So I spent the better part of 2 hours working on this little project of mine for no apparent reason. I tried to make one lemon using the playfield. All attempts failed. Until I decided to just bite the bullet and make two reflecting lemons. This pleases me now. After all, it's "my history teacher ate lemons," not "a lemon." I don't know why I named it that. I name stuff weird stuff I think up in my head. I don't know what my history teacher ate. Perhaps he did eat lemons. Or maybe he was a she.
I thought I'd try my hand at Atari 2600 assembly again. It took a while to relearn stuff I'd forgotten, but two hours' worth of work got this binary file attached here. The batch file says there are 23 references to unknown symbols and 31 events requiring another pass, but it works. Since I have about 1500 bytes left, I figure I might as well add a song, so I'll do that tomorrow. Think of this as a demo, not a game. Mom is still insistent on taking all her pills to die, so I've decided to hide
Mom keeps wanting me to give her all her pills so she could die. She says she's lost the will to live. I keep telling her she won't die and she'll just get really sick, but she doesn't believe me. She keeps saying "maybe I will. Let me try." I keep telling her that I'm going to take all my pills so I can die because I want to die. I can't keep living like this. Something's gotta give. Regardless of this, I decided it was time to put in a game over screen for Oranges yesterday. Composing a litt
So yesterday I was up until 9:45pm or so trying to get channel 3 to make a buzz sound whenever an item was picked up. I thought I was doing everything right, but it kept making a buzzing sound until the song relooped. As it turned out, my buzzing timer was set to go off wrong. Who would have thought that? Not me. So I got that done. But now what do I do? I am waiting for some guy who offered to make some bgm for the ingame song using just 2 channels. But what do I do in the meantime? I really
Yesterday and today I worked on my Game Gear game "Oranges." Basically a stripped-down port of the Secret Government Waffle Project. Yesterday I got it working and today was spent trying to get a ding sound for each point made. I discovered that I could turn the channels off and on at will, so I filled channel 0 with one note and turn it on when I want a ding sound and turn it off when the ding sound is over. This means though that the in-game music only has 2 channels, 1 and 2. I can't use ch
So I played some Berzerk on the 2600 last night. I couldn't sleep, so I figured I might as well continue working on the progress I had made earlier yesterday when I started the whole thing. The only reason I played Berzerk is to get the sprites so I could program them into my game. They were 8x10 or so, so I had to cut out a few lines to make it 8x8. I'm guessing here will be the breakdown of the sprites: sprite 0 - man sprite 1 - man's bullet sprites 2-5 robots sprite 6 robot bullet sprite 7
I have decided on what my next project after the Secret Government Waffle Project will be. It is going to be a dreaded port of something. I looked through all the stuff and suggestions and ideas on what people wanted. There were so few that I thought I could actually do. So I eventually decided on something I think I could at least attempt to pull off. But I need a name for it, though. A new name. Something similar sounding to ... Berzerk. I think I may just do well enough to actually handle it.
The Game Gear bug bit me. I worked on my Oranges game for the Game Gear last night and tonight. I was able to add a fork and change Bob's shirt color via changing the palette. Sometime soon I need to get motivated to make a website for the Oranges game for Game Gear. The fork has to be really long because I made the syrup bottle the same size and the collision detection would be all screwy if I made the fork 8x8. I tried. I also bought Alien 3 for the Game Gear off of eBay to add to my collectio
So I guess Frank the Fruit Fly isn't going to work very well since I can't draw. I can't draw cats with necks. So I guess I'm projectless after the Secret Government Waffle Project is finished. So I guess what I'm getting at is I need some ideas for new games you would like to see on the INTV. Do you have a game idea? Or port you would like to see (heaven knows how many more ports the INTV needs) Also as a side project I have this secret 2600 game project I'm working on. I'm not ready to revea
I must be the only one left making these types of puzzles, but here I am. I made a special Halloween Boggle puzzle for anyone who cares. It's #21. You can download it here. Also available are my previous 20 non-Halloween themed puzzles but they do have a theme. It's just not Halloween. I wonder if anyone will see it. Probably not, but it's just something I do to pass the time. How did it get so late? Oh well.
