So apparently all this working on Game Boy games isn't yielding any feedback. Nevertheless, I continue. I added a way to get back some lives. If a heart comes along, swat it and you'll get an extra life. I was trying to think of stuff in the Mario Paint game even though it's been eons since I last played it. Although I guess I could download a SNES emulator and get a Mario Paint rom, but then I risk getting viruses, which is really dumb. Why would the virus people target likely people who would
Remember that old game in Mario Paint where you moved the mouse around and clicked it to swat flies? Well, I've been working on a Game Boy version, for fly-swatting action on the go (or in the bathroom while pooping a bunch.)
What made me stop? I don't know. What made me continue? Yesterday's blog entry. I found this uncompleted game being in there and I said to myself "I really should finish this. I hardly ever finish anything."
Work I have done this morning includes getting two
So I attempted to make a Game Boy game larger than 32k. I think I succeeded with a start. I put some data in bank 3 and read it from bank 0. Which is a huge start. I've made a 64k ROM. So we'll see where this goes. My interest in the Bert game has been lessening. I found a way to test it on a real Atari 2600, though.
I put the font in bank 3 as well, and read it in bank 0. This is just a test screenshot. I plan on adding a burger in the background. Getting the burger moving was hard,
Finally got the keypad working. So with the title screen done, it will probably not magically change any more. To start the game, press 1 on the Kid's controller. Unfortunately, it is impossible to test on a Harmony Cart because the Harmony Cart menu does not work with a keypad controller. Pressing the game select switch just has the cursor flickering between the first and second items.
(Perhaps) the final Bert design. I moved the nose one pixel up.
So anyway, this will be wher
So I slept a lot yesterday. I went to sleep on the couch at about 11 a.m. Woke up at about 2 p.m. and moved myself to my bedroom. I didn't think I'd sleep a lot, but I slept a good 11 hours on my bed. Woke up at 1:30 a.m. After having a bizarre dream about going back to the video game store and buying something else and having the car disappear when I got out, I thought "I don't want to continue this nightmare," I woke up and went back to work on Bert's head. I made Bert's unibrow a pixel wider,
I think we all know Bert is hard to draw. Even at that, imagine drawing it with programing using Atari 2600 assembly. I wanted to put Bert's head on the title screen of my game. This is the first attempt:
Bert's pupils are yellow, which made him look weird. So I went for a hunt on how to make them black. Then I found a way to make them green. So I changed the background color to gray (Bert just had to have black hair.) While I was programming it, it magically changed size and this is
So today I got a Kid's Controller at the store for my 2600. I noticed that Ernie, Oscar, Big Bird, and Cookie Monster each have their own game. But who's missing? (And if you say "Elmo" I will scream.) Bert is missing. (Well, so is Grover, but that's a different story.) So I want to rectify the situation by making a Kid's Controller game featuring our ol' buddy Bert. (Just don't tell Sesame Workshop.) I worked and worked and eventually got the Sesame Street theme playing on an Atari 2600 using a
These past few days I have been getting up at 10pm and taking a nap at 4am. Which is fine, except for today I didn't wake up from my nap until 11am. Which probably means I'll be asleep soon. Something is making me really sleepy. Before I am off to slumberland, I just thought I'd share with you what I've been working on these past few hours. I got an idea for a Frank the Fruit Fly screen.
The bees move diagonally between their tree and the center one. You can pass through the center tr
So I misjudged how big I can make the sprites. It turned out it was 5x6 not 6x6 as I had thought. Tried to redesign the yeti, but couldn't make it look as good. So I made the sprites 6x6 (in actuality 8x8, but the blank border is needed so artifacts don't clutter the screen!) Lots of time was spent trying to make it move correctly. I spent two days on it. I've been sleeping a lot, which is why I'm on this site less. Don't know why.
The yeti moves "randomly" around the screen. If he co
A lot of work has been put into the raining in Quest of the Cranberry for the Channel F. And since I added a snowflake falling in the snow level, that too. The gist of the random number generator, I think, is this:
1. Generator gets number between 0-255 in a certain table of numbers (that seems random) that the lookup point increases by one if you add to it.
2. Make the number be between 10-73 with some code.
3. Put said number into the x position of the raindrop or snowflake.
So I was working on a song I was making. I got it all beautiful and stuff when suddenly my computer became unresponsive for a few seconds and then abruptly restarted. I had saved the last 45 minutes of my song, but the last 2 minutes weren't saved. I was so angry because it was so beautiful. So I had to redo it. It wasn't as beautiful as the last time I created something, but oh well. I hate my stupid computer.
And this morning I woke up and there was a huge spider, about a couple in
So I began work on a new Odyssey 2 game that has the same idea as an Odyssey 2 game I finished but never got released. I figured since it never got released that I would see if I could make it any better. So swat the flies.
