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About this blog

What I'm working on for the various consoles I can program for.

Entries in this blog

Atari 2600

You, too, can be a banana guarder

I changed the lemon back to a banana. And during the past week or so I finished the game. And now it is ready for release. And it will be released. I don't know exactly when, within a few months or so. I think I did a pretty good job putting this in 2k. I have one byte left, so I really had to cram stuff in there, AND also make it work at the same time. I also came back to my Odyssey 1 project I started a year ago. I designed the overlay to part 1, not to mention think it up
Atari 2600

when life hands you lemons...

I don't know why, but I keep changing my 2k Atari 2600 game Fruit Fly Fun. I guess it's an attempt to try making it better and better. I never did like the banana in the bottom. So I changed it to a lemon. And I changed the clouds so they look far away. Since they do, I then decided to get rid of the enemies going behind the clouds part since there was no longer a need for it. Most of the work was attempting to avoid jagged edges on the playfield (clouds, lemon). I don't know why
Atari 2600

2k games for the Atari 2600

When one thinks about 2k games for the Atari 2600, they think of titles like Kaboom, Breakout, and Golf. The first ever Atari 2600 homebrew, Okie Dokie, is 2k. Well, a year ago, I thought I'd take a stab at a better 2k game for the Atari 2600. My first one about a stalk of celery burning vegetarians in an incinerator was just too far out there. It was also my first assembly game. If I was going to make a 2k game, I would need to do it in assembly instead of Batari Basic. I had to stop progr
Atari 2600

It's Bert! (part 3) / Legend of Helga

OK, so someone at AtariAge helped me to make Bert's pupils black. So I guess the question now is: Would you buy this? I don't want to have unsold copies of this game sitting around. I also have been working on Game Boy programming. I have been working on tree collision on a game I just started called "The Legend of Helga." I improved what I had earlier this morning and now it's working just fine. I'm at a good place to stop now, so I'll pause work on this for a few day
Gamegearguy

Gamegearguy in Atari 2600

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Atari 2600

It's Bert! (part 2)

After a flurry of programming this morning and afternoon, I finished the paperclip game. Although I did have to spend a few hours making the picture steady, which took a couple of extra hours. But I think I have everything in it: The pigeons, the paperclips, what else could a program about Bert need? Well, someone to publish a few dozen copies with overlay would be nice. I designed the overlay, all someone has to do is print them. And have the cartridges made. Since as to not profit o
Gamegearguy

Gamegearguy in Atari 2600

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Atari 2600

It's Bert!

So I was looking through my old files on my computer and I saw Bert. I've decided to add another game to Bert's Pigeons. So now it's called Bert's Games. I watched Sesame Street as a kid. But I was too young to have the Sesame Street games for the Atari 2600. Later on in life, I got them all now and a Kid's Controller. And I became smart enough (barely) to attempt to make a Sesame Street game for the Atari 2600. I learned how to program for the Kid's Controller by making a simple Coun
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Gamegearguy in Atari 2600

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Atari 2600

The return of the flies.

I had been working on a game called Fruit Fly Fun for the Atari 2600. I had to give up and call it quits after I couldn't get the scan line and display a steady 262 scanlines. I came back to it briefly yesterday and could not fix it. So then I thought, if I couldn't fix it with assembly, I thought I'd try with Atari 2600 basic. For those who don't know, Atari 2600 basic uses extra code for compiling and displaying stuff, like making the scanline a steady 262, along with score handling and o
Gamegearguy

Gamegearguy in Atari 2600

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Atari 2600

Golf 2600

I didn't get time to work on the Wasp Woman today. That's because I spent a few hours getting really angry at programming a golf game for the 2600. Sometimes when I get angry, my right eye hurts and that's what happened this time. It feels like it's going to explode. Here is an official site with ROM to try: Golf 2600. I'm not going to work on anything else today since my eye began hurting. And I'll probably go to sleep in an hour or so because it's 8 p.m. right now and sleep cures my eyeac
Gamegearguy