I woke up @ 9am. Mom said she took the dog out when I was sleeping. I gave Mom her pills. I have to hide them from her so she doesn't try to kill herself with them. And mine, too. Then Mom went and laid in bed and I worked on the computer until about noon and then made Mom take the dog out. Kept checking the mail. It never came until after 3pm. I got two games. I had to clean one intensively and finally made it work through my Intellivoice. Made some changes to the Secret Government Waffle Pro
So I had to call them. My mom was going to go in the garage and start the car and try to kill her self that way. I had no other option but to do that because I was sick and tired of Mom. Three cops showed up at my door. They were nice and all, but they basically said I needed proof and needed to catch her in the act, instead of her chickening out and walking back in the house ten seconds later. So me and my sister are basically helpless at this point. I mean, if the cops can't do anything, wha
Mom has gotten worse these past few days. I didn't know she could get worse, but here we are. I know what her problem is: She says she can't do anything. That's what the problem is. And it's gotten to the point where she believes that it's true that she can't, when in fact it isn't. Counseling does not seem to be working. And when I tell her to take her pills, she has to argue with me for a few minutes before she finally does. And all she does is just lay on the couch most of the time. She barel
I tried and failed to make a bankswitched Game Boy game. I give up. There goes all hope for my epic Game Boy game. But all is not lost for Frank the Fruit Fly, though. Once I have the Secret Government Waffle Project done, I will start work on a new Intellivision game. Frank the Fruit Fly is moving to the Intellivision. Which means I have to start all over again with coding, but at least I have a few ideas for screens and traps and stuff. I think Frank the Fruit Fly is better suited towards ha
So I have been having trouble with Jaguar programming. I tried everything and just couldn't make the fire ant sprite appear on the screen without weird lines up above it. I had been using GIMP since that's what the forum post said to use. But I found out that Paint Shop Pro was a better choice, since Sporadic replied and said he used Paint Shop Pro 7 to change the bmp file. So I downloaded Paint Shop Pro 7 and saved the bee sprite (which I had also been having trouble with), and put it in the ga
Mom today was the worst she's ever been since this whole thing started. Earlier she was worried about all the stuff she thinks she needs to be worried about. That's her whole problem: She's worried about all this stuff. Perhaps it's anxiety that's making her sick. Anyway, I took some time out to determine why the collision detection wasn't working in my Cat vs. Rat game. I think I solved that problem, but one still remains. Nobody wants to help me with my grand scheme for this game, and tell m
So I was looking through my old magazines I made. In one of them I mentioned the R-Zone. I remember owning an R-Zone a few years ago. Thought it was a fun system, I don't know why I sold it though. Thought it would be fun to start owning one again. Searched eBay and found a handheld version of the R-Zone, an X.P.G. that had a make offer. So I decided to make an offer on it. Offer was accepted. I saved $10 on it. I was looking for one that came with at least a game. This one has a Star Wars game
You know, for the Secret Government Waffle Project. I've begun working on the in-game credits for the Secret Government Waffle Project, the game I have been working on for a few months years for the Intellivision. I am really excited about how this project is looking and turning out, it's like nothing I ever imagined it would be. Plus, I even got it to scroll, something I was working on yesterday. I was envious of how the credits for Super Pro Football scrolled and I wanted to do the same thing
So Mom has gotten to be depressed all the time. I know I should be there for her, but at the same time I don't want to see her like this. So I have been sleeping all day to avoid her giving me depression. But that will end now because I'm feeling a little selfish for doing that. Anyway, with Mom sleeping I decided to work on Cat vs. Rat again. This time it was trying to add a maze that gave me the most problems. Again: I hate the dumb 256-byte "page" limits imposed on Odyssey 2 programmers. Th
So I have been fighting with the code for the game for a few days now and I think I have it nailed down. It did sort of have a little freakout on maze #7 on real hardware, but I'm ignoring it because it hasn't done anything evil since. Apparently my code was so tightly packed that even putting in a couple lines of code caused all the pages to move around which caused a whole bunch of stupid things to happen. At a couple points I gave up on the game because it was acting so stupid. I added some
So for some reason, I figured I needed to do some bankswitching to get Frank the Fruit Fly working again. I tried to put two files together but was unable to. What led me to this assumption? I started the game from the very beginning and went up to the screen with the buttons. After pressing the second button, instead of saying "RIGHT," it said "bank 1." So I asked for help on the game boy development forum. I realized that what had been happening was it was saying "bank 1" because I put in a
So I got four Game Boy games in the mail today. One of them I had to clean a lot before I got it working. The rest are fine. This inspired me to work on Frank the Fruit Fly some more. So since I noticed that most Game Boy game songs have both treble and bass clef notes, I went to work adding some notes to the songs I already had in the game. The title screen song was easy to add notes to, but the level 1 BGM proved trickier. As a result, I had to slow down the music a little bit so I could fit
So I am still working on Mouse in the House. I'm thinking that I may change the name of the game to Cat vs. Rat. I don't know, the latter is shorter. Anyway, I wanted to put some letters in a maze like I did with the first one. I ended up with a fairly nice maze, but I had to nix it due to the borders. I tried reprogramming the borders, but it didn't help. What I ended up with was what seems like a fairly straight-forward idea. Until you realize that the cat and the mouse meet. This leads to a
So I got back to working on my Mouse in the House game for Odyssey 2. It took me several hours to put in an additional 0 for typing in the level number. But now, when you type 07 and then Enter, it takes you to puzzle #7. I went to sleep with an idea on how to program the tens digit. I woke up about 12 hours later and with the idea forgotten, went back to work. Searching for how to multiply numbers on the Odyssey 2, I found that there is a snippet of code in the BIOS that can do it. So more wo
Last night before I went to sleep, I decided to go through my website and see what old files I had. This led to me updating the look of the main page of my website. I brought back an old logo I had made for the site. Also, I put in a picture of an Atari 2600 for the background. I also brought back a couple of sections that had been missing for a long time. I stupidly accidentally erased the old index.html page I had for the old site last year. I put up a new one in January 2017. I have been ad
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