atari2600land's Blog - Centering the logo

RSS Bot · January 27, 2019

Who knew that centering the logo would make such a drastic difference? I centered it horizontally and instead of it taking up 43 pixels it only took up 38. So I'm happy about that. What I wasn't happy about though, were some new bugs I had found. They were all pertaining to what speed the game should start at. I thought I had fixed this before, but apparently not. For example, if you start out on level 1 and get 100 points, you go to level 2. If you die at 100 points, the game switches back to starting at level 2 instead of starting at level 1 like it should.

Also, if you start on level 1 and die on level 2, if you go back to the options screen, it has the level displaying at level 2 instead of the picked level 1. So I think i fixed these bugs, but I'll have to keep play-testing to find out if I have squished them permanently. And about the centering thing, I figured it would take up less space, but I was surprised at how much less. And I went through the code and changed the way the sprites are displayed.

A quick glance at the VRAM viewer showed the problem: Too many garbled up tiles showing garbage. So I spent about an hour trying to reduce the amount of garbage tiles in the game. In the end, I did, although the game doesn't look any different. And if you'd like to help with play-testing, just give me a PM and I'll send you the latest version I have at that point. Centering the tiles on the title screen doesn't look much different.

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