Gamegearguy in Atari 2600

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Atari 2600

Fruit Fly Fun update for July 17, 2023

I added a new enemy. There is now a big fly. It's still a fly but it's bigger than the normal fruit fly so it takes two hits to kill. The bigger fly can start appearing once you reach 200 points. I also added in a black and white mode so you can play in black and white. I don't know why I did this but here it is. After some code optimization I found all this space in the 2k code where I could use for different things. Unfortunately, this raised the scanline to 263, but it's a steady 26
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Gamegearguy in Atari 2600

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Atari 2600

Fruit Fly Fun update for July 13, 2023

I started out the day at midnight coding. I tried to go to sleep a few times but I'd just lay there sleepy wishing I was asleep. I finally got asleep at 5:30 a.m. But I thought of something I could try: use "STA WSYNC" a few times. So I woke up at about 5 p.m. and began work anew. And then I had to restart my computer for a stupid update. Half an hour later, I worked for about another couple of hours and I think I finally have a steady picture, at least in the Stella emulator. I added a few
Gamegearguy

Gamegearguy in Atari 2600

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Atari 2600

One bite.

I made it so the fruit fly will eat one bite of the banana and then fly away. I don't know why I enjoy making games with fruit flies in them, but oh well. I also decided to change the swatter to a more purple color because I thought its color was too similar to the hornet's color. I have 52 bytes left if I want this to stay a 2k game (which I do.) I figure I'd test it on my Atari 2600 once I call it finished, which I think I am very close to do. Of course I said it was finished before
Gamegearguy

Gamegearguy in Atari 2600

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Atari 2600

A sun day.

So I got some feedback and suggestions for my Fruit Fly Fun game for the Atari 2600. I worked and worked and went to sleep and woke up and worked some more. I bet all in all I worked for about 8 hours combined yesterday and earlier today on it. I didn't sleep very much since I woke up because I was hot and I couldn't go back to sleep so I figured I might as well work on it. So now here is a screenshot of what I have now. I merged the two bananas into one. This is because the fly now ea
Gamegearguy

Gamegearguy in Atari 2600

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Atari 2600

Fruit Fly Fun

I made a website for my fly swatting game. I'm renaming it "Fruit Fly Fun." Hopefully it's more fun swatting fruit flies than it is guiding them to melons. I want to work on the game, but I think it's finished. So what do I do? In other news, my Lynx came in the mail today. I already had two Lynx games from the last time I owned a Lynx: Shanghai and Zarlor Mercenary. It took a while to figure out that my AC adapter does not work, but the Lynx works. I have ordered a second ac adapter, this
Gamegearguy

Gamegearguy in Atari 2600

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Atari 2600

Behind the clouds

I finally figured out how to make the bugs move behind the clouds. It should have been just a simple change for the CTRLPF register, but I changed it and then the scanline went crazy again. So I had to fix that too. And then I had to even out the clouds and make them uniform. That took about an hour or so. One thing, though, if the flies move behind the clouds, the fly swatter has to as well. There is no way around that. Say, changing the player1 fly swatter to a missile or something. It wo
Gamegearguy

Gamegearguy in Atari 2600

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Atari 2600

flies (part 5)

I worked a little more and I got this: But as you can see, the fly sprite got bigger. Now I'm wondering if I should keep it like this wih the big sprites, or cloudless with the smaller sprites. I tried to put the two close clouds together to make one cloud, but a line was jagged so I kept it like this. What do you think?  
Gamegearguy

Gamegearguy in Atari 2600

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Atari 2600

flies (part 4)

As an experiment, I wondered whether I could put some sort of clouds in this game. I worked and got one. Then I went to sleep. I woke up and discovered for some reason the scanline dipped to 261 when the fly was going towards the bananas at the bottom of the screen. So I fixed that. I even fixed a bug pertaining to the upper left corner cloud which was thicker than the other upper clouds. But I'm not going to keep these square clouds in because they're square. If I were to make them ro
Gamegearguy

Gamegearguy in Atari 2600

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Atari 2600

flies! (part 3)

I thought it was possible given the simplicity of the idea. But it took a few days to do it: I now have a steady 262 scanlines (on Stella). I am going to quit programming for a few days because the heat wave is expected to begin tomorrow. And when it's hot, I call my room "the oven" because it's hot. I don't like being really angry and hot at the same time because it literally hurts. And I'm at a good stopping point now. I don't know what else I can do with the game. I have ~170 bytes
Gamegearguy

