atari2600land

Version 52. I got help from SpiceWare about moving the score down to the bottom and changing its look. Tell me what you think. Thanks, Mr. Spice! nosehair52.bin

So I'm inching ever closer to #350.* Today I got Chase the Chuckwagon in the mail. And what a surprise, it actually works! But in order to start the game, you have to press the game select switch like it was the reset switch. So there's this cute little dog in a maze with one obstacle bouncing around the screen, going through the walls. Sometimes it's a bone (which seems odd), sometimes it's this undiscernible orange thing. And then there's a gray man walking around. Touching the thing bouncing around makes you not be able to move for a few seconds (which sucks because sometimes it hardly ever moves in a vertical direction), and touching the gray man causes you to lose a life. And the walls are tricky to move through because you can get partially stuck in them. The goal of the game is to escape the maze where the Chuckwagon is. If you do that, there's this bonus round thing where a food dish is falling and you need to stop it by pressing the fire button so the dog on the screen can reach it and eat from it. The dog has to face in the right direction too. If you stop it wrong or don't stop it at all, the poor dog gets no bonus. And then repeat over and over again with a few maze changes along the way. It's a cute idea, but fails in execution. The walls are sticky, the thing that bounces needs to bounce around better, and the man thing is dumb because you hardly ever get near it. I kept wondering why my score was reduced to 60 when I got into a maze. Turns out they put the timer where the score is in the maze screen. Seems like they could have put in two extra digits because the score is only 4. But it works, so that's good. * - I'm only counting AtariAge and games released back in the day.

Not much happening. I went on eBay and there were several pages filled with overpriced ones. Someone was selling one on Soap Operas for only $1.00! Too bad I already had it. So my collection is stalled. I worked on my cartridge, after about a month of not working on it. I now have 204 questions for it. I need 1,001, so I'm about 20% of the way there. I'm not sure if I can think of 1,001 questions. It's hard. My book is 8 pages long so far. And seeing how 8 x 5 = 40, my book should be about 40 pages. I worked some more on Uncle Hairy's Nosehair again today, making tweaks and minor changes to it.

Why is #14 referred to as blue? It looks like a light purple.

Instructions. readthenosehairthing.txt

Version 51, very minor fixes. The tiny bit of hair showing up before you start the game has been removed. It gives the nose a much cleaner look I think. Also, the game does not change color right after you press the reset switch, instead it waits for a few seconds before it changes colors. nosehair51.bin

This file is in the INTY Basic package:

So I worked a little bit on Uncle Hairy's Nosehair. Three things I did. I made the highest speed the nosehair can grow faster. I changed the shape of the nostril. Just to see if I could. And I could. And it looks good to me. I found the title screen music to be quite hideous sounding. So I made a new tune. For it to work good, each song I do for this game must have 32 treble notes and 16 bass notes. I composed a little song in the key of E minor because the TIA sounds are really crappy, and it's hard to make a good-sounding 2600 tune, especially limiting yourself to two channel types, 32 treble notes and 16 bass notes. I am so sleepy I could go to sleep but I don't want to go to sleep because going to sleep means laying on my bed with my eyes closed for at least half an hour trying to go to sleep. Even if I did take a melatonin gummy. They're supposed to taste like blackberries but they taste hideous. Not only that, I sleep for 12 hours every day. So I'm sleeping half my life away. If I needed less sleep, I would sleep less and wake up refreshed after 8 hours. But I don't. I sleep for 12 hours and wake up feeling like I could go back to sleep for another 12. Oh well.

New 50th version. changed the nostril's appearance... ...and the title screen music. nosehair50.bin

Assembly has more freedom in the way it can handle sprites and missiles and stuff, but the tradeoff is the lack of easiness of programming with it.

