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
So I was looking around in the garage for something. The garage is the place where I keep most of my video game related stuff. I was looking for those Game Boy games that mysteriously disappeared a long time ago. But what I did find was even more interesting: 3 Atari 7800 games I didn't know I had. Well, I kinda knew I had them, but I didn't know where they were. But I found them.
They are Realsports Baseball, Food Fight and Dark Chambers. Each work good after being in the hot/cold g
So I ran into a bit of a problem while coding. It has to do with data tables. And how to make code that advances the variable that reads it. Because I've tried everything and I can't seem to do it. Last night I made a poster for the game.
And I have been working a lot on it. I figured a data table would be the route to go with this game because I want the tracks to be somewhat long in length. I played Excitebike last night searching for ideas. That led to a zipper thing that I added i
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
I worked on the game last night again. I added a score, a title screen and collision detection.
This is attempt #1 at a Skiing title screen. I added the score down at the bottom.
Last night and this morning my computer kept restarting. It did it 3 times. I went back to sleep on the couch and woke up just now and found my computer was still on after it reset earlier this morning. (It's 2:30 p.m. as I'm writing this.) Now I will take a break from Skiing as I have almost the e
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
Since I eliminated the bug in Frank the Fruit Fly about the title screen, I noticed a few weird things happening in-game. Since what I did to the title screen seems to have solved whatever was wrong with it, I decided to do the same thing to the in-game code. Actually, I was going to do so earlier but I forgot to. But now I did. I don't know why the game gets all weird whenever the flapping timer gets above the flapping limit. Common sense would indicate that Frank just would stop flapping his w
Been working on lots of stuff. First I worked on Golf for the channel f. e5frog alerted me to a few problems he was having. I made it so hitting the ball into a tree costs you a penalty stroke. I have also been working on Frank the Fruit Fly, getting the dragonfly to appear in the game.
Pokemon Mini sprites can be a maximum size of 16x16 pixels. Since the two dragonfly sprites when put together were 32x17, I had to do more code to make sure it wouldn't bounce up and down. I had to pu
Worked on the game again today. Life seems to be just speeding by lately. I guess it's because I've been sleeping a lot. Anyway, I now have the game like I want it for now. I changed an image and learned that choosing scaled might get rid of the lower pixel row if your image is 24 pixels tall. So I set it to unscaled and it worked. Now I would love some feedback on how I'm doing with this so far. I ate some onion rings today and didn't choke.
First an update about my dog. Mom says she'll take him to the vet next week (she doesn't have time this week because she'll be babysitting my nephew and niece during the day) and explain the problem to the vet. She started crying when I mentioned that we might want to put him to sleep and said "I don't want to be responsible for his death. I did this already." referring to the other dog she had put to sleep, and more recently the cat.Well, anyway, I'm working on a new video game music album usin
...is something I lack. It's been a boring day today so far. I went for a walk outside. You can see ash collecting on the pavement. I tried Castle of Doom on a real Atari 2600. I changed a level because even though the levels seem easy on an emulator using the keyboard, they seem to be much tougher using a joystick. Especially when you have broken ones. Third time was the charm. I don't know how I ended up with (at least) 3 joysticks, but hey, it works. Couldn't get to sleep last night. I finall
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
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,
And just like that, another day has passed. I spent most of this one sleeping too. I find that even though I usually get sleepy at about 9 or 10, I can't actually go to sleep until about midnight or so. I plugged in my old Commodore 64 (I failed in trying to find my Atari 800) and it still works well. That's about the only thing well on the Comoodore 64 front, I tried to program something for it and all the picture was displaying in red and black instead of the colors I wanted.
I wan
Last time we left Frank, he was flying around in the desert. Since then, he came along some cacti. Or at least they're supposed to be cacti. I can't draw very well. And I spent a whole hour refining this image until I got to the point where I got sick and tired of doing it so I've decided to keep it like this:
And I have an idea of what Frank is supposed to do in this screen. I had to quit working on the game because I had no ideas. But then last night, while laying in bed trying to s
It seems like all my life is is just working on video games, eating, going to the bathroom, and sleeping. I sleep a lot. Anyway, e5frog helped me with the password code for Quest of the Cranberry for the Channel F and I think I have it working correctly now.
The hard part was converting parts of a variable to different values, separating the variable, and then storing those separate variables into new variables. I must have worked on this for a total of about 12 hours before life finally le
I was having trouble keeping the flying hamburger's y position visible on the screen during the title screen. Then, after I don't know how many attempts (including when I was working on the first game), it FINALLY dawned on me. The y position will give a psuedo-random number from 0 to 255. SO I HAD TO PLAN AS SUCH! I had to plan for a number being 255.
So now my code looks like this:
resetburgerx
ld a,5
ld (burgerx),a
call GetRandomNumber
ld hl,
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
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
Not that I care when the weekend is. I slept all morning today. Went to sleep shortly after midnight because I couldn't sleep, and then woke up at about 2 p.m.
I worked on Hamburgers En Route To Switzerland.
I'm beginning to think that it shouldn't be hamburgers since I already made a game about waffles on the Intellivision (not to mention peas and carrots as well.) Something not food related heading to Switzerland. BUT WHAT? My eye began twitching again and it will not stop and
So I woke up at about midnight. Not very rare, I often wake up in the middle of the night. But this time was different. I decided to start programming the TI-84+. Spent two hours trying to hook up the thing to the computer with a regular USB cable. Nothing was working. I apparently need a special one. So I began looking for it. No success. So I bought one off of eBay. It was only $5. And it's supposed to come June 4. (I want it NOW though!) So apparently it's either find the one I had or wait un
So I have been working on GoSub for the Atari 7800 the past few hours. I learned I have room for 25 levels. After every five levels there will be a boss stage. I thought I had more room than I originally did, but found out that the bigger the pictures are, the more room they take up, which is logical, but even in the mainspace and DMA holes they take up space there too, which I am wondering why since the pictures all have their own area to be stored.
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
I named it "Greedy Zyx" because it plays a lot like the game "Alien Greed." I had a ton of trouble trying to make multiple lists, but I think I have the hang of it now. I have been working a lot on it today. Like, almost all day. And now I'm tired of it. But I'll go to sleep and want to work on it tomorrow, making some sound effects for the game.
Right now it technically is a game, where you can die if the eggplant touches you. I don't know whether more enemies should come as time goe
So I decided that the thing to do after spending all day and failing at that, is to split the 8-bit number into 4 2-bit numbers. So, if I ended up with, say, 95, it would print
%01, %01, %11 and %11 on the screen (or 1, 1, 3, 3). But I'm having trouble with even this. I figured all that was was a matter of shifting numbers left and right, but I shifted them left and right in various ways in an attempt to make it work, but to no avail. I wish I was smart like you guys.
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