No stupid virus is going to stop me from working on Frank the Fruit Fly. Today I put in a new screen in it. Frank has to dodge spiders while the spiders move up and down to try and get Frank. In order for my idea to work, the spiders have to move up and down slowly. But it worked. And I also found and fixed a bug pertaining to not advancing the screen. Before, on level 5 (what I'm currently working on), it just had the same screen over and over again. But I fixed that. As if you needed more proo
So I went to the video game store. I called first to see if it was open. While I was there, I looked through the Game Gear games. I figured if I got Mortal Kombat 3, I might as well get 1 & 2. They didn't have two but they had 1. So I got it. I also got Aladdin since it didn't look familiar to me. Came home and as it turns out, I already had it. Oh well. This in turn led me to work on my Hamburgers En Route to Switzerland 2 game I forgot about.
Added the chocolate milkshakes that
So after I don't know how long, I finally got the black patches in Greedy Zyx gone. So it now looks like this:
Which is a lot better than what it looked like before. I got it down to 15 separate colors, but the key was this:
When using GIMP, don't write the color space information. So I am really happy with the game now, as it's 1.58MB instead of what it used to be (1.66MB), so there's more space to put in the AtariAge intro in case it gets published like I would like it to
So I went back to work on Craig the Cranberry for the Atari 2600. It's a lot like Frank the Fruit Fly in that your object is to get to the right of the screen while avoiding obstacles. I hit a lot of bumps in the road programming this today. You're probably asking "Why not just port Frank the Fruit Fly to the 2600?" Because it'd be a lot different. It'd look a lot different and play a lot different.
Anyway, I made a new screen. In order for it to work though, I had to make a black ho
I guess a break from the news is what I need. It's kind of hard when you watch the news and all they're talking about is a dangerous virus that kills people. But now I have to continue watching the news because it started to snow here. I woke up at about 1 a.m. and was surprised to see a dusting of snow on the ground. So I am watching the Weather Channel (less chance of them talking about the stupidvirus), and watching some dumb reality show about extreme weather. I don't think we're going to ha
I've been thinking about the end of the world. And I think this may be it. I never thought it would happen in my lifetime, but apparently it will. Some day soon (before 2020 ends), we'll all be dead. And all because of a stupid little disease. It's been nice living and getting to meet such wonderful people who have the same interests I did. You know, I thought it would happen differently. Like being struck by an asteroid or something. But a little flu-like thing wiping out the entire earth's pop
I am wondering why the STOCK MARKET doesn't close. Everything else is. Way more than 250 people crowd in there every day, seems like a wonderful place for the stupid CORONAVIRUS to thrive in. Something RT said makes me think there will be civil unrest and martial law stemming from all this. People will get cabin fever, go crazy, and start rioting because there's nothing else better to do. But is it really worth it? I think if the world is going to end because of all this, then hey, why not go cr
I needed a background music song. One about the city. There have been many songs about cities ("we built this city on rock & roll", "summer in the city") but I thought of those after my selection. I went with the oldie "Puttin' on the Ritz." Why this? It was the only song I could think of. That and it was semi-easy to figure out all the notes to. I decided to put it in the key of C minor. I like C minor because it's almost like C major and C major is the key that has no sharps or flats in it
Someone made a cockroach sprite for me. And with a little tweaking to the building's interior, I made screen 43 passable. Not only did my tweaking of the building make the screen possible to exit, it also lessened the code a whole bunch. Frank is supposed to hit the button at the bottom avoiding the cockroaches that move up and down and then the blocks at the right side will disappear and Frank can exit. But this only took 2 hours because I was having trouble with the walls. But I got it fixed a
Last night I was working on Frank the Fruit Fly again. I had to work for hours on it since it wasn't cooperating with me. I previously set some stuff for the new level 5 stuff I was going to make soon. But as it turned out, if I omitted the .orgfill statements, it would work better and become a smaller game in size. Instead of it being a 171KB game, it's now a 106KB game. Which is good, I guess, but that means I would have to work harder to make more stuff in to fill it up to 512KB.
I had a marathon coding session last night which made my bedtime around 2 a.m. Just woke up about an hour ago. This one was for Skiing, the new Channel F game I've been working on. I've added some new obstacles.
A tree and a pond now show up randomly, randomly placed. Also, the flags are now at a random x position. But they aren't really obstacles yet since you can go right through them with nothing happening. Collision detection should be easier than normal since the skier stays at t
I decided that since I gave up on the flies game, coupled with the fact that I said I might work on a skiing game for the Channel F, I've decided to make a skiing game for the Channel F. This is a different skiing game since all the slaloms will be placed "randomly" so there will be a different slope each time. I will also add obstacles like trees. But that's later. What I have now are three different skier sprites. One for moving left, one for skiing straight down, and one for moving right. I s
So I forgot about the overlapping sprite situation the Channel F has when sprites overlap. So after adding the flyswatter and having the fly blink a bit, I've decided to give up on the fly swatting game. One thing I haven't given up on though is my long song thing.
