RedBeard

OK. I'm about to have a heart attack. *staggers, raises left arm to the sky, right hand clutching chest* "Elizabeth, you hear that, Honey? I'm coming to join you!"

As many of you know, I had troubles getting Visual bB up and going, but was finally able to get it going late yesterday. So, Hooray! Life-long dream accomplished, right? I worked on it more this afternoon and again tonight. Change this color, save, compile, run. Change that x/y position, save, compile, run. You know, very "trial and error", 'cause that's the way I code roll.

Well, I freely admit it wasn't much, but slap a cool picture on the box and I could have sold me some bargain-bin, play-em-once, lousy, market-about-to-crash-from-crap-oversupply cartridges back in the day. You know what I'm talking about.

Well about 10:00 pm (translation: 22:00 hours) or so, something burped and it is all gone! I think I hit the X (Close Window) button, but I'm not too sure about that, even. All I know is that when I reopened VbB, all I had was sample code with "[ TITLE ]" in it and one of my sprites, basically.

I was able to get my screenshots out of the desktop garbage can, but I cannot find the .BAS file, nor a working .BIN of it. You can see by the screenshot, that there are very few ".BAS.BIN" files from tonight. Believe me, I check all the ones that looked promising.

I guess I was wondering if there is another way of getting back some of those files... does VbB keep a ".BAK" file somewhere, for example? Or, maybe a Temp/Working file open like InDesign does, just in case of a crash? I don't know, just some idea? I'm crushed...

:wq!

Hey all. I was wondering if there is a place that I can find information on how certain games were made. For example, Pac Man uses a reflecting playfield, but has more than two sprites. If I recall correctly, multiple ghosts were accomplished by reusing the sprite (hence all the flicker), but how were all of the dots done? Ball? Missile? Playfield trickery?

I'm not good enough at reading code to figure out such details so I was hoping to find a more general description of such things...

I feel awkward posting a giant list of such items, but a few that I have been thinking about lately are:
Enduro - the road and mountains move a lot. Assymetrical playfield? or tricks with player1, missile, ball, etc?
Mario Bros - no baddie falls down to the next level if that lower level already has a baddie on it... Is this because they are reused sprites? And cannot be drawn twice on the same line?
Pitfall - it looks to me like many of the "obstacles" are playfield issues, including the pits and vines and maybe even the alligators? Or the gators are "tripled" sprites, probably?


Obviously, there are tons of others. If there is a "best" place to find such intricate details, please enlighten me. Thanks.

:wq!

Hey, all. I've decided to try again to program a VCS game. I wanted to use Assembly, but I decided that maybe I could use bB for a couple of small projects until I feel more comfortable. Maybe I could even do a complete (but small) project in this four day weekend...

So, I set up Visual Batari Basic as best I could using some of the tutorials around to guide me. (I don't remember exactly which... Fred Quimby, Random Terrain, KIsrael...) Then I found a video which walks through VBB and followed along with it. I even downloaded the code from his website, to be sure that I hadn't mistyped anything. ("OK, RedBeard, you're rambling...")

Long Story Short: the code appears to compile properly, but will not run in the emulator.

When compiled, VBB says,
Compilation completed at 11/25/2011 4:49:58 PM
view output file:///C:/AtariVCS/bB/Projects/GAME1/bin

If I hit the RUN button and choose Stella, I get nothing. If I choose z26, it (z26) appears to launch a default binary with vertical blue lines, a series of rising tones and ends with "Starpath @ 5253"... but not the binary that I just created. (I have double-checked the paths in the prefs tab, too.)

If I navigate to it from Stella, I get "Not a valid ROM file" and it refueses to load.


I would even be willing to use VBB as a first step, then take the .asm file it would create and manually run it through DASM. Would that work? Honestly, I just want to make a couple of small projects, it shouldn't be too difficult... any help is appreciated.

:wq!


UPDATE: I just used the Create New Project Wizard and compiled it. It created a 0kb file. Shouldn't that be 4k no matter what is inside there? When I went to Stella and tried to launch it, I got: "Error creating console (check ROM file)"