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atari2600land's Blog

A blog by atari2600land

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About this blog

My thoughts on everything.

Entries in this blog

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Swirly gig

I am a lover of crosswords, especially weird-looking ones. So I was delighted to see one in the paper on my birthday last Saturday. It was shaped like a swiss roll (in other words, swirled.) After a few minutes, I thought "this is hard, even for a Saturday!" But I persisted. Gave up, and went back to it later. I think I have done it. Although I don't see how "legislators" are ones on a diet. I thought it was a really cool crossword idea, so I thought I'd take a stab at making one in the same gri

November 4, 2019

0

Lovely birthday

I had a good birthday. I got a couple of Switch games I need to try to get to. And some other stuff. And I decided to attempt to recode the part of Frank the Fruit Fly that has been giving me problems ever since I started on it. And I tested it for five minutes. Resetting the game over and over again and pressing B to get to the password screen. Not once did it do its stupid problem it's been doing about freezing and music going crazy and needing to reset. But I am so sleepy now that

November 3, 2019

0

I'm awake

Well, I should hope so. I don't want to type when I'm sleeping. But what's unusual is the time I'm awake. It's 1 pm. Earlier I thought I'd go to the store and get that game I wanted. But apparently some guy bought it, which is really annoying because it was Cliffhanger for the NES. I mean, who would buy that besides me? So I settled on Shining Force for Game Gear. They wanted $50 for it. I know, I've seen it for cheaper on eBay, but then there's the shipping, and then a hassle if the thing doesn

November 1, 2019

0

I want a game I made in the AtariAge store.

I've tried contacting Albert. I tried to PM him, but I guess he's so busy making other games, and apparently mine aren't good enough. I thought MidSpace was good enough for a 2k game about shooting food in space, but I guess not. I've tried another thing with the 2600 with the 50-foot-tall stalk of celery, but to no avail. I remember long ago how pleased I was to have GoSub be in there. I just wanted to have another game be in there for people to buy. I don't want money, I just make

October 30, 2019

2

MidSpace Revisited

So I went back to working on MidSpace. This time around, the goal was to put the original title screen music in. I put in the code and compiled. I had 89 bytes to get rid of. A monumental task for a game that I wanted to be 2k, but I began working on it, chipping away unnecessary code and other crap I didn't need. That was at about 8pm. Three hours later, I think I have finally done it. I had to do some weird stuff, but I had to to make it fit in the 2k I wanted. I really like that t

October 29, 2019

0

Fun with Windows

A while back, I lamented about some songs I had made, a few MIDIs that when I converted to MP3s, showed their incorrect playing time. Well, one of them showed the correct playing time, so I compared it to the rest of them. The bit rate on it was 112kbps. The rest were 124kbps. So I went to the site I used to convert the files from MIDI to MP3 and, under options, chose 114. When it completed it and I downloaded it, it showed the correct playing time. I don't know what kbps is, and why it mattered

October 27, 2019

0

Pushing my buttons

I had an extremely hard time with the cranberry game last night. The code for pushing buttons. I wanted it so when the button was depressed to act, instead of when the button was pressed in (or "accidentally" held too long.) As it turns out, I had to use the button detecting code TWICE, once for seeing if the button was pressed, and another time for seeing if it wasn't. I had a hard time trying to sleep last night, so I went to work on this. I woke up and discovered I wanted to chang

October 24, 2019

0

There's a cranberry on Channel F.

