atari2600land

Thanks for the info on 4k game making. How would I tell the assembler which bankswitching scheme to use? What is the 'normal' one for 8k+ games?

So I need to learn how to make 4k games. How hard is it? How hard is making an 8k game? Do I need to pick a bankswitching scheme or does it do it automatically? As you can probably tell, I have a lot of questions about making a big Atari 2600 game that's bigger than 2k in assembly. That's because I'm making a game called "Craig the Cranberry." In the end, I want it to be like Adventure, but bigger. This is all I have right now, but even this took about half a day's worth of coding (I can sit at the computer for like 2-3 hours at a time just typing away and testing stuff.) Anyway, let me know what you think so far of my little project. cranberry5.zip

That is the number of bytes I have left for a 2k game. So if I want a huge epic adventure for the Atari 2600 (don't we all?), the time will come (and soon!) to need to learn how to make 4k games. Then 8k games. Perhaps if I get the hang of it I can make this a 64k game. I guess the sky is the limit, although I do want this to be able to be played in one sitting. So now I made a new title screen. This was a nightmare. I needed a whole bunch of seemingly useless code repeated over and over to make. But if I tried to simplify it, it quit working. Then I decided to try to make it so if you run into the trees, you lose a little health. That was opening a new can of worms, as I fought for a few hours to make the screen not shake when you ran into a tree. Why it started shaking again, I assume, is because I put in the code to decrease health. But now I think I have everything fixed... for now. The next step is to make a potion in the third screen that ups your health. I'm thinking the first 2k will just be an introduction level for the player, and then the rest will be where things really get interesting. I bought a Sega Saturn. I need games for it. Does anyone have any? All I have is Sega Rally, and one called Solar Eclipse that I found out in the garage. I thought I had a pinball game for the Saturn as well from my previous Saturn owning days, but after looking in the garage, I couldn't find it. I had to replace the battery though. It got irritating real fast every time you turned the thing on to reset the clock and all.

I have 2 screens in, a title screen, and now I only have 800 bytes left of a 2k game. For the scope of what I want to do, I think I'll need at least 16k of space. I was looking at the Lord of the Rings prototype and it was only 8k. Adventure is 4k. How did they pull that off? So anyway, I made this title screen. Press fire and Craig will show up. Move to the right and I added in two trees. This was especially hard since I wanted to keep Craig in so he could interact with the trees. But I eventually solved that. But then came another problem. Craig would get stuck in the tree. But this only happened on a real 2600. But I fixed it. I even added a little sound effect for him bumping into the tree. But that bumped it up to 263 scanlines for some reason. But I solved that problem as well. I'm going to change the title screen so the actual Craig sprite shows up now that I know what I was doing wrong.

Or should I say... This is Craig the Cranberry: I'm starting a new project which will (hopefully) be an exercise in learning 4k Atari 2600 program making. But if I fail (I have a knack for it), I'll just make it 2k. I could keep going with the Channel F version, but then I thought the only person who can make Channel F games right now is e5frog, and he's already busy with my Trimerous project. So it's best not interrupt him with this. Besides, Craig won't be finished for a long time. I got the health decreasing and increasing correctly, but there's no way to hurt or refuel Craig yet. The object of the game is a cross between Adventure and Pitfall: Go to the right side of the screen. Only it's in 3D (?). I also had trouble with a little jump when the game starts on a 2600, but I think I fixed that. Craig can move to another screen now, which right now has nothing. Oh, and I also had lots of trouble with resetting the game and maintaining a constant 262 scanlines, but again, I think I fixed that as well. You start the game by pressing the button on the Atari 2600 that looks a lot like a cranberry, only a little bit bigger. To reset the game, flip the reset switch and Craig will reappear at his starting place in room 0. I call them rooms when actually they should be called "screens" because Craig is outside in the grassy plains area. Another benefit over the Channel F is the range of colors. Now I have 128 to use! I spent some time doing this and watching the super bowl last night. I really thought the 9ers would win, but it didn't turn out so (I didn't really CARE since the Seahawks weren't in it.) But some guy on TV before predicted the Chiefs would win by 11. And that's exactly what happened. Eerie. The health meter is at 100%. I was having trouble making it going down. Until I poked around and discovered I could make the "sbc" operation. I always figured there must have been one somewhere, but I tried "suc" and that didn't work. I guess the inventors realized it's one letter away from "suck" and changed it. Well, what does "adc" mean? Addition with carry, right? So I figured the opposite would be "suc." Anyway, I went to bed and woke up and worked on this some more. And tomorrow, I'll be back to work on it again. (I don't feel like programming any more today.) So congrats to KC.

Thank you! That worked great and was what I needed.

I have 11 different digits, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, %. I have two variables to hold the score. Score+0 is the thousandths and hundredths digits and Score+1 is the tenths and one digits. I'm having a horrible time trying to make one digit stay the same throughout. I start by making Score+1 be $10. This makes me start with "0%". Score is 16, which makes the total score read "100%" I want to make it so when I subtract a number, the % sign is always there. Normally if I wanted one digit to stay the same, I would just subtract 1, but not now since there's 11 digits instead of the standard 10. The following code works to a certain extent, but it changes the % sign to a 0. I want to avoid this. How? Decrease_score: sed clc lda Score+1 sbc #9 sta Score+1 lda Score sbc #0 sta Score cld rts cranberry1a.asm

I had an idea to maybe make the game better. So I went back and simplified the code. While it's still not as perfect as I'd like it to be, it's better than it was. The problem was too much code for the drawing of the guy. So now he's naked. Or perhaps I should make it not be a human? elev19.bin

It says Copyright 1998-2019 AtariAge. It needs to be updated now that it's 2020.

