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atari2600land

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Blog Entries posted by atari2600land

  1. atari2600land

    K9

    By atari2600land,

    I hated the way the passwords in Frank the Fruit Fly were kind of "guessable." So I changed it. If you wanted 99% health, the first and third letters were "k". But now it isn't like that. It now varies with each level password, making for a more random look if one were to look at the 99% health codes list. Granted, they're still K's, but they're now in different places, and hey, who is going to begin each level with 99% health, anyway?
     
    I could have gone the route I did for Quest of the Cranberry for the Channel F and its password system, but I figure I would have a hard time trying to code it similar, even since e5frog had to help me with it at that. That and the passwords are really long (10 characters) in that game. So that's what I'm doing.
  2. atari2600land
    Just a heads up. If you want to contact me via e-mail, I won't be able to view it until at least Monday. Right now I'm on the spare computer in the den instead of typing on mine in my room because the fan gave out and it needs to be replaced. Unfortunately, this means not only will I not be able to respond to any e-mails, I also can't work on any of my projects until I get my computer back. I can still go on the internet and stuff, but I'd just prefer not to mess with the settings.
     
    So it will be a (for the most part) computerless weekend. And with no computer, I guess that means I'm free to do other things, like watch TV, or DVDs, or perhaps Netflix. And I guess while I watch TV, I could attempt to come up with new Frank the Fruit Fly ideas.
     
    The computer repair people I had to choose just happen to be particularly busy the past few days (just my luck.) And of course it just had to happen right before the weekend. Sitting near the phone waiting for news is a bit depressing. I had to call them twice because they weren't calling. Let's just say this will be the last time I choose this particular local company, as they seem to be doing well without my business.
     
    Another thing I could do is actually play more video games. And I played my Pokemon Mini for about an hour yesterday and my eyes got all blurry. So yeah, I'm not in a good mood.
     
    EDIT: They actually called me at about 1p.m. and to my surprise said it was fixed. So I went down there and it only cost $40. Honestly didn't know what to expect, but I'm just happy to have it back so soon, until the next time...
  3. atari2600land
    So I wanted to work on Frank the Fruit Fly. But I had no ideas for the next screen. What to do? Then I remembered I needed to make some new music for the new level. So that's what I did. Got my normal 15 hours of sleep. Woke up, and posted a YouTube video of it.
    As you can see in the video I'm working on level 6. I don't know how many levels I'll end up having though. And I sure did think I made a blog entry after Sunday, but it's gone. Either that or the days just zoom by so they're like a blur. Sure didn't feel like that yesterday, though. It slowly meandered by instead of zoomed. I don't know what was different.
     
    And I want to make a mini-game where it's like the Mario Paint fly swatting game that would be accessed via a password. This is becoming more and more likely as I've been working on the game for almost 2 years and I'm only 1/4 of the way done. So I think that if I just started level 6 and level 5 ended at screen 50, that means at my current pace, level 24 will end at screen 200, a nice round number. But that would mean I would need to make 150 more screens and think of 17 more level locales. And ideas for stuff for Frank to do and how to solve them are at a minimum because I can't think of anything.
  4. atari2600land
    So I took my Colecovision out of the garage. I found the games, and eventually the power cord (it was hiding from me), so I plugged it in and tested it. The lines came back. A whole bunch of rubbing alcohol was used near the power switch. Next was the troubling fact that there was no sound. I jiggled the cable going to the TV. The problem was that it wasn't plugged in far enough. But I plugged it in as far as it can go, and I don't want to sit there holding the cable. Eventually I got sound from the machine without doing that. Every time the sound went away, I put in Keystone Kapers and that brought back the sound. How weird is that?
     
    A few days ago, I finally got the fish in my Colecovision "demo" working. I want to make it a complete game. What I have in mind is adding a saw to saw the cods as they appear. I want to add stuff like lobsters that when touched hurt the saw. So it's like the fly-swatting game in Mario Paint. But for now, all I have is a fish (silently) moving in a circle around the screen.

    I want to work on this. I want to like Colecovision programming. But using C in various consoles I've programmed for tends to make me miss features. Like batari Basic. It's great, but it won't let you do certain stuff because it's a BASIC language and not ASM. I'm tired as all get out and I've been choking on foods I don't usually choke on. I've been sleeping for like 15 hours a day.
     