I made the nosehair's fastest speed faster so it should be more difficult. I tried watching the Twitch thing for the first time but I tuned in too late because they were talking about Chaser. What did they say about my game? My high score in version 49 is 482. nosehair49.bin

I got help with how to correctly save your progress through the game. It now saves three things: level you are on number of lemons you've got so far your health %age. Now I can continue on level making. This after I got rid of a bunch of excess code. This freed up an amazing 4 kb (!) of space to use for other stuff. The game is 32.07kB. It was 36.07kB. I put the lemon collecting as a side-quest. You don't HAVE to get all the lemons to beat the game, but I just thought it would be sorta fun to hide lemons in the game because of the title of the game. I will also add limes to also help you get back some health. Limes are like lemons, but they are green. But you probably already knew that. Since I freed up some code, I noticed that the shooting is faster. So is the walking, but it didn't get as faster as the shooting did. I want to have at least 9 levels in the game. So far I have three: forest, mountain, and desert. Level 4 will be the ocean. The gameplay is similar to Frank the Fruit Fly.

I was looking through my Intellivision manuals and spotted a couple of interesting things. The cover of the Pac-Man manual by Atarisoft has a picture of the Pac-Man screen in the upper right hand corner...of the 2600 version. The English cover of Tron Maze-A-Tron has copyright notices in French (So does the French side.) I found these interesting and wanted to share. Let me know if you spot something interesting in an Intellvision game.

I'm good for now.

How odd, it seems to be working correctly now. I wonder if that save I had before just got corrupted sitting on my computer for some reason. Thanks, all.

Health is being displayed as "I5" when it should be "95".

edit: It's not nanochess's code, it's something I'm doing wrong. It goes back to the title screen after doing the level intro and I don't know why.

Okay. I got this far with the Count's Castle game before I figured not many people would be interested in it, so I'm dropping it. And my Count looks like Mr. Turniphead. Besides, I have other things to work on, like that lemon game I started a few years ago and never finished. Figuring out how to use INTV flash memory is hard. I don't know how but I managed to do it. I don't get how it saved the number of lemons collected, even when I didn't tell it to, though. I wanted it to do that, so that's good. Right now I'm starting on level 3 of the lemon game. I want to make an Adventure-like game for the Intellivision. But with my sense of humor and non-sequiturs (My History Teacher Ate Lemons is, I think, the best one I've ever thought up so far.) It is a title of an old noise track. I make CDs of weird noises and give the tracks really odd titles. Speaking of that, I should get back to work on a half-filled one I stopped working on. Oh, the projects I have. I spent about 8 hours today on my lemon game trying to get the save function working. Which is all day. I woke up at 11 a.m. and really wanted to go back to sleep even though I got 12 hours of sleep. I hate going to sleep, but when I'm asleep I hate waking up. It's a vicious, never-ending cycle.

All I want to do is store three variables into the jlp flash memory. One is called levelnumber, one is called lemonnumber, and one is called health. Why does it have to be so HARD?! Can someone please tell me how to do this? The flash sample program is not understandable.

Problem NOT solved. This is stupid. I hate living. When I get to a new level it gets rid of #row(1) and #row(2).

Problem solved. You must ERASE what you have before you can rewrite to it.

A little better: when I enter level 3 it displays what I saved in level 2.

My program won't save any more. I'm using the following to read and write: write_row: PROCEDURE FOR c = 0 TO 15 if c=0 then #row(0)=levelnumber if c=1 then #row(1)=lemonnumber if c=2 then #row(2)=health NEXT c FLASH WRITE FLASH.FIRST,VARPTR #row(0) return END read_row: PROCEDURE FLASH READ FLASH.FIRST,VARPTR #row(0) for c= 0 to 15 next c return END I'm doing this before every level: gosub write_row gosub read_row I put the --jlp command in when compiling and playing in jzintv but it still won't remember my progress. What am I doing wrong?

Is there a reason why it won't work with it?

When I plug in my Kid's Controller into the left port and turn the Harmony on, the menu goes crazy, it starts scrolling through the options automatically. I was just wondering if there was a way to make the Harmony work with it.