atari2600land

Well, 17-year-olds ARE crazed.

I've decided to make this less of a fighting game and more like an arcade-style game in which the object is to get the highest score possible. I wanted to make a fly swatting game for the Atari 2600. I wanted to make a game starring letters. I figured "Why not combine the two?" So that's what I did. Or rather, am going to do. Because it hasn't been done yet. More "fun" with the scanline count ensued when I tried to add to the score every 32nd frame. But I think I got it all under control. Tomorrow I will attempt to make the X move. Without breaking what I have so far. I had to use an "align 256" though. Since the copyright year got all screwed up when I tried to show it. Another addition. I'm not sure about it since it doesn't say who has the copyright. Oh well. At least it's recorded for posterity what year the game was made. I need to make the 2s match though. I think it shall be like this: player 0 - x player 1 - o missile 0 - bee #1 missile 1 - bee #2 ball - ? To kill an O, have X move up to it and press fire. But be sure not to touch the bees.

Is it possible to have two two-digit numbers, one being red, the other being blue, as the "score"? (I'm using assembly. I think it's possible given the minikernel in batariBASIC that does just this, but I don't know how in assembly.) xversuso3.asm

"Ever since they were invented, the letters X and O have been enemies. X is jealous of O because O comes before X in the alphabet, and O is jealous of X because it doesn't look like a big fat zero. The centuries-long struggle between the two - from tic-tac-toe to sports play drawups - has finally come to a point where they can't stand it any more, and they are going to fight. And that fight is on your Atari 2600." I have decided to make a game featuring the two letters as my next project. It will be like Outlaw (or Gunslinger, if you swing that way), but a little different. How, I don't know because I don't know what the game is going to be like, but now that Uncle Hairy's Nosehair is pretty much completed, I want to begin on a new 2600 programming adventure. And what an adventure this has been so far. Hours of trying to make the scanline a steady 262. I got this: The arena where the two letters will duke it out. How they will fight, I don't know. What I do know is one letter will win once their score gets to 9. Or perhaps I'll make it so it starts at 9, so it's like a health meter, and the first letter to get 0 loses, like it is in Mortal Kombat. If anyone has any ideas for the game, let me know.

Have you ever began working on a game without an idea? That's what I'm trying to do right now. The idea of a letter X fighting a group of letter Os began as an idea for the ActionMax where you shoot Os. But then I lost the program that I was making ActionMax games on. Then I got it back, but I didn't feel like making an ActionMax game. So I began to make a title screen for the Atari 2600 for a game with no idea. It has to be in color because the writing for the playfield has to be in color because of the timing of the game will not let me add code to change it to b&w where I want it to be. So it's in color. It's changing colors in a color cycle. The background color changes color every 4 seconds or so. I had a horrible time trying to get the scanline count a steady 262, but I think I did it now. Here is a picture of my title screen. I measured the lettering to make sure it is centered. But I don't know what to do. I want to make an Outlaw-type game, but Outlaw has already been made. Is there a one-player vs. computer version? Perhaps I can do that if not. I mean, who has an extra friend to play with, anyway? I know I don't. I have 1,411 bytes left in a 2k game.

Thanks for letting me know. Try this version. I think the problem was I specified the wrong game number to use when the demon got the box. nosehair63.bin

Whatever happened to this? Will it be released on a cartridge ever?

My head and right eye hurt last night so I went to bed at about 10 p.m. I woke up at 2 a.m. with me feeling better, so I had a midnight snack and worked a little on Uncle Hairy's Nosehair some more. Apparently the quick fix for the jumping issue wasn't really one. One of my "things I wanted for the game" item on the list screwed it up. But it worked out okay in the end I think. The thing I am talking about is having the difficulty switches only change when the game hasn't begun yet. If you started with the left difficulty switch on A and then mid-game changed it to B, it used to react to that. I'm not sure how something like Combat would react to that, but I changed it so now if you did that, it still acts as though it was in A position until the game ends before switching to the B mode in the next game. This fix for the difficulty switches, however, puts me at 0 bytes left. I have had this game be 0 bytes left before, but I don't think there's anything else I can add to the game, so I guess I'll call it done unless a bug pops up. It took an extra hour or so to make the scanline count be a steady 262. Then, at about 4:30 a.m. I went back to bed. It took about a half hour for me to go back to sleep (that's usual) and got three more hours of needed sleep. I also found a way to get sharper images using Stella. I don't know, it seems like this should be the default setting: no interpolation and no correction of aspect ratio. That makes for no blurriness. All I had to do was reduce this image size by half, Stella makes really huge screenshots for some reason.