  5. atari2600land
    There will be 2 dozen copies for sale. You'll get a Trimerous cartridge complete with lovely labels and instruction booklet in a lovely box. It's not ready yet. I will make a for sale thread for the game in the Marketplace forum when I am ready. I don't know when I will be ready. It may be a couple weeks or a couple months. Anyway, I want to thank e5frog for making all this possible. This isn't possible without him.
     
    I actually woke up at a sane time (4 a.m.) It took some effort to stay in bed and stay asleep since I went to bed at about 1 p.m. I wanted to live like a normal person and be awake during the day. Took a few hour long nap at about 8 though. Woke up at ten. I was really sleepy and didn't intend to fall asleep. So here it is, noon, and I'm not asleep. Which is good.
     
    I'll get back to work on the Channel F game I'm working on (Quest of the Cranberry) as soon as I get an idea. I spent a lot of time improving what I had. So I think it's all good and bug-free now. What I'm aiming for is a "Frank the Fruit Fly"-type game, only for the Channel F.
  6. atari2600land
    Working on Quest of the Cranberry for the Channel F again. I had to change an important aspect of the game: The way the raindrops fall. Discovered that raindrops falling off screen are bad. So instead of them falling slanted, to make it easier on myself, I made them fall straight down. This way I could control the x position of each raindrop better. I also made the raindrops' x positions random instead of in a pattern. Well, as random as the Channel F (and my programming skills) can get. And since the rain wasn't falling slanted, I changed the shape of the raindrop. My ideal shape was apparently too big, so I had to make it a 5x5 shape instead of 5x6 like I wanted it to. This is the result:

    Which looks more like the bottle Jeannie came out of in "I Dream of Jeannie" than a raindrop, but oh well. I have been sleeping a lot more than I have. I usually sleep for about 14 hours. I want to sleep less, but I can't help it. I figure if I didn't need that extra sleep, I would wake up earlier. I can't imagine sleeping only 8 hours a day. But at this rate, I'm asleep more than I am awake. Right now it's almost midnight.
     
    What was the problem with the raindrop spawning off the screen? Any time you have a sprite off the visible screen on the Channel F, if you reset the screen, it makes the y area where the sprite is a different color (in this case a lighter green than the one shown here). And since I'm changing the screen to white later on (a snowstorm hit suddenly), it meant that part of the screen was not white, but that lighter shade of green. I also added sfx (Channel F beeps and boops that I taught myself how to do. As it turns out, you need to add a "pi Delay" as well.) So i think that it's okay now. So that's what I've been up to (while I was awake, anyway.)
  7. atari2600land
    I decided to work today on Hamburgers En Route To Switzerland 2, my sequel game for the Game Gear. A few nights ago, I had an idea for a level: Why not at a fast-food restaurant?

    I also discovered I needed to make the lowest milkshake level possible a bit lower. One can just go to the bottom and sit there without anything hitting you. Of course, you'll never pass the level and you certainly won't get any points for doing so, But in the interest of making a good game, I'll lower it...once I'm done testing things. I had a little problem I ran into with the vanilla milkshakes that was due to me testing the nuggets, but I think I fixed it. This is in front of a fast-food joint called "Burger Palace." I guess it would be where burger king lives? This is a lot simpler than the other drawings which are based on real pictures, but if I made a picture of a real fast-food joint, then it would be a real existing one. So I drew one.
     
    So in this level, level 5, the last one with strawberry milkshakes (the ones that don't shoot), has an increased chance of running into a vanilla milkshake (the ones that do shoot). In level 6, I'll ditch the strawberry ones, and in level 7, I'll also ditch the chocolate milkshakes (the ones that can but not necessarily will shoot), so it will be all vanilla milkshakes. And the ending, which will differ from the original one. I hope I can keep the boss fights in. I have 37,516 bytes left before I'd need to change the game into a 2MB game (something I don't want and don't know how to do), which means the game so far used 93,556 bytes.
     
