atari2600land

I just got one of these things. Overpaid, but not by very much if you count shipping on eBay (the thing is huge.) I also picked up a Yoshi's Safari cart. I thought the stupid thing wouldn't work but then I plugged it into the second controller port and it worked then, but I couldn't choose a 1P game in Yoshi's Safari (thus not making it work correctly.) This thing is frustrating me! But since it's such an oddball item, I just had to have it. Are there any homebrew SNES games that use it?

Now I need help with randomness. It likes to do certain unbreakable patterns. One of which is: celery down celery down vegetarian down vegetarian unchanged vegetarian up repeat the Y positions exactly the same. I've cleaned the code up some, removing unnecessary blank lines and changing swear words and stuff. I just get so angry when things don't work. celery40.asm celery40.bin

So i guess I wasn't done with the celery game after all. I decided to write a song for the game. I put it in there. It's in the key of B. I also found a spot where if the conditions are correct, you could just not move and have the game keep going. So in order to avoid this, I made the celery and vegetarians have slight up or down movements as well. This took a long time to determine when to stop the moving up or down because if I didn't stop it, it would just disappear off the screen and another thing would take its place without the score increasing. So essentially I worked all day on this yesterday, pausing to take a look at the snow that was coming down. When it stopped we had 2 or so inches. I had some other snow in December, so I am sick of winter. It's been a bad one if you hate snow. I heard there's snow in 47 out of 48 states right now. Not really enough to make a 47 reference because there's probably snow in Alaska right now. So anyway, now that I have 37 bytes left in the 2k game, I think now is a perfect time to call it done, that is, unless bugs are found.

This web page really helps a lot: http://www.randomterrain.com/atari-2600-memories-music-and-sound.html Here is my first try. EDIT: I also made the vegetarian and celery move up or down slightly, randomly determined. celery39.zip

I had an idea. Why not make a title screen song? This proved to be way way harder since every time I put stuff in, it kept breaking or not working right. I think I finally got it working okay after 4 hours of work. Let me know if you see any bugs in this version. I know the title screen isn't all that great, I plan to redo it, the one in here is just temporary. celery37.zip

I would like to buy a copy of Xenophobe for the Atari 2600. Loose preferred. Also, it doesn't have to be in terrific shape, either, just as long as it works. PM me if you have one for $$$.

So I think I'm done with my celery game. That is, coding it. One thing it still needs however is a name. Since the name of the game doesn't show up in the game, I could call it "Wonderful Attack of Doctors That Weigh Several Hundred Pounds." But I'm not going to. That would be silly. Also, I'd like to avoid a blah title, like "The Celery Game." I thought about "Cellar-y Celery," but, like I read that Jim Davis said once that he tries to avoid using puns for Garfield because they don't translate well. "The 50-Foot Tall Stalk of Celery" sounds good, but I hope to have a game named that for the Odyssey 2 released sometime this year. And it's different. Maybe I can make it an odd title, like "Video Vegetarians." or "Don't Eat the Celery!" Nah, that last one sounds like "Please Don't Eat the Daisies." How about "Untitled Celery Game." That's unique. Or, "A Video Game That Has a Really Tall Celery Stalk In It." Kinda long though. Or I could just name it "Big Celery."

20XX means 2020 in Roman numerals.

Since the idea is for the guy to go in the incinerator, I decided to switch the collision from player1 (the incinerator) to ball (opening in incinerator.) Unfortunately, this caused a problem about flashing items for a split second before they start going across the screen, but I was able to fix it by voiding the sprite if its x position was 2 (starting.) I am also wondering how Chavert got a green celery on a PAL TV. I thought it would be purple. celery36.bin

I don't know if I have enough room for a life counter.

One of the things I wanted to do when I started the project was make the incinerator have a hole so the vegetarians can enter it. So it was now that I decided I should try, seeing as how I could change the playfield color at the bottom since it was using COLUBK. So I tried and eventually got it so that the opening was there, but it started drawing the hole at the wrong y position. Time to fiddle with it some more. Finally got it correct. But then the score went crazy on me, adding horizontal lines between the tens and ones digit when the ones digit was 6 or higher. So I scaled back some code, I erased some that didn't have any use I think. Turns out it didn't because it still was working OK and the horizontal lines were gone. And Darrell Spice had to help me, but we finally got the little men to wear clothing instead of running around naked. So now here's what it looks like: Together with the celery's eyes, I must say that the game looks way better than it used to. I have <200 bytes left to work with. I'd like to keep this at 2k just to see if I can. I would like some feedback on the game, though. Hardly anyone visits the 2600 Programming For Newbies forum, so perhaps it's time to put this in the Homebrew forum and ask for feedback on the game there. I have designed a little 4 page manual to go along with the game. I wanted an 8 pager, but I had trouble filling up the 2 pages I had!

I decided I wanted a visible entrance to the incinerator. So I played around for 2 1/2 hours and finally got one. It's the ball. But then the score decided to get crazy. So I decided to delete some code that wasn't useful and the problem went away. I don't know what causes it, but sometimes there's lines that get between the ones and tens digit, especially if the ones digit is 6 or higher. I have a little less than 200 bytes to work with. My ultimate goal with this game is to keep it at 2k. Anyway, let me know if you find anything weird or see improvements I could make, or changes you want. celery35.zip

Thank you so much, again! It hadn't occurred to me to try to do what you did. I changed the colors a bit, as well as added grayscale colors for when the b&w switch is on. i thought it'd be nice to not have the vegetarians running around naked. I also solved a little problem I was having about the death. I got it to 262 scanlines BUT when the death noise was playing, the floor went down by a pixel and when the death noise was over it went back up. I fixed it, though. I have about 180 bytes left. I doubt I'd do it to this game, but is making a 4k game as easy as changing a simple ORG value? celery34.zip

I tried for a few hours and just can't make multicolor sprites. Argh! What I want is for the little guy to be these colors: VegColor .byte #$f6 .byte #$9c .byte #$9c .byte #$4c .byte #$4c .byte #$a8 .byte #$a8 but I just can't do it. No matter what I do, nothing works.

