I think that I can definitely do it in 4k, and I should probably learn how to do a 4k game in 2600 assembly anyway. The hard part has been making the scanline count steady at 262. I've also been using the branch guide located
So I wanted to bring my N64 out from the cold cold garage and play it. Luckily I found it a controller and the games pretty quickly. I put in Super Mario 64 and turned the thing on. It still works. Hurray! I noticed that SM64 and Mario Kart 64 are some of the more pricier games for the console. I don't understand why having the word Mario in the title doubles its value. Copies of Mario Party are just as expensive if not more so. The only exception seems to be Dr. Mario 64. So anyway, I was pla
About a week and a half ago I wrote about how I finished the first of Ghosts from Nine Inch Nails. Well, a few days after that, I finished Ghosts II. The only song left was 14 Ghosts II. So even though it had a whole bunch of weird noises, I went to work on it and finished it. So I have half the double album done. It only took about 10 years to do. So here's what I have left: 19 Ghosts III, 20 Ghosts III, 23-27 Ghosts III, 29-31 Ghosts IV, 33 Ghosts IV and 35 Ghosts IV. I think I did the longest
I decided to work on my Channel F game even though I don't have a Channel F. But even if I did have a Channel F, there doesn't seem to be an Everdrive-type thing for it. Last year I bought a Channel F, but it wasn't working right so I took it back. I don't know why I did. Dumb decision I guess. So I'm stuck with working on it with MESS. My last computer I had had all the stuff, but it died, so I had to redownload all the stuff I had used. And I still am almost clueless as to how to program the
So I got this game in the mail today. It's a Sega Master System game called "Quartet." I don't know why they called it that, since it's a duo of characters going through a quintet of levels. I think this would be fun if the Master System had a Game Genie released for it. I die too quickly. I can't seem to get past level 2, but I have seen past it with the demo. Standard run and jump and shooting stuff Mega Man style video game. But what sets it apart from Mega Man is the fact that TWO people c
I've been stupid. Since I was using the PLAY FULL command, I read in the IntyBasic manual that the SOUND command could not be used. That isn't entirely true, though. Sounds can be used, although they sound like total garbage like in the previous versions of my game. I was wondering about that. So I changed PLAY FULL to PLAY SIMPLE, and it made a world of difference. The sounds are much cleaner sounding. So now that the game sounds better, I have a reason to continue working on it. I added a bo
So I got offered a thing to do with the Cedar Games intro. Between it and the title screen, put the word PRESENTS in. Just thought of a goofy thing to do with it. Make it change color with each new game. For the Oranges game, I will make it orange. Funny thing about the Oranges game for Odyssey 2: Technically, the color I'm using is its yellow. Which looks like orange, so I'm able to make the game at all. If it hadn't been for this fact, I would have had to make it something like "Giant Peas." A
So I thought of a way I could get the Cedar Games intro in every future game: Make it a 4k game, regardless of whether or not it needs to be a 4k game. For the Oranges game, what I did was put the intro in the bank where the game starts and then switch to the already completed game. A few lines of code were added to get rid of the leftover stuff not needed from the intro. It took a few tries to get it working, but now that I know how to do this, I can make better title screens for games so I can
The next Odyssey 2 game I have as well as all others made until the day I die, will have this splash screen to begin the game. I tried to put it in Oranges even without the music but it wouldn't fit anywhere. I guess I just have to make a new game and start with it and then build the game and fit the code around the intro screen. So I;m so sick of coding now that I'm going to take a break from it for a few days and then come back to it. I know I've said that in the past. But this time I mean i
So I revisited the Oranges game I made for the Odyssey 2 and made a few changes to it. This inspired me to want to work on a new Odyssey 2 game. There's just one problem: No ideas. I guess that's the problem when you've done so many Odyssey 2 games you could vomit. I have 8 published games, from various publishers. I guess Oranges is a glorified version of my first game Fatso, an attempt to make a version of Fast Food back when I was still trying to get a hang of Odyssey 2 programming. But now
So it's Thanksgiving. Not really a big deal in this house. Mom is vegan, and my sister's family is going to Tillamook for my sister's boyfriend's family. That leaves me with a turkey TV dinner. Yesterday I worked on MHTAL for the Intellivision. Almost all day was spent trying to get some sort of collision detection in. About a couple hours was spent trying to make a maze like the 2600 version had. This was the result: I took some code from the Celery game and put it in this code to create the
The number 47 has eluded me for the longest time, but now it suddenly comes back in a big way.
I saw an ad for a local department store selling turkey for 47 cents a pound.
Or the basketball game a few nights ago when that guy scored 47 points in a game.
And I opened up the paper and read today's "Pearls Before Swine" comic about the scout leader who took 50 kids for a hike and returned with 47.
About a week ago, there were 47 days left of the year. (November 15).
