I spent most of yesterday working on the game. I tested it on real hardware. It was a case of the platforms getting too close to each other, causing garbled characters. On the Odyssey 2, if characters overlap, you get that. So I tried to fix it by making it so if the y position is too close, move it up more. I went to bed with a broken game. I woke up, and started anew. I had the bright idea of putting a noise in so I would know my code would be working. I thought I had it, but I went to test
I'd been working on this for a few hours earlier this morning. It's a Doodle Jump game for the Odyssey 2. The only trouble is, I had to make it so it always scrolls down since I couldn't figure out how to make it stop and be nice like it is supposed to. I got disgusted with the way it wasn't working, so a total rewrite was in order. Once I got that mostly done, I tried to make it so it stops, but I just couldn't figure out how to. I think the problem is I need to figure out the y position of eac
Last night I worked on White Water Madness some more. And when I was done, I worked on an instruction manual cover for it. I didn't do a very well job for it: I tried to get the fonts, but all the AtariAge links that I got when I searched were broken. It was hard, but finally I found a post saying it's Bauhaus, so I downloaded that. I remembered HammerFat, but I couldn't download it because, like I said, AtariAge's archive pages are full of dead links. I changed some stuff, made the items fas
So I was looking through my blog posts trying to find out when I got my Atari Jaguar. The earliest I wrote about it was in 2008 when I was thinking about possibly selling it. Well, it's 10 years later and I still have it, so I didn't sell it. And I'm not going to, especially after seeing how high Jaguar game prices are on eBay. Power Drive Rally $150? I have that game and I doubt I paid that much for it. My upper limit for one game is about $100. Most of which those games are Pokemon Mini Japane
So I have a list of Atari 2600 part numbers. The games near the end actually look interesting. Too bad they never made them. Jinks. Street Fight. Thunderfox. Looking for an Atari 2600 project to do, I came across cx26184: White Water Madness. Figured it might be a fun project for me to take on. So I spent about an hour making a title screen for it. This is what I came up with. The words "White Water Madness" with a guy rowing a raft across the screen.
I have never been white water rafting, t
I decided to give another go at putting some code from my Upmonsters game into this minigame. This time it worked, for the most part. You can now continue jumping on the same platform without risking it going away and scrolling down to disappearing. I don't know, though, it seems like I've made the game too easy. I wish someone could give me feedback on Pokemon Mini games, but the forums have been dead for a few weeks now despite my posting in them. I'm the only one who has yesterday and today.
I've been trying to stay up later so I can go to sleep later so I can lead a more normal life. Yesterday I went to sleep at noon instead of about 7am. Partly due to the fact that the neighbor's dog got loose again and came up to our window a couple times, and our dog kept barking at it. And it just stood there like nothing was wrong. Idiot dog. Oh well. I got up at about midnight. And I worked on the Pokemon Party Mini 2 game I was working on. Last time I worked on it was July 7 apparently. I
So I worked on this for about three hours today. I think it's finally done for now. What's more, I kept it under the 16k limit - barely. That was the big problem: Fighting it, rearranging code, removing code, adding code. While testing the game, I got up to level 13. I added lives. You get four lives at the start. The scoring is when you get past 5 clouds, you get a point. Losing a life makes you lose the points you gained since the level started, unless you have 0 lives left and the game ends.
I think I know what I am going to do with Frank the Fruit Fly. Level 1 will be the house. Your job is to guide Frank out of it. Frank starts his journey in the bathroom. Waiting for him at the other side of the bathroom is a spider. What you need to do is get Frank past the spider in order to get out of the bathroom. But why is Frank in the bathroom? I don't know. Ask the moths that appear in mine. I also have a title screen done. I need to add some music for it though. And I also need to a
I went to work on the Upmonster game again I've been making. After trying to fix the jump, I think I discovered why it was doing the high/low jumps: It had something to do with the way I was scrolling the screen. So I put in a bit of code and it looks way better. But then I had a bug in the 2 player game where it wasn't displaying the "P2 WON" message sometimes. I think I finally figured out why that was happening. But something seemed off. The upmonster was jumping on clouds, but the title sc
It's been decided that the upmonsters are actually aliens, and they're trying to get back to their UFO. But before they do, they have to reach it, which is obscured by clouds that the upmonsters have to jump on, farther up and up until they get to it. Then, once they get close enough, the UFO's beam pulls them up inside, like this: And then a new level starts with an all-new upmonster. So that's what I've been doing all day: Working on this game, adding tons of stuff to it. I'm surprised I
Someone who was in charge of making the screenshots for the Fall 1988 INTV catalog must like the number 47 a lot... - Page 3: Body Slam Super Pro Wrestling - Over the T in the words "GIANT SPLASH" is the number 47. - Page 5: Pole Position - One of the scores is 4700. - Page 5: Super Pro Football - The number of Total Yards for the red team is 47. - Page 6: Slap Shot: Super Pro Hockey - The time left in the game is 16:47. - Page 7: Tower of Doom - The amount of Life Force is 147. - Page 8: Diner
I just got Nigel Mansell's racing game for the NES in the mail today. Working on all these games it makes me want to begin work on a game for the NES. Only problem is I don't know how to begin work on making an NES game. I figure it uses assembly, which I am using for the Pokemon Mini version of Frank the Fruit Fly. But I guess I don't really need to since most Pokemon Mini games are 4 Megabits, which is far greater size than a regular NES game. That and I gave up trying to bankswitch Game Boy g
So my boxes of Atari 2600 games in the garage were made of cardboard and the bottom ones were beginning to crumble due to the pressure of there being 5 of them stacked up one atop another. So I decided to empty them all out and put them in the bookshelf in the pantry. While unpacking them, I thought to myself, gee I should try one to see if they all still work okay. That one I picked was Video Pinball. I could have picked a rarer one, like Mr. Do's Castle, or Miner 2049er II or Master Builder, b
So I am looking at the game library. I like to collect games released late in a system's life. Looked up Cliffhanger on eBay. It was about $80. Last Action Hero was about the same. Disgruntled, I thought Jimmy Connors Tennis would be a sane price. Nope. It's even higher. Who would pay $200 for a stupid tennis game? I did however find sane prices for a few I didn't have: Championship Pool (October 1993) and Jurassic Park (June 1993). I thought I had Nigel Mansell's game, but I looked in the garag
I got labels for the Kevin Vs. Tomatoes cartridges. I have to cut and print them myself. I tried my best but this is the best I could do. Needless to say, this is my copy. I would hope to do better than this very first attempt at cartridge label making. Perhaps there's some print shop I could get premade labels with my design on them?