    What I need to do is compose level 5 music and boss fight, add in level 6 background, music, and boss fight, add in level 7 background, music, and boss fight, and ending background and music. The thundershirt thing we didn't do because the car's battery died. So tomorrow I'll do nothing special, just hearing loud booms all night and having a scared dog.
  8. atari2600land

    Fireworks

    By atari2600land,

    Oregon is a backwards state. We can't pump our own gas, there's no sales tax, and fireworks that go more than 12 feet in the air or explode are illegal. But if you're near the border of Washington like I am, that doesn't stop fireworks enthusiasts from obtaining illegal ones and they light them off anyway. Creating big huge thunderous booms. Here it is, the night of July 2, and there are people lighting them off. I can hear them. Our poor dog has to suffer because she's scared of them. Tomorrow, mom is going to get one of those Thundershirts you hear about on TV. It's worth a try, since this stuff called "Rescue Remedy" doesn't seem to help any.
     
    I'm still zoning out to the newish Nine Inch Nails music. With an occasional boom of a firework going off. I bet this year is going to be better than normal July 4 since most of the big firework shows in my area are cancelled due to covid-19. When all the fireworks are said and done with, I have decided I am going to continue programming again. This time I am going to focus on Quest of the Cranberry for the Channel F. I keep having dreams where my computer breaks down and doesn't start again. The one I had last night felt so real. I was like "Oh man, now it's happening for real," but I woke up a few hours later to my surprise. I don't know whether all the stuff I use to make games will work on a Mac or not. But when my computer goes to the great computer dump in the sky, I don't know what I'll do. So I'll decide it then.
     
    Why July 6 for programming again? I don't want to upset the dog with my yelling at the stupid computer. The stupid computer has been slower recently. I don't know why. And if something I try won't work (which is usually what happens), I used to get mildly angry. So now I've started thinking "You know what? It's not like any homebrew game publisher is going to show any interest in anything. Well, except for occasional 2600 games, and the Channel F, and the Game Gear stuff. So I'll focus on those and quit wasting my time making Jaguar and Odyssey2 games nobody cares about. That and I really want to get Frank the Fruit Fly for the Pokemon Mini finished since I've worked so hard on it the past couple of years.
     
    I don't know what to do. I get so sleepy and I sleep for 12 hours. And right now, usually that 12 hours is during the DAY. There was a time not too far long ago where I would be sleeping right now (it's Midnight as I write this). But I guess that's what happens when you go to sleep whenever you feel sleepy and wake up when you want to.
  9. atari2600land
    Twelve years ago, Nine Inch Nails released a double album called "Ghosts I-IV". Twelve years ago, I eagerly awaited the next installment. Years pass. I decided to make my own sequel. So today I made two new songs for my sequel. I go to the Nine Inch Nails website just because I wondered what Trent and Atticus were up to. To my surprise, they had finally decided to make two new Ghosts albums. I was all ready to pay and get them, but to my surprise, they were absolutely free. (After a huge downloading process.) So I downloaded the two albums. I am listening right now to Ghosts V. And it's not the one I was making.
     
    Eschewing the past, NIN decided to give the songs actual titles, instead of "36 Ghosts IV", we now have titles like "Letting Go While Holding On." And gone was the apparent 6-minute length limit that was never stated but I somewhat suspected: Two of the songs are 13 minutes long! So anyway, why wasn't this made 11 or 10 years ago? Makes one wonder. Also, it's kind of too bad that there was no actual physical release of the albums. I guess gone are the days where you could go to the local department store and buy a new CD album.
     
    So now I have some recorded songs that I guess I will put to use some other way. I thought of some nifty song titles. I tried really hard not to make silly non sequiturs (i.e. "Sally Buys an Eggplant One Two Fork Three"). This unexpected release is a game changer that happily changed my plans. Fans of the original Ghosts release won't be disappointed by this new effort.
  10. atari2600land
    I improved the 7800 program I had. I added some music and changed the font to resemble my own handwriting more. I still don't know what to do with the program though. It most likely will be a title screen, but what will the game be about? It was a little work drawing 62 letters and numbers in Photoshop and "correcting" them but I think I did a good job of it.

    Am wondering why more games don't use a white title screen like this. If white web sites are the best ones to look at, then why not white title screens? They all tend to have a black background. I guess because they're all about outer space, which is black. Interesting that nobody made a game taking place IN Earth. "Voyage to the Center of the Earth" anyone?
     
    I finally fell asleep a little earlier, at about midnight or so, and had to really force myself out of bed at 2 p.m. It's so hard living when you want to be (and can be) asleep all the time. Perhaps I should do a Rip Van Winkle and sleep for 50 years and see what happens.
     
