Worked some more on Hamburgers 2. I thought of an idea for a place for the action to take place. The jungle. Here is a picture.
I had a horrible time trying to change the red numbers from green since they were green on level 1. As it turned out, the code for changing the color was in the wrong place.
It begins with the letter p. But it's not what you think. It's pipes. Last time we left Frank, he was in the middle of the ocean. I had finally gotten the randomness working on Chris the Cranberry but it wasn't doing it random enough, so I quit and started to think about what I can do in Frank the Fruit Fly. So I was thinking and it came to me. I was thinking about water levels in Mario and Kirby games and I got to thinking about this level in Kirby's Dream Land 2 where there are pipes spewing o
So after sleeping for about 15 hours yesterday, I decided to get up. I could have slept longer since I have no life. I could sleep all day and all night just waiting to die. But that wouldn't be very exciting. Anyway, once I woke up, I began to work on Chris the Cranberry for the Odyssey2 again. I was trying to get a second track in the game, but with no luck.
Until I tried some idea I had. Why not make all four tracks just one giant data table and put different starting and ending p
So all this working on games involving cranberries made me think of the one I started on the Odyssey 2. The reason I quit working on it is because it wasn't very exciting. But I had an idea for it: Make a track that has randomly generated obstacles. So I worked. All night I worked. I figured out how to make it so that I can have tracks of different lengths without extra code. I was having trouble using the joystick to select a track number. So I decided to move that to the keyboard. I spent a fe
So I finally got the score working in the cranberry game. I also got it to display playfields and sprites simultaneously. The sprites can move and interact with the playfields not just on the tree screen, but every screen I wish to display playfields on. All the extra code that is needed is the playfield data and when to draw it. There's a timer that adds two at a time and while the result looks rather blocky like a bB game, it is an assembly game.
The bottom of the screen was making
So my Cranberry game decided to make the score all crappy looking. I tried EVERYTHING. I tried sleep statements everywhere, I tried lowering them and upping them. I tried adding garbage code to make the game bigger in lots of places, but nothing works. It still does the same thing. Why does this always happen to me? I work on something all proud and then bam. Some stupid thing happens and screws everything up. I might as well just stop coding altogether if the stupid computer doesn't want to pla
I was working on my cranberry game last night. I couldn't shut my mind off and just go to sleep. I have trouble with that. I want to be awake doing stuff, not laying there trying to go to sleep. I put in a new screen:
In this one, Craig needs to go through without touching the electric walls. If he does, he'll lose health, so it's best not to. But upon testing, I found that the scanline jumps to 263 when the screen changes to screen #2, so I tried Andrew Davies's vector code. It works
After a long night of coding, I only got about 10 hours of sleep last night.
I was trying to free up some more room in the cranberry game. I noticed that I was using the same code over and over again. But deleting that extra code meant changing the way "craig" looked on the title screen. It now looks like this:
All other efforts done this morning yielded stuff that looked like crap with blank lines in between the red. So I'm going with this. I tried to sleep at about 11 p.
That is the number of bytes I have left for a 2k game. So if I want a huge epic adventure for the Atari 2600 (don't we all?), the time will come (and soon!) to need to learn how to make 4k games. Then 8k games. Perhaps if I get the hang of it I can make this a 64k game. I guess the sky is the limit, although I do want this to be able to be played in one sitting. So now I made a new title screen.
This was a nightmare. I needed a whole bunch of seemingly useless code repeated over and o
I have 2 screens in, a title screen, and now I only have 800 bytes left of a 2k game. For the scope of what I want to do, I think I'll need at least 16k of space. I was looking at the Lord of the Rings prototype and it was only 8k. Adventure is 4k. How did they pull that off?
So anyway, I made this title screen.
Press fire and Craig will show up. Move to the right and I added in two trees. This was especially hard since I wanted to keep Craig in so he could interact with t
So I was perusing eBay. I came across a Game Gear game: PGA Tour Golf II. I wanted the very last version, so I thought for a minute or two trying to remember the name of the website I wanted to visit. Finally, Digital Press popped into my head. (Do I have Alzheimer's?) So I went there and I realized I wanted PGA Tour Golf '96. (I have a thing for the later games in a console's life for some reason.) I searched and found a copy for <$5. It was from one of those people who throw junk that isn't
Or should I say...
