atari2600land

I like designing fonts. A long time ago I had a font program that let me import pictures into glyphs. Well, a few years ago, I remembered that old program and decided to hunt for a similar one. Lo and behold, I had to pay to make my fonts be actual fonts. So I did. It was around $30 or something. And after making a few test fonts, it sat on this computer unused. Until tonight. I made a font. It's called Squaresville. You'll see why if you download it. I have attached it here just in case you want to take a look at it. Give me feedback. I didn't do every single symbol (some were impossible), but I made enough so that a standard user could use them. I mean, who uses the square root symbol in a font? I had to give up on the shooting game because I could not for the life of me put in player 0 at all. So I am going back to work doing something I love: Designing fonts. More fonts will come later. This is an Open Type font. I don't know the difference between an Open Type and a True Type font. I spent about 2 hours on it so far, making the glyphs in Paint and then importing them into the program. Squaresville.otf

I give up. I can't make any sprite appear on the screen.

Thanks. I added some more stuff to my game. Next time I feel up to it I will start working on putting a fly to shoot in it. flies4.bin

I did this. Fire at the screen to get past the title screen. The red dot indicates where you hit the screen. I should probably have this part in so people can get a feel for it. What say you? flies3.bin

So it took a lot of hours of programming. Woke up at 2 when it began snowing. Worked and worked and took a break to watch Jeopardy! at 7. Went back to work and now it's almost 9 and I have it: a game where you can shoot. The red dot is where you shot at on the screen. I took that sample code, worked a lot on it to match my title screen. I tested my code with a real XE Light Gun and it works good. This will have to be at least a 4k game since I only have 246 bytes left as it as a 2k game. What I plan to do is add some flies and check to see if the red dot collided with a randomly moving fly. So now all I have is a ball on the screen. I can add both players and missiles. I don't know how many people still have a CRT for this type of gaming. And also, it is kind of sad that in order for it this type of stuff to work, you need an outdated type of TV.

I have an idea for a light gun game for the 2600. 2 were ever made, and only 1 was released (Sentinel). I want to make #3. I spent a couple hours fiddling around with a title screen, trying to make it just right. It's a game where you shoot flies. I can make this 4k if I need it to be. I don't really care much about file size, I just want to make a working gun game for the 2600. It does nothing at this point, the score increases by 1 every frame and the life counter decreases by 1 every frame. I have all the ingredients I need in order to test it (gun, CRT, 2600.) Although I do wonder how many people actually still use CRT TVs. I have my Atari 2600 hooked up to one, my gaming TV that gets no channels (thanks to the people who took away analog TV. Yeah, I bet they're using all those channels. ) So anyway, the word "flies" was all red, before I decided to try and spruce up the title screen. I can't sleep, so I'm up typing this blog entry. I tried to go to sleep. I laid in my bed for a half hour before deciding it wasn't going to work, so I got up and worked on this some more. I made sure I could see the score down at the bottom on my TV. Basically it will be like my Game Boy game, only using a gun instead of the directional pad (or a joystick.) But if I can't use the gun, I guess I'll use the joystick and a cross hairs to shoot flies with. I will still work on Uncle Hairy's Nosehair if any work needs to be done on it or if someone has an idea, although I think it's about done, so I decided to work on this. I don't know. I'm extremely bored, I want to go to sleep but I can't, and it's almost 2 a.m. here. I guess I'll take a stupid icky tasting melatonin gummy and try again to sleep.

I have an idea for a game that involves the gun. I have the gun, I have a CRT TV, I have an Atari 2600. I want to make a game for the Atari 2600 using the gun. My question is: Have any of the coding gurus out there ever find out a way to detect hits with it? I'm looking for some sample code to start from. I searched this forum and all I got was this topic about how they don't work with LCDs. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

This happens when Frame is an even number (so about 30 times per second): The variable NoseHairSpeedTimer increases. When it gets to 250, the variable NoseHairSpeedTimerSecs increases, and the variable NoseHairSpeedTimer resets to 0. When NoseHairSpeedTimerSecs reaches 7, the variable NoseHairGrowTimerLimit gets decreased if it's greater than five. If NoseHairGrowTimer equals NoseHairGrowTimerLimit, the nosehair gets a pixel longer. It's very complicates, but needs to be since I can only use 8-bit numbers.

The growing speed gets faster about every 28 seconds. The value starts at 15 and stops getting higher when it reaches 5. Also, using the scissors to cut a lot can make the growing speed faster, as I put some code in the cutting part to increase the growing timer.

