So I went to Wal-Mart to get Yoshi's Crafted World. Wal-Mart is the closest place to me that sells video games, so when I want a video game, I usually go there. I looked and looked at the cages and couldn't find it. So then I looked a second time. There, up in a corner on the highest shelf, was the game. After waiting for a few minutes while the lady there was ringing up someone else, she got the game for me and rang it up. $59.88, which meant I got a dime and 2 pennies back. Like I'm going to u
So with Yoshi's Crafted World coming out for the Switch, I decided to make an issue of Nintendo Power. What I forgot though was that not only did I make one 6 years ago in 2013, I made three. So this will be the fourth one. It's easy to forget things you did 6 years ago when your computer keeps crashing every couple of years. It's a wonder I've had mine for 3 years now. *knocks on wood* Anyway, issue 4, May 2019, will have a review of Yoshi's Crafted World in it. I even made a cover and the fir
I was looking through AtariAge and noticed the thread where they were talking about trying to make the Odyssey be an online system. it prompted me to get out my Magnavox Odyssey and test it. Found 6 C batteries, put them in, and the console still works. It's amazing because it was released 47 years ago! Then I remembered I was going to release a game for it but never got around to it. Well, I decided that I should do it now. I had to remake the instructions because it had a copyright of 2016 (!)
I finally got the snow to fall randomly. I was wondering if there was a value that was happening psuedo-randomly all the time since the beginning, like a register. Turns out there was. While I was at it, I also composed and added a new song for level 2. it's hard to compose little tunes when you only have one audio channel to work with. A second one would have made a world of difference. I guess Nintendo didn't really try really hard when designing, making, and selling the Pokemon Mini. Which th
I thought of an idea for Frank the Fruit Fly, so I decided to implement it. It took a few hours to figure out the collision code for the walls, but it was done. This was yesterday. Today I decided to play it to try to get a better picture of it. I noticed that the snowflake was only health subtracting causing if it fell on him. Since I wanted him to subtract health if he bumped into it, I looked at the snow falling code. Sure enough, I had made a small mistake. I used "add" twice instead of "add
I worked really hard and wore myself out working on the 19-minute-long MIDI composition. I went back to that website to convert it to MP3, and the result was it was longer than the MIDI. I had to make a special version of the MIDI (sped up) to make it the correct length. I went to check out the other one I had done, and it mysteriously slowed down as well, so I had to speed up the other one to make it the correct length as well. It was quite the challenge to do, so it's not really perfect, and
So I've decided to take a break from Billy the Ball to focus more on some other stuff. I have all these projects I do to keep myself busy. It's quite possibly the only reason I don't watch all that much TV. This time, I've decided to try and make a MIDI of the Incredible String Band song's "Ithkos" off the 1974 album "Hard Rope and Silken Twine," which I bought for the sole purpose that it has a 19 minute long song on it back when I was collecting long songs. "Ithkos" is the 19-minute long song.
I thought that the title screen didn't look very good with the copyright notice right under Billy. So I decided to change the title screen. I changed the title so it was a smaller font size. I think this looks way better than it did. Thoughts? I've also been working on this game for most of my waking hours again for the third straight day or so. And it is really hot in my room. Yesterday it was 77 degrees in my city. It's hopefully supposed to cool down. So now in the code I have a 6-digit sco
Since I had a problem with the Atari 2600 version, I decided to abandon that version and instead attempt it on the Intellivision. It took most of my waking hours to get started on it. To have a good base to build the rest of the game upon. I had lots of trouble with the line clearing, there are still some areas that it does dumb things, so I made it impossible to do them. If the title screen looks familiar, I just took the cranberry title screen image, erased the words "Quest of the Cranberry,"
For the past couple of hours and last night before I went to sleep, I was trying to get the ball bouncing around the screen in my new JezzBall-inspired game. You'd think such a thing would be relatively easy, but no. It came down to this. When the ball hits the border, it either goes two ways. For 4 borders, 2 x 4 =8. I needed 8 different lines of code to write in case the ball hits the wall. Since the ball is moving diagonally, it was a little harder. But I remembered some code from earlier abo
I designed a new screen for the first screen of level 2, since it is snowing where Frank the Fruit Fly is, the mountains. But I had a problem with something. The screen went all weird on the right hand side. It kept giving me 2 very short lines. I tried everything. I tried redesigning the mountain. No. I tried moving the clouds around. No. Then I just got rid of the clouds. That seemed to work. But why? Who knows? I really wanted those clouds in there, but oh well. Next on the list of stuff I
So I learned something. The Jaguar can only display (or have available at any one point) 256 colors. The part in parentheses was the one thing I was having trouble with. I was coming up with rather weird stuff trying to make the backgrounds be 256 colors. As a result, they can only have 192 colors, because I apparently already have 64 colors ready to go in the other CLUTs. But I only have 3 other 4-bit cluts, which would only make 48 colors. So does this mean that CLUT 15, which displays text al
While i was play-testing the Aaron the Aardvark game, I noticed that on some backgrounds, the white text was partly unreadable. I decided after earlier trying to change the color of the text that something else needed to be done. Then it hit me: Change the background! So I went and put in a black background in each of the four background images. I thought it diminished further the quality of the image by making it use less colors. Then another idea hit me: Put the background as a level. This way
I was play-testing Aaron the Aardvark when I noticed when the taco came down, the ants kept coming out, thus enabling you to eat all the ants you wanted without the UFOs, and then get tons of lives before eating the taco and moving to the next level. So I stopped new ants from coming out when the taco comes falling down from the sky. I also made the taco stop lower so it looks better. I also changed the shooting so you can shoot at the UFOs and destroy them when they're at the top of the screen.