This is Craig the Cranberry:
I'm starting a new project which will (hopefully) be an exercise in learning 4k Atari 2600 program making. But if I fail (I have a knack for it), I'll just make it 2k. I could keep going with the Channel F version, but then I thought the only person who can make Channel F games right now is e5frog, and he's already busy with my Trimerous project. So it's best not interrupt him with this. Besides, Craig won't be finished
I was having a really hard time in Video Game Sage forums posting a YouTube clip of my game in action. Let's try it here:
How odd. I had to make the link be not a link with Notepad and then copy and paste the Notepad text into here. Just like in that other forum. Well, anyway, this is level 1 of my new game. I like how it's going so far, but it still needs something so it's not so repetitive. If you'd like to play it, you can download it since I attached it. If you play it,
I sat there for a few hours trying to make the score not blink when you die. I went back a few versions to see if it always did that. No, it didn't. But what changed? After a few hours of trying to fix internal stuff like turning the screen on and off, when suddenly I found the problem: The Game Gear's limitations was to blame. You can't put 8 or more sprites on a single vertical line. That's what was happening when the burger was going down really far. So I made it stop a little bit upwards and
Who knew it was going to be so hard? I composed a .psg file like I always do for Game Gear games. This time I made a song for the boss part of the game. So I went to put it in the game's code and I kept getting bizarre times when the music just would not play. Then it played but stopped when you died. The odd thing about this problem was that the sound effects played normally the whole time (channel 2). It was just channels 0 and 1 that weren't working correctly. I have no idea how I fixed it, b
I tried. Last time we left Frank the fruit fly, a whale ate him. I was going to have a screen of Frank going through the digestive system of the whale. But I had to give up because it was too complicated. So before I went to bed, I thought of an idea of a screen: Why not just skip the digesting and go right to the whale pooping Frank out? I woke up the next morning and began coding. A few hours later, I had my other screen finished. It's too bad I couldn't do the idea of the other one. What ange
So after a whole bunch of hours spent working on my game I gave up on, I think I have it in a playable state where it won't crash on you. It does, however, still show the number 4 and a little bit of garbage, but that's out of the range of the Game Gear screen (so that's mainly why I make Game Gear games instead of SMS games, I don't know why garbage tiles come up!) The problem was collision detection outside the Game Gear's visible screen.
I have made a boss. You must shoot the boss
This time I have decided to give up on Hamburgers En Route to Switzerland 2. There is something in the boss fight that causes death when it doesn't run into anything and makes the game start all over again. So I've decided to save the torture and just give up on it. Just what I need in my life is more torture.
So I took a stab at redesigning the hamburger as well. This is what I came up with:
I should note that looking at this picture, I should probably change the lunar surface so the score is easier to see. And this is my palette now:
The second color in the palette is reserved for the score, and I can change it on the fly to whatever I need to to get the score visible. I had to put in every color for the rest of the sprites (which are not visible in the game) because the progra
So I read on a couple of different websites that if you put in ?PB or ?DL as your name in the high score entry in Hydro Thunder, it unlocks all the tracks and boats. THIS IS WRONG. It doesn't unlock anything. I tried multiple times to do this in the Dreamcast version but it won't work. Why would they print this if it wasn't true? It just makes me angry.
You know what else makes me angry? Ants. They've discovered my bathroom. And they won't leave. It's stupid. Why be in there if there
So I decided to attempt to change the background color of the score in MidSpace. You'd think it would be somewhat easy to do, but instead it took hours of moving code around and trying different things. I gave up a couple of times. But something made me come back to it. I think it was boredom. Well, anyway, I finally did it. When I was finished, I went to test it on a real Atari 2600. This can be game-breaking. It may look fine in Stella but the screen may still jitter on a real Atari 2600.
There was always just one thing bothering me about the password screen in Frank the Fruit Fly: I never put in an option to exit it and go back to the title screen. Yesterday I did just that so now you can.
Looking at this just now, it could benefit more if I moved Frank a few pixels further down. Then it would be perfect. Which luckily is a very easy thing to do. I also made a version of Frank the Fruit Fly that begins at the beginning rather than where I just left off. I just put it
Something made me replay level 2. I came to a part where the game froze. I tried several things to try to make Frank move again until I did the right thing that pleased the computer. I redrew the whale because I wasn't happy with what I had come up with on my first attempt. After redrawing and looking at pictures of whales, I figured it was pretty good for guessing what a whale face looks like. Or perhaps it's a shark. But whales need teeth too to eat stuff, so it could also be a whale. So now I
I was thinking about how in level 1 of Frank the Fruit Fly you fly into a cat's mouth and out its ear. At the time I programmed it, I wanted to do more but I feared I wouldn't have enough room for it. But now since I figured I have more room to do what I want, I might as well do it. Not with a cat, but since Frank is underwater, I figure he might as well swim inside a whale. Hey, after all, fruit flies can't even swim. So to get the heck out of the whale, touch its uvula. I plan to have Frank be
So I got to thinking when I was playing "Skiing" by Activision, how did they put in a hundredth of a second timer when I assume the game is only 60 fps. In order for it to keep track of it, wouldn't it need to be 100 fps? Sooo, I went to Stella's debugger and found the answer. When programming the timer in, they skip some numbers! For example, it is impossible to have a time ending in .49 seconds because the game skips that number and goes from .48 to .50. I find that odd, but it needs to be don
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