So I'm back to work on Quest of the Cranberry, my Channel F game. I know, I hop around from various project to various project. Most of my projects seem to be about anthropomorphic food. I wonder if that means I'm subconsciously hungry all the time or what. Or it's just that I find that funny. Anyway, I added a password system to the game, something I said I'd do last but I ended up doing it now because I wanted to and was bored. So once you get past the screen with the heart, a blue number will

October 22, 2019

0

Hamburgers En Route To Switzerland

I don't know why but I got to thinking about the game and finally got in touch with someone who might help me make my dream of releasing a Game Gear game come true. This inspired me to take a look at the sequel I began work on a month ago. I changed a few things that were bothering me about it. So now the title screen looks like this: I have to think up of another locale for the hamburger to fly to. 6 more, in fact. I figured out how to make the score tiles different colors. I don't g

October 21, 2019

0

Pea-Man's identity crisis

I have been lucky so far. I haven't yet slipped and called Pea-Man by another, more famous name. So I figure in order to keep the streak going, I should change Pea-Man's name. I couldn't think up of anything better. So I decided on Pea-ter. It's a pun on the name Peter. Also, I want to call the game "Peater the Pea," not "Hi! I'm Peater the Pea!" I worked a lot on cleaning up and tidying up what I have so it looks really great and not having artifacts and random junk left

October 20, 2019

0

Beam me up!

While trying to make a song for level 5, I did, but I figured it would be better for the spaceship level. So I made another song for level 5. I had a terrible time trying to draw a spaceship for Pea-Man to get beamed up into. Eventually settled on this: I'm quitting for the night. It's a little after 7:30pm and I want to focus on other things. Last night I didn't get to sleep until 6 a.m. I only got 6.5 hours of sleep. And you know what? I feel better. Perhaps I should stay up until 6

October 19, 2019

3

A corn-ucopia of vegetables.

Pea-Man went to the corn maze and found the carrots have invaded it. Is nothing sacred?! I worked some more on Pea-Man. I thought that corn, peas and carrots together on the same screen would be really amusing, so I did it. I also introduced a new thing: The level does not end after you eat the last dot. Instead, a passage opens up on the left edge and Pea-Man must go through it to advance to the next level. Here's what will happen: At the end of level 5, the carrots will

October 16, 2019

1

Pea-Man part 2

Pea-Man part 2

I spent a few hours trying to make something work. Apparently changing the mode from mode 1 back to mode 0 during the maze part of the game made it work. So now I have two levels in the game and it's now at 12k. Am thinking I can fit a whole massive game in here if I keep this up. (Yesterday I said that the waffle game was about 60k.) And now with the engine complete, all I have to do now is design new mazes, new graphics, and new cut scenes. Which is mostly made of data lines. Unfor

October 15, 2019

2

Pea-Man

Programming is hard when you've got a semi-broken mouse. The problem with mine is that the wheel stopped working. Now I have to scroll up and down using the side arrow buttons. Nevertheless, that didn't stop me from working on a brand new creation (Well, not all that brand-new.) called Pea-Man. The carrots have come and they want to take Pea-Man to planet Carrot and assassinate him! But why HIM? And why now? Pea-Man begins his quest in his house, which has suddenly turned into a scary house. Bec

October 14, 2019

0

Frank the Fruit Fly update - October 2019

It seems like I only work on this game once a month or so. I really should work on it more than that if I ever hope to finish it. The main thing holding me back from working on it is lack of ideas for what Frank can do. The last time I worked on Frank was Sept. 12. So one month later, I returned to work on it. I noticed right off the bat something was wrong with the way Frank was flapping his wings on level 3. How did I not notice this before? The solution was to fix the source image (from where

October 12, 2019

0

No noise

So I was working on something on my video editing software when all of a sudden, I couldn't hear anything it was doing. My speakers were working fine. So I tried resetting the computer and see if that solved it. No, still silence. And then I got a notice that I needed to update Windows, so I did that. That didn't help either, so I guess I won't be making videos until I get to Best Buy or something to get new video editing software that actually WORKS. I know I'm not getting Pinnacle, because of

October 9, 2019

0

MidSpace Redux: Day 3

So with it all nice and done, I went to test my MidSpace version 18 on a real Atari 2600 with my Harmony cart. To my horror, I discovered the screen jumped whenever I lost a life. This was I think at 9 this morning. I then spent the next at least hour and a half trying to fix it. Part of that went to changing the title screen tune since I wasn't really liking what I had in there then. I think my new song sounds more ominous. So after 90 minutes of working on the thing, I made the scanline count

