I'm working on a Virtual Boy version of the casino game Craps for my Virtual Boy game "Chris's Casino". But there's one problem: I don't know the rules. I read some rules on Wikipedia and I've implemented "Pass" and "Don't Pass" bets, as well as rolling the dice. I don't understand the "Come" and "Don't Come" bets. If I get this working, I think I'll call it done, since it seems like 4 games is enough. Like I've said before, I think Video Poker is undoable, at least by me, because of the amoun
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
I have decided to give up on Even Number Man. Even if I got it working, it just takes up too much space to do what I want it to do. So last night, I went back to work on Hamburgers. Even that wasn't working for me. It was late, about 3am or so. I decided to go to sleep with that broken. There were thunderstorms here last night at about the time I went to sleep. I woke up and decided to work on Hamburgers again. It kept giving me false deaths. I was trying to add an onion ring to the game that
So I have been working on my latest game for the Odyssey 2 I'm making called Even Number Man. Now I have a bunch of projects going on at once, along with Hamburgers En Route To Switzerland, My History Teacher Ate Lemons, and Castle of Doom. So anyway, I am looking at the website I made for it and am wondering how to NOT make it automatically switch to a new line when </h3> is used. Or is that even possible? If you look at the website, I want to have the "last updated" part on the same line
I just got the boards today and the game works fine on 16:9 TV sets, but part of the score is not going to show up on 4:3 ones since I accidentally made the score show up more to the right than it should have been. Lesson learned. I will try to center stuff more next time so it will be usable on all TV types. Here is a picture of the game on a 16:9 aspect ratio TV. Putting the board together for mine was a real chore because I had to figure out how the springs fit on since they got unattach
So I spent the better part of my waking hours today trying to put words in the GG game. Letters didn't really want to work, so I put phrases in instead. But somewhere along the line, I broke collisions. It started detecting what I thought were false collisions. But while playing on the Everdrive, I saw something I didn't see with Emulicious: an extra rogue 8x8 strawberry milkshake sprite part pops up for a fraction of a second sometimes right after the sprite goes away when you shoot it. Me
So I worked on HERTS (Hamburgers En Route To Switzerland. Funny acronym I made) again. I was having trouble making the milkshake's y position go up and down. It kept thinking there was a collision when in fact there wasn't. After many angry outbursts, I had an idea. Perhaps it was thinking there was a collision because the 2 parts of the milkshakes were overlapping. So I separated them more, one pixel up moving up and one pixel down moving down. That worked, except for if you fired while the s
Popeye is no stranger to video games. But he was when this one came out. His last video game appearance was in the '80s. But I guess they wanted to introduce Popeye to new people. This is not the way to do it.
Popeye is not a platforming game. Rather it is a racing game that looks like a platformer. Think Mario, but your intention is crossing the finish line first. Thankfully this game has a password system so if you cared enough, you could probably google the passwords or go to GameFAQs if
I don't know why I keep making games about food. I guess it's because I'm hungry all the time? Well, at least it was healthy food (tomatoes, lettuce, celery, etc.), that is, until now. I've transitioned to meat. This is the "secret" Game Gear game I was working on. I've decided to unveil it now because, well, I'm stuck. Not with the code, but with the game play. Right now it just seems, well, boring. I need to spice stuff up. But how? Right now, you control a flying hamburger as it is going to
So I have been busy again with the Game Gear game tonight after sleeping almost all day. One of the things I wanted to do is have a sfx play on channel 2, since it isn't used in the song. But I tried and kept trying because I thought I wasn't doing anything wrong. Frustrated, it dawned on me: Since channel 2 had no data in the song (channels 1 and 0 did), it must be silent all the time. But why, I wondered, could I write data to channel 3 and have that work? So anyway, I tried my best to make
So I was working on my Game Gear game again today. I designed some new numbers for the score. But something was wrong with the 9 digit. It wasn't put in the game. So I wondered why. I went back to the bmp2tile messages to see if anything had gone wrong. It only read numbers 0-8. 9 was on the end and for some reason didn't get read at all. So I moved it one pixel to the left and tried again. Success. I don't know why that made a difference though. I used the Century Gothic font to make these nu
So with my eye hurting again, I decided to program the Atari 2600 some more. I worked on Castle of Doom. Today's update is just to see if what I had mentioned in yesterday's blog about size and space was true. Turns out it is. Right now I have 57 bytes left in bank 1 and 2,135 bytes left in bank 2. So that means I can put a ton more level data in bank 2. But I had to make it switch between bank 1 and bank 2 though. This meant having level data getting code in both banks. Once I successfully did
