Well, here's what I have so far: A brand-new Gosub, this time I'm sticking with it and only it until I get a 32k version. I don't know when or if Batari will release said version where I can put playfield info in every bank instead of the last one, so it may be a while before you see another update. Right now I've got a little under 500 bytes to spare with 15 mazes, the beginnings of a password system, b/w-color and left difficulty are operating (game select is kinda. Right now, if you set it on
I think I'll have to wait until the release of the version of bBasic with playfield graphics in every bank, but I want to make a 32k bBasic game! And I think GoSub would be the perfect idea. Just think, dozens of mazes for the sub to navigate through, along with an Ants-style minigame. Now THAT would be cool. And, what's more, it might be actually good enough to sell in the store. That would be really cool!
I have to finish up job training that I abandoned, so that means less free time start
So yesterday I worked on the Cranberry game some more. I made the changes I talked about in yesterday's blog. I made it so there's a screen type. And I made it so the screen type is the thing based on deciding what goes where instead of the screen number. This will save a lot of space, so instead of having two long things of code to decide what to show when, I'll only have one. I was still bored, so I decided to put in the health monitor. I fiddled around with different ways to do this, includ
Well, Cal-Am is taking this thing seriously about our trailer park. 99.5, the Wolf, is apparently at our trailer park. That's the good news, the bad news is it's a country station. And in my quest to find this station online, I've come across two other stations called the Wolf and also on 99.5. The one here is KWJJ based in Portland. Why a Portland radio station would be at a trailer park in little old Salem is nobody's guess. So I'm sitting here listening to a country station when I hate countr
It's 98 degrees right now (not sure about the .6 part) I was having trouble. I discovered that left in my Bert game wasn't working on real controller. So I tried various things but to no avail. I thought my 7 button was broken. So I opened the controller up and cleaned 7. It was clean already. Put it back together. Then I thought of the keypad test I had on my computer, so I put it to the test on a real Atari 2600. All my numbers were working fine. So it must have been something in my code. Even
Since my computer died, I thought I'd go through my Game Gear collection list I last saved somewhere. I took the three bins of Game Gear games and did just that. As it turns out, I apparently missed one, so now I have 98 instead of the 97 I thought I had. I looked at the Office Max advertisement in Sunday's paper. It showed some desktop computers. But I didn't see any when I went there yesterday. I guess they must have them somewhere else away from all the other computers (which would be stupid)
I can't believe it's been 9 years since I've joined the forums at AA. It's been so long, I even forgot how I found them. And 9 years and 1 day later, I now have 338 Atari 2600 games. I want to have at least 350, so I need 12 more. But it is really hard when you have almost all of them. I guess I need to cough up the dough and look on eBay. I've also made more than 8,500 posts. So anyway, I've been sleeping a light 14 hours every day. I went to bed at noon and I kind of fell asleep at 12:30 pm, a
...well almost, but it's certainly going to be. But what I need in order to actually sell this is 9 people to buy it. That's it. Just 9. I already have one confirmed, so it's actually 8. So the big question is, if Super Maria Sisters were on sale for $13, would you buy it? (The person who bought it for the $20 price will get an automatic $7 rebate, in case he's reading this.) If not, what would you change? E-mail me or give me a PM if interested. I've only got about 1k left to neaten up some thi
Here's another update of the roulette game I'm working on. I know a roulette game using Batari Basic shouldn't take up 8k, but here it is anyway. (note: It's actually more around 5k) Added the odd/even number option. Up next: Choose your own number!
I went to Value Village to see if there were any Atari 2600 games. There weren't any. But I did see an 8-track player that I contemplated buying. Since I didn't see any 8-tracks I like (except for Neil Diamond), and most 8-track tapes are crappy '70s music, I passed. However, I did get Zoey 101 at the K-Mart next door, which completes my GBA 07 collection so far (I don't know if M&M's Break 'Em is coming out or not tomorrow, since it mysteriously went off of IGN.com's release date list about
I found a folder in my computer of a baker's dozen of little crosswords I had made a little over a year ago. I then decided to put together a little magazine of these each month. So I made 3 more for a nice round number of 16 (four on each page, plus cover and answers page) for a little 6-page monthly issue. Man, these things are tough to make. I spent at least two hours making one for the next issue. So the next time I get bored (which is too often), I guess I can make one of these suckers. I h
I was just wondering if the Harmony cart works on the 7800 or not. The reason I ask is because I don't want to plug in my 2600. I just now played Food Fight for the first time. Here are my thoughts. Could the guy trying to eat the ice cream be any more slower? I doubt it. I move the joystick really hard for the first time and he moves an inch. Without a manual, I discovered that the point of the game is to eat the ice cream cone. But there are chefs that apparently don't want you to. So you hit
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.