October 8, 2019

3

MidSpace Redux

So yesterday I thought I'd take another stab at adding enemy missiles to the game. It turned out to be a two-day affair. I noticed this morning when I woke up I got back to work on it. After returning from the grocery store, I noticed that I had made a mistake about where to put a part of the code. But it still wasn't working right. Then I read the Programmer's Guide. After trying a few things and failing at them, I noticed the part about RESMP0. I thought "Hey, that's exactly what I want to do!

October 7, 2019

0

Green on white

It always has fascinated me that there's hardly a game out there, on any console, that has a title screen with a white background. I have made it my mission to make a full-fledged game with a title screen with a white background. I had failed with the movement of the cranberry game on VB, so I went back to the Channel F again. I made a title screen for a new game based on my Mr. Celery comic character. This game will be rated E for edible. Anyway, I want to make a game similar to TMN

October 6, 2019

4

VB Success (finally.) part 2

I worked some more on this. I must have had to download it to my FlashBoy+, go to the den, cry out of frustration, come back in here, code some more and repeat that process about 10 times and that was the past hour of my life. The problem was the screen was flickering. I don't know why. Or how, but part of it was. I eventually made it calm down to get this result: I even added some clouds that go by. And yes, they must be that thin. I guess I could thicken them up, but not by very muc

October 5, 2019

0

VB Success (finally.)

So I figured out why I failed in my quest to make a Virtual Boy game. The problem was in the header. The game title needed to be EXACTLY 20 characters. My game title was 21. So fortunately, the phrase "Craig the Cranberry." has exactly 20 characters (I was using "Craig the Cranberry!!") I tried it on my FlashBoy+ and it works great. But why did it even bother working in Mednafen if the header wasn't correct? Mystery. I was scared to eat a piece of pizza following my 2 hour long choki

October 4, 2019

0

I've gone mad.

Well, I've done it. I successfully made an issue of a Mad-like magazine. Since Mad has ended. Introducing Stupid Magazine! 8 pages' worth of comics just like Mad. Except it had more. But I'm just one person. If you like my comics, be sure to read it. (OK, who likes my comics?) The site has my first-ever animated-gif icon since I learned I can do that. And the strawberry Crush tastes just like strawberries. Yum. I choked on pizza at 7 a.m. I tried all sorts of stuff, including stickin

October 3, 2019

2

Cranberries

I must make one clarification on yesterday's blog picture - those weren't all masschamber's cartridges. Some of them I got from other sources. As soon as it was clear I was going to make a second Channel F game (which I thought was Killer Heads of Lettuce), I started hoarding cartridges. Then I made Golf and thought of the Trimerous game and decided I needed some more. I updated the Quest of the Cranberry website. I made a few minor changes, like adding a sound effect when Craig gets

October 2, 2019

0

Donor carts aplenty

They're multiplying! I think this should be enough to hold me for a little bit. AtariAge user masschamber sent me some lovely donor cartridges. Before you panic and think that I am crazy for using a copy of Alien Invasion, let me say that the cart is broken. I tried it and it didn't work at all. I went to the Wal-Mart. They had a bunch of Halloween stuff. I had most of it already (what happens when you have a jack-o-lantern collection). They had an arcade machine I wanted.

October 1, 2019

1

No backtracking

Worked on Quest of the Cranberry this morning after being asleep most of yesterday. I woke up at 1 a.m. and began work. I spent about 3 hours on the thing. Mid way through the work, I decided to get rid of allowing you to go backwards through the game. It was causing a bunch of problems for me, and probably nobody knew you could anyway. Doing that helped a little. I actually got the game to work instead of it not working. I think the problem is I was doing too much stuff at once. I m

September 30, 2019

0

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