  11. atari2600land
    Making this in 7800 BASIC should not take TWO HOURS.

    I am going to add fancy title screen music. (Well, as fancy as you can get with TIA.) And then what, I don't know.
    I started out with a fancy actual pineapple. But color #1 did not want to show up. And then I thought "OK, this is ugly. I'd be better off drawing a pineapple." So I did. Color #1 in the palette still wasn't showing up. So I did a work around. I made color 1 insignificant and used the other colors. And I was also having trouble with text. It turned out I had the text only in 2 colors instead of 3. So I fixed that.
    All this working on a screen showing a pineapple made me hungry. I must eat lunch now.
     
  12. atari2600land

    Level 6

    By atari2600land,

    Yesterday I began working on the level intro to level 6 of Frank the Fruit Fly. It was more work than normal. Since there are 32k code divisions, I have been just reentering bits of code used by each level and just changing the labels to say "level_6" instead of "level_5". It seems to be working out good. So I'll continue doing that. While working on this, I hit a milestone. Well, sort of. I wanted to know if anything would change once it reached 128k. So I called one screen in two different labels, thus making the ROM 129k. I figure once I made the proper screen for Frank to start at, it would be 129k anyway. It looked and played great. I even enhanced it so the garbled screen that comes up for a split second doesn't show up. I made it display an all white screen for that time, thus ending the mess.
     

     
    The "khkgcc" you see is that level's password. I made it display regardless of whether you used the password to get there or not. It was just easier. I had trouble making the password screen go to level 6 if you entered that password, but I eventually made it work. The password system works this way: first it checks for level 1. If a letter is out of place, then I skip to checking level 2. And so on. But it does this really fast so you don't notice it. If the code gets past checking level 6, then the password blanks and you're forced to enter another one. (Or you could just exit the password screen and start on level 1.) I even have an idea for the first screen of level 6. I want to take a break from this, so I guess I'll write my idea down. I'll make a uniform idea sheet for the game, so whenever I have an idea, I can just print one and fill it out. That will be interesting.
     
    I went to bed at about 11 p.m. I woke up at 12 p.m. I have been sleeping a whole lot lately. Even when I woke up at noon, I had to force myself up because I was so sleepy even though I had just slept for 13 hours. I am still sleepy here at a quarter after 1 p.m. and feel as if my head hit the pillow, I could sleep the rest of my life away. But I don't want to do that.
  13. atari2600land
    Last time we left Frank the Fruit Fly, he was in a chimney. The only way out was to go up into the top and out the hole. I made a screen for what happens after he does that.

    We discover flies flying up into the sky. They just won't stop. Luckily there is a space between the flies so Frank won't get too harmed by them. I discovered Frank always gets harmed when moving to the right when I have it like this. The flies' speed makes that happen. But if you are a good player at the game, it will only be by 2-3 points. This is the end of level 5 after all. And, fortunately the way I programmed does not allow you to go back in the chimney. If you press down, you'll just fly in front of it.
     
    This is the end of level 5. Next time I will work on this, I'll set up stuff for level 6, which, if level 5 is any clue, won't be much fun. I tried Colecovision programming last night, but I gave up. I was trying to do it in assembly, but since I have no idea what's going on in the code, I think it's best that I not do it any more.
     
    What's also annoying is eBay sellers with a Make offer option and if you attempt to make a reasonable one, they counter with an offer that's only $1 less than what the original price is. $1 doesn't get you anything! Scum like this are stupid. Very stupid. Harslij is a word I just made up that means "an infinite amount of 'very's." Scum like this are harslij stupid.
  14. atari2600land
    So I put in a box in the game. It was working fine. Until I tested it on a real VB. Turns out the box logic was not working correctly at all on a real Virtual Boy and yet it worked fine in emulation. So I took the box out. The item block is still in the game because it works fine, this box was on the ground. I may not work on this anymore. Cause: lack of ideas. I may try to elevate the ground and make a hill, but I doubt I can get it working if I can't even make it so the cranberry stops at a box.
     