I was having a really hard time in Video Game Sage forums posting a YouTube clip of my game in action. Let's try it here: How odd. I had to make the link be not a link with Notepad and then copy and paste the Notepad text into here. Just like in that other forum. Well, anyway, this is level 1 of my new game. I like how it's going so far, but it still needs something so it's not so repetitive. If you'd like to play it, you can download it since I attached it. If you play it, please tell me if there's any bugs. After you beat level 1 it goes back to the title screen. I need to add a level 2, etc. But first I need to think of some locales for levels. Does anyone have any ideas of where the burger can fly around? Let me know. I'd like some new ones that aren't in the original. They are: volcano, ocean, mountains, meadow, cave, sky, city. hamburgerstwo17demo.zip

My NeoGeo Pocket Color was having trouble with not recognizing button presses or when to go to the next screen (I was playing Bust-A-Move). So I put in two new AA batteries and that solved the problem. I just bought a game on eBay, it's a pachi-slot game, which I figure is pachinko and slot machines, right?

Well, that's a good thing to know about the 208 y-axis thing. I wonder how many problems that was causing in earlier programs I attempted to make.

good luck!

Couple of eBay goodies. #15 is an auction - It's here. #25 is here too. It's $100 and cart only. Casino Poker.

"The page you are trying to access is not available for your account."?? Can you make it so it uses the Atari Light Gun?

Who knew it was going to be so hard? I composed a .psg file like I always do for Game Gear games. This time I made a song for the boss part of the game. So I went to put it in the game's code and I kept getting bizarre times when the music just would not play. Then it played but stopped when you died. The odd thing about this problem was that the sound effects played normally the whole time (channel 2). It was just channels 0 and 1 that weren't working correctly. I have no idea how I fixed it, but I eventually did. I went to test it on a real Game Gear when I had the problems all sorted out and worked on Emulicious. It worked fine. Again, I have no idea what the problem was. I have no idea what the solution was. It's really frustrating when that happens. A problem pops up and you have to spend a couple hours trying to sort things out when you have no idea what you're doing. Went to bed at 6 last night and woke up at 6 a.m. today. I shouldn't need 12 hours of sleep. Yesterday I woke up and had a severe leg pain. It was under my leg just below the knee. It's a little better today, but I can still feel the muscle when I walk sometimes. I guess I slept weird. Not much happens when you are sleeping 12 hours every night. It was pretty much an uneventful day yesterday.

I tried. Last time we left Frank the fruit fly, a whale ate him. I was going to have a screen of Frank going through the digestive system of the whale. But I had to give up because it was too complicated. So before I went to bed, I thought of an idea of a screen: Why not just skip the digesting and go right to the whale pooping Frank out? I woke up the next morning and began coding. A few hours later, I had my other screen finished. It's too bad I couldn't do the idea of the other one. What angers me is I did something similar with a bunch of walls in level 2, but I couldn't duplicate it here. In this screen, Frank dodges the poop that the whale poops out. It's not a very challenging thing, but the poop will track Frank down as it makes its way to the right side of the screen. When the poop gets there, the whale does it again. And over and over again. Part of me wanted to have Frank move slow so he would have to get hit at least once, but I ultimately didn't put it in. I've been working so hard on this and other stuff that I forgot to update the player's guide. So I'll go do that.

Now make a game.com game.

I sat there for a few hours trying to make the score not blink when you die. I went back a few versions to see if it always did that. No, it didn't. But what changed? After a few hours of trying to fix internal stuff like turning the screen on and off, when suddenly I found the problem: The Game Gear's limitations was to blame. You can't put 8 or more sprites on a single vertical line. That's what was happening when the burger was going down really far. So I made it stop a little bit upwards and that made the score stop blinking. The score is made up of three sprites, and the life counter is another, and the burger is 4 sprites. When all 8 of them are on the same x-axis, the Game Gear goes "I can't handle this!" thus making the score (and not the burger) flicker. I thought the limit was 8, but apparently it's 7. Which begs the question of how something like Space Invaders works on the Game Gear. PGA Tour '96 came yesterday. It works great. So now I have all the 1996 Game Gear releases. Which isn't much to get excited about since there were only like 10 or so. I also have The Lost World which I think is the last one and it was released in 1997. (Unless you count Majesco and the first hamburger game.)

So after a whole bunch of hours spent working on my game I gave up on, I think I have it in a playable state where it won't crash on you. It does, however, still show the number 4 and a little bit of garbage, but that's out of the range of the Game Gear screen (so that's mainly why I make Game Gear games instead of SMS games, I don't know why garbage tiles come up!) The problem was collision detection outside the Game Gear's visible screen. I have made a boss. You must shoot the boss 20 times to advance while it shoots 4 onion rings at you. Shooting the onion ring or touching them causes you to lose a life. Shooting the onion ring being bad came out of necessity because of how the collision detection works. I can't change it. Some of the problems I was having included the small onion rings that the boss milkshake shooting at you were in the wrong x position. In order to not cause a collision, they couldn't overlap. They were. So I fixed it. Also, I got a thread stuck in driver error message while testing, and the computer reset. I guess my computer is getting old, I've had it for 4 years. I keep wanting to get a Mac when this one dies, but I don't know whether I'd be able to continue work on all my projects. So I guess I'm stuck with Windows.

This thread made me dig out my N64 and play it. For a real challenge in Mario Kart 64, try Toad's Turnpike in Mirror mode: The cars are flipped around so they're coming right at you!