I wrote a poem I don't know how long ago (probably a year or so) and had the tune to go along with it somewhat in my head, but I now just put it together. I made a MIDI out of it. At first, I was going to put some other instruments with it (like drums and strings), but decided the piano was enough. That, and I thought the poem was too stupid to go with the melody I made, but here are the words and the midi is here. (1:20)
"Slack-Jawed Jackdaws"
slackjawed jackdaws up in the tree
laughing a
I'm making a secret game. It's so secret, there will only be one copy in existance. I might make the binary file available if the 2008 Minigame Compo ever gets under way. The name of the game is "A Game." I couldn't think of a better title for it, well, anything that would make sense. I could have called it "Fred the Psychotic Pair of Yellow-stained Underpants That is Foaming At the Mouth," but I didn't. And it ain't about underpants, although the guy in the game might be wearing some, or he mig
The year was 1995 A.D. (which seems kind of strange given the title of this entry.) I was in 6th grade, the last year where 6th grade meant being in elementary school (the next year, the school district moved 6th grade to middle, or jr. high, school.) My teacher was Mrs. Lennon. I think it was near the end of the school year because this project didn't make any real sense. She gave us a whole bunch of construction paper and put in this ambient CD and told us to make our "visual" of the music pla
Hi all. I've started a 3DS review site which you can find here: http://www.atari2600land.com/3ds/ (Links don't work for some reason, so I can't put the word "here" as the thing to click on any more.) Every Monday, I'll post a review here if I can. I already bought next week's game as well as some yummy Boo Berry cereal. So now I have two 3DS games. I also got 3 game.com games in the mail today, so now I have 15 of them. So anyway, that's what I'm up to game wise.
Hey gang, the high temperature here (in Fahrenheit) gets to be 47 around this time of year, but in the next week, at least according to the Weather Channel, this won't happen once, not twice, not thrice, but FOUR, count 'em FOUR times! After tonight's brief snow flurries of course. I posted a picture of this (rare?) occurrence of four 47 high temps four-casted (pun intended) this next week. I thought it was pretty cool. Especially Friday when I have to go to the doctor. Hopefully 47 will be my l
Well, I finally am back to working on 2600 games again. I decided to work on the minefield game again. I even thought of a name for it: TNT Teddy. I changed it so the only time the pattern changes is when you defeat the level. There's a try counter down at the bottom. I'm trying to limit myself to 2k here, though it's even harder because I'm using bB. I might have to take out some stuff I'm not using, like the code for playfield scrolling. Anyway, here's what the game now looks like. Try, discus
This all started coincidentally. I had bought a compilation CD off the internet called "Two A.D." since I had "One A.D." (collections of ambient songs. I blame my sixth grade teacher for this. She made us listen to One A.D. and I admit I liked it. So I asked where she got it and I went and got it myself. Back then sixth grade was in elementary school. I was the last class to have sixth grade in elementary school so I got to begin seventh grade and not be the youngest class in it. Years later, I
So I thought I'd work some more on my Virtual Boy game I'm making called "Pineapple 64". I went to look at the code, and realized that I needed to make a better collision detection section. Well, I tried and failed a few times before, but I really set my mind to it. And once I had it, the music sped up faster. I was wondering why, so I put a line of code in that stopped it from moving faster. Then I loaded it on my FlashBoy. The banana didn't show up. Argh! This problem plagued me and by the tim
No, not the Nintendo Switch (sadly), I'm talking about the switches on the Atari 2600. My first two games I made in assembly lacked a feature: The ability to reset the game at any point during game play. Well, I guess I could program it into FIC8, but we'll see. I would like to call that one done. So anyway, I decided to see if I could start the game using the fire button. After weird code usage, I finally got it working. Next was the reset switch. So I looked on Minidig to see if I could unders
Well, last night, I put in collision detection for the cat and goal. I'll probably break the game many times between now and when it's finished because of stupid page limitations. What I am going to do is put all the data information for level setup in the first bank. But since there's other stuff in the first bank, like collision detection routines, I'll probably push some stuff out of their places and into places that the game doesn't work. So then I'll have to do more code adjusting to make i
I wanted a new project to work on for the Intellivision since the Waffles game is almost done. Also, I wanted to try to make a Doodle-Jump-like game for anything except the Odyssey 2 one which I failed miserably at. So I put those things together and decided to work on a Doodle-Jump game for the Intellivision. It took a few hours to finally see how and what would work about the platforms scrolling works, or at least what makes it work in this game. I am going to name the game "Upmonster," sinc
Delivering good on my promise, here's a Space Invaders review.Space Invaders+ Release: October 1997+ Company: Nintendo+ Size: 2 Megabits+ ESRB Rating: K-AThere's four choices: Upright cabinet, black & white, black & white with cellophane, and color. Upright Cabinet has a picture of land with a space background, while the others don't. At the options screen, you can change the number of lives to up to 6. Other than that and a two-player mode (where apparently two players can play at the s
I've added a special little thing if you get 100 or more lines in 2600tris. It took &*^&*ing FIVE tries to get over 100 to see if it works. It does. If you want to try it, here's a link to the latest version (as of 11/18/09.) I'm getting a little sick of Tetris, though, after playing the NES and Game Boy versions for research/inspiration. But nevertheless, I will press on working on my 2600tris. A couple of people are downloading each version, and I want them to tell me what they think o
Well, after saying I wanted to go to the library to do research on my Keizer site, I finally got the first of what I assume will be many trips out of the way. As a result, three articles have been added. I hope to have this site done by November 2, 2012. It's a 30-year retrospective on the city. I was born on the day they voted to make it a city. As a result, my birth announcement was in the same day's paper as the first article posted on the site. After the library, I went to Straight From New
Well, it happened again: my eye began hurting. Undeterred, I decided to tackle Insecticide once again, adding a sample background fighting arena. I got it so it scrolls back and forth like my 50-foot-tall celery game. I also fixed the "PAUSED" text not showing up when the game is paused. It also dawned on me that I need to double the amount of fighter characters to 16 sprite patterns, 8 for you and the same 8 for opponents' because they're in different "worlds" (only a VB programmer would unders
As much as I like the number 47, there is another number that is bugging me. It's 33. That's how cold it has been all day long. If it only got to 32, then it might snow or something, but right now it's just rain. And 33 degrees. I woke up a few times last night and opened the window to see what it was doing, but I didn't see any snow. Maybe tonight...
