Odd, I See...
I wonder why games work OK on O2EM, but don't work at all on real hardware. I was trying to program Reindeer tonight. No matter what O2EM said, the stupid thing would not go past the title screen on an O2. If I pressed fire to start the game, I got garbage. Then I thought I was having trouble last night too because it was going over 1k. I was trying to add a score and it wasn't working right. Ooh was I mad. But finally I figured I could try moving some code into the second bank to free up the first bank. A very annoying thing that Odyssey 2 programmers like me face is that if you try to jump to a bit of code that isn't in its block of 256 byte code, you get an error message when you try to compile it. I guess even strange and non-working stuff happens if half a bit of code is in one 1k bank and the rest spills over to the second. But amazingly, the dumb thing decided to cooperate with me and I got it working. This will be my last time working on it for now since I'll be away from my computer for a few days starting tomorrow. And while I'm at the beach, I don't want to get all antsy wishing I was home so I could be programming it yell at the computer trying frantically to make it work, lol. So I'm at a good stopping point. I do have a small problem about the screen going white for a split second once you score a point by leading a reindeer back to the other side, but I don't think it's horribly noticeable. So my goal is to have a complete game on or near December 25, since it is a Christmas themed game. When I continue working on this, the next step I guess is to add an enemy. I'm thinking elves. Too bad characters can't overlap, so I'll have to make only one elf be on the ice at a time since the ice floes are characters. The elf will be the fourth and final sprite to add into the game. Now I'm wondering if I can cram this stuff into 2k. I've used 1,244 bytes so far. It's been an interesting project so far. I hope my Frogger cart will be in the mail tomorrow. It is traveling from Brazil. And I hope it will work on my Odyssey 2. I think I have all the (non-board-game) Magnavox carts, and I know I have both Imagic ones, so what's left to collect is the Parker Bros. carts. I'd really like to give Frogger a spin on real hardware before I leave for the beach tomorrow.
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