atari2600land

I'll let you guys look at what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to make the "lost" CCW game "Count's Castle." Things are going good so far, but if I have any questions, I'll need to ask before I begin pulling my hair out. Here is a zip file containing .asm and .bin files. I need new bat and Count sprites, though. count6.zip

So I finally got the right amount of bats on the screen: There are five bats on the screen, and the number of bats is five. But I hit a roadblock: A weird bug. When I reset the game 39 times, the bats quit flapping. On the 40th reset, the bats disappeared. I have NO idea what caused that to happen, but I think I fixed it. I also made a floor for the (eventual) Count to stand on. I also had trouble with the scanline count. But through trial and error I made it a steady 262 scanlines. Tried it on a real Kid's Controller and real hardware. I think my Kid's Controller has a little issue with the middle column. It seems like I need to press extra hard a couple of times to get it to register a press, whereas on Stella, it does it right away. So here's a list of things I want to do with the game now that I have the correct number of bats: Replace bat and Count sprites Spruce up the screens Add some sound effects Make button presses logic (so if the kid presses a button, it does something besides display a number) Get rid of bat number total Redesign numbers And probably some more stuff I'm forgetting. I am wondering what type of material is used to make the overlays. It's stronger than regular paper, yet not cardboard-y. I am also wondering when I turn on the Atari 2600 with a Harmony Cart in and a Kid's Controller in the left side why the menu goes crazy. It automatically scrolls through the choices. I have 2,533 left in a 4k game, but I think I may have to make this 8k to match the other Sesame Street games. Astute people will notice I changed my avatar. That is the logo of Children's Computer Workshop. But I am making the first C "Chris's". I spent a lot of time redesigning the first C so its opening is more open, yet still curved the way it was. I think it was more closed than it should have been. I am still proud of me being able to for the most part match it on my computer. The internet button on my router is flashing intermittently. But I'm not worried. It's been about 1.75 days since power was restored. It's nice to go into the bathroom and have the lights come on when I flip the switch. And it's also nice to be able to play TV video games again.

I need a new bat sprite. After hours and hours of work, I FINALLY got it to work. Nine bats, and the Count will eventually be standing there as well (It's that little multicolored blob in the lower left of the picture.) It's multicolored just to see if I could make it multicolored. And because it needs to be multicolored. And I can't draw the Count, so someone will have to design that for me. Yes, I know that's not 7 bats. And I will redesign the 7 so it looks more 7-ish. And the bats are there flapping their wings in a two-frame animation (that will hopefully be eventually replaced). And now comes the hard part: Making sure the number of bats on the screen matches the number it chose to be. This will probably be the hardest part of programming the game. I'll need more code in the bat drawing part which already has a whole bunch of code in it. And that's an awfully dark castle you've got there, Count. Kind of looks like my room when the power was out at night. Except for the bats. So I'll probably work on that too after I get the numbers correct. But first, I need to enjoy my power I got back on yesterday (27 hours ago.)

I've been working on this for 6 hours?! Anyway, I did this. Nine bats with two frames of animation. I need a better bat sprite though. That thing on the bottom is Player0, while the bats are player 1.

Hi all. I am working on a game in assembly where I need to have (up to) 9 characters on the screen at the same time. And since Space Invaders did this (not to mention all the homebrew works, like bBlocks), I am fairly certain I can achieve this. But how? I know that I can get two copies of the same sprite with NUSIZx. But I'm wondering if I can just set GRPx to 0, reset the counter used to draw them, and then start drawing them again and again for the desired 9 times I'd need to do this? By the way, they can all be the same sprite. They don't have to be different sprites. It's just going to be bats flapping their wings up and down, so it's nothing too fancy. So I would need to use player 0 for the bats, and I'd also like to have player 1 free if possible.

Why are there no Game Genie codes for Donkey Kong Land 2 & 3?!

I was rudely interrupted by a power outage for six whole days. I just now got the internet back for some reason. Yes, friends, I had no electricity between Feb. 13-18. Luckily, we didn't freeze to death thanks to the gas fireplace that doesn't use electricity. They said 90% of our area would be restored by tomorrow evening, so I was thinking we would fall into the unfortunate 10%. But shortly after 4 p.m., the power miraculously returned! But there was a problem: I had no internet. But that issue resolved itself somehow just now and it's a little after 9 p.m. when I'm writing this now. Before the power outage, I made some changes to the title screen involving the letter t. I think that looks a lot better and more straightened. I also attempted to get the keypad working. I thought I did, so I thought to myself "I'll just test it later." Then we had a power outage that lasted 6 days. But I tested it a few hours ago with my Harmony cart and it works okay. I also got a random number generator working. The number on the right is the number of objects that will appear on the screen for the kid to count (so obviously it's not going to show up when it's all finished.) The number on the left is the key the kid presses. For instance, I pressed the 3 key here. This took some time because I couldn't get a random number to appear since I didn't seed the RNG. Then, once I seeded it, a whole bunch of difficulty with the display happened. But that is gone (for now). The next thing to do is to try and figure out how to display the bats the kid needs to count. The number is between 2-9. (Because you just can't count 1 thing.) And a background would look good too. Perhaps I'll do that first. And I'll post the latest binary here just in case you care (it needs the children's controller - select "Keypad" for left controller in Stella.) count3a.zip

