I started another project after I failed to convert Rockcutter a Megacart format. I soon figured out that if --codeseg bank1 is in that command line, then it would compile the code and const segment in 1 bank. SDCC -? help got me a list of switches to tell me what each switch does. So I found --codeseg and tried it out. Sure enough it compiled both const and code in 1 bank. I used cvmkcart.exe to put the segment together and sure enough it works(once I figured out which bank is the right o
I managed to optimize the game enough to have over 700 bytes left before hitting 32,768 bytes. I ditched the font and use the Coleco's BIOS font, 300 byte saving. There's little text in it anyway. My next project I'm going to attempt to bankswitch. I'm going to break up my source files into pieces. And find bfg.passion tutorial and try again with SDCC. I think I can't use CCI3 for this but to compile the sources, but use another program to link all of the data together in to one Megacart RO
I had an idea come to me at work when I'm by myself, peace and quiet while I place cookies on a cardboard trays. Why don't I abuse the play_sound function some more. Each sound data can be the single instrument and tone. Maybe put about 10-20 instrumental tone in different pitches on the sound list. Play_sound function can retrieve the sound number from a table, and it'll play that sound. When the next note come it'll stop the sound in progress and play that tone since it uses the same SOUN
One of the most stressful part of making video game is making music for the game. I know over thousand of video games music in my mind. Making music is hard due to having 1.9 KB left. Sound effect I can do, they are usually short and can be complicated. I think I need to somehow make a music driver or something that each note played can be alter by tone and volume. And the number of time that part of the track loop before advance to the next one. I do need to take a break from the project a
I spent my afternoon making the ending animation. I remembered the animated gif I made a long time ago and I decided that'll make a good ending. I drew the background with the help of tile studio and ICVGM, my favorite tool. Then made the sprites in CV SPRITE 2 software. I'm glad I learned how to use Hexeditor to get the uncompressed ppspr data I need to convert to pletter. Typically I dump the VRAM to get the raw data. Pletter compressor is very good at rle compression and does dictionary
I added cutter beam attack. The mock-up of him tossing the cutter blade, so it had to happen in this game. You have to collect the cutter power up to use them. I added a counter that shows up when you have some. I didn't think it would be possible, but I realized that I had 12 sprites available and not 6. I was thinking 4 boss sprites took 4 sprite slot, but that not how it works. The enemy takes up 12 sprites, the boss when he appears takes 4. It could take more, but this isn't a mega ca
I made this gif a long time ago when Pixelation had awesome avatar war.
The game's now at 26.5 KB. I think a good sized level 5 will be possible. Maybe 10-15 rooms. I will probably make 1 more enemy and replace the cannon graphics for this one. I only put 2 cannons in the fourth level, since I abused them in level 2 and 3. I succeeded getting the hunting down the 4 enemies to unlock the gates event. 4th level boss took up 10 sprite slots, so that replaced bird object, cannon ball, and
I was reading Groovybee's comment about structure. I thought back to my CreateObject function and it can be a lot smaller if I used a pointer to a table of information about the object in question and less if branches.
Before, it was...
if(objecttype==1){objectID[ID]=2;objecty[ID]=y;objectx[ID]=x;objectc1[ID]=1;objectc2[ID]=12;objectp1[ID]=128;objectp2[ID]=132;objectb[ID]=b;goto added;}//rocky..to..if(objecttype==17){objectID[ID]=17;objecty[ID]=y;objectx[ID]=x;objectc1[ID]=14;objectc2[ID]
I finished building level 4. Now I just need to place enemies, script a event, and reprogram the 4th boss. I thought up a way to reduce my metamapping screen writing routine. Before:
void WriteScreen() {y=0;c=0;x=0;for(i=0;i!=192;i++){c=Data[i];if(c==0){put_frame(SkyDkBlu,x,y,2,2);}if(c==1){put_frame(SkyTrans,x,y,2,2);}if(c==2){put_frame(SkyLtBlue,x,y,2,2);}if(c==3){put_frame(GrassTopSolid,x,y,2,2);}if(c==4){put_frame(GroundSolid,x,y,2,2);}if(c==5){put_frame(GroundBG,x,y,2,2);}if(c==6){p
When I first program this game, I wanted to make a platformer. I did make a gameboy mockup for Pixelation challenge thread long long time ago. Then went on to make a Mock-up of Rock Cutter, if it was made for NES. I made this in Flash 5. I didn't really know how to program back then. The Gameboy and NES mock-up was created in middle of 2002. I thought of trying to make this game for the Colecovision. Platformer is one of my favorite game genre. So I started on it last year in
I finally went back to Rock Cutter and put the curtain on the 2nd boss room since I forgot to put it on there after I have compressed it. It symbolize Zelda 2, since I love that game so much.
Sometimes I get anxiety when something bothers me while making games. I know how to go fix it, but I just ignore it and do something else. Now something bothers me in Mad Bomber, like animating the mad bomber to walk over to pick up his back pack and leave his shack. I don't enjoy doing sprite work.
I added background scrolling to this game. It does lag the game a bit. I divided the task up for the enemy object to occur every 3 frames, so 2 enemy movement would be process per frame. Every frame or so, it'll lag a frame since the tiles are redrawn every 8 pixel have been scrolled. So every 48 frames, it'll have that one lag frame. Other than that, the game is stable. Occasionally the < ship get flicker in the wrong direction a brief moment.
