I spent some time yesterday trying to put original, non-stock noises in the game. I think I have done it. At the beginning, the game plays a short "tune" and when you die, the game makes a buzz that isn't like the buzz that you'd hear in a normal Odyssey² game. The Odyssey² has a very limited library of noises. But it can make more than just those. If you get out of those noises, you can access more noises it can make by changing the values in registers 0A7-0AA. That's what I did here.

For a while, though, when you completed a screen, a character popped up on the screen sometimes. First it was an almost complete cyan letter B. I isolated which character it was by giving the remaining characters different colors. A yellow dollar sign popped up. Then I looked through the code. I assumed character 9 was coming up because I was using the register for it for something else. So I changed all the user-defined registers to be between 061-072. Then I played it for about ten minutes on a real Odyssey². It had disappeared.

But since the registers 061-072 are being used for other stuff, this means I can't use quads 2-3, which I usually would use for high score displaying. So this game can't display your high score as well as the other score you are amassing during play. And I doubt I could fit in high score displaying code anyway since without it I've used 1,890 out of an allotted 2,048 bytes in a 2k game. And I also discovered the source of the static at the top during game play on a real Odyssey².

As it turns out, it has nothing to do with how I code, but how I use the Odyssey². It is connected to the VCR. If I have the VCR turned off and turn the Odysssey² on, it works, but it displays it when I play one of my games. If I turn the VCR on and then the console on, it works just fine. Oh well. I like how the game has progressed now anyway. Having the ghost be unkillable makes it so you can't just stand there and shoot, you have to keep moving around.