atari2600land

change line 65 to if shipx>167 then gosub new_ship_ts

I went with a third option: having 7 extra cloud MOBs and putting them in and then if it was at the left edge, make more code to handle it so it looks seamless. It sure is a roundabout way to do things, though. Here is the code solution plus a ROM to test it out with. zipzap1.zip

Suppose I have a sprite: SPRITE 1,cloud1x+$300+ZOOMX2,cloud1y+$100,SPR59 + 7 If I am moving it a pixel at a time, it exits the screen normally, but when it comes back on the screen from the opposite side, half of it appears first on the left side instead of it gradually floating into screen, making for a IMO ugly entrance. Reading the manual, it seems like the left most it can be is 0, which causes the right half to appear suddenly. So I guess it is a rant or question if I can do anything about it?

How does the name Zipzap sound?

I'm thinking about changing the name of the game. It must be at most 6 letters long, so it fits on the title screen. Any suggestions? Just so I could, I made it so once you pass level 1 it goes to level 2. But for testing, later on I'm going to make it so it starts at level 3 when I'm ready to work on level 3. Since the gameplay is endless, after you get through all my levels, I'm going to make it pick a level at random until you lose all your lives. Life counter now displays at level screen. xybort18.bin

Just watched a YouTube video of a guy getting 400,000 points on Xevious. It's just the same setting over and over again, and there is no boss. So I guess my game will be different in those regards.

I wasn't going to work on it. But I got very bored and I thought "It wouldn't hurt to work on it just a tiny bit, unless something goes wrong." Something did go wrong on real hardware, but it was my fault. It was an easy fix. Apparently you can't let characters go off the screen. Why are the characters moving? In level 2 they are airplanes and are flying around. What's next to work on is connecting level 1 to level 2, so if you beat level 1, level 2 shows up. But I'll save that for another case of boredom. So if you thought dodging stationary trees was hard, try dodging the moving airplanes. I have an idea for level 3 involving robots trying to get your ship, but I mustn't get ahead of myself. Also, how many levels does Xevious have, anyway? I also changed the colors of the ships. You now pilot a yellow ship, and the white ufo enemy is now red. I had some qualms about making the other ufo light blue on a dark blue playfield, but it is very visible against it, so I kept it blue.

Level 2: I must ask: Does Xevious have an ending? Or does it just keep playing the same levels over and over? I can't get past level 1 of it. xybort17.bin

My Skunkboard came in the mail today. Are there any instructions on how to use it?

What was intended to be a quick update to the game turned out to be another off and on coding day. What I wanted to do was just put in some code to make the background and characters different for different levels. For example, value 0a3h holds the color for the background and grid (it doesn't matter about the grid since I'm not using it). get_bg_color mov r0,#levelnumber mov a,@r0 xrl a,#1 jz level_1_forest level_1_forest mov r0,#0a3h mov a,#21 movx @r0,a ret This is the code to determine which background color to get based on level. Right now there's only one level, so it will get the level 1 background color. A similar thing for the characters. But it kept giving me a blank screen on Odyssey 2 while playing perfectly on O2EM. Until it decided it had enough of its little fun (perhaps I knocked some sense into the Odyssey 2) and it worked. So there there should be no difference between version 15 and 16 except if you look in the code. So I know I've said this before, but NOW I've finally found a good stopping point for a break. When I come back to this, I'll begin work on level 2: the sky, a cyan background with horizontally moving airplane characters (if it will let me). I wanted the code at the end so it would have minimal impact when I add stuff to it. It gets uppity and stops working if a page boundary has been crossed. Sometimes it gives an error message. But sometimes it doesn't, like when the page boundary gets crossed in the middle of a code section.

That is something I'll never do again. After a ten-or-so hour coding marathon, I finally got a good version of Xybort playable until the end of level 1. I went to work adding the boss in. This took longer than expected due to various crap happening with the program. And then I decided to make the code better. As you may have noticed if you played it on real hardware sometimes the trees flickered for a split second. I think I fixed this. But at the expense of adding another 'waitvsync,' which made things slower, so I sped the movements up. Instead of the ship moving, say, 1 pixel to the right, it now moves 2. I think I was able to keep the feel of the game as before, and have the enemy ships move more than they did before, which is good. I will now take my Xybort break because I am sick of programming for now. Although I'll say one thing: It's 1:30p.m., and I'm still awake. I woke up about 12 hours ago. The huge majority of today was spent fighting with my code. I only stopped to eat taquitos and a big bean burrito. And the boss is in the game now. When you get 20 points, you'll see the huge black spaceship. Shoot it 5 times to clear the level. Although right now, when you clear the level, it says "GAME OVER". I did this on purpose so the game would end once 25 points have been reached. 1,383/2,048 bytes have been used in bank 2, which should be enough room for a few more levels and the data that goes along with them.

Did a little "cleaning up". Someone discovered my white ship wasn't correct, and I put in an "enemy counter" variable I need to set to trigger a boss fight. But I've been working on this so much I am going to take a few days away from coding this nonstop so I don't get burned out and sick of coding it.