When I was making my Bert game, I thought of it as an exercise, a warm-up on how to code for the Kid's Controller. So, I've decided to try to make the 'lost' sixth CCW game, Count's Castle. This took two hours: While good, it wasn't centered. Another 90 minutes of figuring stuff out, I finally had it centered. I also made it a little brighter. Well, as centered as it could be. You'll notice extra black on the right side. I tried making the C's four pixels wide instead of three, but that oddly didn't work. So we'll have to go with this. If you look at the title screen for Big Bird's Egg Catch, it has the same problem. It's raining freezing rain today. No, it couldn't be snow. Heavens no. I'm surprised I got as far as I did with this without the power going out. I started on it at around 9:30 a.m. and it's now 12:45 p.m. So I need to eat lunch. So what is the gameplay of Count's Castle, you may ask? We never knew what the official game was about since it was never finished. So I took some time to think. It stars Count Von Count of "Sesame Street" fame. His favorite activity is counting things. So why not make it a game about counting things? A random number of things (let's say bats) come on the screen and the player has to count the number of bats there are on the screen and press the corresponding number on the Kid's Controller. I wondered why have numbers if all the official uses were for moving the character (muppet) left or right or up or down. I mean, why bother putting numbers on it? Anyway, although this may seem like a lame idea for a game, let's keep in mind that its target audience is young children, preferably those learning how to count. And now, the machine counted. I have 3,254 bytes for a 4k game. Ah ha ha ha! *thunder sound*

I just found a copy of Burncycle and a Not for resale Hotel Mario from the days when I had a CD-I. I wish I had one now. It broke.

Noticed a few things. 1.) The music seemed to stop for a frame when the colors were changing. 2.) If the scissors got to the right edge, they glitched a bit. I think I fixed both of these things. Let me know if anything else weird goes on. nosehair48.bin

If it has anything to do with art, I like to do it, but the results are, well, bad. I was looking at some of the Atari 2600 manuals. The white ones with pictures at the center of the screen that look hand-drawn and sketchy, yet amazingly life-like. I wondered what I could do with Uncle Hairy's Nosehair. In the center is Uncle Hairy, (looking unintentionally a lot like Butthead), pointing to his nosehair. The hand with the scissors is the nephew (you) as he is about to cut the nosehair. To the right, the red fellow is the nosehair demon. And, finally, he's trying to get a box above him. Even though I am not going to use this as real art for the game, I will give this to whomever wants to do the art and say "Make it look like this, but not sucky." And that's if a.) I'm ever going to finish it and b.) someone wants to publish it (I'm counting on neither but hey, it could happen.)

I found some more bugs. I'm working on it. EDIT: Here, try this. nosehair_2021_02_10_version2.zip

New version. I had an idea: If I set the CutMark variable to change the same time as the PlayerY variable, I could then not have any issues with the cutting. This meant having a set of valid values that CutMark could be, regardless of where PlayerY was on the screen. It took a lot of fine-tuning, but I think I got it: sec lda #255 sbc PlayerY lsr adc #41 sta NoseHairCutMark I don't know why I had to add 41, though. Let me know if any bugs pop up or if I didn't solve the problem. A few sound-related bugs popped up, but I think I got them all. nosehair46.zip

Thanks for the help, I really appreciate it. Seems like there's more than one way to do it.

Basically, what I need to do is get the number on the left column to get to the number on the right column (and the number on the right column to be the number on the left). 174 80 173 81 172 82 171 83 170 84 169 85 168 86 167 87 166 88 165 89 164 90 163 91 162 92 161 93 160 94 159 95 158 96 157 97 156 98 155 99 154 100 153 101 152 102 151 103 150 104 149 105 148 106 147 107 146 108 145 109 144 110 143 111 142 112 141 113 140 114 139 115 138 116 137 117 136 118 135 119 134 120 133 121 132 122 131 123 130 124 129 125 128 126 127 127 All I can tell from this is that if you add all the rows, they all equal 254.

In Odyssey 2 and Channel F assembly, there is a function which inverts the number, so like if it was, say, 167 and you call the function, the number would change to 88. I was just wondering if there is a way to do this in Atari 2600 assembly and if so, how?

...It's the only channel worth watching. All the other ones have boring coverage of you know who being you know whatted. Since I had been programming the Channel F the past few days, I decided to plug mine in and see if it still works. It does. I'm thinking of perhaps selling all my Channel F videocarts except my Multicart and my copy of Trimerous. I have a few rare cartridges (#23, #25, #20, to name a few) but I don't really need money right now. I also have been playing a lot of Dreamcast lately. I have a bin full of Dreamcast games. I bought one more. I'll have to think of something else when it comes. As a result of having no ideas for the Cranberry game, I'm in my room typing this listening to the jazz music station on TV being in a complete and total rut. I do have an idea for a commercial of the game, but it involves buying cranberries and using one. Just one. Why can't they sell individual cranberries to people who perhaps just want one?

Have ET eat Reese's Pieces while avoiding the scientist guy.

As my Quest of the Cranberry game grows, it became apparent that the password code part was not going to go well where it was. So began the quest to move it to a position and not break anything. This only took 15 minutes. So if you play version 51, it might look no different than version 50, but it isn't so code-wise. I moved the password code part which was at the beginning to the end of the game's code. Thus, I hope to be able to add more code to it for more levels and not have it break as easily. I played my Sega Dreamcast today for about an hour. I played billiards. Some people are going to videotape our sewers and we're not supposed to flush our toilets when they do it. I hear a truck backing up beep, so it is probably soon. I went to bed at 4 p.m. (missed the entire Super Bowl.) I was depressed when I heard the Bucs won. I was rooting for the Chiefs because I got sick of hearing about how goat-y Tom Brady is. But, on the plus side, we may get more snow later this week. Or at least that's what they're predicting. We usually get no snow or one snow event each winter here, so two would be interesting (we had one earlier this winter. where we got about 2 inches.) I want to stay awake so I don't get >12 hours of sleep each night, but staying awake is a real struggle. But I don't know why I should care how much sleep I get, but I like to have my mind be active, and having it be idle for half my life is making me depressed. But so is struggling to stay awake. I can't win...