Like Mr. Gumby in the Monty Python sketch: "My brain hurts!" It's summer now. Hard to believe the first day of summer was 10 days ago. And I forgot to tell here I made another comic book issue. I do these to keep myself busy, much like playing and making video games, making music, animation, and other stuff I do. All various projects going all at once because if I don't, I'd be very bored just sitting and watching TV. And besides, there's nothing good on anyway. Yet I have all my DVDs in case I
Most of today was spent working on (and getting angry at) the Oranges game for Game Gear. Literally a couple hundred attempts at least today. Just little changes. I finally got it the way I want it to be. I made the oranges random like in the Game Boy version. Woke up at about 9am. It's 7:30pm right now and so I spent about 9 or so hours working on this game today, barely doing anything else. I swear, computers have a mind of their own and they disobey me. I tried and tried and couldn't do what
So yesterday, I composed a song for Oranges for Game Gear. I had a problem with it. It had more than 1 sequence. It was a MOD. So I had to slow it way down so I could squeeze more song into an allotted space of 1 sequence. I am guessing the program that converts MODs to VGMs does not like MODs to have more than one sequence. So then when I was done, I converted the VGM into a PSG file so it could play in my Game Gear game. There was a slight pause though in the song that bugged me. So when I got
So I got the oranges in the game. I don't know if there's a way to make them be random or not. The Game Gear doesn't have a random number generator. So that means it's going to be a lot harder to make it seem more random. I got the oranges moving. As it turns out, even though the game looks the same as the Game Boy version, everything is shifted 32 pixels to the right. This is why the image I used to make the playfield looks like this: There is a huge border. This is presumably due to the fact
Well, yesterday, I said I was too sick of working on Oranges for Game Gear and decided to call it quits for the day. That didn't turn out to be the case. Later that same day I worked on getting the score in. Today I also had a go at changing the colors to not have the top right corner of the screen be so icky. The result is I made it less icky (I wanted it to be gone, but after trying for 90 minutes with various color schemes, I decided this one was the best.) As you probably noticed, there is
So I was trying to make the Orange-O-Matic screen with the Game Gear. On a real Game Gear the first one I had had blurriness. So it took a half-hour and lots of testing and lots of color changing. The first version I had had white and black and I guess it doesn't like white next to long black horizontal lines. I finally deemed this version acceptable: As you can see it's quite colorful. Up next is to try and make a score counter. I'm so glad I finally have the Pause function in already and I ha
So I decided to take a stab at making Oranges for the Game Gear. This required downloading a lot of programs for my computer. But when I was done with that, another challenge hit me: I completely forgot how to make Game Gear games. So I looked through previous code I had done. I was able to get a title screen done last night before I went to bed. I woke up at 2am. I put in the guy. This required getting colors just right for an hour or so. For some reason his pants kept coming out transparent. B
So I tried to put in a .mod to play when a death happens in Ants. Sometimes, Virtual Jaguar plays a scratched up computer sound instead of it. One time, the game froze. I don't know why I even bother trying sometimes. So now I have to wait for help EVEN THOUGH the stupid program keeps doing stuff I don't tell it to do. It's like I typed in "Yes, please play a stupid scratched up sound not all the time, but just sometimes. I'd like that." But the odd thing, is that most of the time it plays just
So I wanted to try something different with my Jaguar game I've been working on. So I tried again to code the squishing sound for the ants. Last time I tried to it only played part of the time, you may remember. I tried something different. If an ant gets squished, make a variable that controls the playing of the ant sound go to one. Thus if the ant got squished, the variable would change to one and the sound would play. When the sound got finished, it would just stop. Well, that idea actually m
So I decided to buy the last DS game ever released in North America. While unfortunately, the title had to be Winx Club: Saving Alfea, I will now die happily knowing that I have obtained it: The last DS title released known to man (well, a North American man.) I also noticed on eBay there was a 3DS version. That version probably has no historical place in history. My copy, once I get it, will be sealed. And probably never opened due to the fact I have no idea what Winx Club is. But hey, it was &
So I noticed I was having problems with the Start button. It liked to sometimes have a mind of its own when the game ended. I would press Start (Enter on the emulator), and, while I was still pressing start, it would turn back to the title screen, something I did not want it to do. This would happen so fast I was unsure what was causing it. So I tried some different stuff, and I think I might have fixed it, it only happened once, but I noticed I wasn't still pressing start when it happened. But
I have a problem. I don't know what to do with the Oranges game. I want it to be difficult, but not impossible. So far, it's been impossible. I haven't gotten 1,000 points. And I doubt anyone else can. Right now, the action speeds up at 100 points. This is due to the fact that people were saying it was too easy. Or my problem just might be I suck at my own creation. I made Bob go almost all the way to the other end. I was wondering why he didn't go all the way, then I realized it was because man
I played Ms. Pac-Man on the Game Boy. I got the highest score I ever got. 51560. I got to the fourth maze. There were three bananas. And my game ended when I tried to go back and get a dot I missed. It's really hard when there are four of them and only one of you. And touching one is deadly. I would have just put three ghosts in the maze, possibly two. Because four is just too hard. I was figuring out which Game Boy cartridge shells to harvest. It ended up being a Frankenstein cart. One back and
