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atari2600land's Blog

A blog by atari2600land

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About this blog

My thoughts on everything.

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Hamburgers VB update

So I had to go to the doctor's office today at 8 a.m. I stayed up until 4 a.m. Got a couple hours of sleep and then woke up at 6 a.m. Got there at 7:40 a.m. The check-in lady was asking me a bunch of questions I had no idea what to answer. Went and got a blood test. Right hand yielded nothing, but left arm got some, so they took some out of there. Afterwards, I stopped at Burger King. To my surprise, they told me they no longer have strawberry milkshakes. That is so sad because they are the

17 hours ago

0

Comical comics

I haven't posted anything to my webcomic for the past 9 days. This is due to the power outage I had for 6 days earlier this month. Not only could I not scan anything, I couldn't think of anything. I was too depressed to because there was no electricity. Well, once I got my electricity back, I decided to continue it even though probably no one reads it. I have to fill my day with something to do so I don't get bored, right? The previous comic is this one, from February 19: I have been

Sunday at 02:09 AM

0

Good and bad news

First the bad news. I was eating some nachos when I started choking on them. I tried drinking some water but it wouldn't go down my esophagus. So I stuck my finger down my throat and a few coughs later, this red glob plopped in the toilet. I have no idea what it was. I don't remember eating something red whole. After that, I tried drinking a sip of water again. I could drink it. This is extremely weird because often when I choke on food, a huge red glob of something doesn't come out. Oh well.

Saturday at 12:00 AM

1

#346 - Chase the Chuckwagon

So I'm inching ever closer to #350.* Today I got Chase the Chuckwagon in the mail. And what a surprise, it actually works! But in order to start the game, you have to press the game select switch like it was the reset switch. So there's this cute little dog in a maze with one obstacle bouncing around the screen, going through the walls. Sometimes it's a bone (which seems odd), sometimes it's this undiscernible orange thing. And then there's a gray man walking around. Touching the thing bouncing

Thursday at 10:56 PM

0

Tiger Quiz Wiz update

Not much happening. I went on eBay and there were several pages filled with overpriced ones. Someone was selling one on Soap Operas for only $1.00! Too bad I already had it. So my collection is stalled. I worked on my cartridge, after about a month of not working on it. I now have 204 questions for it. I need 1,001, so I'm about 20% of the way there. I'm not sure if I can think of 1,001 questions. It's hard. My book is 8 pages long so far. And seeing how 8 x 5 = 40, my book should be about 40 pa

Thursday at 04:43 AM

0

Nosehair Happenings

Nosehair Happenings

So I worked a little bit on Uncle Hairy's Nosehair. Three things I did. I made the highest speed the nosehair can grow faster. I changed the shape of the nostril. Just to see if I could. And I could. And it looks good to me. I found the title screen music to be quite hideous sounding. So I made a new tune. For it to work good, each song I do for this game must have 32 treble notes and 16 bass notes. I composed a little song in the key of E minor because the TIA sounds are r

February 24

0

Lemon aid.

Lemon aid.

I got help with how to correctly save your progress through the game. It now saves three things: level you are on number of lemons you've got so far your health %age. Now I can continue on level making. This after I got rid of a bunch of excess code. This freed up an amazing 4 kb (!) of space to use for other stuff. The game is 32.07kB. It was 36.07kB. I put the lemon collecting as a side-quest. You don't HAVE to get all the lemons to beat the game, but I just though

February 23

0

Life handed me lemons.

Life handed me lemons.

Okay. I got this far with the Count's Castle game before I figured not many people would be interested in it, so I'm dropping it. And my Count looks like Mr. Turniphead. Besides, I have other things to work on, like that lemon game I started a few years ago and never finished. Figuring out how to use INTV flash memory is hard. I don't know how but I managed to do it. I don't get how it saved the number of lemons collected, even when I didn't tell it to, though. I wanted it to do that,

February 22

0

Count's Castle: Correct

So I finally got the right amount of bats on the screen: There are five bats on the screen, and the number of bats is five. But I hit a roadblock: A weird bug. When I reset the game 39 times, the bats quit flapping. On the 40th reset, the bats disappeared. I have NO idea what caused that to happen, but I think I fixed it. I also made a floor for the (eventual) Count to stand on. I also had trouble with the scanline count. But through trial and error I made it a steady 262 scanlines.

February 20

0

Count's Castle: Batty

I need a new bat sprite. After hours and hours of work, I FINALLY got it to work. Nine bats, and the Count will eventually be standing there as well (It's that little multicolored blob in the lower left of the picture.) It's multicolored just to see if I could make it multicolored. And because it needs to be multicolored. And I can't draw the Count, so someone will have to design that for me. Yes, I know that's not 7 bats. And I will redesign the 7 so it looks more 7-ish. And the bats

February 20

0

Count's Castle: Numbers

I was rudely interrupted by a power outage for six whole days. I just now got the internet back for some reason. Yes, friends, I had no electricity between Feb. 13-18. Luckily, we didn't freeze to death thanks to the gas fireplace that doesn't use electricity. They said 90% of our area would be restored by tomorrow evening, so I was thinking we would fall into the unfortunate 10%. But shortly after 4 p.m., the power miraculously returned! But there was a problem: I had no internet. But that

February 19

0

Count's Castle: The Beginning

When I was making my Bert game, I thought of it as an exercise, a warm-up on how to code for the Kid's Controller. So, I've decided to try to make the 'lost' sixth CCW game, Count's Castle. This took two hours: While good, it wasn't centered. Another 90 minutes of figuring stuff out, I finally had it centered. I also made it a little brighter. Well, as centered as it could be. You'll notice extra black on the right side. I tried making the C's four pixels wide instead of th

February 12

0

I suck at drawing.

