So I revisited the Oranges game I made for the Odyssey 2 and made a few changes to it. This inspired me to want to work on a new Odyssey 2 game. There's just one problem: No ideas. I guess that's the problem when you've done so many Odyssey 2 games you could vomit. I have 8 published games, from various publishers. I guess Oranges is a glorified version of my first game Fatso, an attempt to make a version of Fast Food back when I was still trying to get a hang of Odyssey 2 programming. But now
The number 47 has eluded me for the longest time, but now it suddenly comes back in a big way.
I saw an ad for a local department store selling turkey for 47 cents a pound.
Or the basketball game a few nights ago when that guy scored 47 points in a game.
And I opened up the paper and read today's "Pearls Before Swine" comic about the scout leader who took 50 kids for a hike and returned with 47.
About a week ago, there were 47 days left of the year. (November 15).
I used my cell phone
Ever since my grandparents died, me and mom haven't done anything special for the holiday. My sister and her boyfriend go to his folks' place then, and we're stuck here doing absoluetly nothing. I told my sister when she was out shopping a few days ago to get me "a turkey TV dinner." She comes back with the most fattening one: A Hungry Man dinner. Figures. I look on the back of the box: It has 1,300 mg of sodium. So my question is: Why? I'm not going to eat the "dessert" in the thing, nor the
Unlike a certain president, I actually built a wall. I was up part of the night doing it, too. Unfortunately, it's just in My History Teacher Ate Lemons. And what's after the wall? Another wall! What's after that wall? I don't know yet, so an open field will greet you if you happen to figure out how to get past it. I made the tree-drawing code simpler. Instead of asking if it's on a certain screen number and then getting positions, I moved them all into a data array and did it that way. The pr
I've been busy all day working on my Game Gear game about oranges. I spent most of yesterday and all of today trying to get two different noises to play in the noise channel. It kept wanting to play only one of the sounds I wanted instead of both of them. I kept going and going and just solved the stupid problem. I don't know how, either. It basically was the same thing I've been trying only a little different. I don't see how a different change can alter a game so much. Oh well. At least it has
It was originally going to be a monster, and it still says "monster" in the code, but when I got to designing it, I only had room for one eye, so it became a cyclops. I worked last night trying to improve Oranges for the Game Gear to make it look better, but I'm just going to stick with what I had. And then I went to sleep, had a dream about poop coming out of the sink and our plumbing not working. Woke up and worked on the lemon game which is where cyclopses reside. Level 1, which is where Fr
So I've been working on both the Secret Government Waffle Project and My History Teacher Ate Lemons today. Fred has found his overalls and will put them on. His gun is the same color as his skin and he can shoot it. But even a clothed Fred will have a heck of a time trying to get back to his school to teach history to his students. And yes, it'll involve the eating of lemons. So anyway, I've been super busy today programming since I couldn't go to sleep until about 1:30am and got up briefly a fe
So the goal of this project is to make this game in 2k. I programmed a lot of the in-game last night. Today was spent trying to make the scanline count steady at 262. I wanted the program to continue playing the music and color change with the reset switch pressed down. I think I did that. So anyway, here is a screenshot of the game: You press fire to hold my history teacher's mouth open to eat the lemons. When the fire button isn't held, my history teacher's mouth is closed. Eventually there w
I thought I'd try my hand at Atari 2600 assembly again. It took a while to relearn stuff I'd forgotten, but two hours' worth of work got this binary file attached here. The batch file says there are 23 references to unknown symbols and 31 events requiring another pass, but it works. Since I have about 1500 bytes left, I figure I might as well add a song, so I'll do that tomorrow. Think of this as a demo, not a game. Mom is still insistent on taking all her pills to die, so I've decided to hide
Last night I went to work on this thing again. I had an idea for a song that had a pattern of 7 short notes followed by a longer note. And for the life of me I couldn't get it to work! I tried everything and spent about an hour looking at previous codes I had done and then trying them in this thing but nothing worked until I decided to try the sequence backwards. That worked. So now that part of the code looks like this:
lda MusicPtr cmp #32 bcs ResetNoteTimer
So I spent the better part of 2 hours working on this little project of mine for no apparent reason. I tried to make one lemon using the playfield. All attempts failed. Until I decided to just bite the bullet and make two reflecting lemons. This pleases me now. After all, it's "my history teacher ate lemons," not "a lemon." I don't know why I named it that. I name stuff weird stuff I think up in my head. I don't know what my history teacher ate. Perhaps he did eat lemons. Or maybe he was a she.
So I played some Berzerk on the 2600 last night. I couldn't sleep, so I figured I might as well continue working on the progress I had made earlier yesterday when I started the whole thing. The only reason I played Berzerk is to get the sprites so I could program them into my game. They were 8x10 or so, so I had to cut out a few lines to make it 8x8. I'm guessing here will be the breakdown of the sprites: sprite 0 - man sprite 1 - man's bullet sprites 2-5 robots sprite 6 robot bullet sprite 7
Yesterday and today I worked on my Game Gear game "Oranges." Basically a stripped-down port of the Secret Government Waffle Project. Yesterday I got it working and today was spent trying to get a ding sound for each point made. I discovered that I could turn the channels off and on at will, so I filled channel 0 with one note and turn it on when I want a ding sound and turn it off when the ding sound is over. This means though that the in-game music only has 2 channels, 1 and 2. I can't use ch
I have decided on what my next project after the Secret Government Waffle Project will be. It is going to be a dreaded port of something. I looked through all the stuff and suggestions and ideas on what people wanted. There were so few that I thought I could actually do. So I eventually decided on something I think I could at least attempt to pull off. But I need a name for it, though. A new name. Something similar sounding to ... Berzerk. I think I may just do well enough to actually handle it.
