SpiceWare's Blog

Mystery photos!

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 00:01:00 +0000

For Thanksgiving I went up to Wisconsin and hung out with my brother and his family. Amongst other things, we made melted snowman cookies with the boys. You can see the rest of the photos here.

I'd brought...

Special Room Objects

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 23:15:00 +0000

Special images are in place. All they do at the moment is animate.

Humanoid shifts with...

National Night Out

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 22:36:00 +0000

Tonight's National Night Out for the Houston area. I thought it'd be fun to demo my games to the neighbors. I've got two 2600s and a 7800 that I'm going to set up in the driveway.

To make it easier for them to play Medieval Mayhem, I used these

to color code the paddles. I took a...

a couple optimizations

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 00:57:00 +0000

The sprite collision routine is called a lot, and I do mean a lot. it's used to check if a robot can safely move (Wall Avoidance in Berzerk and Wall + Robot Avoidance in Frenzy), figure out if a robot collided with something, figure out if the humanoid collided with something, and so on. So my first optimization was to look it over and see what...

bye bye digital audio

Sat, 01 Oct 2011 21:53:00 +0000

hello 2 channel sound

The bug in the ARM chip had me >this close< to cancelling Frantic. Thanks to the help of GroovyBee, I'm now using the bug workaround which is to set the ARM's MAM to Mode 1. That partially disables the ARM's cache,...

frenzy variation playable

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 02:26:00 +0000

Frenzy variation playable
Traditional Tanks in place, they won the votes
Hitting GAME SELECT will bypass the end-of-game score screen
door routines revamped, if you die the room's entry door will reopen
for testing purposes, the room number shows during the room-shift...

6507 all in bank 5

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 19:31:00 +0000

Finished merging 6507 banks 4 & 5 into bank 5. Saved 377 bytes by doing this!
updated robot up/down graphics (no more sliding leg)
revised sprite routines to offset the Right-Robot images by 1 pixel
revised wall avoidance routines to work better with animated sprites
new screen which shows last score for a bit, with...

epiphany

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 18:49:00 +0000

This came to me a couple nights ago as I started to go to sleep. I jumped out of bed and sketched it out so I wouldn't forget.

For Rally S, one of the issues I'd been concerned with was the Atari's chunky scrolling of the play field. I'd originally been planning to make the up/down scrolling chunky as well so...

walk robot walk

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 23:52:00 +0000

Robot animation frames are in place. They have thrown off the wall avoidance routines though, so no need to let me know that the robots are walking into walls more frequently than they should!

Also no need to let me know the Frenzy variation doesn't look right! That's because the Tank...

run humanoid run

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 04:03:00 +0000

espire8's been quite busy churning out the graphics, so I decided it was time to work on how to implement the animation sequences. First up, the humanoid's now using a 4 frame run sequence.

When I initially got it working, I thought the the speed was a bit to fast, so I did another build where each...