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About this blog

My thoughts on everything.

Entries in this blog

 

Changes to Ftff Title Screen

I thought that the new/password letters were too big so I decided to change it and make it smaller. I also made the title words go up so it didn't interfere with Frank flying in the words' way. So this is what it looks like now. Yes, if you press down, you can move the arrow down and enter a password and pressing up moves the arrow up if it's not already there. Pressing A starts the game with the choice you made. When something like this is implemented, it's much easier than if there

atari2600land

atari2600land

 

First Frank update of 2020

So I decided to attempt to make the screen I last worked on in Frank the Fruit Fly to be faster since Frank moves really slowly in it. I think it came out a lot better. I also went back and thought of that RNG posted in the "Elevator Events" thread to see if it could be used in Ftff. So someone was nice enough to convert the code snippet so it could be used with Pokemon Mini programming. It worked out so well that I changed the snow falling code I had from what I had before (which was a bunch of

atari2600land

atari2600land

 

Quest for a walnut

So I got inspired by King Crimson's "Lizard" to make the best MIDI I could possibly make that was my own composition. I began composing this grand symphony. But it didn't have a name. So I decided to name it "a walnut." And for the cover, I decided to put on a picture of a walnut. Rather than stealing one, I decided to buy a walnut and take a picture of it. But I went to the store. I couldn't find a walnut. I mean, how could you not find a walnut at the grocery store? I guess it's not walnut sea

atari2600land

atari2600land

 

Henry the fourth

So there was an urge to plug in my ol' game.com to see if it still worked or not. The cable was a little wonky and it took a few tries, but I got it working. I tried to play the Lost World, but I couldn't figure it out. So I switched to HENrY. This game consists of matching tiles to try to match. It shows you a tile, and then you have to try to guess where the tile (called "clue") is on a board of 16 tiles. It's you vs. the computer (like you have a friend who's interested in playing the game.co

atari2600land

atari2600land

 

No Frosted Flakes

After getting that throat medicine, I have been choking a lot less. But there's still one thing I always choke on no matter how many times I try (or chew): Frosted Flakes. I don't know why. I can eat ham sandwiches, I can eat onion rings, but no frosted flakes.   I have diverted my attention to the Intellivision. I'll still work on my Jaguar game, but a little less than I had been earlier. My eye hurt yesterday, yet I still like a trooper went to the used video game store. A lot of new

atari2600land

atari2600land

 

Jaguary 2020

Well, it's January time again. The time where it's supposed to snow but it doesn't here. And lately I've been waking up at about 11pm and going to sleep at around noon, so I was awake when it changed from 2019 to 2020. Yesterday and most of today (It is after all 2am as I write this) I've been working on Zyx for the Jaguar again. This time around I've been fooling around with the sound effects and music, trying to cram them into the allotted 2 MB, which is hard, but I think I did it. Now all I h

atari2600land

atari2600land

 

Music to my ears

...or rather FOR my ears. I've been listening to MIDIs of long songs. It alleviates the boredom. So does MAKING them. So does collecting them. I just finished my MIDI I had been working on of "Macho City" by the Steve Miller Band on the thirteenth. Really surprised it hadn't been done before given how old the song is. And if it has, well, I made my own interpretation of it. When it came out, I was not yet alive. So I'm always looking for a new long song to make a MIDI out of, the older and not y

atari2600land

atari2600land

 

Back to Frank again

I decided to quit working on Goshzilla. I decided it was too similar to Death Race. So I picked Frank back up and put him on the front burner, so to speak, on my projects stove. I had a hard time with this screen. Since the Pokemon Mini has no object collision detection, I had to code that by hand on not only the two fish, but on the three walls as well. But it seems done for the most part, so I'm moving on. My stomach has been hurting since Christmas night and I don't know why. I nee

atari2600land

atari2600land

 

An idea for Goshzilla

I couldn't get to sleep last night. I finally did at 4 or so this morning and had to wake up at 8:30 so I only got 4.5 hours of sleep. While I was laying in bed, I thought about what I could do to make Goshzilla an actual game. At 2 a.m. I had enough and went back to work on it. A few hours later I had a working 6 digit score. I also figured out something: The only time the high score needs to be updated is if someone beats it. Therefore, it can remain on there without me having to constantly up

atari2600land

atari2600land

 

Goshzilla with 2 L's

Worked on this a little more today. I had to attempt a lot to try it on real hardware because it wasn't working right a lot. But I finally got it to. The problem was I added a sound effect for the fire and it wasn't playing on the title screen. What fixed it was I added a command to play a noise, a keyclick, before setting up stuff. While the result works, you can hear a slight buzz noise for like a few hundredths of a second. Which, while it doesn't seem like you wouldn't be able to notice it,

atari2600land

atari2600land

 

Goshzila

I wanted to work on Frank the Fruit Fly but having no ideas for it caused me to skip that today. So I worked on "Giant Reptile Monster." I named him: Goshzila. There's a reason for one L instead of 2, but it's due to the Odyssey 2, so we'll skip it. I added a title screen with Goshzila running in place. I also changed the fire sprite so it is random, much like the colorful shield in Yars Revenge, only it's red, 3 pixels tall and not very wide. But that's okay since Goshzila isn't very

atari2600land

atari2600land

 

Something completely different.

