Pineapple: a 7800BASIC exercise.

[+ZeroPage Homebrew]

I'm liking the updates. ?

 

- James

 

[+atari2600land]

Thanks. Here's another one. I added some optional ingame music. Left difficulty switch A position - music on, B - music off. This only works on the title screen.

pineapple_2020_12_11_v3.zip

[+atari2600land]

For some reason I decided to come back to this game after over 2 years later. I thought to myself "what can make this game better and less repetetive?" Then it hit me: a BOSS STAGE! In the boss stage, a big banana bounces around the screen for one minute, first starting slowly, then speeding up after 20 seconds, and then speeding up even more after 20 more seconds. If you "defeat" the boss, the bananas in the next stage will be faster (until you hit the limit on how fast they can be, which I think is about 3 boss stages.) I have to think up of a new song for the boss stage, though, so this isn't completed yet.

For some reason my 7800 basic setup wasn't working, so I had to move everything into a folder in my C drive and start over again. How odd...

 

pineapple.bas.bin

[+atari2600land]

I attempted to make the main in-game song better and made a new boss song along with some other minor tweaks.

pineapple_2022_04_19.zip

[gambler172]

Hi Chris

 

Glad to see you back in the 7800 Forum.

How about a new game?

[+atari2600land]

I have an idea for a game once I call Pineapple finished. It is called "W". That's all I will say at this point. I will experiment with the idea when I finish Pineapple.

[+atari2600land]

Made a couple changes.

• screen no longer blinks when changing from boss screen to ingame screen.
• redesigned the boss banana.

Unless someone finds a bug or I (or someone else) thinks of something else to add, I think I'm going to call this completed.

I'd like some feedback on the game. How am I doing? I see 6 people downloaded the last version, but I haven't gotten any feedback about this.

pineapple.bas.bin

[+Muddyfunster]

can you add the .a78 file for download please?

[+atari2600land]

OK, here.

pineapple.bas.a78

[Trebor]

Play it under JS7800

 

1 hour ago, atari2600land said:

How am I doing? I see 6 people downloaded the last version, but I haven't gotten any feedback about this.

It makes for a quick and fun pick-up, mini-game. 

 

Two item that may be worth reviewing are the similar luminance of the background and sprites which could make it hard to distinguish (especially when accounting for NTSC artifacts such as color blending/bleeding), and the boss banana appearing disproportional in its width as opposed to the length.  It almost seems like a giant yellow cotton swap, instead of a banana, is the boss.

 

Respecting the aforementioned color luminance, currently:

Pink/Purple background = $6A

&

Banana Peal = $1A

Pineapple Sprite: (Main) = $2B / Pineapple (Spots) = $39

 

The sprites' luminance are within the same range as the dominant background luminance.

 

Perhaps taking out the Pink/Purple background, leaving the red and gray/brick and mortar speckles on a black background instead.

[+Karl G]

1 hour ago, atari2600land said:

Unless someone finds a bug or I (or someone else) thinks of something else to add, I think I'm going to call this completed.

I'd like some feedback on the game. How am I doing? I see 6 people downloaded the last version, but I haven't gotten any feedback about this.

 

It's fun! I like it more than your previous versions. The game speed seems about right, and the sounds/music are good. I also agree with Trebor's feedback:

 

22 minutes ago, Trebor said:

Two item that may be worth reviewing are the similar luminance of the background and sprites which could make it hard to distinguish (especially when accounting for NTSC artifacts such as color blending), and the boss banana appearing disproportional in its width as opposed to the length.  It almost seems like a giant yellow cotton swap, instead of a banana, is the boss.

A visibility solution other than color tweaks would be to make one of your 3 palette colors (not including transparent) for your sprites be black, and then outline the sprites with black to make them pop against your colorful background.

 

I agree with Trebor about the boss banana not looking quite right, and I'm wondering if you are purposely limiting yourself to a height of 8 or pixels to match your zoneheight? There is no reason that you have to do that. 7800basic will handle taller sprites correctly "under the hood" to display parts of them in different zones as needed without you having to do anything special.