So I guess Frank the Fruit Fly isn't going to work very well since I can't draw. I can't draw cats with necks. So I guess I'm projectless after the Secret Government Waffle Project is finished. So I guess what I'm getting at is I need some ideas for new games you would like to see on the INTV. Do you have a game idea? Or port you would like to see (heaven knows how many more ports the INTV needs) Also as a side project I have this secret 2600 game project I'm working on. I'm not ready to revea
I tried and failed to make a bankswitched Game Boy game. I give up. There goes all hope for my epic Game Boy game. But all is not lost for Frank the Fruit Fly, though. Once I have the Secret Government Waffle Project done, I will start work on a new Intellivision game. Frank the Fruit Fly is moving to the Intellivision. Which means I have to start all over again with coding, but at least I have a few ideas for screens and traps and stuff. I think Frank the Fruit Fly is better suited towards ha
Mom today was the worst she's ever been since this whole thing started. Earlier she was worried about all the stuff she thinks she needs to be worried about. That's her whole problem: She's worried about all this stuff. Perhaps it's anxiety that's making her sick. Anyway, I took some time out to determine why the collision detection wasn't working in my Cat vs. Rat game. I think I solved that problem, but one still remains. Nobody wants to help me with my grand scheme for this game, and tell m
So I have been fighting with the code for the game for a few days now and I think I have it nailed down. It did sort of have a little freakout on maze #7 on real hardware, but I'm ignoring it because it hasn't done anything evil since. Apparently my code was so tightly packed that even putting in a couple lines of code caused all the pages to move around which caused a whole bunch of stupid things to happen. At a couple points I gave up on the game because it was acting so stupid. I added some
So I got four Game Boy games in the mail today. One of them I had to clean a lot before I got it working. The rest are fine. This inspired me to work on Frank the Fruit Fly some more. So since I noticed that most Game Boy game songs have both treble and bass clef notes, I went to work adding some notes to the songs I already had in the game. The title screen song was easy to add notes to, but the level 1 BGM proved trickier. As a result, I had to slow down the music a little bit so I could fit
I feel like Heloise. I like old-timey stuff. Like vintage video games. And crossword puzzles. I just rediscovered on my newsstand TV Guide Crosswords. It had long been absent. I don't know if they still make TV Guide. And if it does, if they still put crosswords in it. Anyway, I like to do the older ones, the "classics" as they refer to them. The 1980s brought some really interesting crossword grid designs. So what do I do now? Since I would like to do them over and over again, I copy the ones
So I got Thunder Castle in the mail today. Tested it and it works fine. This proceeded to more work on the Secret Government Waffle Project for the Intellivision. It's going good. Right now it's at about 35k, and I think it will grow to even more than that. Tried it out on my LTO Flash! and it works great. I've been working on and off on it for the past few days, just putting new and more and more features into it. I don't know when the game will be finished, though. I never dreamed I could ma
Well, the first day of Fall is tomorrow. How fast time files. Every day on the first day of the season, I make a new comic book. This summer was no different. I had made up some pages of a comic book, and then stopped for a little bit because I was ahead. So I fell behind. Earlier today, I made a few pages of it, scanned it, and put them all together to make a new issue of "Bill and George Quarterly." For this issue I thought I'd try something different. Like the Monty Python's Flying Circus e
So I finally got sound working on the French Fries game. I also fixed a couple of bugs I had in the last one. One of the reasons I decided to make this game was because of my username: Atari2600land. There was a time when I was an avid collector for the 2600, but after almost 350 games, I have most of them and unless I want to pay crazy prices for rare games, I figure I might as well just stop. All the games are in five separate boxes in the garage. The first box is labeled "Atari 2600 A-C." Y
I was watching TV when I noticed the pace of home runs in MLB has increased 47%. Also, I watched a tiny bit of the second episode of the 47th season of Sesame Street. I think Elmo killed the show a long time ago. And at a trip to the grocery store, I saw a bag of popcorn that proudly proclaimed it had 47 calories per cup. The number 47 has eluded me for a long time, but now it has come back these last few days. I was working on my Oranges game for the Game Gear. I noticed when I started work yes
Last night there was this really big spider on the counter. I tried to kill it with a shoe but I failed and it went into a crack in the cupboard. This inspired me to make a spider in Frank the Fruit Fly. So I added the spider in last night and went to sleep. I got up at 12:30pm, was awake for a few hours, then felt really sleepy so I went back to sleep. Woke up again at 6 after another nightmare forced me up. I keep having them for some reason, most of them involving being back in school which w
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