If it has anything to do with art, I like to do it, but the results are, well, bad. I was looking at some of the Atari 2600 manuals. The white ones with pictures at the center of the screen that look hand-drawn and sketchy, yet amazingly life-like. I wondered what I could do with Uncle Hairy's Nosehair. In the center is Uncle Hairy, (looking unintentionally a lot like Butthead), pointing to his nosehair. The hand with the scissors is the nephew (you) as he is about to cut the nosehair

February 10

3

Channel F...

...It's the only channel worth watching. All the other ones have boring coverage of you know who being you know whatted. Since I had been programming the Channel F the past few days, I decided to plug mine in and see if it still works. It does. I'm thinking of perhaps selling all my Channel F videocarts except my Multicart and my copy of Trimerous. I have a few rare cartridges (#23, #25, #20, to name a few) but I don't really need money right now. I also have been playing a lot of Dr

February 9

0

Code rearranging

As my Quest of the Cranberry game grows, it became apparent that the password code part was not going to go well where it was. So began the quest to move it to a position and not break anything. This only took 15 minutes. So if you play version 51, it might look no different than version 50, but it isn't so code-wise. I moved the password code part which was at the beginning to the end of the game's code. Thus, I hope to be able to add more code to it for more levels and not have it break as eas

February 8

0

Passcode changing

I mixed up the pass code (pass number?) a little bit. Quite literally. I jumbled some numbers around to make it harder for people to know which digits pertain to the health part of the pass code. And, with help from e5frog, I think I got rid of that bug I was talking about in yesterday's blog. But it does mean you might have to type all ten numbers before you know if it's valid or not. And I also had to move some code around to get the stuff I had working before but quit working back working aga

February 7

0

Bugs are not fun.

I found a lovely bug pertaining to the passcode system of Quest of the Cranberry. What's that number to the left of the five? You tell me. Normally, the player would only see this bug if he were just randomly inputting numbers for entering a passcode in the hopes one would find one that works. But apart from that, I did make the beginning of level 3 okay. I am wondering whether to drag Craig lower while he's swimming (like in Super Mario Bros.) and the player would have to

February 6

0

Fireball

So I put in a fireball in Quest for the Cranberry. It took tons of hours, but I finally did it. I don't know how I did it or what was wrong, but it kept doing strange things when it got to the fireball screen. Freezing was the most popular thing, followed by making the % sign weird colors for no apparent reason. I was going to make a dragon the source of the fireballs, but it looks like I can't do that. I'm going to start on level 3 instead. Like I said before, level 3 will be underwater, which

February 5

0

Quest of the Cranberry - version 45

I am back working on Quest of the Cranberry for the Channel F. Last time I got discouraged because something wasn't working right. Well, I worked on it for a couple more hours and finally the dumb thing started working right. In order to move the sprite up or left, apparently I MUST do this: lisu 3 ; move x position right 2 lisl 1 lr A, S ai 2 lr S, A lisu 3 ; move y position up 2 lisl 2 lr A, S ai 254 lr S, A I was trying to m

February 3

0

Fixing bugs in Flies!

Fixing more bugs in my Game Boy game I'm working on. Found a really weird one but I have been unable to replicate it. It didn't impede game play, so that's good. It was just the word "TIMER" showing up when the boss was around. And it only happened once. Made a fourth background. It's swirls. You probably can't tell, but the swirls are made up of two different colors. And this is my highest score so far: 1,120. I think I got to wave 5 that time. I'm amazed I can put this co

February 2

0

Game Boy Flies

So I went back to work on Flies! for Game Boy, which I thought I had finished, but I found a few bugs. Took me about five hours. I added some stuff, removed some stuff. I added a new background. The game now chooses a background randomly at the beginning of each wave. I noticed that the bees always moved in from the bottom whenever the bug bomb wears off. I changed that. I also found an interesting bug where if you pause and unpause the game when you begin wave 2, it does weird things. I think I

February 1

0

Back in business

So I finally found the CD-ROM of that program that let me make videos and DVDs. I had to reinstall it. That took about an hour. And I couldn't just leave it on its own because I had to keep clicking on buttons that kept popping up. I got done with the program installing and took it for a spin. It works just as I remembered it did before it quit working for some reason (this was when I had enough and decided to factory-reset the entire computer.) Anyway, the point is I can make DVDs a

January 30

2

Squaresville.

I like designing fonts. A long time ago I had a font program that let me import pictures into glyphs. Well, a few years ago, I remembered that old program and decided to hunt for a similar one. Lo and behold, I had to pay to make my fonts be actual fonts. So I did. It was around $30 or something. And after making a few test fonts, it sat on this computer unused. Until tonight. I made a font. It's called Squaresville. You'll see why if you download it. I have attached it here just in case you wan

January 28

2

Shoot. (part 2)

So it took a lot of hours of programming. Woke up at 2 when it began snowing. Worked and worked and took a break to watch Jeopardy! at 7. Went back to work and now it's almost 9 and I have it: a game where you can shoot. The red dot is where you shot at on the screen. I took that sample code, worked a lot on it to match my title screen. I tested my code with a real XE Light Gun and it works good. This will have to be at least a 4k game since I only have 246 bytes left as it as a 2k game.

January 27

0

Shoot.

I have an idea for a light gun game for the 2600. 2 were ever made, and only 1 was released (Sentinel). I want to make #3. I spent a couple hours fiddling around with a title screen, trying to make it just right. It's a game where you shoot flies. I can make this 4k if I need it to be. I don't really care much about file size, I just want to make a working gun game for the 2600. It does nothing at this point, the score increases by 1 every frame and the life counter decreases by 1 eve

January 26

1

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