atari2600land

I think I know why. For the past hour or so I have been struggling with making the 0 disappear. Right now once it goes one past 89 it says 09 instead of 90. And then if I add one to that, it says 19. I can't make it do otherwise, so I'm leaving it as is.

Worked on Frank the Fruit Fly some more. Sometimes when I went to the password screen, it was kind of messed up. Other times it worked perfectly. So I wanted a wonderful working password screen. So I thought I'd take a second stab at redesigning it. This is what I got. Since the redesign, it has been working fine. But that doesn't mean it will always. Pokemon Mini game programming problems seem to pop up and disappear whenever they feel like it. One thing I've also noticed is that the number of people reading my blogs has gone down. Is my life really so boring that a blog about it is boring? I've been having a hard time going to sleep and I usually fall asleep at about 1 a.m. after going to bed at 11 p.m. or so. And then I get up at 3 p.m. or so. I'd like to stay up longer, but if I didn't need the sleep, then I wouldn't sleep as much. It feels like a Monday, but it's Sunday night here.

I'll try to remember. You might want to remind me again when I make the final hole (#18). I'm a long ways from completing the game. Thanks for the kind words.

Added hole #11. I also added a hundreds digit to the stroke counter and made sure it works. I don't know what will happen after 999 strokes, though. golf55.bin

I'm making a new project. A new newsletter-type thing. It will have pages of useless information and trivia in it. In case you've ever read an Uncle John's Bathroom Reader, kind of like that, only crazier and in newsletter form. Anyway, I decided to make a page dedicated to the wumpus. Why? Because it sounds funny. But there's just one problem: I don't have a TI-99. So I went to Wikipedia to research the page. What I want from TI-99ers is if you could read the page and verify the information on it to make sure it's correct. Because I don't want to print lies in my thing. I am hoping to make many issues of this thing, and I want the first one to be finished in time for August. And the second one will be the special back-to-school issue. I did this because I was bored and not many people have been on the internet lately because it is the 4th of July holiday (or summer.) What is it with people going camping and crap? I like my house. It has a toilet. Anyway, read the Wumpus page here and tell me what you think.

Changed the life system. Now you get 3 chances to complete the level on every level, so the lives don't carry over to the next level. I thought it would be better since some of the levels with the shark are kind of difficult and it wouldn't be fair to the player. I added two new levels so I'm up to 16 levels now, and 7,366 bytes left for more. gosub2019july5.zip

No, this is a different game for the 2600 about ants.

I was poking around my computer, finding stuff that I forgot about, when I ran across my old Ants game for the 2600. No, not the very old game, the more recent one which was a port of the Jaguar game I was working on. So I continued where I left off and added some more stuff. I have 952 bytes left until I run out of room for 4k and then have to make it 8k. I don't know what to add or change, though. I put a whole bunch of sound effects in the game yesterday, working while it sounded like a war zone due to all the stupid fireworks. I then slept for the next 12 hours. All I did special yesterday was eat a few hamburgers. I have a few more left that were extra. Hamburger: breakfast of champions.

Added some sounds: + Title screen music + Bee buzzing + Ant walking around ants6.bin

It's a not-so-nice Spring day. Because it's Spring means all the bugs have woken up from their slumber and decided to have a party...on your dining room table! So your job is to squish the nasty, gross ants! But beware the bees. If your arm touches the bee, your squishing days are over. The quicker you squish the ants with your finger, the more points you get. To squish the ants, press FIRE to press your finger down on the table. This is a "semi-port" of the Jaguar game I made a while ago. Some things had to change due to the Atari 2600. The game randomly decides whether to put an ant or bee on the table. ants5.bas.bin

