atari2600land

Well, it does take a long time for me to make a 40-minute-long song. I started work on Steve in October. Pretty soon, I'll put out a website where you can check out my musical stuff.

So I have been working on another project. I had a font called "Vivaldi" I had been using for it. But when I reset my computer a few weeks ago because it was acting horribly, I had lost it. I hadn't worked on it since before that happened, so I was unaware that it would look crappy. It replaced Vivaldi with Comic Sans MS. So I was on the hunt for a new font that looked like Vivaldi because apparently I needed to pay to use it for some reason. I found a new font on dafont.com called "Chandiluna". I chose it because it was a calligraphy-type font like Vivaldi is, but also because it was free. And since I don't really plan on distributing this work, I can use it for just my own stuff I don't plan on releasing for profit. I have those types of projects that I work on because I get bored waiting to die. In case you're wondering, I am writing a couple of songs for one of my CDs. A while back I was browsing my website server where I put stuff, and I came across an unfinished attempt at setting the epic 1800's poem "Goblin Market" to music. So I finished that. it was 42 minutes long. Since CDs can hold a maximum of 79 minutes' worth of audio, I thought it would be a waste, so I wrote my own epic poem and set it to music. It was 37 minutes. I guess I could have made it even longer, but I had to cut it short due to the fact that a CD can only hold 79 minutes' worth of audio. So right now I am making a second epic poem and setting it to music I'm composing. I've been using Anvil Studio to make midis of the music. It is ten minutes long so far. I am aiming for around 40 minutes. And after that I will make a third epic poem and make it a little shorter. My second poem is called "The Adventures of Steve, a Hair On Top of Bob's Head." So far, kid Bob was born, and Steve fell into Bob's soup when he was 5 years old, and Bob accidentally ate him and pooped him out. Steve is now in the sewer. And not only that, I'm also taking time out of my mornings to work on and improve the Intellivision game I started work on. And then there's my webcomic nobody reads, my Quiz Wiz project, and some more stuff. I figure I have about 40 more years left to live. That seems like a lot...

I have a Microvision emulator on my Microvision site. I can't wait to play Barrage 2021.

How is the programming guide/emulator part going? I really want to make my own Microvision game.

Here is a better picture. I can't work on this any more today since my mouse broke.

I put the lettuce on top.

The pea in this game is being used as the missile. It should say Lettuce is shooting peas now. I will have other vegetables in the game, like an eggplant. And corn. I must add corn.

Play with the food. Pea shooting added - pea shoots randomly. Death also added - so it's technically a game now. I also added/changed a bunch of little things. It says I only have 20 or so 8-bit variables left. I'm not using very many of them. Is it compiling wrong or is it just me? herts7.zip

I just finished question #150. The number of questions I need is 1,001. How much have I done? a.) 5% b.) 7% c.) 12% d.) 15% The correct answer is d. Well, if you round up a little. It's actually 14.9%. It's really, really hard thinking up of questions for this thing. Luckily I'm not confined to a certain subject, like Nature & Animals, or Mystery Places (which is really just geography.) I have to go to the second page of answers I found out. The first page had answers for 1-150. In other news, I plugged in my PlayStation. It works good. I played "Blockids" for about 20 minutes. It's a lot like Arkanoid. Except it's in "3-D". Well, it still looks like Arkanoid, but instead of just one layer of blocks, you have several, so the average level looks a lot like a Mahjong Solitaire layout. I have not abandoned the hamburger game for the Intellivision, it's still on my list of projects I have going. I made a label when I first started this. I started the Quiz Wiz project on December 23. So it's been almost a month. I will have several copies of this game due to the fact that almost all the Quiz Wiz lots on eBay have the cartridge I'm using the answers for. Unfortunately, they also have the console, so I'll end up with about a few dozen of them if I want a complete cartridge collection. Right now I have 13 cartridges and 3 duplicates which I'm going to use for my project. I also have 2 unopened ones. They switched colors from black to gray beginning with cartridge #55.

I know. The Secret Government Waffle Project was the largest project that ever got released. Did some more work on the game this morning. I added in the enemy lettuce heads. Eventually they will shoot peas at you, but for now they don't.

OK. That makes sense.

But it's my computer telling me it was 5kb. Is my computer meaning kilowords?

You want Intellivision games? Here.

Try my game out. The score will increase when you shoot. I will change this to once you hit an enemy the score will increase when I put some enemies in. I took some time to compose and add in music and a shooting sound effect. The enemies will be heads of lettuce shooting peas at you. In the original game it was milkshakes, but I don't think I can draw a milkshake with just one color. herts5.zip

The code a couple posts ago has been simplified: if cont.up THEN burgery=burgery-1 if cont.down THEN burgery=burgery+1 if cont.right THEN burgerx=burgerx+1 if cont.left THEN burgerx=burgerx-1 I was thinking for some reason the left CTRL and SHIFT buttons in jzintv controlled player 1 when in fact they were controlling player 2. The right CTRL and SHIFT buttons and arrow buttons are controlling player 1.

This is what the game looks like now:

Because in the game, something different happens when you reach 20 points in a level.

I had an idea last night before I went to bed, which was show the lives counter only when the player died. This freed up a sprite which I could use for a enemy missile. I would like to at the least display the score because it will be an indicator of how far along in the level you are. I finally got the disc and button working in tandem, but in order to do it, I had to make this ugly code: f=cont if f=DISC_NORTH THEN burgery=burgery-1 if f=$A4 THEN burgery=burgery-1 if f=DISC_NORTH_EAST THEN burgery=burgery-1 : burgerx=burgerx+1 if f=$B6 THEN burgery=burgery-1 : burgerx=burgerx+1 if f=DISC_NORTH_WEST THEN burgery=burgery-1 : burgerx=burgerx-1 if f=$BC THEN burgery=burgery-1 : burgerx=burgerx-1 if f=DISC_SOUTH THEN burgery=burgery+1 if f=$A1 THEN burgery=burgery+1 if f=DISC_SOUTH_EAST THEN burgery=burgery+1 : burgerx=burgerx+1 if f=$B3 THEN burgery=burgery+1 : burgerx=burgerx+1 if f=DISC_SOUTH_WEST THEN burgery=burgery+1 : burgerx=burgerx-1 if f=$B9 THEN burgery=burgery+1 : burgerx=burgerx-1 if f=DISC_WEST THEN burgerx=burgerx-1 if f=$A8 THEN burgerx=burgerx-1 if f=DISC_EAST THEN burgerx=burgerx+1 if f=$A2 THEN burgerx=burgerx+1

Is there a way to read both the button and the dpad at the same time, so that the user can press the button to fire the fry and move at the same time?

Here's the setup of the sprites sprite 0 - burger (bun) sprite 1 - burger (patty) sprites 2 - fry sprites 3-5 - score sprite 6 - (eventually) enemy sprite 7 - (eventually) life counter It took a horribly long time to figure out how to make the sprites numbers. I was going to have sprite 7 be the enemy's missile, but I decided that showing the amount of lives is more important than having enemy missiles.

Is there a way to display the score but have it NOT scroll?

More work on Hamburgers. I made the burger sprite. It took a few hours for me to understand the scrolling code, but even though I wasn't able to put in a lovely MODE 1 picture and make it scroll, I was able to do this: The burger sprite has the same colors as the burger picture on the title screen minus the ketchup (curse the inability to make mulitcolored sprites on the INTV. The burger takes up 2 sprites.) Just now realized I need to make music for the game! It's already at 5kb!