Gamegearguy in Atari 2600

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Atari 2600

flies! (part 2)

How hard was this? At one point, I just decided to give up completely. My idea wasn't possible of having the bees move in a straight line. So then I thought, "Well, what if they moved in the same way as the files?" That was seven hours ago. And I worked for 7 hours and now I have this: Most of the seven hours was spent trying to make the scanline at an even 262. When it's all done, I will put it in my Atari 2600 and see how badly it jumps if at all. Bees stay on the screen for a
Gamegearguy

Gamegearguy in Atari 2600

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Atari 2600

Flies!

I am making a new Atari 2600 game. Keeping in the old tradition, I have decided that if I can fit all my plans in, it will be a 2k game. If I can't then I will have to bump the size up to 4k. The original goal is to see if I can make an enjoyable game using just 2k. I was originally going to put this as part of "Going Bananas," but decided that it could stand on its own. Plus, I now have more room to work, whiddling away the 900 or so bytes I have left if I want to make it a 2k game. T
Gamegearguy

Gamegearguy in Atari 2600

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Atari 2600

Going Bananas

So I got back to working on Going Bananas for the Atari 2600. I have an idea for the third and final game. My plan was to attempt to put in three simple games on one 4k Atari 2600 cartridge. The three games have one thing in common. Bananas. So my idea for the third game is you're guarding bananas from evil fruit flies that want to eat your bananas. This is all I have so far. Nothing moves yet and the button does nothing yet. And yet I spent all of last night working on this. So w
Gamegearguy

Gamegearguy in Atari 2600

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Atari 2600

Q version 21

Added a bunch of stuff to Q. Title screen. It just says "Q" because that's the title of the game. On the title screen, if you press "action" with the right controller, you'll control the q with the right controller. If you press "action" with the left controller, you'll control the q with the left controller. Changed the q's interaction with bumping into a tree. If you use the joystick while the q touches the tree's trunk, it won't do anything except play a bump thud. When yo
Gamegearguy

Gamegearguy in Atari 2600

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Atari 2600

Going Bananas part 4

Yesterday and this morning I worked a lot on the game. I decided to work on the menu and put the two games I made in the same binary file. As it turns out, the menu wasn't as big as I thought it would be, so I have about 200 more bytes than I used to. I also have about 1,400 bytes left for the third game, which is a little more than 1k. I used the extra room I got to expand "Road Block" and add and alter stuff I had. I tried to draw a gorilla but I didn't do very well. Perhaps someone
Gamegearguy

Gamegearguy in Atari 2600

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Atari 2600

Going Bananas part 3

I finished the second game. I had to make a few changes to the way the game looks in order to fit everything in. I couldn't fit in the orange I wanted to. But other than that, I think I got everything I wanted in there. It was a little too easy so I had to speed it up a bit. And this is the result. I have no bytes left. Time to move on to the next 1k game. I am tired of having the guy eat bananas. So for the final game I want to have the player shoot oranges and get bananas in a s
Gamegearguy

Gamegearguy in Atari 2600

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Atari 2600

Going Bananas part 2

So I worked and worked and worked some more on this all night. It's a little after 4:30 a.m. as I'm typing this now. After I type this blog entry, I'm going to go to sleep. In fact, I was already trying to sleep when I got an idea about what I could do to make the game better. So I worked in a way to put two sprites in. Now I have this: The brown gorilla/monkey/what have you has a two-frame walking animation. I had to lose the stripes on the road because it was giving me fits. This is
Gamegearguy

Gamegearguy in Atari 2600

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Atari 2600

Going Bananas.

I decided to challenge myself. Could I write a game for the Atari 2600 that used only 1k? So I did. It was during the coding for that game that I got an idea. If I was successful in coding one 1k game, I could make 2 more, add a 1k menu, and have a three-games-in-one cart without bankswitching. This would be similar to the Atari 2600 program "Pigs In Space" (yeah, you've all played that one before...) where there's three games to choose from. Right now I just started an attempt on a second
Gamegearguy

Gamegearguy in Atari 2600

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