So I spent a few hours last night trying to put a taco in the Jaguar game I'm making. Turns out I ruined the whole thing. Luckily though I had a backup from the last time I worked on it and restarted from there. I went to bed Friday with no taco, but the game wasn't broken any more. I took my melatonin gummy at about 8pm and laid in bed for a few dismal boring hours before finally falling asleep at midnight. I did not want to get up though, but I did and tried again with the taco. I finally go
About a month ago, I tried to make a gray shade in Frank the Fruit Fly and failed miserably. It worked, but Frank kept acting weird. I decided to come back to it today. I think I found out the reason why. I was using the a variable to move Frank around AND to switch between the two screens that made the gray shade possible. So I tried changing the a to b and lo and behold, Frank quit acting weird.
mov b, [graytimer] inc b mov [graytimer], b
I was testing version 39. The last version I saved was version 38. I don't remember why there was a version 39 if I didn't care enough to save it. Anyway, I noticed that sometimes all the food comes out at exactly the same time and goes exactly the same speed. And it looks quite bizarre. So I put in code. Food #4 comes out immediately, Food #1 comes out after a random amount of time between 1 and 64 ticks of the timer, then Food #2 comes out at double that, and Food #3 comes out after that. 60 t
So I thought it had been awhile, so I decided to play my Switch. First I played Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. I still think they should have made a Mario Kart 9 instead of just rereleasing Wii-U games. After I was easily beating my CPU competition, I decided to play Super Mario Odyssey. Man, that game is hard. I swear it took me 15 minutes to go around in the Sand world. I retraced what I did accidentally. And then I went inside the pyramid. It took at least 6 tries to get to the top of the stupid pyrami
I decided to continue work on the Game Gear version of Yum. As I left it, it was still the face mouth opening and closing version. So a lot of work had to be done to make it more like the Game Boy version. I played with color palettes, programming various things, sometimes angrily. And I finally got the mouth moving around where I want it, a purple pickle to avoid, and a cookie and pizza with random y positions. Since the Game Gear has color, I decided to make the background black because it
So I searched my blog for LFSR. No results. I guess it's time to give up on the game. I tried the other one, but then the duplicate card checker quit working for no apparent reason. I just wish I was a good programmer. I've done this for years, you'd think I would be great at this. I guess it's just because I'm stupid. Or some people just have a knack of it and I don't. I did, however, get a fourth item in Yum for Game Boy. It seems like you die faster now that there's 4 things to avoid or get
So I googled "random in C" (what I'm using for this stupid game.) and found a whole bunch of examples, but they all use the rand() function, and efforts to find the included h files were in vain. But I did do one thing (I think): Shortened the code a bit for the dealing. It looks like this:
for (i=0; i<5 ; i++) { // my stupid random code. carddifference=carddifference+3; if (carddifference>51) carddifference=14; Cardnumber[i]=cardtype+carddifference; if (Cardnumb
So I made a new title screen for Chris's Casino for Virtual Boy. It wasn't fun trying to fix the text in Roulette. Playing this, it becomes clear I need to figure out a better way to make the cards more random in Video Poker. Hmm. I got a new X-Box game at the used video game store: Tecmo Classic Arcade. It works! Played a few minutes of Pinball Action. It kept my high score. Great! Looking through the other games, Swimmer looks a little like my White Water Madness only the character goes unde
e5frog has offered his technical wizardry and assistance with my game, and as a result, we're polishing it up, adding more stuff as we go along. He added a high score counter, you know, stuff like that. When we're done, I hope to amaze all of you with the finished product. HOPEFULLY it will stop snowing for the year come spring when I plan to release the game. It's been snowing non-stop since about 1a.m. So 8 hours' worth of snow is on the ground now. It's only about 1-2 inches, but apparently e
Found a bug in Kevin Vs. Blueberries. When the timer got below 10, it said 90, then 80, etc. until you got a blueberry, then it corrected itself. I fixed it. I was drawing a promo image for it when I realized I wanted the grass to be green, not blue. So I went and figured out something. I can have green grass, but the blueberry and snake would also have to be green. It could be a darker shade of green, but still had to be green. That's dumb, but I had to oblige to the Atari 800's hardware. So I
Before you get all excited and thought I was programming a sequel to my Channel F game "Kevin Vs. Tomatoes," let me say that this was just me fooling around with attempting to make a program using just 10 lines of Turbo-Basic for the Atari 800. I woke up at 1:30am because I couldn't stand being thirsty any more. I lay in bed dying of thirst when I try to go to sleep and I don't bring any water into my room because I'm afraid I'd spill it all over my games accidentally. So anyway, after fooling
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