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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

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

Hot.

Yesterday it was 116 degrees here. I could have sworn the Weather Channel had 117 on the screen for about an hour or so, but I guess it was a mirage? Anyway It was hot Sunday too. About 112 or so. Both those are above the all-time record of 110. And yet I coded. I am making a new Atari 2600 game. I was influenced from a post on AtariAge. (Influenced is not the word I wanted, but it will work.) It was about one button games. Games that only use one button and no joystick. I thought "I could
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Gamegearguy in Atari 2600

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Atari 2600

Hamburgers for the 2600

I'm jumping around from project to project again. Someone made me remind myself that I tried to make a port of Hamburgers for the Atari 2600. So I decided to resume work on it. I have two levels working now. Level 1 is the Big Rock Candy Mountains and level 2 is the Chocolate Cave.   Right now I can alternate between the two by changing the value in a variable in the code called "Level" to 1 or 2. What's next in work on my game is to make the game start on level 1 and then switch to lev
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Gamegearguy in Atari 2600

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Atari 2600

Flying Hamburger - May 17, 2021

I got some help with the score. I added a lives counter to the left of it. I also made the onion rings move at different speeds. I also made a few other minor changes. Now that there's lives, I added a death to the burger if it touches the onion ring. I've been working on this a lot for a few days, so I'm on a this-game-programming break now.
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Gamegearguy in Atari 2600

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Atari 2600

Flying Hamburger - May 14, 2021

I have been busy this past couple of days on a new Atari 2600 game I'm making called "Flying Hamburger." It's a lot like my NES game only it's on the Atari 2600. Because of that, I had to make some changes. Milkshake now an onion ring. Onion rings cannot shoot. But they will eventually speed up and go in different directions. The backgrounds will be something like this: I like having purple mountains with white tops in my game. Once I get the rest of the game figured out,
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
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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
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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
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Gamegearguy in Atari 2600

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Atari 2600

Count's Castle

So I was making the beginning of Count's Castle for the Atari 2600 (The "lost" Kid's Controller game) when the power went out. I was expecting it to be out for a couple days since we had an ice storm here that toppled trees. It lasted SIX DAYS. For almost a week, all I had to keep myself warm was a gas fireplace. And all I had to entertain myself with was the radio and a Game Boy. Many hours were spent trying to figure out the puzzles in Daedalian Opus and trying to complete the screen in Word Z
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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
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Gamegearguy in Atari 2600

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Atari 2600

Back to nosehairs

Last night I didn't want to go to sleep. So I was laying in bed thinking about various things like I do. I got up and worked on the nosehair game I had made for the Atari 2600 and then gave up on because it wasn't going well. I thought about what I was doing and tried different ways to do what I wanted the game to do. A couple hours later, I had it: A steady picture while playing, and while not playing. It was good. Then I finally fell sleep at about 10:30 pm. Woke up at about 9 am and work
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Gamegearguy in Atari 2600

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Atari 2600

Another Return of Uncle Hairy

I was having trouble with this game getting the cutting just right every single time. An idea came to me as I was laying in bed trying to go to sleep. Make the Cutting variable the same as the PlayerY variable. This meant when PlayerY moved, so did the Cutting variable. And THIS meant setting a permanent variable for all of PlayerY's positions. Thankfully it wasn't as complicated as it sounds. It just meant to put in this code before exiting the Joystick code: [code]         sec     
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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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