So I figured out how to understand the values of Game Boy music. Say you want to make C5. Someone found an excellent guide for Game Boy note values, but I wasn't understanding it. But now I do. The value for C5 is 1546. In binary, that is 0110 0000 0101. The first part (0110) goes in the register NR14_REG (+ 1000 0000 in binary to make it work, so that would make it 1000 0110.) So the rest goes in NR13_REG. But what is the rest? 0000 0101. Which in hexadecimal is A. So fill NR13_REG with 0x0A an
So I found this website that makes custom Game Boy cartridges. I am wondering whether or not anyone would be interested in buying a Game Boy homebrew programmed by yours truly, the Oranges game. The benefit of buying it from me is that if enough people are interested, say, 10, I will finish up the instruction manual I was writing, and design a label for it and put it on there. Plus, I will swap it out and put it in an actual Game Boy cartridge shell, the ones that say Nintendo GAME BOY, not just
So I was working on Mr. Celery's game again today. I noticed that you can duck, but only in stage 4. So I added the ability to duck (by pressing down on the joystick). At first it was in all 7 stages but I discovered a rather nasty bug if you tried to duck in stage 5: You might get trapped in the seaweed. And ducking in stage 2 had a similar problem, but it was one of aesthetics. So you can't duck in stages 2 & 5. I still don't have a tune in place for stage 7. And I fear nobody will help me
I thought of a setting for stage 7. I thought "what can be long strands?" Then I thought of spaghetti. So stage 7 will take place in a big bowl of spaghetti. I have the level specifics up and running. It took me a while to perfect the rolling meatball effect. The enemies in this level are meatballs. It's a lot like the lava rocks in stage 4, though. Right now, stage 7 has the same layout as stage 6, but that will change. I am also wondering if I should make the score in this level white or keep
Today I noticed a bug in the Celery game: The game went crazy upon ending stage 2 and didn't let you go on to stage 3. I found the problem: One of the gotos was in the wrong bank. So I fixed it. I also had another idea for yet another Boggle puzzle. This time it was breakfast foods. I don't know why I thought of it, but I did. I had 7 of them in one puzzle and two spaces left. I needed one more word for 8. Then I noticed the C and O, and the B i just moved when it came to me: Bacon. I rearranged
Woke up at 10am today. Was at my desk typing away from about noon to 6pm. First I worked on a Boggle puzzle. I had an idea for one, so I made a list of colleges and then it took a while to make it, like an hour. I then decided LaSalle wasn't a good answer, so I took it out and tried replacing it with Clemson. That took another hour. But one of the names had two possible endings. I decided then to start not caring because I had completed it. Then at about 2pm, I began work on the Celery game agai
So for a long time I wanted to do a boggle puzzle about dog breeds. I went to work, and eventually came up with one. Only problem was I had "yorkie" as one of the answers. Yorkie is short for "Yorkshire terrier." I kind of didn't want to have an abbreviated dog breed name in there, so I looked through a dog book I have seeing if I could come up with a replacement. I came up with Kelpie. So I tried in vain to replace yorkie with kelpie. But I just tried again a third time just now and it was fair
It took a ton of work, but I finally added in some coins and enemies to get. And since he's getting coins, he needs a coin counter, so I added that as well. As for a lives counter, I will add one, but it will only be shown once the guy loses a life. I figure there's too much stuff going on for the Odyssey 2 to handle, mainly sprite animation and telling it what screen it's on and what to display on it. But I got the flying ostrich back in the game. He looks like a flamingo. It took more time to
Working on Super Mario 64 2600 reminded me of the old Odyssey 2 game I tried and failed at called "Super Giuseppe." The reason I failed is because even though the game was completed, it still flashed a lot on real hardware and stuff ended up being wrong. That was a few years ago. Today I dusted off that idea and began to redo the entire game from scratch. Of course, since I just began today, all I have is this: Giuseppe can walk around the screen and jump. I added walking animation. His jumping
So I'm basically trying to do the same thing I was trying to do on the Jaguar on the Atari 2600. Things are going much better since I moved. I wanted to do this in assembly, but I didn't know how to do the arm technique in assembly. And I think it's going to end up being 4k anyway, so I figured why not do it in bB? The result so far: This is after a few hours' work on it. I think it's actually better than the Jag version since it's only one ant instead of three. You can focus on squishing that
So I was working on making a .rom file for Ants, during which I discovered that rom files cannot have snds playing in them. This means that squishing an ant must be silent. At least in Virtual Jaguar. And I guess it is realistic as well because if you squish an ant in real life it is silent. Even in an .abs file, the squishing sound wasn't playing correctly. Most of the time, it was either in the left or right speaker, a few times both, a few times it was silent. So since there was a silent mode
I have decided to get out of the 32X. I never play it any more. While I am keeping a few titles, the majority of games I will be selling. That being said, I am keeping the 32X console. I have the 32X set up now to test Kolibri and Knuckles, which I put in the marketplace, but let me know what you want and I'll let you know if I have it. I will, except if it's one of the utlra-rare ones that sell for hundreds of dollars on eBay. I can also test it for you if you want. So anyway, I'm into smaller
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