So the stupid wheel on my mouse broke. It really is annoying when you're so used to spinning it and have something happen so it's jarring to spin it and have nothing happen. Anyway, I had to give up on the Hamburgers game since apparently I can't straighten out sound effects. Sometimes they don't play. So I'm going to give up on it and go back to Frank the Fruit Fly. I made this screen a couple of days ago. I was having so much fun with ideas that were new that I forgot the simpler aspects of th
Went to Game Crazy earlier today. Not much there this time, but I did get Jurassic Park (B), and Palamedes (B+) according to Mike Etler's NES rarity list. Jurassic Park was made in 1993, and I really like NES games made after 1992 for some reason. 2 Zoda's Revenge (early 1994) was still sitting on the shelf, both still priced $6.99. Want to get rid of them? Sell them at $2.99 like all the other cheap NES games. And is Chubby Cherub really worth $4.99? Geez. Here's the thing about these stores th
But that didn't stop me from going to Game Crazy. Have any of you had this happen? You buy a few games because you think you don't have them and you take them home only to find you do have them after all? Luckilly I only spent $3 for 3 of them. 1 doesn't work but I haven't cleaned it yet. Well, anyway, I submitted Virtual Dieter to the 2008 Minigame Compo. And I'm going to get me some Carl's Jr. food (Hardee's on the east coast), because my mom is going to go visit her dad and then come home and
Well, from what I've heard everywhere is expect snow down to the valley floor (which means for me) on Sunday, with highs and lows near freezing. Probably not very much, though, but there could be a rain/snow mix as early as tonight. Because of that, I won't be able to go to the flea market which is on Sunday (I don't know why they can't have it on Saturday.), but I will be able to go to the South Salem Game Crazy tomorrow (that is, if the forecast holds up.) I'm looking for more black Tengen NES
So I finally discovered a quirk with my computer (this marks the one billionth!) The thing does not like the Dev Mode. It now works just fine in the "regular" mode. And another thing: I got rid of the "Insect Combat!" voice at the beginning and the music started playing! I know a little about why that happened, what I don't know is why it was working fine on the Mednafen emulator. And, Richard, the file you gave me does not want to open with 7-Zip. I downloaded a Flash Boy program on Planet Virt
I wrote a song called "Jackdaws Love My Big Sphinx of Quartz." Most of the music I make I record for myself to enjoy (god forbid anyone hear "The Most Disgusting Song Ever Made...") but I have decided to share this little bit of wisdom with you, and I plan to make a whole album of stuff like this. It took a few nights of recording to come up with this, and I'm still not really pleased with the finished take (a couple of noises in the background, maybe someone could take those out or tell me some
After obtaining a complete collection (yes, I even bought the Hannah Montana game. It was in a lot, so I didn't feel as awkward), you'd think there would be nothing left to get. Wrong. I just bought an AC adapter so I don't have to use batteries. Although the hole in the Didj itself says DC instead of AC, but it said it worked for Didjs as well as Leapsters. And there's also a Didj charging station, but that was $30, so I went the more thrifty route and I'm not a completist when it comes to hard
So I was working on the ending song for Oranges. It wasn't playing right. Instead of playing at all, I kept getting this stupid icky white noise-sounding noise. Finally I said to myself, "Well, what does and has been proven to work in my game?" So I borrowed my own code, modified it for the end, and stuck it in there. Worked fine. I've decided to lower the goal from 10,000 down to 1,000. In case you go over 1,000, the game stops you and sets your score at 1,000, so that's the highest score you c
The Game Gear bug bit me. I worked on my Oranges game for the Game Gear last night and tonight. I was able to add a fork and change Bob's shirt color via changing the palette. Sometime soon I need to get motivated to make a website for the Oranges game for Game Gear. The fork has to be really long because I made the syrup bottle the same size and the collision detection would be all screwy if I made the fork 8x8. I tried. I also bought Alien 3 for the Game Gear off of eBay to add to my collectio
Like us on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
AtariAge on Instagram
Watch us on YouTube
Chat on Discord