This is the cover for the album. I think I have a pretty good chance of finishing another 27 minutes of music by April 30. I have 10 already done. This is the picture of the walnut I took. I used Photoshop to make the backg
e5frog is putting the finishing touches on "Killer Heads of Lettuce." I am working on a manual. This will come with a full-color 8-page manual. Although I'm not sure what to put on page 2 and the back. I actually printed some full color manuals for "Kevin Vs. Tomatoes" but I didn't include them with the game for some reason. So if you have the game and want one, just PM me and I'll send you one. I guess it's because I didn't think it was worthy of a manual. But I think certainly Trimerous is, so
I was working on Killer Heads of Lettuce when it gave me a 3k binary file upon compiling. I must have exceeded the 2k limit so it pushed it to 3k. I noticed Video Whizball's ROM was 3k, so I tried mine. It works in MESS just fine. Whether or not it will work on a real Channel F is another story, though, but if Video Whizball works on MESS and my 3k ROM works on MESS and Video Whizball obviously works on a Channel F else they wouldn't have released it... So anyway, what I did is the beginning o
So I spent a few hours making a title screen for the Channel F fly game.
The fly is flapping his wings here. But I've had the worst time trying to get the fly's position to be random when you press fire to start. It always is at the same place. I worked on it some more this morning. While I was working, there was this stupid nosehair that started bugging me. So I went to the bathroom and I pulled it out. It was a white nosehair. I've had white nosehairs before, it's just a sign tellin
So I woke up to discover that there were ants crawling all over the kitchen counter. Barf. Right now it's a quarter past 8 p.m. and I'm sleepy. I just finished discovering I have no idea how to return a random value in Channel F programming. So I spent a few hours making this:
All the fly does is flap his wings and move diagonally around and if he touches a border reverses course. And I spent two hours on it. I'm going for a Mario-Paint fly swatting type game. I was going to do this f
I don't know if I posted anything about this, but I was finally able to buy a bag of walnuts. Problem is, I had to buy the whole bag. I thought I liked walnuts, so I began to open them and eat them after taking a picture of one. After about eating 5 or so walnuts, I quickly began realizing I hated walnuts. Too bad there's nowhere you can buy just one walnut. I decided to split my giant "A Walnut" song into parts after it became clear that one 159-minute long song was too long to listen to all in
There has been a national ad recently for a lawyers' office where you text something to the number "47 47 47." The 47 car started in the first position in the Daytona 500. I turned on the weather channel just now (channel 47) and it was 47 degrees at 10:47am. So lots of 47s for me to take in. The Golden State Warriors might lose their 47th game of the season tonight.
So I'm at the 50% mark on Frank the Fruit Fly. I started this project in July of 2018, so it only took me a year and a half to get to this point. Yesterday I worked on the level 5 intro. The plan is to have 8 levels total. Level 5 will take place in the city. Which city? A big one. I guess any city you want. Your typical metropolis with alleys and skyscrapers. It will be at night so there will be less people around that want to try to squish you. I worked to make sure it went from level 4 to her
So thefarside.com is nothing more than the old comics. Disappointed, I decided to make my own like-comics. I just drew three for today for March 2020. (I usually make comics one month in advance.) Longtime readers of this blog may have heard of my on-line comic "47 Meatballs." Well, it's returning. Every Monday starting March 16, I will put an online comic on the website. I would like some feedback. Mainly on how big the letters in the tic-tac-toe game are and if they're legible because it's a m
I decided since I had the room, to add a "dummy" color to stand in to the first color that was being black. The palette showed the dummy color as the first one. The dummy color was a hot pink, which I used to color the tree trunks. Then I made sure the original tree trunk color was still in the picture (or else it wouldn't show up in the palette), I put it it to the extreme left, and it doesn't show up in the game. I changed the colors to 4-bit and changed the hot pink to a different shade of br
I decided to make the images that show up during the Running Zyx game 4-bit. They were 8-bit. Although I saved a little room, the Jaguar decided to replace the darker tree trunk color with black. No matter what I did, everything I tried, and it still showed up black. So then I got the idea that if it wants to be black and I can't change it, I'll change the trunk color to the other color that was displaying fine. Then it can be black all it wants but not show up at all. So that's what I did. And
Last time I looked at the Zyx code, the Running Zyx game was effectively broken. After a few hours this morning, trying to take my mind off of the fact that I had to not eat for my blood test, I finally made it work again. I added a vut that comes running at you from the opposite direction. In the end, you'll have to avoid the vuts and get the bananas. If you get hit by a vut or miss a banana, you'll lose a life. The game speeds up every ten bananas you get until it is at its fastest speed at 6,
I found this SD card laying on my desk. I wondered what was on it. So I looked at it on my computer. Just some old Game Boy game files. This is what prompted me to begin making a new Game Boy game. It's called "Flies." Remember that Mario Paint game where you swat at flies? That's this. All I have so far is a title screen with some music. I discovered I had a Frank the Fruit Fly demo for Game Boy on my computer, so I'm using that to build on.
I think Game Gear games are prettier, don'
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