    I went to the game store. First time I wore a mask. It was hard to breathe while wearing it. I don't know why people do that. I think it's stupid. How could that actually help anything? Oh well. I bought Mario's Tennis for the VB. It's always nice to have an extra VB cartridge for a homebrew, or, in my case, 4. No Virtual Boy in sight at the store, so I don't know why it was there.
  15. atari2600land

    June 20, 2020

    By atari2600land,

    Well, work was done on the Cranberry VB game. I didn't add very much, just a faster strawberry, a hole, and another item block. But even just those three things took at least an hour to do. I don't know how long each stage should be. I had troubles with the item block moving when it shouldn't. I had trouble with the hole and enemy not appearing. I don't know how I fixed it, but I did. Or at least I think I did. I also don't know how many stages there should be.
     
    I also made the cherries collision detection border better. It is enforced more.
     
    I keep having dreams about my computer dying. And in each of them I keep saying "OK, that's it. I'm getting a Mac." But my HP Pavillion is 4 years old now and still going strong. So should my next computer actually be a Mac, or should I just stick with Windows? I know some video game making software doesn't work on Macs. I've never owned one, but it should be fairly simple to learn how to use, right? Or should I be knocking on wood right now?

  16. atari2600land
    I decided to work on my craig the cranberry game for the Virtual Boy, this after I started a new project (like I didn't have enough already.) But I don't know whether I should continue my Tempest-like shooter or not because of this. These games have been worked on within the last month or so:
    MidSpace (Atari 2600) - although this one's done HERTS2 (Game Gear) Quest of the Cranberry (channel F) Craig the Cranberry (Virtual Boy) Tempest-like shooter (INTV) I can't juggle 4 games at once. So something has to go. Anyway, most of the work in the Craig game today involved those darn cherries. I finally thought of a way to make it work: Have the cherries not move left and right and instead, and like before, Craig has to maneuver through them without getting hit. The cherries will be still. And, of course they can jump. And I redesigned them as well.

    And I redesigned the strawberry and item box as well. So that's what I've been doing lately. That and gaining weight. I don't know why or how, but I suddenly gained a few pounds, but I look the same. I thought that quitting eating ice cream would help, but it hasn't so far. Normally I wouldn't care, but since other people care (like my mom and my doctor) I guess I have to, too. Which sucks because not caring is easier. You can say that about anything.
     
  17. atari2600land
    Well, we finally got the new ac/furnace installed yesterday. Most of my waking hours were spent cooped up in my room with the dog working on the computer and listening to the jazz station on TV. The jazz station has its flaws, for example, I keep noticing songs that seem that they just played the day before. But oh well. They arrived at 8am and after working all day, left at about 5pm. As a result, I don't know how to work the thing. I thought turning it to heat or cold and turning a knob (like the old one) was pretty simple. But oh no. This thing has a computer screen (of course it does.)
     
    I spent a few hours trying to work on a 10-line game for the Atari 800 (Altirra) when I discovered something. One line can only have 2 if statements. If I put in a third, it ignores it. Well, kaboom goes my idea then.
     
    I'd like to work on the Hamburgers game for the Game Gear but haven't found any motivation. I've been working on MidSpace trying to iron out all the bugs before I can call it "finished." It is very difficult to keep it in 2k, but I've managed to do so somehow, even after bug fix after bug fix. I don't know, I just seem tired a lot. I've been sleeping for about 13 hours or more a night. Going to bed at about 7pm and waking up at around 8am or so. I've noticed I tend to think about stuff while I am sleeping. I guess I get really bored just laying there, so instead of dreaming, I think. And then 13 hours later, voila, I'm awake.
  18. atari2600land
    Tomorrow will be horrible here. Because that's the day they're going to install the new air conditioner. They have to go up in the attic and bang on the walls and stuff. The poor dog will be locked up in my room with me most of the day. She likes to bark at people.
     
    So anyway, before that is today. I took some time to work on my MidSpace game to try to make the dome centered. It's a good thing I did that. I discovered a few bugs. I was playing version 30 without my headphones on. I discovered when you died, it didn't make a crashing sound. And if you don't press fire fast enough, a new enemy comes on the screen anyway but it doesn't shoot at you. Both those things have been fixed, as well as the dome now being centered.
     
    At the expense of the rocket being smaller now. I had a horrible time with the missiles because they were crooked sometimes. I think I straightened them out. I've had 16 people download version 31. Not one gave me feedback. I hate it when people don't leave me feedback because it leaves me wondering whether or not I should continue working on the game or not. And if I do decide to continue and not just give up I don't want it to be all for naught.
     