Finding something to do, I thought about that old Castle of Doom game for the Atari 2600 I made 26 screens of and stopped. Well, I picked it back up and made some improvements, like the guy is actually standing on the floor instead of floating above it. Couldn't fix the part where the guy can't reach the absolute sides of the wall, though. Castle of Doom is sort of like GoSub instead of a submarine, it's Bob and instead of the walls being deadly, they're solid. And instead of an octopus, you get
While working on Chris's Casino for Virtual Boy, it occurred to me that I think INTV was the only console back then with a roulette game. But it didn't have a slot machine game. So I'm looking to expand the Las Vegas game line with Las Vegas Slot Machine. I don't think the "Las Vegas" name is trademarked. And since there seems to be no TM next to the "Las Vegas" icon, I'm guessing I'm free to use it as well? So I am stopping work on the unusually hard VB casino game to work on this INTV casino
Why are some games so much more expensive than others? Take, for example, Jack Bros. for Virtual Boy. There's multiple copies on eBay, yet they're all about $500. So it can't possibly be rare if there's so many of them. When I got my TurboGrafx-16 years ago from the used video game store, I didn't ever imagine how much money the games would be worth and be so hard to buy. I have a decent-sized collection, but it cost money to do so. I have 2 dozen games for the game system. Last night I plugge
I got to thinking there is no Channel F game that is holiday themed. I wondered why. Two of its colors in its palette are red and green, so it would be perfect. Then I got to coding. The result is a title screen to a new holiday game about a snowman. I hope I can get this done in time for the holidays. Here is a screenshot: At first I was going to make the snowman green and call it Snomwan, but then I got to thinking if I can display white, then why not make a white snowman on a blue background
So I spent a few hours making my roulette Virtual Boy game playable. It works now. It isn't very exciting, but it works. You only get one wager for each wheel spin, though. You move the gambling chip like a cursor over the wager you want to make. Then press Start. A number and either "WIN" or "LOSE" will show up depending on the wager you made. Later on in the development, I will add a bank roll tally so you can keep track of how much you win (or lose). I just made roulette because aside from v
I have to go see the doctor tomorrow. And get a stupid blood test. I don't know why I have to do it every year since every single one turns out fine. I'm never going to die of some stupid blood disease since I don't want one. Five million years later I'll be sitting in this chair typing away blog entries. Although I doubt AtariAge will be around 5 million years from now. But I will be. Got Videocart #4 in the mail today. Was really fast. I ordered it Saturday and it went clear across the count
Well, last night, I went back to work on the lettuce game again. I fixed a whole bunch of stuff. Like I discovered that if you have the lettuce and ship overlap and press fire then the lettuce disappeared. Fixed. I made the lettuce speed random. I also fixed the shooting problems. Like when you hold down fire, the ship kept shooting. This has been fixed. I also made the missile disappear when the game ends, you lose a life, or you hit the lettuce. A few days ago, I made the ship's vertical movem
That's what I am. I went to help my dad with getting a new TV. Turns out, the TV manufacturers are getting rid of the place where you plug in the antenna from the cable. How are you supposed to have cable if you can't plug in the cable that comes up from the floor? Also, I saw a stand about high-definition or something DVD movies. Apparently if you're supposed to stream everything, why bother? Best Buy is getting rid of CDs. So what are seniors like my dad supposed to do? Figure out how to str
I spent a few days trying to get the oranges to show up on the Jaguar correctly. It was horrible. But I finally got it done. I know it doesn't look very good. Apparently all I can do is 4-bit images. Because anything larger won't work. I used to be able to do 16-bit ones but I can't any more apparently. But at least with 4-bit images I can have up to 15 colors. I would have gotten an image of a machine that spits out oranges, but I don't know where to find one. Type in "machine that spits out o
So I made this e-zine called "Channel F News." This is going to be a quarterly e-zine dedicated to the Channel F. Issue 1, spring 2018 is located on the Channel F News website which I just made and hope to spruce up a little bit later on. In the first issue I talk about homebrews as well as a 2-page article on Kevin Vs. Tomatoes. Issue 2 I want to have out by June 1. Anyway, read it and let me know what you think of it.
I was extremely bored. So I thought I'd give Doom for the Jaguar another go. I got as far as level 3 when all of a sudden, I kept walking around in circles. I swear I must have killed every single creature there because I had no idea where I was going. After about 20 minutes of this, I fell into the lava and couldn't get out of it. I said "Screw this," and gave up. So why people think that was fun in the '90s is still a mystery to me. I want to love the Jaguar, I really do, but there are almost
Mr. Whiskers is ready for a night on the town since he's been let out for the night. Can you guide him to the end of the game? Have you ever looked for something and came across a project you had started years ago and never got around to finishing it, much less get very far on it? This is the case with me. I just stumbled upon this game for the Odyssey 2 I started back in 2014. My programming skills have improved somewhat since then, learning new stuff as I went along. So I decided to continue w
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