So I was looking at the celery in the 2600 game I had restarted work on. I had about 400 bytes left to work with. I thought to myself that the celery stalk was straight. A little too straight. And that it doesn't look like that in my bB movies starring the stalk of celery. So my job for today (actually later that day, it was after midnight when I worked on it last. Then I went to sleep and woke up at about 5pm or so.) was to make the celery rounded. That part was mostly easy, except for the fact that the eye moved. I spent two hours trying to put the missile initialization code in various places of the code to make the eye come up at the correct place. Finally, it worked. Except for one drawback: I thought the code hadn't worked on the actual 2600 because there was a black line at the right edge of the eye. So I went back to needless work trying to correct it. It finally dawned on me that it was my TV that was bad. Either that or my console. Because it was working fine on Stella. So I tried the b&w switch on my 2600. The black line on his eye went away (but, of course, the game was in completely black and white, but that's OK since I wanted it to be.) Funny thing: when programming missile x output, it's completely dependent where on the screen it lands by the part of the code it's in. So the first part of the code that draws the celery stalk looks like this: Draw_MrCelery: lda #$20 lda #$20 ; here to align eye correctly sta NUSIZ1 sta NUSIZ1 ; here to align eye correctly EyeDot: inx sleep 6 ; here to align eye correctly cpx #30 sta RESM1 ; reset missile1 position Looks pretty odd, and I had to explain what I had to do in the comments to get the eye aligned correctly, but IT WORKS. I also fixed a bug pertaining to the incinerator moving off screen and out of view. It no longer does that, at least if you're using a joystick. Funny how when you don't need an Atari 2600 joystick there's tons of them laying around, but the moment you need one, they're nowhere to be found. I didn't want to spend a long time fumbling around in the garage because A.) The Christmas decoration boxes haven't been put back in the proper places yet because B.) It's below freezing outside. But I eventually found some oddball one and it works on my 2600, so I'm using it. I'd rather have an actual 2600 controller, but that will have to wait. So here is the result:

Made the celery stalk rounded, not a straight line (like in the 2600 bB movies). This, of course, displaced the eye, so I had to spend a few hours trying various things to make it be in the correct position. celery33.zip

How do I play it? I press fire at the title screen and a dotted line keeps moving right.

So something made me think about the 2k celery game I had made. I know what it was that made me think of it: I was looking through my GBA games and saw one had been made by 2k Games. (That's what I wanted to name MY thing, but for a totally different reason!) So I looked through it and was determined to put an eye on the celery instead of just a hole. I was able to make a 2-color missile. Eventually. It took many tries to get the missile put in at just the right x position, which was very hard because I didn't know what I was doing, and I still don't. I also made a few other changes, including fixing a bug I had in the "final" version where the floor had a different beginning x position drawing place (I don't know how I fixed it though.) So now this is what you get when you start the game up: Looks a lot better now that Mr. Celery has an eye.

Came back to this project to see if I could add/change anything. I was able to add a few things: + Added eye to the celery, which is missile1. Pretty cool that you can have missiles be different colors. Why not in bB? At one point, I had two missile1s be different X positions and slightly different colors. I thought that was weird. + When the vegetarian runs out to the left, he disappears off screen and the game ends. Previous versions had him stuck there being animated walking against the non-existent wind. + Found and fixed a bug where the floor changes steepness. Let me know if you find any weirdness. celery32.zip

Prices lowered!

I quit Game Boy programming. It was too hard. All of a sudden, printf stopped working for no apparent reason. So, now I think the only things I'll work on are Odyssey 2, Atari 2600, and ActionMax. I've been in the other room working on a cartoon. I use Windows Movie Maker for it. If things went the way they did for Word, I'd probably have to pay extra for the privilege of it being on my new computer. So I have been using the old one with Vista. Why do that, though? I highly doubt Microsoft wasn't getting enough money. It snowed a little bit yesterday, just a dusting though. I slept most of the day yesterday, January 1. I was really sleepy for some reason. I was working on the computer last night when I heard a big bang. I said "What the?" I looked at the clock. It was 12:01am. The stupid morons had been lighting off fireworks all night, but they were small (yet big enough to scare the dog.) So the first word I said in 2017 was "What." Oh well. The first food I ate in 2017 was popcorn. Shortly before 1 a.m.

So I cleaned up the title screen I had for this game so it looks better now. I also added a short tune loop. Making music on the Game Boy is hard, I don't understand it. So what I did was keep plugging in, trying numbers until it sounded good. I don't understand what the values (called "frequencies") are or why their values are the way they are. Like, why does a frequency value of 154 differ from 74, and even then not by very much? I also have some sad news. There's this channel in the northwest part of America called NWCN (NorthWest Cable News). It's shutting down on January 6. I guess not enough people were watching it, but even still, they just celebrated their 20th anniversary. So goodbye to NWCN. And it will be a cold start to 2017, with temperatures in the morning reaching the teens some days next week.

Snowman now has UFO to shoot at. snow9.bin