I've worked on Uncle Hairy's Nosehair a lot since Saturday (sounds disgusting, I know. But unfortunately, nosehairs are a fact of life). I spent most of my waking hours the past few days on this game, fixing stuff and trying to make the game better. I added the music back in. If the nosehair demon gets the box, 10 points will be subtracted from the score. The demon no longer zigzags when he's walking towards you or the box. That last thing took some work to get right. And I still didn't get it the way I wanted because I ran out of room. Right now, the demon's head is what is keeping track of its movement. If I had more room, I'd change it to the middle of the demon, its body. So I guess it really wants to eat the box. Remember that old programming saying "If you can't fix it, make it a feature"? At least the demon is aiming more towards the center of the pair of scissors. And when I got all done with that, I had to work on the unpleasant task of making the scanline count steady. Fortunately, I didn't have to spend very much time on it today (so far). I don't like the screengrab feature result of the latest Stella version. It's all fuzzy colored. I wish I could go back to the 4.x version I had before I rebooted the computer's hard drive. For example, this is what I got when I took a screenshot of the game: The edges of the things are all fuzzy looking. It didn't do that before. And why does the picture need to be really huge? An ideal size would be half smaller.

Sped up the starting nosehair growing speed a little (but it's still slower than what it was). Demon no longer wiggles when he walks. nosehair40.bin

OK. Thanks for answering.

Here's a little video of the game in action:

New stuff: Nosehair begins slower. Demon takes away 10 points if he gets the box. In case you were wondering, I was having trouble with collisions. The box didn't go away after it collided with something, thus causing the scores to double. So I put a pointer to the sprite positioning code part right after I wanted the box to go away. This caused the thing to not collide twice (thus causing the score to double.) nosehair39.bin

Edit: I'm still working on this.

OK, I'll work on slowing down the nosehair when I get done with the score problem I am having.

OK, I'm stuck. I have absolutely zero idea how @SpiceWare did the drawing score routine. But I wanted to add something else to the game, and I figured out how to display the score without the flipped numbers, but there's a gap in the middle of it. So I'm wondering if it's possible to move the score over to the right so there's no gap, like in my mockup here. But like I said before, I have no idea how the score is being displayed. The code for it begins at line 1,317 in my code if you want to take a look. I attached the asm code and a binary in the zip file here. nosehair38a.zip

It's late. I need sleep. Here. nosehair38.bin

I figured out how to bring the music back. What's more is I have 15 bytes left. The screen does not change colors though (unless you turn b&w mode on.) It was so simple. Instead of long complicated code, I just had the Frame variable handle when to change the notes. And since there were 32 treble notes and 16 bass notes, that divided evenly into 256. EDIT: The color switch won't work. I'm looking into it.

I made a second update today and the full name of the game is "Uncle Hairy's Nosehair."

Last night I worked a ton on Uncle Hairy's Nosehair, trying desperately to make it a game. One of the things I did to change it was make the nosehair demon go towards the box when it pops up. And if he gets it, the score would decrease. Eventually I had to drop the decreasing score upon the demon getting the box due to scanline issues. But that's later. So I programmed that in there. And I needed to get rid of 48 bytes. So the obvious choice of what to ax was the music. But I wanted it to do something. Then I thought of the color scheme changing, like in the early 2600 games like Combat. So I had a whole bunch of trouble trying to get that to work. Eventually what I did was introduce four temporary variables to change, then use them to change the values, both in the color and black and white versions. By that time it was almost 2 a.m. and I was so sleepy. I posted what I had and figured if there were any bugs, I'd deal with them when I wake up. 12 hours later I woke up and tried my game. The scanlines were going crazy on a real Atari 2600 console. Another four or five hours later and I think I conquered them all. The real stubborn one was when you pressed the reset switch. It was horrible. It kept being 261 scanlines after the reset switch was pressed. I don't know how I fixed it, but it's apparently the correct 262 now. It's almost 9 p.m. here. It might be a rain/snow mix tomorrow morning. I'm watching the jewelry selling channel because there's no local news on. So now the demon goes towards the box when it pops up. If he gets the box, nothing special happens, but you do have to wait for another chance at a box. Plus, you lost all the points you wasted when the points lower, one per second, of not getting the box. I don't want to sleep for 12 hours every night, but I get really sleepy after staying up for about 10 hours. And my eye began hurting now because I was really angry at the game not working. Now I have 10 bytes left. So if I need to squash any bugs that may pop up, I won't have very much room to do it in.

I think I fixed all the points where the screen jumps. I tested this on real hardware and works okay. Let me know if there are any bugs. nosehair37.bin

I went back to work on this. I added in the subtraction of points if the demon gets the box. When the box appears, the demon stops going after the scissors and tries to get the box instead. Since this took more room, I had to get rid of the music and instead make the colors change (like in an early 2600 game). What do you think? nosehair36.bin