atari2600land's Blog - 1 False Move

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So I got a four digit score working in my game. Not the way I have wanted it in there, but it's in there. Which is good. Spent last night and this morning working on making the score work properly. Finally made it work okay and rolls over once you get 10,000 points to display 0000. It took a little bit more code than I anticipated, plus I was able to take out 4 digits I wasn't using. I had put in some backwards digits for PF2 since I read that PF2 was backwards. The score is using PFs 1 and 2. I have 756 bytes left for 2k, so plenty of room for additional stuff, like making the vegetarians faster as the game went along. I did notice that Atari 2600 ASM is similar to Odyssey 2 ASM in that the code is made up of 256-byte chunks called "pages." I guess it was just a miracle that I hadn't run into that problem until yesterday. But now since I tweaked the score, I could not get the white part of Mr. Celery's eye on the correct part of the screen, so I just got rid of it and made the incinerator a light blue color. But all is working fine on real hardware showing a stable 262 scanlines with no tiny bits of jumping. Hopefully I'll have enough overscan to get the speed increases in like I want. But since I've been working on this for a whole week, I need a day or so of rest. I know I always say that, but this 2600 assembly thing is making my brain work very hard. I was going to make a manual in the style of an early 2600 game's. I thought I had a manual like that, but I couldn't find it. So now I need a Combat manual. I would like any, though. I think it would also be fun to see a manual for the latest Atari 2600 game like Secret Quest, and see the differences between the two. I put up a thread in the Wanted Marketplace forum for Atari 2600 manuals.

http://atariage.com/forums/blog/168/entry-13161-1-false-move/