    I also don't like it when people say they're going to PM or e-mail you back later and then they never do.
  19. atari2600land
    So I woke up at about 10 p.m. on Thursday. I thought of something I could try to add to MidSpace. I figured the console switches weren't doing much, so I was going to try to make the b&w/color switch work by changing colors. I spent all day on that game and went to sleep at 7 p.m. on Friday night. I tried a few times from starting from version 28. I finally got it working, but the scanlines jumped. So I had to spend more time trying to figure out how to stop it. At about 6 p.m. I finally had a working version 29. I went to sleep and woke up at about 3 a.m. today (Saturday).
     
    I went through the code and changed a few things. I replaced all the swear words in the code with sound-alikes. Tidied up a little, discovered a bug that when the middle bar was flashing in the b&w version, one of the colors it flashed was a dark brown. So I fixed that. That was about the easiest thing to do this past couple days. I also just now noticed the dome on the rocket is a little off-center. But I can't do anything about it, so it will have to be that way.

     
  20. atari2600land
    I have a collection of long songs. I also have a collection of long MIDIs. Not a very big collection, but a collection nonetheless. Searching for MIDIs on the net of songs longer than 15 minutes can be somewhat of a let down. Most of the songs I'd like have no MIDI to match. So I got to making them. I pick songs on the easiness level, what would be fairly easy to figure out the notes to? I just now finished Still Remains by Fates Warning. I had a terrible time with it. I doubt I got the vocals close to correct in some places.
    So anyway, I thought "What song should I do next?" A few months ago, I recently got out my vinyl copy of "Flying" by UFO and I think I'll do its title track next. I converted my copy to an MP3 so it's all ready to go. The only problem is it's over 25 minutes long. And I've never done anything that long before. But you'd be surprised at the songs some people made into MIDIs: Thick as a Brick (yes, the whole thing), A Passion Play (same here), Karn Evil 9, Tarkus, Lizard, Supper's Ready. I've made a couple of more obscure, yet still long, songs.
    In case you're interested, it's here.
     
  21. atari2600land
    So I was working on Hamburgers 2 when I realized something was up because it wasn't playing the explosion sound after you shot the milkshake and a new one shot an onion ring. Those two sound effects are on different channels so both of them should play. I went to SMS Power and looked at my former posts and realized the value I was putting in c was incorrect. "3" should not be for channel 3, but if the effect was using both channels 2 & 3. Went to sleep at 1:30 a.m.
     
    Woke up at 3 p.m. I had to force myself to get up. I could just sleep all day and all night if I felt like it. But I have programs to write. In my oven room. I got my beta (alpha?) copy of Trimerous in the mail. I played it. It was very fun. And it inspired me. I had previously given up on Frog Crossing because it was acting up on me. But playing Trimerous inspired me to pick up where I left off on programming Craig the Cranberry. It inspired me to make one really huge Adventure type game for the Channel F. So that is what I'm going to do. Later today, I'm going to resume work on Craig the Cranberry. Last time I had touched it was near last Halloween and it was 8k. Well, I want to make it 64k (or whatever the Channel F limit on how big a program can be.)
     
    So how did I do that? I remember I had set up a password system involving the keys at the title screen in a certain sequence given at the beginning of each level. If I'm going to make it as big as I had planned, I might have to make the sequence 5 keys long instead of the current 4 keys. But since I had only gotten so far in programming as the beginning of level 2, I need to figure out a lot more. Craig started out in the forest, and now he's in snow. Next, he'll brave the ocean in level 3. It's too bad though that the Channel F can only make green, red, blue and white though. Really limits the background colors and levels I can think up of. Like what can the next level with a green background (level 4) represent?
     
    I made the 8th and final page of the Trimerous manual today. I cheated. I didn't put very much text on it. I didn't need to. So now the manual is completed. So once I assemble all the games when the boards come from Sweden, THEN I'll print out a manual and make copies of it. And I figure the whole process of all that's needed to be done, I figure it will all be done by Holiday 2020.
  22. atari2600land
    Last time we left Frank the Fruit Fly, he was at the fireplace getting ready to enter the chimney. Spent a long time yesterday with this, but here (finally) is a picture of inside the chimney.