So I decided to play my game.com. It had been right next to my bed for months, so when I got it, it was covered with dust and stuff. So after dusting it off and plugging it in, I decided to play Indy 500. Whenever I hit a curve, my car would automatically hit the wall and spin around, no matter where I was on the track. Also, the car ahead of me seemed to always block me, wherever I was. So I gave up and played Sonic Jam. I actually beat Stage 1 of Sonic 2! I am so proud of myself. So then after playing all three versions and sucking at all of them, I reached for another game. Then my game.com quit working. I unplugged it and plugged it back in. Still nothing. I did this a few times. Crap. So with a pen I pressed the reset button on the back. And it came back to life. What's more is that all my high scores were still saved on there. I looked on eBay for another console in case mine quit working again. The cheapest working one was >$100! There were like 5 that were for parts/broken on eBay. So when I next play my game.com I am going to try The Lost World. Plus for the past few days, I have been working on improving what I have in my Channel F golf game.

To help you, I made it so if the ball hits the left side of a stream or tree, it won't appear on the other side. golf54.bin

Since there is no video, I have to ask. How is this different than "Save Mary"?

I didn't know there was a box for Alien Greed II, and I made the game!

Made it so the ball no longer flickers when it stops. golf53.bin

One of the things that bothered me was that the ball flickered when it hit obstacle #2 or 3 when it was a tree. Yesterday I tried to fix the problem but was unsuccessful. Today, though, I think I did it. The problem was the ball wasn't appearing when the power meter was reducing, thus causing the flicker. (I don't know why it wasn't happening to obstacle #1, though.) So now it does the same thing when all three obstacles are hit when they are trees. I made the third obstacle be able to be a tree and not just a sand trap. So now here are the possibilities for hole creating (in case you want to): + two trees and a sand trap + three trees + a tree, a lake (or stream) and a sand trap + two trees and a lake (or stream) + one or two lakes (or streams) and one sand trap (or tree) All the streams have to be up/down. I think drawing a horizontal stream would take too long. Right now hole #11 is a three tree test screen. But now I can change that since I'm done testing 3 trees. I don't know what to change it to though. This was one of the fears I had when I decided to have 18 holes since people wanted 18 holes. I originally wanted just 9 since the Odyssey 2 and Atari 2600 just had 9.

Obstacle #3 can now be a tree. I also fixed a bug in hole #10 about the ball going right through the bottom tree. golf52.bin

The answer: $1,462. Someone paid $1,462 for a democart #2 and three dirt common games. Is a Democart #2 worth that much?!

Friday night I started working on making three obstacles in the game for the 10th hole. It kept making weird stuff happen, so I had to give up. Saturday afternoon I started up again. I kept working even though the weird stuff kept happening. I kept working on it all night starting at about 10 p.m. At 3 a.m. I finally made it happen. Then I went to sleep and woke up at 2:00p.m. and then my back teeth started hurting. Yes, you can go between the two trees, but you will waste your time trying to find the right spot to do so. The third obstacle has to be a sandtrap. It is for hole 10. This is meant as a thing to "spice up" the holes a little. And to help me make new holes. I'd need a lot more code in order for the third obstacle not to be a sandtrap, but with over 4,600 lines of code so far, I don't want to make any more code because I think what the weird stuff happening's cause was too much code for it to go through. I thought I had everything going well, but it was noticed that the sandtrap's code was still going on even though it was not on the screen. I moved the sandtrap's locations off screen when a new game started to fix it. I must remember to do this if there is no sandtrap on hole #11.

OK, I think that's what happened to me as well. I moved the sandtrap out of the available screen so this shouldn't happen again starting with version 51. golf51.bin

I worked all my free time yesterday and all of tonight (it's 3:30am now) to bring you a third obstacle. You can now have two trees and a sandtrap, like in the picture posted here of hole #10. There was a little bit of weirdness that happened in the second playthrough on hole 7, but I am guessing it was just my computer and not the game. Or perhaps I need a quick way to reset all the variables. Anyway, tell me if you run into anything odd. golf50.bin

I changed the joysticks to joy1. I also changed the background color since it was kind of hard to see the shark. gosub33.zip