atari2600land's Blog - Nine

RSS Bot · April 9, 2018

So I was working on my Game Gear game again today. I designed some new numbers for the score. But something was wrong with the 9 digit. It wasn't put in the game. So I wondered why. I went back to the bmp2tile messages to see if anything had gone wrong. It only read numbers 0-8. 9 was on the end and for some reason didn't get read at all. So I moved it one pixel to the left and tried again. Success.

I don't know why that made a difference though. I used the Century Gothic font to make these numbers. I typed in all 10 digits with the size of 8 pixels. For some reason MS Paint likes to blur text. So I went to Photoshop and smoothed everything out getting rid of the stupid blue and purple shades Paint gave me. This is the result:

I also learned that black is the same as transparent. Which is odd because when I made my first three games, I used a red color for the transparent parts and worked out fine. I guess the proper way is black. So when these numbers get shown on the screen, the background gets shown behind it. I tested to see if the numbers worked right by adding 1 to the score every second. The 9 digit came out as garbage. That's how I discovered something was wrong.

I have been using Emulicious for Game Gear emulation, so I opened up the tile viewer and lo and behold, no 9 had been entered. Later I will test this on a real Game Gear with my Everdrive. I bought an Everdrive a few years ago for my Game Gear when I first tried to program for it. It's funny though, after a few years it still works like a champ and I have no problems with it. The guy who owned it before me must have replaced the capacitors on it, or I must have extremely good luck.

Before this, I went back to work on Chris's Casino for VB and Las Vegas Slot Machine for the INTV. Just a lazy Sunday sitting at my computer working on stuff I don't need to do.

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