atari2600land's Blog - Trapped

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Well, I worked on GoSub for the Game Gear again. I wrote a SMS Power forum about my game, and they suggested I draw the coral in background and then to check for collisions do some thing I'e never heard of before. At least there is a way to do it. More help is needed. But at least today's job was semi-easy: drawing a coral square. I had to first make it in a 256x192 size, then check out the boundaries of the Game Gear's screen size, then make it visible in the Game Gear's screen. First time was a charm. The second part wasn't so easy. Just for now and to test the restarting of the sub if you lose a life, I made a few borders and then crashed the sub. It flashed a pink screen for about a second then restarted. I got rid of the pink flash, though, and now it does what I want it to. How did I get the coral shape? Just a secret between you and me, I stole it from Super Mario Bros. The tile however was 16x16 and what I wanted was 8x8, so I shrunk it 50% to get what I wanted, then plunked it in there. At least I now know how to make PNG flies work on the Bitmap to SMS file converter. Open it in Photoshop, go to Edit, then Mode, then select "indexed color." This will give you a number of colors that will be visible in the picture. If it's less than 17, it's good to go (I think.). Working with the Game Gear, I am surprised that this great machine didn't trump the Game Boy. I mean, the Game Gear had COLOR and the GB had a puke green screen with black dots. You'd think the Game Gear would totally crush the GB, but that's not how it happened. Nevertheless, the Game Gear is a great machine.

http://atariage.com/forums/blog/168/entry-12491-trapped/