So apparently I was trying to cram in too much for the poor Odyssey 2 can handle and it gave me flickering walls at the top of the screen. It does that when it's not happy. I tried moving the walls down, but this didn't help. So instead of continuing work on a crappy game where the walls flicker when the alien gets hit, I've decided to just give up. Which is sad because I was actually enjoying working on this. I guess this gives me more time to work on some of my other projects like Castle of
So I'm thinking about possibly porting the Atari 2600 game "Room of Doom" to the Odyssey² after seeing it in DoctorSpuds' blog entry. I think it would work well except for this change: The "doors" would always have to be open. The grid does not support such tiny openings in it. So I went ahead and made a real-life mockup (a picture of an actual binary I made) and I think it looks good. The guy is sprite 0, the dinosaur will be sprite 1 and the guy's bullet will be sprite 2, and the guard's bulle
So I went back to the store and said the second copy didn't work. So she let me choose another game since there weren't any other copies left of the one I wanted. I chose Atari Anthology. I think you know why, since it's my username and all. I take it back home and lo and behold, it starts working. I guess it's either Atari charm, third time's the charm, or it hated Namco Museum. I'm just happy it FINALLY started working. I was beginning to think it wasn't going to work at all.
So today's waking hours were spent getting the collision detection in the game for the guy's bullet. Oh, he now can shoot and move around in four directions in case you don't frequent the Odyssey 2 part of the AtariAge forum. But when all men were shot it was supposed to get all new men to shoot, but it kept wanting to freeze and glitch out when I put the code in to do that. But finally I got that solved. I still don't know why it happened, I guess it was due to the stupid page limitations. Yo
So I finished the second song (MIDI) on my album and converted it to an MP3. But when I went to add it into Windows Media Player, it said it was 27:05. I was like "What?" All the other Windows programs that play music said it was around 27 minutes as well. So I went and started up Nero. It said a more sane time: 26:25. Which is what the MIDI program I programmed the music in said it was. Why is Windows Media Player then saying it's 27:05 when it's actually 26:25? I've had discrepencies in musi
I'm happy that the rodents are gone. Not only that, the big huge spider I mentioned in a status update left yesterday morning. So with everything gone and nice, I decided to work on Castle of Doom again. I was originally going to have a level that looked like a snake since I went to Game Crazy today and got Wildsnake for the SNES. I already had it for the Game Boy, but I decided to get it any way just to help them stay in business. I'm so nice.
What the level ended up like is the blog entry
So my sister is moving away from her boyfriend because he turned into a meth addict. He was admitted to the hospital tonight apparently even though he claimed he had worms boring into his eyelids. So I guess that meant my sister and nephew had to come over here before they could move into the new house. My house has so many boxes of stuff you'd think we were moving. Well anyway, they came over here tonight. And along came the rest of the pets. The dogs are in a kennel. The cat has been here fo
Every time I hear the word Jaguar I think of the Atari Jaguar. This lady on Jeopardy! said she was in a cage and there was a jaguar that pawed at her face. Even though she was talking about an actual jaguar, I still couldn't help but think of the Atari Jaguar. I had to uncapitalize "jaguar" while typing that last sentence. Anyway, I went and worked on the Jaguar again. I was having quite the time with the UFOs. It just so happened that even if you put in a 24 bit image with 5 colors in it, it
After announcing on this blog a few weeks ago I was making a music project here, I have been working on it almost daily. The only thing that changed is that in the beginning I used a keyboard to plot out notes. That has changed so now I just use the software I use to make the MIDI which is the sound of the piano anyway. I finished the first song and am halfway into the second one. Oh, and I changed the name of the "artist" from "no" to "uncle jim's barnyard fun." What prompted this change? I f
So after a whole bunch of hours programming, I finally have the beginnings of a video poker game. It took a while to get it just right. A few problems were in the way. One was that it kept giving me two king of clubs sometimes. I think I have that problem gone now. Another was sometimes it was ignoring pairs. Again, I think I have that problem gone now. The next step in programming is to make a hand icon and make it allow players to keep cards and then redeal the cards they don't keep and the
So I went back to work on my Pokemon Mini game I was working on because this guy on eBay told me he had a Pichu Bros. game he'd give me a great deal on. Except I had to pass on it because I already have it. So that got me thinking about my Pokemon Mini game I was making. Does the shading on these clouds look cool or stupid/weird? It's easy to change, so be honest. And I went to update the page for it, but the é and copyright symbols weren't working any more. They changed the pages I used to go
I have an idea. The idea is make this new Intellivision game I started work on, make a version of Yum for the Intellivision, make a third game I haven't thought of yet, and put it all together and call the thing "Triple Fun." I figure the games aren't going to be very large, so I can just make three 16k games and put them on one ROM along with a title/game selecting screen. I don't know about the Lemons game I started for the Intellivision. I kind of lost steam on it. I want to finish it, but
I've decided to continue work on Castle of Doom. I am wondering if I have room for an even 50 levels. And an ending. After all, defeating all those levels you might as well get one. How special it is depends on how much room the rest of the levels take up. Right now I have 35 rooms in there and 1,444 bytes left in bank 2, where rooms 27 and beyond are stored. Levels 1-26 and info are in the first bank, along with the "engine." So I figure if I can fit 26 rooms in a bank, then I SHOULD have room
