atari2600land

Decided to make a version of Zyx for the Channel F. I figured it's not that complex of a game idea and the Channel F should be able to handle it. For those of you unfamiliar with it, food falls down from the top and the creature at the bottom (the zyx) must eat (or avoid) it. If it sounds like fun, there's a more complex version on Inty Basic Showcase #1. Anyway, I made a title screen that went through a few iterations before I decided on what the sprites would look like. The zyx originally had teeth, but when he was moving, it didn't look very good so I got rid of them. I made the cauliflower sprite (and the blueberry one as well) look a lot better when it's falling down. I reduced its flickering a lot and I'm really happy with the way it came out (Well, on MESS anyway.) Right now the food is falling but there's no collision detection. When I add the score, it will be just below the zyx on the floor. The zyx is animated, so when he moves left or right, he actually walks and his mouth moves a little. This was originally flickering a lot too, but I reduced it a lot after experimenting with ways I could put the sprites on screen. A few years ago, I started work on a similar idea called Yum for the Channel F in that the player opens a giant face's mouth for the candy and closes it for the rhubarb. I think moving a character on the screen around makes for a lot more engaging and more fun game.

Spent a whole lot of time cleaning things up and making them look better. I added the food falling down, but no collision detection yet. I decided this time instead of a well, Zyx could be on an island in the middle of the Green Sea. You've never heard of the Green Sea? It's right next to the Red one. zyx3.bin

This is a Zyx. Its main goal in life is to eat blueberries. (well, it is usually bananas, but the Channel F can't display yellow.) This particualr Zyx is seeing blueberries dropping down from the sky. Unfortunately, so are cauliflowers, which makes for a sick Zyx. So your job will be to eat the blueberries and avoid the cauliflower. I worked on this today, the Zyx is animated, but there's no food falling yet. zyx2.bin

I'm working on something. Perhaps a start of Trimerous 2? This is all I have so far.

Thanks!

How did you get the light blue background?

On Nintendo's Tetris, I think I may have spotted a bug a long time ago. The first piece doesn't fall down right away, giving you ample time to turn it the way you want. I'm thinking some timer having to do with its falling is the cause of this. This is most viewable if you start on level 9. What say you?

So I woke up with a really bad stomach ache an hour or so. This time it appears to be nausea. So I took some Pepto Bismol. I guess I am the only person in the entire world who doesn't mind the taste of the stuff. Let's hope that gets to work so I can stop burping and feeling like I need to vomit. Yesterday, I worked on my NES game some more. I thought of a new location: Space. I tried to draw the planet Saturn, but it looked really awful. So I windered if I could use NESst to import partial graphics. In fact, it requires pictures to be 128 x 128 pixels or less. So I can't, say, import a whole entire screen I drew. But that's okay for now as I wanted to get a picture of Saturn I drew in Paint into the program. So I made the tile set, opened YYCHR, copied the tile set of Saturn into the game's tile set, and went back and drew Saturn in there with the game's tile set. All that work for this: Saturn took 36 tiles to draw. I was hoping for a way lesser amount, but oh well. I guess I have half a tile set empty that I can use for levels 7-10, as well as some empty tiles in my first half of the tile set as well. And also, it was 15 years ago today I joined AtariAge. That was super long ago. Think about it. I was 15 years younger. All this time I spent playing and making video games and then writing about it in my blog. Let's just hope things will be better 15 years from now in 2036. I'll be a geezer then, but hopefully video games will still be around, as well as ways to play the really old Atari and other stuff.

e5frog is currently right now the only person in the entire world who can try stuff on real Channel F's. I don't know what type of setup he's got, but until interest rises enough for making flashcarts, it's going to be that way.

The one tree level happened again, exactly the same on exactly the same level (8). Did you attempt to fix this?

I beat SMB, SMB2, SMB3 and SMW (where I found the 96th exit suddenly after having 95 for years.)

I thought this puzzle was awfully easy:

Yes, this works good.

No, it still does what it did before.

I have a possible solution: Code it so when the player moves, it only moves one square until the joystick isn't pressed, and then allow the player to move again when the joystick is at neutral.

That's what I'm talking about: The cursor skips all the way in the direction you press. I've got the arrow keys mapped up for the joystick.

Working on Channel F programming again. So I figured out how to make the background a light green, although I can't figure out how to make it a light blue. So I fixed level 1 to make it a light green instead of a dark green. Although the drawback of this is I can't use white if the background is a light green. So I changed the strawberry seeds to a stem. It had been almost two months since I last touched this program. I still don't have any new ideas for the underwater level 3 which I last worked on, adding the green fish. I wanted the grass in Golf this way, but I didn't figure out how to then. And the sand traps would have to be red.

I'm playing on MESS 0.211.

Some comments. The cursor moves way too fast. Could you slow it down? When you reset the game, the picture is red and green instead of black and white. Nice sound and graphics.

"playsound" refers to the place in the BIOS that plays sounds. You can just call to it like that. There are different tunes (noises) you can call, mov a,#tune_buzz ; buzz mov a,#tune_select ; the select game sound mov a,#tune_select2 ; the select game sound backwards mov a,#tune_beep_error ; a low-pitched beep

And here is some example collision code: mov r0,#vdc_collision mov a,#vdc_coll_spr0 movx @r0,a mov r0,#03dh mov a,@r0 anl a,#002h ; check for collision of sprite 1 jnz collision_happened

You can't have characters overlapping. Playing sounds is easy. Here's how to play a built-in sound: mov a,#tune_keyclick call playsound

Here is a picture of all the characters. Collision detection is easy unless you want to check multiple things. You just need to figure out what value is in the collision register and then act accordingly. The Odyssey 2 has a few built-in sounds (like the SELECT GAME sound).

I tried MESSUI64 v.0.211 (Jun 26, 2019) and Pac-Man does play the song when you start.