atari2600land's Blog - Playing With Switches

[RSS Bot]

No, not the Nintendo Switch (sadly), I'm talking about the switches on the Atari 2600. My first two games I made in assembly lacked a feature: The ability to reset the game at any point during game play. Well, I guess I could program it into FIC8, but we'll see. I would like to call that one done. So anyway, I decided to see if I could start the game using the fire button. After weird code usage, I finally got it working. Next was the reset switch. So I looked on Minidig to see if I could understand any code involving the reset switch. I found Space Jockey. I put about 3 lines of code followed by more of my own code, and finally got it to work. So in this newest build, whenever Mr. Germ bounces down, that signals the game is being played. And whenever he is resting on top, the game is not being played. For an added bonus, I actually got the needle to not function while the fire button is being pressed to start the game. I have a little over 900 bytes left (!), so that will consist of the actual game programming. I already have an idea for game play. a germ is wandering around the screen and your job is to get the needle on him and press fire. You'd better be quick because if a germ touches the knee, the game ends. See, germs are the reason this guy's knee hurts. So your job is to keep germs from attacking his knee. You might remember my knee hurting for about a week and a half about a month or so ago. Back then, I had an idea to make a game based on knee pain. Like that one time my stomach hurt real bad and I decided to make a game based on it. So this new game is going to be similar to the Mario Paint fly swatting game, only there's an area to protect. I guess it's a cross between that and the 2600 Activision game Plaque Attack.

http://atariage.com/forums/blog/168/entry-13777-playing-with-switches/