I took one look at that code that that compiler spewed out and it was like I was reading Greek. There was just no way I could learn all that stuff. What I did learn though was about stacks, and what pushing and popping them actually did. And I got the program that made the converted my code into Epson code. But to run it I had to install Python. So I googled Python and got version 3.8.1 on my computer. Installed it and ran the program. Success on the second try. Out came a 859 KB asm file instea

atari2600land

atari2600land

 

A new way

So now with a whole bunch of code written, I now get to learn a new way of compiling Frank the Fruit Fly. Even though it's called "assembly," it looks like a whole new language. So I'm going to put Frank the Fruit Fly on hold and begin learning this new "Epson" assembly. And MSYS as well. And all the other stuff I learned today. It will be hard, but it might get rid of the weird bugs I have been experiencing with Frank the Fruit Fly in the emulator (even though they don't show up on a real Pokem

atari2600land

atari2600land

 

I don't know if I should care

I don't know if I should continue working on anything because nobody seems to care about some various projects I was working on. I changed the Vut's color from yellow to blue. But I don't know if I should continue working on this if there's no interest in my Jaguar game. I had to give up Colecovision programming because it's just too hard. One of the things that I was going to do in Zyx Classic was make a lime fall down like a banana to jump over and avoid and after a while it disappears. But if

atari2600land

atari2600land

 

Colecovision time

Time to unearth my Colecovision from its frosty position in the garage. Cleaned the power switch to get rid of the lines, moved the wire that hooks it up to the TV, it needs to be in the perfect position for sound. After all that, it decided to work. Which is good because this is the only Colecovision I've ever seen in the wild. I have about two dozen games for it, mostly they're common titles. The rarest one I have is Grog's Revenge.   I've been busy programming the Zyx game for the J

atari2600land

atari2600land

 

Orange Ocean

How did this orange end up in the ocean? I don't know but it's there. I added the white dots to signify (maybe) that it's an orange instead of, say, a grape or something. When I put grapes in the game, it will be a bunch of them. I enjoy working on this project. I don't know how or why, but it's the easiest assembly I've ever worked with. But sometimes the first letter of the password doesn't show up when I force it to begin to level 4. I'm hoping this is not a thing to worry about si

atari2600land

atari2600land

 

Squids

I put a giant squid in Frank the Fruit Fly yesterday. His tentacles move up and down and you must avoid them while moving to the right. This was also a test to see if I could put 5 sprites on the screen at the same time (yes I can. The squid is part of the background and his tentacles are sprites.) It took about two hours or so to get things the way I wanted. There were a couple of times I felt like an idiot though. Like the time I discovered the tentacles not showing up was because I didn't inc

atari2600land

atari2600land

 

George

The result of a dream I had and about 7 hours of trying to get it on to the Atari 2600. I don't know what to do with this, so I am putting it here. What do you think? George has just crash-landed on the planet Xarksljfjsdhgjhd. You know the planet, the one where the toxic grass grows. And the ones with incredibly winding paths. This is by far the most trouble I've ever had with anything 2600 Basic related. And I need to make all the future playfields in a really awkward way (but

atari2600land

atari2600land

 

NEStopia stuff.

So I had an idea for one of my webcomic about Mario using screenshots from Super Mario Bros. I went into Nestopia but it didn't recognize the button presses of my Tomee NES game pad. Even though it said the NES game pad was set to the default controls. So I had to reset the game controls to fix it, pressing every button so it recognized the controller and not the keyboard. And when I was done, I remembered to unplug the thing because when my computer resets it just hangs forever if it's plugged

atari2600land

atari2600land

 

Elevator Events: Day 4

I finally got a score in after spending all day yesterday working on the game. I also made it so once you reach the top right, you start again at the bottom right. So what's next? Rest. I've been working on this game so much I'm tired of doing it, so I'll take a few days off. I know I said that in the past and then worked on it again a few hours later, but right now everything is the way I want it to be and I need a break from programming this. When I return, here are the things I was planning o

atari2600land

atari2600land

 

Elevator Events: Day 3

So one of the things got crossed off my to do list: Make the elevators start at random y positions. But one thing is the same: They all start moving down. I have an idea on how to change it but I don't know how. What I want to do is check the rightmost bit and if it's a 1 (odd number), start moving up and if it's a 0 (even) start moving down. But I don't know how to check certain bits. e5frog and I worked on the random y position problem. We got it working good. But even after making three games

atari2600land

atari2600land

 

Elevator Events: Day 2

Another day, another work session. I don't know why the elevators appear as lines (I was trying to make a solid rectangle), but since it looks like an Elevators Amiss elevator (and I don't know how to change it), I'm keeping it in.   I had to slow down the elevators sometimes since they were moving too fast sometimes. Whenever left or right are not pressed, they went faster. So to compensate for that, I added some unnecessary code for it to mull through so it slows down whenever he's n

atari2600land

atari2600land

 

Elevator Events

So I worked on a new Channel F game. I don't think it would be very good on its own, so I am wondering whether I should make a Trimerous 2 cartridge even though the first one isn't finished yet, or what to do with this. I call it Elevator Events. Right now this is the fastest the elevators can go. I don't know how I got the smooth movement of the vertical movement of the elevators, but it looks really good. The X movement of the guy could use some work, but I don't know how.   It's a C

atari2600land

atari2600land

 

A tale of two fish

So I waited for the snow to come. It's midnight now, and there isn't any. Kind of hard to snow when it's 35. I was hoping for visible, white dots falling from the sky, but I guess it's not going to happen this time. I got the fish design back. I took another stab at designing a fish. This is my result: While it looks weird, when you put it in motion it looks better. But I need your help. Which one do you like better? I found a bug pertaining to the score in version 97 that

atari2600land

atari2600land

 

Level 4 began

So with the Blazers loss, I decided to write this blog entry. Not about how badly the Blazers suck, but about the work I did on Frank today. I had a hard time getting level 4 music in until I realized I had named the labels in the level 4 file level3 because I copied the level 3 file. Now it works okay. I don't know what to do about the ocean though. Right now the top of the ocean is a two-frame animation. I tried to do a two frame animation on a fish sprite but I just couldn't do it. So I asked

atari2600land

atari2600land

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