atari2600land's Blog - Bones is hard.

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I worked on Boney McBones again. I had an idea to make the bug you shoot with not go back to the center screen. When all four bugs are dead, just have them either be to the extreme left or right of the screen, that way they don't touch the center when they respawn. But actually coding it was hard to do because the game's code was apparently perfect before I went and ruined it. Well, it took me a few hours to refix it so it works again. I tried various stuff, but it wasn't working. So what I did was have the old code be there as well as the new code. This kind of made sense because Odyssey 2 code is in 256 byte chunks called pages, and you can only jump to another page by either using "jmp" or "call". "Call" needs a "ret" (it's like the "gosub" command in Basic). So since version 7 worked, I just added on to it leaving the old code, modifying it just a little to make version 8. But since I have the old useless code in there, I only have 482 bytes left to make changes (I've used 1,566 out of a possible 2,048 bytes). So that's what I did. I'm not sure whether or not to make the bugs go faster as the time goes on, since nobody has commented on the game's mechanics so far. I also made a website for the game. A link is in my signature.

http://atariage.com/forums/blog/168/entry-12455-bones-is-hard/