Wickeycolumbus' Blog

sounds like you've been busy then, well done wickey

 

Just hasd a idea for a remake you could do (in homage to a certain disgusting hamburger you were pictured with)

 

Mega mania 2....hamburgers revenge

Nice work - I'm looking forward to seeing that multicart.

 

Chris

One of my first ideas for a 2600 cart, circa 1994, was a snake game called "Wormy". I started working out the memory layout and a title screen even before I started what would eventually become Strat-O-Gems. I can't find anything that's close to being a legible title screen; I vaguely remember having an almost-working title screen, but my archives don't seem to have one. If I studied the code I might find that something was just a few cycles off, and I neglected to save my best version before I changed something that made it worse. I might have some title screen graphics on a 2" disk, but I have no idea where I could find equipment that could read it.

 

One of the design challenges with Wormy was figuring out how to have lots of goodies to pick up as well as obstacles and the snake, all in a ROM-only cart. I revisited the code around 2007 and wrote an amazingly memory-efficient kernel. Perhaps I should revisit it.

 

Your game is a little simpler than what I'd been trying to do; on the other hand, yours is actually playable. I think the game could probably benefit from a bigger playfield and the addition of more goodies and/or obstacles. RAM would quickly become tight if you want to use a ROM-only cart, but since carts with added RAM are no problem, it might be good to see what you could do with an extra 128 bytes.

Thanks for the comments! It seems like I have to approve each comment for some reason, sorry for any troubles that has caused. Anyone know how to change that?

 

I've added a ROM with the menu system and other games enabled, in case anyone wants to try it out. I still have to add sound to Snake and work out a few minor bugs.

 

@supercat:

 

Unfortunately, the amount of ROM I have to play with is very low (~700 bytes). I currently have a table of coordinates for each segment in RAM, so each takes 2 bytes. I'm sure there are much better ways to handle it, perhaps I should try to implement one. At a minimum, I should be able to combine the coordinates into a single byte, since the grid is 16x16. I wanted to keep the multicart 4K for ease of production should I ever sell carts, so extra RAM isn't really an option for me. I'll see what I can do to get the grid bigger, thanks for the suggestion

 

By the way, your project sounds pretty cool. You always seem to come up with really neat kernels and tricks.

1) While in the blogs, click the orange Go... button in the top-right

2) select Manage Your Blogs from the drop down

3) In the blog list is an Options button, click it

4) select Manage Settings

5) locate Approve comments posted on your blog? in the section labeled Your local Blog settings

6) change from Approve to No Approve

7) scroll to the bottom of the page and click on Save Changes

Thank you! That has been an issue since I started this blog.