I had to make the fly body a square since the round body was just not working at all. I only have one sprite left though. The hand is one, the handle is one and the swatting part of the fly swatter is another. Stuff I plan to do in the near future:
+ Make the
I was working on Frank the Fruit Fly making sure the passwords worked right. I tried level 3. I got four screens in when it started acting weird:
So I went through the code and determined that the cause was code placement. I tried for about an hour trying to move code and stuff. I then remembered about the .orgfill statement. Perhaps that could help. So I tried putting that in the code in various spots. It worked. It also made my code 40kb larger. When I get all done adding levels, I
I hated the way the passwords in Frank the Fruit Fly were kind of "guessable." So I changed it. If you wanted 99% health, the first and third letters were "k". But now it isn't like that. It now varies with each level password, making for a more random look if one were to look at the 99% health codes list. Granted, they're still K's, but they're now in different places, and hey, who is going to begin each level with 99% health, anyway?
I could have gone the route I did for Quest of t
Just a heads up. If you want to contact me via e-mail, I won't be able to view it until at least Monday. Right now I'm on the spare computer in the den instead of typing on mine in my room because the fan gave out and it needs to be replaced. Unfortunately, this means not only will I not be able to respond to any e-mails, I also can't work on any of my projects until I get my computer back. I can still go on the internet and stuff, but I'd just prefer not to mess with the settings.
S
So I wanted to work on Frank the Fruit Fly. But I had no ideas for the next screen. What to do? Then I remembered I needed to make some new music for the new level. So that's what I did. Got my normal 15 hours of sleep. Woke up, and posted a YouTube video of it.
As you can see in the video I'm working on level 6. I don't know how many levels I'll end up having though. And I sure did think I made a blog entry after Sunday, but it's gone. Either that or the days just zoom by so they
So I took my Colecovision out of the garage. I found the games, and eventually the power cord (it was hiding from me), so I plugged it in and tested it. The lines came back. A whole bunch of rubbing alcohol was used near the power switch. Next was the troubling fact that there was no sound. I jiggled the cable going to the TV. The problem was that it wasn't plugged in far enough. But I plugged it in as far as it can go, and I don't want to sit there holding the cable. Eventually I got sound from
There will be 2 dozen copies for sale. You'll get a Trimerous cartridge complete with lovely labels and instruction booklet in a lovely box. It's not ready yet. I will make a for sale thread for the game in the Marketplace forum when I am ready. I don't know when I will be ready. It may be a couple weeks or a couple months. Anyway, I want to thank e5frog for making all this possible. This isn't possible without him.
I actually woke up at a sane time (4 a.m.) It took some effort to st
Working on Quest of the Cranberry for the Channel F again. I had to change an important aspect of the game: The way the raindrops fall. Discovered that raindrops falling off screen are bad. So instead of them falling slanted, to make it easier on myself, I made them fall straight down. This way I could control the x position of each raindrop better. I also made the raindrops' x positions random instead of in a pattern. Well, as random as the Channel F (and my programming skills) can get. And sin
I decided to work today on Hamburgers En Route To Switzerland 2, my sequel game for the Game Gear. A few nights ago, I had an idea for a level: Why not at a fast-food restaurant?
I also discovered I needed to make the lowest milkshake level possible a bit lower. One can just go to the bottom and sit there without anything hitting you. Of course, you'll never pass the level and you certainly won't get any points for doing so, But in the interest of making a good game, I'll lower it...o
Oregon is a backwards state. We can't pump our own gas, there's no sales tax, and fireworks that go more than 12 feet in the air or explode are illegal. But if you're near the border of Washington like I am, that doesn't stop fireworks enthusiasts from obtaining illegal ones and they light them off anyway. Creating big huge thunderous booms. Here it is, the night of July 2, and there are people lighting them off. I can hear them. Our poor dog has to suffer because she's scared of them. Tomorrow,
Twelve years ago, Nine Inch Nails released a double album called "Ghosts I-IV". Twelve years ago, I eagerly awaited the next installment. Years pass. I decided to make my own sequel. So today I made two new songs for my sequel. I go to the Nine Inch Nails website just because I wondered what Trent and Atticus were up to. To my surprise, they had finally decided to make two new Ghosts albums. I was all ready to pay and get them, but to my surprise, they were absolutely free. (After a huge downloa
I improved the 7800 program I had. I added some music and changed the font to resemble my own handwriting more. I still don't know what to do with the program though. It most likely will be a title screen, but what will the game be about? It was a little work drawing 62 letters and numbers in Photoshop and "correcting" them but I think I did a good job of it.
Am wondering why more games don't use a white title screen like this. If white web sites are the best ones to look at, then why
Making this in 7800 BASIC should not take TWO HOURS.
I am going to add fancy title screen music. (Well, as fancy as you can get with TIA.) And then what, I don't know.
I started out with a fancy actual pineapple. But color #1 did not want to show up. And then I thought "OK, this is ugly. I'd be better off drawing a pineapple." So I did. Color #1 in the palette still wasn't showing up. So I did a work around. I made color 1 insignificant and used the other colors. And I was also h
Yesterday I began working on the level intro to level 6 of Frank the Fruit Fly. It was more work than normal. Since there are 32k code divisions, I have been just reentering bits of code used by each level and just changing the labels to say "level_6" instead of "level_5". It seems to be working out good. So I'll continue doing that. While working on this, I hit a milestone. Well, sort of. I wanted to know if anything would change once it reached 128k. So I called one screen in two different lab
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