    There is a bigger fly trapped in the chimney. All he does is just fly in a square pattern. This causes Frank to fly in a zig zag pattern so as not to touch the big fly. About half of the time was trying to make Frank stay inside the borders, and the other half was spent making the big fly move the way I wanted it to. I tried all sorts of things, but after none of them worked, I got an idea. Make the fly move in a direction until he hits the border, then make him move in another direction... like Frank does at the title screen. Granted, it had been at least a year and a half since I programmed that title screen, but still, I'm an idiot.
     
    I think there must be something wrong with me. I'm sleepy just about all the time. I spent most of Sunday sleeping. Then I get up at about 10 p.m. Sunday night and go to sleep at about 11 a.m. Monday morning. And the next thing I know it's Tuesday already. So I guess the moral is: if you want time to zoom by, sleep.
  23. atari2600land

    The snowman

    By atari2600land,

    I put a snowman in the game. He throws snowballs at you. At first, nothing happened if you touched the snowman except it being erased. Since I didn't want this to happen, I put in collision detection for the snowman as well as the snowballs he throws at you. Clever sprite reuse: the snowballs are also the strawberry seeds of the strawberry.

    So if you happen to touch the snowman or the snowballs, you'll lose a point off your health. The score acted up and went berzerko, never found the cause but I did fix it. It's not a very important screen, and I am wondering how many different sprites I can have in the game. I want different levels, like with snowmen, and in a water level, I want fish swimming around amidst kelp.
    Still, I am surprised at how much stuff I am able to fit in 8k. I am adding stuff left and right and it's still only 8k. I guess it's a good omen since I want the game to be fairly large.
    But I should probably stop and work on my other projects I have going on, since the past few days I have only been working on this.
  24. atari2600land
    I knew I had some sort of code somewhere that told the computer what to do if a number was higher than 9 in hexadecimal. I found it in my snake game. I tweaked it a little and applied it to the Quest of the Cranberry game. Now the game doesn't accept the code if the health % number is invalid. Just to make sure, I put in a number which was invalid ($7A) and it worked. It rejected the passcode. But I spied something I forgot to do the last time: I forgot to reset the passcode to 0 if it was invalid! So I did that. And it works okay now. If you type in an invalid passcode, and then type in a valid passcode, it reads it correctly and does the game right.
     
    In case you're wondering what that code is, (ha!) it's here:

        ; set the ISAR     lisu    7     lisl    4     ds s     lr a, s ; Decreased timer value is now in Accumulator.     sl 4                ; keep only lower nibble     ci $F0            ; Is the originally lower number an F?     bz  changeFto9        ; It is, change it...     br .subTimerEnd        ; We're done, go to end
    Of course, this was when I was subtracting, so all I had to do is change $F0 to $99 and it worked fine. I also had to get rid of that "ds s" line since that tells it to subtract one from the number I'm checking. And what's more, it didn't take very long to put that code in the game. <20 minutes!
    I put a video on YouTube about the game, showing it. Thus my need to ask about the comment I got in my last status update. You can view level 1 of the game here:
    In case you're wondering, I put that black border around it just to look like it was something being displayed on a TV (and to hide the non-game stuff my screen capture software captured. When you pick a program to capture, it likes to make the part it captures bigger than the window itself for some stupid reason. And I tried to adjust it, but to no avail.)
    Version 30 (which I talked about earlier) is now on the game's website.
     
     
     
  25. atari2600land
    It seems like all my life is is just working on video games, eating, going to the bathroom, and sleeping. I sleep a lot. Anyway, e5frog helped me with the password code for Quest of the Cranberry for the Channel F and I think I have it working correctly now.
    The hard part was converting parts of a variable to different values, separating the variable, and then storing those separate variables into new variables. I must have worked on this for a total of about 12 hours before life finally let me have the correct way.
    The game will accept "weird" numbers, those not able to be put on screen at the beginning of a level, but since they're never on screen, the player won't see them. The player must be fooling around pressing random buttons on the title screen and accidentally stumble across one.
    The latest build is on the website now. The passcode for level 2 is 243124, plus another 4 numbers at the end of that for the health amount you had. So in all, ten buttons to press to continue isn't too bad. The numbers in the passcode correspond to the numbers on the buttons on the console, another thing working in my favor is that there's only 4 numbered buttons and four possible digits in a 2-bit number, which is 1/4 the size of an 8-bit number, the 0-255 value we've come to know and love.
    Now my brain hurts and is ready to explode after all the thinking I've been doing these past couple of days.
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