[+atari2600land]

I addressed those two issues. I darkened the pink bg and made it more purple, made the papaya brighter green, and redesigned the banana. It is now 32 x 16 instead of 32 x 8. Both .a78 and .bin versions are in the .zip file I attached, and I think I will keep doing it that way since apparently people want both versions of it. What do you think?

pineapple_2022_04_20_2.zip

[+Karl G]

1 hour ago, atari2600land said:

I addressed those two issues. I darkened the pink bg and made it more purple, made the papaya brighter green, and redesigned the banana. It is now 32 x 16 instead of 32 x 8. Both .a78 and .bin versions are in the .zip file I attached, and I think I will keep doing it that way since apparently people want both versions of it. What do you think?

pineapple_2022_04_20_2.zip 12.58 kB · 3 downloads

Looks much better, I think. And yes, providing both the .bin and .a78 files is a good idea. Most people will want the latter, but I think there is one older multicart that can only do .bin files, if I remember correctly.

 

Edit: It looks like you are only using two colors on the boss banana. Maybe you could use a darker brown as a 3rd color to put some spots on the peel to make it pop more? Just a thought.

Edited April 20, 2022 by Karl G

[Trebor]

27 minutes ago, Karl G said:

Looks much better, I think.

 

Play it under JS7800.

[+atari2600land]

You mean like this?

pineapple_2002_04_20_3.zip

[+littaum]

Pretty neat!  I thought the "Dodge It" game for the Channel F was one of the better ones for that system, and the sprite handling capabilities of the 7800 make it an ideal port.  Any chance of adding more bananas to dodge, at least in later stages?

[+atari2600land]

I don't know how many sprites on screen I can have at the same time. Right now it's 8: 6 bananas, the pineapple, and the papaya.

[+Pat Brady]

1 hour ago, atari2600land said:

I addressed those two issues. I darkened the pink bg and made it more purple, made the papaya brighter green, and redesigned the banana. It is now 32 x 16 instead of 32 x 8. Both .a78 and .bin versions are in the .zip file I attached, and I think I will keep doing it that way since apparently people want both versions of it. What do you think?

 

Nice game.

 

The darker background is a big improvement. It makes the sprites pop as opposed to blending in. If you want to experiment further, try $31 or $32 (same hue as the bricks but darker) instead of the purple.

 

The boss is also a good addition. The first phase is much easier than what came immediately before. Not sure if that's intentional.

 

I believe the raw .bin file is needed for Cuttle Cart 2 and Mateos carts (neither of which I have). AFAIK everything else takes .a78.

[+Karl G]

38 minutes ago, atari2600land said:

You mean like this?

Yeah; something like that. Maybe even a little darker than that with a few spots on the peeled-back bits, too. But that's just my personal opinion.

[+atari2600land]

Upon compiling it says I can have 31 objects per zone? That can't be right. On the third level, I managed to put in 8 bananas, 2 pineapples, and a papaya.

I added a few more levels. When you reach the fastest banana speed, it keeps being that way until you die.

 

I'm pretty pineappled out today. Any work to follow won't be today.

pineapple_2022_04_20_4.zip

[+Karl G]

5 minutes ago, atari2600land said:

Upon compiling it says I can have 31 objects per zone? That can't be right. On the third level, I managed to put in 8 bananas, 2 pineapples, and a papaya.

I think that refers to how much RAM 7800BASIC is allocating to keep track of all of those objects. The actual number that can be displayed depends on a number of factors like the graphics mode, the width of the sprites, etc. You would need to find out through trial and error, but I bet even with your tiled background you could probably get a few more in there without any issues. You may not need to though if you are smart about object positioning in a way that never has them all clustered in the same zone at once.

 

Do you have a way to test on hardware yourself at the moment? If not, I or another person would likely be willing to run a test if you want to e.g. produce a test ROM that lines up a bunch of sprites in a row to see how many display successfully.

[+atari2600land]

No, I don't have any way to test it on real hardware. I wish I did, but the Concerto cart seems to be "out of stock" at the moment. I'm testing with A7800 and it seems to be running fine.

[+atari2600land]

If someone would like to test the game on real 7800, that would be great, though.

[Silver Back]

@atari2600land I've been playing the latest a78 file on concerto and it seems to play fine. I think there's definitely something cool here!  I'm gonna continue messing with it, I'll let you know if I encounter any issues but it plays fine on my 7800 with the concerto so far. 

[+atari2600land]

Nice! Thanks for letting me know. The two player option has an extra sprite in it, so be sure to test it as well. And you can turn the music off by having the left difficulty switch turned to A on the title screen.