I used my cell phone
After ten years. I was cleaning my room when I stumbled upon the Nine Inch Nails album "Ghosts I-IV." This led me to think about my Ghosts MIDIs that I made. So I quit cleaning my room and began trying to finish the ones I didn't do. I started with 7 Ghosts I. I tried for an hour but didn't do it. My eye hurt real bad last night, bad enough to go and vomit like I usually do when I have a bad eyeache. I woke up and tried again to make 7 Ghosts I. What has impeded me before is all the weird nois
So while I was looking through my 2600 manual collection, I came across a Desert Falcon manual. And I thought "Wow. They made new 2600 games up until 1990." Then it occurred to me: If people make homebrew 2600 games, then I should make another one, too. After all, my name isn't IntellivisionLand. So I began work on a 2600 version of My History Teacher Ate Lemons. While working on it, I decided to make the sky visible, so I could do some neat stuff with it. An example is a bird flying in the sk
Ever since my grandparents died, me and mom haven't done anything special for the holiday. My sister and her boyfriend go to his folks' place then, and we're stuck here doing absoluetly nothing. I told my sister when she was out shopping a few days ago to get me "a turkey TV dinner." She comes back with the most fattening one: A Hungry Man dinner. Figures. I look on the back of the box: It has 1,300 mg of sodium. So my question is: Why? I'm not going to eat the "dessert" in the thing, nor the
I made a short commercial for My History Teacher Ate Lemons. Hopefully it will shed some light on the backstory. I got bored last night so I made this. I need an idea of what to do in the game next. I know that each level will end with Fred eating a lemon. But I want the three levels to be big enough. There are going to be three different levels: the Forest (which is what I'm working on now), the Mountains, and the Desert. Each level will end with a boss fight with a lemon. The first lemon wil
Unlike a certain president, I actually built a wall. I was up part of the night doing it, too. Unfortunately, it's just in My History Teacher Ate Lemons. And what's after the wall? Another wall! What's after that wall? I don't know yet, so an open field will greet you if you happen to figure out how to get past it. I made the tree-drawing code simpler. Instead of asking if it's on a certain screen number and then getting positions, I moved them all into a data array and did it that way. The pr
It was originally going to be a monster, and it still says "monster" in the code, but when I got to designing it, I only had room for one eye, so it became a cyclops. I worked last night trying to improve Oranges for the Game Gear to make it look better, but I'm just going to stick with what I had. And then I went to sleep, had a dream about poop coming out of the sink and our plumbing not working. Woke up and worked on the lemon game which is where cyclopses reside. Level 1, which is where Fr
New Boggle puzzle is up on My boggle puzzles page. #23. I make one about once a week or so. Pretty soon it will be 2018 and I'll have to change it so it says "made in 2018 by Chris Read." But I'll leave all the puzzles made in 2017 to say made in 2017 even though I will probably upload the last ones made in 2017 in January 2018 because they were made in 2017. I spend about a few hours each week making one of these even though from what I can tell nobody cares. Just do this to keep myself busy. R
I've been busy all day working on my Game Gear game about oranges. I spent most of yesterday and all of today trying to get two different noises to play in the noise channel. It kept wanting to play only one of the sounds I wanted instead of both of them. I kept going and going and just solved the stupid problem. I don't know how, either. It basically was the same thing I've been trying only a little different. I don't see how a different change can alter a game so much. Oh well. At least it has
So I've been working on both the Secret Government Waffle Project and My History Teacher Ate Lemons today. Fred has found his overalls and will put them on. His gun is the same color as his skin and he can shoot it. But even a clothed Fred will have a heck of a time trying to get back to his school to teach history to his students. And yes, it'll involve the eating of lemons. So anyway, I've been super busy today programming since I couldn't go to sleep until about 1:30am and got up briefly a fe
Why does everything have to be so hard? Example: my sister and her boyfriend came over to help me get a new doorknob so I could lock my door whenever Mom was being so annoying and asking for her pills so she can kill herself with them. The next 2 hours were spent trying to install the thing. Another example: I spent about an hour and a half last night trying to get the shooting in my new Intellivision game just the way I want it to. For those who want Berzerk on the INTV, you'll have to wait l
I woke up this morning to mom holding a bottle of pills in her bathroom. Which seems kind of hard since they were in my pocket while I slept. She came in there while I was sleeping just to steal her pills. Well, anyway, she went to the doctor's appointment. She didn't overdose on them (a thing she later regretted.) My sister got me a locked safe with combination to put the pills in. They doubled the dose of the appetite stimulator. Not only that, I had to go to bed with my program not working.
So the goal of this project is to make this game in 2k. I programmed a lot of the in-game last night. Today was spent trying to make the scanline count steady at 262. I wanted the program to continue playing the music and color change with the reset switch pressed down. I think I did that. So anyway, here is a screenshot of the game: You press fire to hold my history teacher's mouth open to eat the lemons. When the fire button isn't held, my history teacher's mouth is closed. Eventually there w
Last night I went to work on this thing again. I had an idea for a song that had a pattern of 7 short notes followed by a longer note. And for the life of me I couldn't get it to work! I tried everything and spent about an hour looking at previous codes I had done and then trying them in this thing but nothing worked until I decided to try the sequence backwards. That worked. So now that part of the code looks like this:
lda MusicPtr cmp #32 bcs ResetNoteTimer
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