Added a whole bunch of stuff. Level 1 is still endless, but I want to make it so that if you get a certain score (like 50 or something, I don't know) you'll trigger a boss fight. xybort13.bin

So my break begins now. I felt I just had to do a couple of things before I went on it. I changed a few things: Instead of pressing fire to go back to the title screen after the game ends, it does it after giving you time to read the "GAME OVER" text. Enabled the high score saving. Added a "LEVEL 1" message at the beginning and every time you die. Bank 1 is 1115/2048 filled and bank 2 is 1155/2048 filled. I think what I'll do is put the boss code in with the main game since I (Apparently. You never know with the Odyssey2) have around >800 bytes left in bank 2. So I've been adding things left and right and apparently not using very much code for them. Perhaps this will only be a 4k game after all. I do have a question: Does Xevious have an ending? I mean, can you beat it like you can beat, say, Super Mario Bros. 3? I have Xevious for the GBA, but I suck at it and can't finish level 1. I had items #1 and 3 on my list done when I discovered I had more than enough time to enable the high score saving, so I went ahead and did that as well. I tried to turn my life around and be awake during the day like a normal person, but I couldn't take it any more. I had gone to sleep at about 11 a.m. and woke up at 2 a.m. The plan was to get up at a sane time in the morning but I just couldn't stay asleep that long.

I'm assuming there's no bugs and it's done...

Well, I worked on the game for a couple hours last night. Later this morning I got extremely bored, so I decided to work on the game even more. Here are a few things I added: game over screen lives counter white UFO that shoots at you changed laser beams to rings That last one was a necessity. Since I was using the tree/ship collision code for enemy ship laser as well, it registered as a hit even when it wasn't touching. I had two options: Make more collision code or change the laser beam. I chose the easier option not just because it was easier but also because I want as much space as possible. A funny thing: The red rings look like candy canes on my old CRT TV. I don't know what that is about. It's Christmas again! Now I'll take a short break while I figure out what to do next. I think I have enough room to put the boss fight in with the in-game stuff, as well as to stop the trees from moving down when you get to the boss fight. And yes, I'll use the "spr_double" command to make the boss bigger.

OK, thanks. I was wondering if it was for some contest or something. It's kind of odd it's a bag, though. I thought there was a prototype of a cancelled game called $1,000,000 Money Machine".

I found this on eBay. Any idea on what it is? http://www.ebay.com/itm/294026760458

Why does it have a copyright date of 1992?

I have restarted my Xevious-like game on the Odyssey2. Back when I first started programming this machine, I had this idea. Now that I know much more than I did back then, I decided to go ahead with this game. I have my Odyssey2 SD cart to help with testing it on a real console (O2EM, while helpful, isn't exactly perfect.) Right now I have scrolling and two different enemy types. One thing that is different than Xevious is that you die when you crash into a tree. The blue enemy ship does not shoot at you, but the white one does. I want to have a black enemy ship that follows your horizontal movement and shoots, but that will be saved for a later level. I am imagining an 8k game here, so there will be much MUCH more to do. This is just a little sampling of what I have done so far. Right now, even at this early stage, it's 4k. The two 2k banks are around half filled. xybort10.bin

After a couple months, I decided to get out the Odyssey2 and continue work on Xybort. After making version 9, I tested it on real hardware and discovered it didn't work correctly. So I basically spent all night trying to get it working on a real Odyssey2 and around 7 a.m. I finally got it working. I still don't know what the problem was, though. I cured it by making the enemy ship move continuously down and perhaps left or right a little bit sometimes, like in Xevious. After all, that's what I'm trying to do here (and hence the title of the game beginning with the letter X). The trees scroll downwards to give the illusion that you are moving and the screen is scrolling (when it actually isn't). Now that I've got this far, there's a whole bunch of stuff I want to add, so I may make this an 8k game. different enemy types, some that shoot at you. different levels: a blue level with boats is something I can do. perhaps a boss at the end of the stage. a message saying which stage you are beginning. a game over screen. lives perhaps. See what I mean? I will make the high score counter work. It isn't right now. But the score works, and increases 1 point per each blue ship you shoot. Also, I made it so you can crash into the trees and die that way as well. So what you're doing is shooting a ship that's moving downwards while avoiding the trees. Sounds simple, but try programming it, especially on the finicky Odyssey2 and then say that. Come to think of it, it's really like Hamburgers En Route To Switzerland, except for it's an overhead view. So that's what I did last night.

Building a better burger:

So I sneaked a look at Oric assembly. It looks way hard. All I could do was print words on the screen. I figured even adding circles and lines is better than this. So I guess I'm just doomed to BASIC for a very, very long time. Nevertheless, I made some improvements to what I had in the title screen department. My title screen now looks like this: I drew a little picture of a hamburger. Or as close to a hamburger as you can get in BASIC HIRES mode. But some sad news, all the items have to be the same color. So the burger will be shooting french fries at onion rings. At least it still plays the little tune I made. At least I will work with LORES mode for the in-game part. I'm thinking something similar to my GoSub game I made for the Oric a million years ago. I can simplify things by having onion rings be the letter O and a fry be the hyphen. Then all I'd need to do is change the letter Q to look like a burger. Or something. My program is only <600 bytes. I am thinking of just giving up altogether since all this looks crappy.