The Atari 5200 has been my all-time favorite console for a very long time. However modern times have not been kind to it. The machine itself is fine and I don’t mind the RF hook up it received but the controllers have a poor working ratio when not used often. Which is weird considering most other systems can tolerate months without being used. The Atari 5200 controllers, however, are a double edged sword. If you don’t use them once a week they fail, if you use them too often they can fail.
I have been working on a video game for the Sega Game Gear called Flying Hamburgers. It's like "Hamburgers En Route To Switzerland" but with some differences. I am wanting to make this the best video game I've ever made so I'm working and working and working on it. It is 128 KB (so far). Right now I'm working on level 5.
So I'm trying my best to compose good sounding background songs for each of the levels. I'm trying my best to make good graphics. And I'm trying my best to make the g
So I have been doing a lot of work recently. I picked back up the X Vs. O game I was making for the Odyssey 2 and added a few more things.
I added a win counter to the tic-tac-toe game, I added in the Cedar Games logo splash screen, and now I'm working on a Whack-an-O game. That is what the last picture is. No game play has been added yet. But I will add O's to whack and X's to not whack hopefully soon.
I was really sleepy after getting up at 10p.m. so I went to sleep at around
TECH TIME
Saturday, November 11, 2023
Hi and welcome to Lance’s Laboratory! This is the fourth entry of what will be my personal blog, sharing small slices of life with you from within my Lab. For those who are new to Atari I/O let me introduce myself. My name is Lance Ringquist, I’m from Minnesota, and I am the world's oldest surviving Atari dealer. You may have heard of me before as Video 61 Atari Sales which I have consistently operated since 1983 and I have been at it now for
Today I composed the final two songs I needed and put them in the game. And now it's finished. Stupidman has been completed. I like it when I can finish projects. Unlike that stupid fruit fly game for the Atari 2600 I couldn't finish because the scanline kept quivering. I took another stab at it today and couldn't fix it. So will there be a sequel? I don't know. Perhaps if I can think of another thing for Stupidman to do. I'll have to look back at all those old drawings I did as a kid and see if
I worked on my game a little. I noticed the walls were a little wonky, the collision detection wasn't quite correct if you bumped into them from the left or right. I tried and tried and finally gave up. But I was bored, so an hour later, I tried again. And after an hour or so of work, I think I got it right. Without Stupidman getting caught in them.
As you can see, I also made them look different. I think this looks better than what I had:
What do you think?
I also mad
New comic.
Kevin is a zamboni driver. Bertha is his wife. They live in Cincinnati with their dog named Rex. I drew and colored this comic strip because I was bored. I'll probably make more. In case you don't find it funny, it isn't meant to be. It's just, well, odd. And if you do find it funny, good for you.
I got this idea because I was looking at a pair of scissors and wondering why they're always in pairs and what is a scissor? I tried really hard to make my handwriting legibl
So I worked a little bit on Stupidman this morning. I went to sleep at about 1 p.m. and woke up at around 1 a.m. today. I made some spooky music for walking around the hideout. And I made a map of what I want the hideout layout to look like.
One square represents a screen. I made it so no screen repeats itself. It's like a maze Stupidman has to go through. Even though there's already two smaller mazes Stupidman went through (the museum and the grocery store). The F represents where th
It was about a year ago when I last worked on this. I forgot a lot of stuff about NES programming. I had to relearn most of it. But I got the intro to level 6 partly done.
I thought it would be a shame if I didn't finish this game up since I only had a couple levels left to do, so I decided to pick this back up again. And I don't want to care about how people say if the game is crappy. At least it will be a FINISHED crappy game. So here's a breakdown of the Acts (I wanted to make this
I put in the collision detection. It works just fine. I added some support for 2 more banks. If you press 1 on the title screen it goes to bank 1 and pressing 0 will send it to bank 0. But the game goes crazy if you do because those banks aren't in the game yet. When I make banks 0 and 1 and insert them into the game it should work then. I will change it from pressing 1 to pressing the multiply sign (because it looks like an x) and 0 can stay because it looks like an O.
Since I put in the c
I did. I got rid of the trees in the main game to X Vs. O. The trees should have started small and get bigger. Since they were made of characters, I couldn't. So I took them out.
This should make collision detection a lot easier. I'll begin work on that tomorrow. Since the missiles don't touch the character when one begins firing one, all I have to do is detect which missile actually does touch a character. I'd need extra code to figure out which character it hit, but I don't need to since
I already touched on this in an earlier blog post not that long actually, but I will summarize again really quickly.
Main issue is that in 7800 mode and games, one or both fire buttons might show as being pressed without a controller plugged in. Plug in a controller and everything behaves as it should but ultimate, the console shouldn't read anything actively from the ports without a controller plugged in.
In my previous blog, I mentioned that an out of spec resistor located at R35 was
As stated in another blog, I have a few 7800 sent to me for repairs and eventual upgrades. This 7800 had an interesting problem where as soon as you plugged in the DC power to the console, it would immediately power on and would NOT turn off. While there are a few components in the mix that can cause, this, I've found really only two components well technically 3 that should be looked into as possibilities:
The first component and the one most people already know about, is the power switch
A few 7800s have been sent to the ITC for repairs and eventual upgrades. Before any upgrades are done, I always get the consoles back to fully working stock condition first. This 7800 was working but had very dark, fuzzy, and as such very poor RF output. Now yes, RF output doesn't look that hot on modern displays to begin with, but this was obvious something was wrong. After looking over the board for a bit, it became apparently that someone in the past had replaced or tried to replace the 74LS3
With the minigame completed, I thought I'd move on to the main game. After fiddling around with the grid lines with little success, I remembered I had attempted something similar before and it was better. So I put that code in the game.
After realizing I couldn't have random numbers be generated with this, I thought up of that code I saw for a random number generator. So someone was kind enough to "translate" it into 8048 assembly and I put it in the game and now I can have random numbers!
I'm calling this minigame finished. This took a while to do. It's for the Odyssey² and it's part of a larger project that I need to think up of.
I like this a lot better. Stuff I changed yesterday:
got rid of the Cedar Games grid and replaced it with just text.
changed it so instead of changing the grid color, it now displays who won or if it was a tie.
Stuff I changed today.
made it so the main game will start with a fire press instead of pressing o
So I've finally figured out why I was having so much trouble trying to get four characters in the Pokemon Mini display. As it turns out, I've been told I can't with the method I'm using. So I'll have to stick with three colors, which is okay with me. I got the bird gray instead of black, which was something I wanted to do.
So despite being stuck with three colors, I'm happy with the game's direction so far. What I'm trying to do is a Fast Food clone for the Pokemon Mini. So now that I
I've been attempting to put in a 4-color Pokemon Mini display. A few days ago, I made another minigame to my Virtual Boy minigame collection. I tried unsucessfully to try to change the Super Game Boy palette for the Game Boy. I found my letters I use to make my "26 Squares" puzzles and made another one of those. I went to the post office today to mail my Odyssey games I sold. So I guess I've been busy with all my various projects.
I've been really sleepy lately and I don't know why. I got u
I worked on the first two minigames I had and attempted to make them better. I made both games speed up until it reaches a fatest speed, and then it's about surviving as long as possible.
Next time I work on this, I will put in a new minigame. People are talking about the old Game and Watch game Fire and hearing how people like it, but I don't know if I could be able to program something like that. Also, the people were asking why is the soup marked at 99 cents. I don't know how muc
