atari2600land's Blog - The bottomless pit (part 4)

RSS Bot · August 4, 2018

Last night I attempted to put a banana in. When I finally did and tested it on real hardware, it flickered like crazy because it couldn't handle it. Well, I thought it COULD handle it, so I had to do a second rewrite of the code. It was about 5:45pm when I tried to (I gave up on trying to going to sleep because it was too hot in my room). It was about 9pm when I finally got everything working.

I tried it out on a real Odyssey 2, and no flickering. I went to sleep for 12 hours. Woke up. Tried to add some stuff to the game, like the grid. The grid doesn't like to be added. Neither does the guy reaching the top of the screen. But the banana was added last night. I redesigned the banana.

You'll notice the guy's red part of the mouth is gone. It was a casualty of Odyssey 2 limitations. In version 11 which I was working on, it began to not be aligned properly all the time, so I ditched it. I didn't really think it needed to be there anyway. So I decided to not put it back in when I rewrote the code (version 12). Version 11 used up more than 1,400 bytes, while version 12 only uses about 1,275 bytes, saving me about 125 lines of code. That apparently did the trick.

So now what do I do? I don't know. I guess now that I have the Odyssey 2 hooked up again, I might as well play some of its games.

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