So I was looking for something I thought had been gone for a while. But I wondered how I would have played my Genesis without the RF switch. I looked in the garage, I looked in the pantry. It wasn't in there. Angry and defeated, I just gave up and bought another one on eBay. And then I went to the bathroom. That's where it was, hiding in plain sight, waiting to be found. Argh! I got a Genesis game and the Game Genie at a store. I wanted to see whether they would work or not. The Boogerman game
Here's a first. I've decided to give up on this game. Not because I'm having trouble programming it, but because it's not a very interesting game to play. So I guess I'll chalk it up as a learning experience and move onwards. I did get two items on the screen at the same time. It took about an hour to do. While testing it though, I wasn't very interested in playing it. I guess intermittently pressing fire isn't very interesting. Maybe I'll make this game part of another game. Like what Fairchi
I think I figured out how to make 4k games on my own. I went to the VES wiki and took a look at some of the disassemblies of commercially released games. I noticed something. A 2k game did not go above the address A0fff, while the bigger ones did. I went back and inspected my own code. I noticed the signature:
org $ff0signature: .byte ".chris read 2018"
I thought the ff0 was A0ff0. So I thought to myself, "Well, what if I changed that org statement?" So a few attempts later, I got a
So I worked and worked for hours. I finally got it so not only does the blueberry chase you around, but it does so only on a specific screen. You start on screen 1 and then move right, just like in Pitfall (although in this game you can't move left at the starting screen.) Screen 2 has the blueberry and screen 3 doesn't. Surprisingly, having the blueberry chase Craig was the easy part. What turned out to be extremely hard and basically most of my programming was moving from screen to screen.
The internet was mostly out yesterday. This led me to more time programming. I didn't go to sleep until 2pm, because I was having "fun" programming. I started with the Channel F because it had been a while since I last programmed it. I want to make an adventure game, a lot like My History Teacher Ate Lemons, only for the Channel F. A hard task. I had problems from the start. The guy I made looked crappy when he was moving. I even had him animated, but I had to scrap it because it looked atrociou
I have noticed that there are only a few cable channels I can record now. Forget networks. I am so sick of greed I could vomit. Why would anyone care if I record something off TV? Yeah, like I'm gonna sell it. Do people actually do that? Is that why they stopped letting you record network TV channels? No. It's greed. Just the very thought of someone recording something for their own private use makes them fearful that they'll lose a penny even though they won't. It's greed, folks, and it has des
Last night I worked on Mr. Stick for Game Boy. I fixed the eyes so they're a lot better now. I also added in the game logic for the vegetable or candy getting. It took a whole lot of time, maybe a couple hours, to put in that background. I decided to, but it was persistent in not letting me. Finally, some really weird code later I had the background in. I can't explain what I did, though, or why it works.
I have a little story for the game. Mr. Stick decides to trade his cow for something be
Okay, so MIDIs are a way obsolete file type, but I have a collection of them on the internet. Long time readers of this blog know my fascination with long songs. So this collection has a bunch of long songs in MIDI form. You name a long song, it's probably here. If not, then get to work and I'll add it. Pink Floyd, Rush, ELP, and Dream Theater are just a few of the prog bands I have long MIDIs of. Of course, I had to make a few Dream Theater ones (I did NOT make the Octavarium one, though. It is
Call me crazy but I've made the front cover for my album I've made. I found a copy of a CD I had made in 2009 (Hard to believe that was NINE years ago!) It is called "Pretty Pretzels" by a fictional band I made up called "No" (A take on "Yes"). I decided to have No make a comeback album, and this is the one I'm working on. The difference is, all the songs on the 2009 CD are improv pieces on my keyboard, while the one I've just begun are actual pieces with music that anyone can play over and over
Well, not exactly. Inspired by making MIDIs of other people's long songs, I decided to compose a long song myself. One that's really easy to play and follow along to. So I sat at my piano plunking out notes. Notes, that when played together (chords) sound good or interesting, at least to me. I finished my long MIDI I made of "The Diamond Sea". I sat down and said to myself that I was going to finish all 10 minutes I had left whether my eye hurt or not (it did.) Anyway, you can follow along as
Today I worked on adding some new, non-built-in sounds. It was, like programming the rest of the game, hard. It took a few hours of rearranging code sections. At one time, I thought I had it done, but the game froze in O2EM when the banana scrolled off screen. But I found the cause and tried again. And a few more times before I think it is working. Rafael suggested I do this on the Videopac.nl forums. He is notorious to me for hating the built-in sounds, whereas I like them because they're easie
After working on trying to get collision detection so the platforms don't touch each other, I think I finally did it after 2 DAYS of trying. It was hard. Very hard. To aid myself, I put in a noise for each time a collision happened and the offending platform moved off screen. Aiding further were giving the platforms their each individual color so I could tell which platform was which. But I think I finally did it. This little bit of code:
colllll movx a,@r0 ; get Y pos of sprite 0
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