atari2600land

Have you ever found yourself composing a song for a video game and when you're finished, you realize it doesn't really fit the mood you want? That's what happened to me. I had worked on this song for my Game Boy game Golden Pineapples. I called it done. Then the next day (today), I thought to myself "Wow. That song is really dark sounding and in a minor key." So I decided to make a more upbeat song for it. One in my songbook of songs I created a long time ago, long before I started video game making, and are stored in my head in case I need to use one for a game or something. I returned to Golden Pineapples after I realized I wasn't ever going to make my Game Gear game any better. So I worked on this again. Instead of creating new levels, I instead redesigned stuff and changed the graphics and other things not related to creating new levels. I also took some time to see if I could reduce the compiling time. Instead of over a minute to compile bank 0, it now takes a quarter of that time, around 15 seconds. Here is what it looks like on Super Game Boy... ...and here it is on a regular Game Boy. For some reason, I think the regular Game Boy screen looks better than the color Super Game Boy screen. Lots of pineapples. The next time I work on this I will work on a new level for it. I think the Game Boy needs more puzzle homebrews, which is why I made this (and Ugly Uppity Umpire).

So I found my USB NES controller last night, so I decided to play some NES games. First, I wanted to see how many points I could score in SMB again. I must be slipping since I remember getting >800,000 in a NES HSC a long time ago. Next I played SMB2. I found this sort of interesting and didn't know was possible: Mushroom blocks stopping for cherries. Thus making one float in mid air for no reason. And apparently the continuity of the Mario series is all screwed up since Ostro took Birdo's name. It's OSTRO, Nintendo, not BIRDO! It took at least ten minutes to feed Wart his last veggie since they kept disappearing in his bubbles he spit out. I had the opera channel from Music Choice on (channels 949-950 if you have Comcast) and sometimes it has little facts on the screen along with the music. One of them was how some composer made his first opera at the age of 50. Well, I'm about a decade younger and it hit me: I haven't done an opera yet. I had begun a couple but I never got them completed. Of course it will be a rock opera. So this one I fully intend to finish, but who knows if I will. It's also intended to be a comedic opera. It's called Larry. It's about Larry. I like the name Larry.

Tried to make the speed increase better. Lowered the death jingle one octave. Added pause for ghost eating. Joystick/buttons work all the time. pacline16.rom

Yes, please work on the death animation. I thought it was strange because I thought there weren't enough frames. I'll work some more on the stuff you mentioned.

I just spent two hours failing to get a second enemy in. Everyone seems to want more enemies in Flying Hamburgers but every time I try to, I fail. So there's only one solution: Don't try any more. It's so frustrating. Why does programming have to be so mean and hard and STUPID? There will only be one enemy in the game at a time because I have to fail at everything and make nothing but crap games because I'm too stupid to make more complex games. My arm just started hurting in a peculiar spot and it's really painful. And annoying. And I don't know why. I'd say it was due to my arm resting on the desk typing, but it's not at that spot. It's down further. I keep going to sleep at midnight and waking up at 1 p.m. Whatever. I just don't really care any more.

I've decided not to pursue publishing this game with 2Minds. That's not to mean I don't want it published at all, it just means I need to find someone else to make Game Gear games. I made a few changes to the Flying Hamburgers game. I noticed that strawberry milkshakes (which are pink) shoot at you while all the other food that shoots at you are green. So I changed the strawberry milkshake which was pink to the same shade of green of the shooting sprites. I also made it so the burger can go lower on the screen. This was back when the score was at the bottom. But I moved it to the top but never moved the burger's boundary down a little. So I did. I also made it so the boss appears after you shoot 50 enemies and not 60. This was done to round up the game and make it more uniform. I still don't know what's wrong with my Game Gear, as I tried level 6 on it with redone colors and it still gave me shadows. I guess it just needs to be recapped, or there's some sort of display problem with my Game Gear Everdrive. I found the rest of my Intellivision games. I had a bin that had A-S. I have so many of them I needed to put T-Z and homebrews in a separate bin. I found the T-Z bin today after searching for it for a couple of days now. I searched in the pantry and the garage, but as it turned out they were in my room the whole time.

I thought the boss screen in Flying Hamburgers looked rather sparse, so I decided to attempt to put some clouds in there. That was easy, but then I discovered the shots and the burger were going behind them. A whole bunch of sprite address rearranging then occurred and then I finally got the result I was looking for. It's amazing what adding just four sprite tiles does to the look of a game. I also fixed the blackness (or sometimes whiteness) that appeared to the strawberry milkshake. That was due to the number of colors in the palette. The light pink used to highlight the shake was in pos. #2 in the palette, but so was also the numbers. I changed the color on the fly to color the score and lives counter. Fortunately, I only had 14 of a possible 16 colors in that palette (for the sprites), so I added a 15th color. I have one left in case I wanted to add something else, but I don't see a need to right now. I also worked pretty hard on Intellivision Pac-Line but nobody seems to care any more. I saw that Brian's Man Cave had put a version of Paku Paku in the contest, which made me sad. But who knows? Perhaps he thought of it and started working on his before I did mine. Which is what led me to resume work on Flying Hamburgers.

Today's update: + added a button mode. Now you can play the game with the buttons instead of the joystick. + fixed a bug where the power dot wasn't resetting if it was on and on screen and ate again. pacline15a.rom

I recorded the NES version of Pac-Man death jingle on Mesen. As it turns out, I can't really duplicate it exactly. I tried DATA 1 and it was too short and DATA 2 was too long. So I had to cut out and change a few notes to make it all fit together. Thoughts? pacline14.rom

Today's changes: + made the ghost disappear when he's eaten + added a death sequence + added a sound for when the power dot gets eaten + fixed a sound bug that had the sound stuck on the title screen. Thoughts? pacline13.rom

What do you mean by score? You mean to have a sprite look like the number 200 like in Pac-Man?

Can you give me the death sprites? I'm ready to add those in.

I don't know how though, as I swear I did it like I did before. Oh well. Here is the power dot blinking. I also attempted to add the score before the ghost pause. pacline12a.rom

I got the power dot blinking!