Yes, interpolation is disabled.

Well, better for taking screenshot captures of, anyway.

I disabled aspect ratio correction and got this: Which is a lot better. Thank you for your help.

Changes: Difficulty switches now can not be changed mid-game. If fire is held at beginning, no long continuous note. nosehair62a.bin

Got rid of screen jitters at beginning and end of game. nosehair62.bin

I've been working on the railroad Uncle Hairy's Nosehair, all the live-long day. Just passing time away. Stella is blurry, so I had to clean up this screenshot to accurately portray what's on the screen: The gap at the top of the nose has been filled in with skin. One of the things I can cross off my want list for this game. Just now solved another problem I was having regarding the screen jumping sometimes. As it turns out, it was dipping to 261 scanlines when the game ended and began. Fortunately, that was an easy fix. Among the older changes is the score font, and adding a mode where the nosehair demon doesn't subtract ten points from your total if he gets the box first, accessible by having the right difficulty switch in the b position. My Atari 2600 has a problem with the right difficulty switch. It seems to not like it when it's in the A position because it gets black and white static, like it's been powered off. If I turn it back to B though, it clears up and is fine again. I am a perfectionist and want things to be working the way I want them. But then again, don't we all want things working the way we want?

This picture was taken with version 6.5 Notice the blurriness around the objects: the nose, the scissors, the demon, the score, it's all BLURRY. Why? And can it be fixed?

Thanks! That did it: jsr Random ora #15 sta ColorsChange As you can probably deduce, I changed the random color generation a little. I also changed the 3 digit so it looks less like an 8. And I filled in the gap at the top of the nose. nosehair61.bin

I want to get the brightest values of the 16 colors (15, 31, 47, etc.) for the color cycle shade for the score. I don't know how to do this. All I have is this: jsr Random and #15 sta ColorsChange But all this does is get a number between 0-15. I've tried asl's and lsr's, but that doesn't really help much. What do I do?

It seems my right difficulty switch doesn't work at all on my real Atari 2600. If I flip it to A, the screen goes berzerk and acts like the power is off because it gives me tons of static. So could someone please test this with the right difficulty switch on A on a real Atari 2600? (Version 60 is on my website. The only difference between it and 59 is the starting Y point of the scissors.)

Version 59. changed score font if right difficulty switch set to b, the demon does not subtract ten points if he gets the box, if it's set to a, he does. EDIT: Fixed version 59. nosehair59.bin

Thanks for the comments. I don't know whether I should tinker with this some more or call it done.

I noticed that when you get hit and a sound effect is playing, it takes a shorter time to play the death tune then if it was silent and plays the death tune. I want to quit, and if there is no way to tell if SNDZEROPLAY is working, I may just have to. (NOTE- I started this project way back when Raptor Basic was a thing, and I'd much rather prefer to keep doing what I have rather than start the whole thing over with a thing I have no idea how to use.)

So I got the Skunkboard 5 a few days ago. Thought I should take it for a spin a few days later. So yesterday I did just that. My computer seemed to have ruined my Jaguar projects so they don't work as well as I had remembered before I reset the thing in December. Nevertheless, I was wondering what to put on my Skunkboard to test it with. I found Aaron the Aardvark. So I put it on there. The Skunkboard works great. Too bad the game doesn't. It seems to be superslow on the Atari Jaguar for some reason. Longtime readers of my blog know I can't draw, so about a year or so ago, I had Clint Thompson make up some backgrounds for the game. I just PMed him now asking for more. So I rebegan work on the game. One of the things to do was make the game work correctly, since it wasn't. This was a 2-day ordeal, but I finally got it to the point where it is working okay now. I had to cut the background music out because it was too much for the Jag to handle. POWAH my aunt Fannie. So anyway, the point is I'm working on this again. If you play the game on VirtualJaguar it will play much too fast, as it's intended for a Skunkboard.

http://atari2600land.com/aarontheaardvark/index.html new version. I had to cut the in game background music because it was apparently taxing the Jaguar. Now you need 50 ants to get an extra life, up from 20. Now 20 ufo's per wave, up from 10. Lots of other odd stuff to make the game work again. I don't know why it's so slow on real hardware. It's a lot faster in emulation. Oh well. The Skunkboard is back in its baggie for another time. I never heard of such weird precautions with a piece of electronics though.

OK. I guess I'll cut the bgm then. Thanks for your help, I really appreciate it.