The only GBC game I've been playing recently is Tetris DX. If I want another portable game in color, I'd get out my Lynx thank you. And I thought this game would never end, but it did, but not before I reached a nice round number of lines of 700. Twin Galaxies has 841 lines at third place, so if I had a video of this, I'd be in fourth place. I don't have a video of it, but I do have a screenshot (I was so proud of myself for achieving this...) I do have a video of me getting 56 eggs in Yoshi for
So I created an animated movie short that's a little over 7 minutes long in Windows Movie Maker 2.6. And it's taking forever to save. Or is it even doing anything? I checked Task Manager and it appears to be doing something since it's taking a little over 30% of my CPU, but all it has to show for itself is a 13.2k .wmv file that's 0:00:00 long. It's been doing this for the past 5 minutes. I cancelled it and retried it and it just sits there not seeming to do anything. It says "Estimating Time Re
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
So I took a look and tested what I had of level 2 before the igloo part. I needed to fix a few things. It should be running okay now. I also added some snow on the igloo screen (not the inside of the igloo, that would be crazy.) The way I think it is is if the largest Pokemon Mini ROM can be 512k, and if bankswitching is needed after 64k, then that must mean you can have 8 64k banks in a code. I've taken to sleeping on the couch at about 9 a.m. and not getting up until about 5 p.m. Today I w
Well, it took all night but I finally got a working version of Frank the Fruit Fly that is bigger than 64k. Not very much though, it's 67k. But a couple of people on the Pokemon Mini Discord helped me with it. So now what I'm going to do is keep working on it. I suspect I am going to have to move the code for level 1 to the 64k mark eventually since I would like to make an adventure with many different scenarios, screens, and levels. But that's not soon. When I get done with the second level,
OK, so it looks like I'm having trouble with Audacity then. When I go to convert a song to MP3, the default settings list it as 128 kbps, but once I finish making it an MP3 and click Properties on the MP3 I just made, it says it's 64 kbps. Well, with this latest song finished, I'm up to past 100 MB, and it's about 4 hours in. Also, it appears I can't go back and redo the project to make it 128 kbps because I apparently moved some files it needed after I did the first time. I tried putting the
Well, it's been six months since I bought the Lynx, and I haven't regretted it for a second. Right now I have 28 games, but I went ahead and ordered 2 more so hopefully I'll have 30 by the first part of next week, if not sooner. So, with 6 months, I got these 28 games:
Baseball Heroes, Batman Returns, Bill & Ted, California Games, Chip's Challenge, Crystal Mines II, Dirty Larry, Gates of Zendocon (ridged), Hockey, Hydra, Ishido, Klax, Kung Food, Ms. Pac-Man, Pinball Jam, Power Factor, Qi
My computer is just trying to aggravate me on purpose. Why else would it keep freezing on me? I've had to restart the program I'm using three times, and when that didn't help, I restarted the whole computer. I think my progress has been saved now since it actually didn't give me an error message when I tried to close the program. Every time I inserted a snowman, I had to wait about a minute for it to recognize the change I made to the game, then another minute for it to process what I've done. I
Yep, it's another crossword. This is a "historic" first: The numbers on the clues don't go above 60 in this 15x15 puzzle. I worked on making this all evening and got done around 6:30, so at least a good 4 hours was spent making this one. Not only is it hard, I made the clues deliberately even harder. I think I'll make some more of these non-themed puzzles, it's good not to have a certain theme going. You can download it at the bottom, and the answer will be displayed in the next blog entry.
I did one better, making a crossword that has the highest clue number of 54 this time. This time I'll try to remember to put the answer in the next blog entry.
I got some games for my 5200 today. They work fine, the system seems to work fine (it's from Value Village), but the controllers don't. Well, the start button kinda does. I had to press it with a pair of scissors to get it to work. The fire buttons don't work. I tried playing Galaxian and couldn't get the ship to fire. The only game I know that works fine so far is Pac-Man. All the other ones work, but I can't play them because the stupid fire buttons don't work. Oh well, at least I have a worki
I played Ms. Pac-Man on the Game Boy. I got the highest score I ever got. 51560. I got to the fourth maze. There were three bananas. And my game ended when I tried to go back and get a dot I missed. It's really hard when there are four of them and only one of you. And touching one is deadly. I would have just put three ghosts in the maze, possibly two. Because four is just too hard. I was figuring out which Game Boy cartridge shells to harvest. It ended up being a Frankenstein cart. One back and
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