I added the green blob enemy that foll
I made a 9-liner shoot'em up game. I wanted to expand on that idea. So now you have 6 enemies to fight against at once. I made a ship, and with 4 selectable weapon with it own quirk. Laser shot, quick straight shot. Slow but big shot. Missile, slow at first, then speeds up. And wave shot, which the shoot wave up and down. The shots are multiplexed 3 times to allow me to have 7 sprites on screen without flickering. Next to work on enemies' behavior stuff.
I started this game couple days ago.
I first made the TI-83 version. It stayed with me since I never showed it to anyone. So I decided to bring it over to the Intellivision since I'm now obsessed with IntyBasic now.
It's a simple game where you're this obsessive laser cannon that sole purpose is to match the yellow number to the white number value. If you went over on one of the number, that number goes to zero and you have to shoot that number back up again. You have a time limit,
I checked out this thread in the Intellivision programming forum and there was a topic about the 10 version of snake. Catsfolly told us to stop doing your epic game and participate. I don't know what happen if I disobey Catsfolly so I better do what he wants . I needed a break from that project I started about 16 days ago. So for some reason, meh why not try making one. The awesome snake game Catfolly made me think of the games I made for the TI-83. So the ship shooting game was made for tha
I just turned 32 years old today. I first played the Atari 2600 I think I was 4 years old. And that was my first passion of video games. My older brother and sister didn't have the patient to play through video game like I have. So now, I finally can make video games. Only for the Colecovision though. Well, I can make Flash games, and Petit Computer. I'm really interested working with system with limitation.
I got my Colecovision in 2008, because of Burgertime. I never actually given
Last month I worked on Phoenix. I want to change the name to Firebird because it's not going to be an exact arcade port. Sorry I disappoint people. I'm not expert at programming, but the game engine I set up for this game works pretty well. I'm using this kind of game loop.
while (game==1)
game logic1
delay(1);
game logic2
delay(1);
Collusion detection takes up a lot of CPU time, so I process it depending which gamelogic have spare cycle. Using the paper(); technique that nanoc
I worked on this game last night. I drew the witch and her shooting star. I added a system that the tree can be spawn which I can do by pressing 1.
I'm going to do try to see if I can get the trees to look like trees.
The goal in this game is to travel as far as you can. You lose by colliding into a tree. You can shoot stars at trees to destroy them. However, you have limited amount of mana, so avoiding trees is the best options in most case. You also have limited of bombs that wi
One of my goal this year is to release a Halloween themed game. So I am going to port Adventure of a Witch:Flightful Night from Petit Computer to the Colecovision. I might as well start now and it finished. I opened up the project to see where I am at in this one. I had the 19 tree scrolling along with the grass. So I rewrote the sprite routine to allow sprite flickering. It's not at 30hz, more like 8hz. I correct the 19 tree issue to have 20 trees that I wanted and the array limit was 20
Pong nearly done. It has 4 different games. I had to cut the original Wall Ball and I didn't think it would stand on it own when the Super Wallball is much better. I rather allocate more memory making Super Wallball fun and addictive.
The original Arcade mode is like the arcade cabinet. There is a switch in the arcade that enable the game to be played to either 11 or 15. So the game ending default at 11, so pressing 9 on the keypad will set it to 15 points game. You can change the color
http://atariage.com/forums/topic/185982-monster-bash-arcade-conversion/
This thread talks about pletter compression. So I decided today to try to get the pletter compression working. I wasn't feeling well today, so I'm the type of person who don't give up until the last bit of energy/strength. So I poked at it until I figured out how to use it.
I was thinking how am I going to get the sprite data. I was thinking of C code of data. I opened meka with Computer Space since I have dump t
I am finally gettiing settled working on this project. I got the tile collusion up yesterday so the ball will bounce off the walls. I thought up 4 different boards I can do for the home edition. I thought up Wall ball, which is hand ball. I have the player 1 paddle automatically move up and down on the left side to force to change the ball's direction, so the player couldn't cheat having the ball repeatly hitting the wall racking up points. Basketball, Hockey, and Pinball are the other one
Here's a video of it in action along with the sounds.
Sound is another thing I wanted to try to make for the Colecovision. I used CVnotes which can be found here:
http://atariage.com/forums/topic/139854-cv-notes-tool-to-somehow-help-coding-notes/?hl=%2Bcv+%2Bnotes&do=findComment&comment=1692445
It generates a note for me and I can copy and post it into const byte snd_FX[] = {0x40,0x43,0xA0,0x01,0x50,
} The last byte usually 0x50 for a channel usually the stop sound marker.
Here's a screenshot of the final version:
I spent the day redoing the score board. They only have glitched number in Computer Space player 1 mode, double digit in 2 player and Deluxe mode. Not very easy since I only had like 100-300 bytes left to reprogram it. I found few duplicated codes that I turned them to function to get some memory back. Now I have 20 bytes left. I couldn't work in Atari logo into this game due to that. I'm going to hand in the final version tonight and then wo
Flight of the Icarus, I like that title. For a month I had to focus on Computer Space. I didn't want to start a new project and ignore this game. I had a bunch of ideas and wanted to try something. More like I wanted to build something. It's like building blocks, programming these games. I know it very important that I deliver the games requested. Computer Space is very close to completion and the Collector Vision likes the Release Candidate. All I need is to finalize it. The next versi
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