I decided to work on the game over screen for Hamburgers on Game Gear. After considering it, I didn't want to go with just a simple "Game over" message. It's old, tired, and cliche. So I decided to go with "you died." And, after a half-hour's work, this is what I have: Some somber music is planned but not in the game quite yet. Here's what I have left to do:
+ compose game over music + make game ending music and screen + make sure game works on real Game Gear + make nuggets appear way l
With ants on the kitchen counter once again (they're late this year), I began working on my Hamburgers Game Gear game. Today's task was not about programming, rather composing some eerie music for the caves level. My eye hurt a lot last night so I wasn't able to sleep very good. I slept for four hours last night, and couldn't get back to sleep. I later went to sleep at noon and woke up at 4 or so. I just finished my music, which was programmed oddly. By plunking out certain notes in the MOD ma
One thing I have been wondering is why there haven't been very many long songs, like over an hour or so. I have 15 in my collection. I mean, if people have the attention span to sit through a two-hour stupid movie about superheroes, then why wouldn't they have the attention span to listen to a 2-hour piece of music? To my knowledge, the number of two-hour or so songs you need only one hand to count them with. Back in February I started work on a 2-hour long song. I stopped because I went to wo
So today I decided to not sleep and instead put in a splash screen in the Hamburgers game. At first this was in black, gray and white. Then I noticed "Hey, this isn't the Game Boy. Why not make it in color?" So I did. After a testing, one of the problems I described in earlier entry came back. So I had a fun time doing that. Oh, and if you've played the game, you've probably noticed the irritating yellow screen that pops up for less than a second in an intermission. As it turns out, the yel
So all the work on Doodle Jump for the Atari 2600 someone else had been doing inspired me to try and make one for the Odyssey 2. With the characters being platforms, the most I could have would be 12 at a time. But if I decide to keep working, I doubt I would make that many. So what I have now is a guy, a platform, jumping, and collision detection. I figured putting collision detection in would be the easiest way to have the guy keep bouncing. My program looks like this: Also, I have the begi
My package came today. And I know why it went to California first instead of here. The guy put a cross inside the 7. the upper part of the seven was bended down a little, so it looked like a 4. So some dumb postal worker who didn't know that Europeans write sevens with crosses assumed it was a 4 and it went to California. So it wasn't the seller's fault at all, except for the fact that he should write his sevens better. So I put in the cart and it didn't work. So I took it out and put it back
Last night at around midnight, the package tracking status said "Your package delivery has been delayed." Well, can you tell me WHERE IT IS? Meanwhile, I have been working on the Pokemon Mini. I made a fish show up. But I can't draw a swimming fish, so I need help with a b&w, 2 frame, 12x12 pixel fish animation picture. This is what I have in here now: I slowed down the fish because it was moving too fast.
Yesterday I tried my hand at making something for the Pokemon Mini. After a successful "Hello World," I decided to try my hand at making an image appear on the screen. But this is as far as I got. I have no idea how to make a sprite appear on the screen and move it around. I looked at various code from other games and didn't understand any of it. Which is too bad because I have an idea for a game now. And it's also too bad that I can't try what I did on a real Pokemon Mini because the guy that
Insomnia has been hurting my head the last couple of days. I can't sleep. And even if I am lucky enough to fall asleep, I'm only asleep for 2 hours or so. I lay in my bed supersleepy for a half-hour yet can't fall asleep. The fact that it's hot in my bedroom doesn't help either. Fan is going, window open at night, yet I can't fall asleep. So now it's 4:30am and I have been awake for 3 hours or so. And it's boring just laying on my bed with my eyes closed. I guess I'm the type of person that li
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