Grocer Games

Learning PXE playfield by converting my DPC+ Bag Boy playfield. I am loving the prospects of the offsets making it easier to do things like change different segments of the screen or even utilize the playfield essentially as a large Sprite!

My first Bag Boy project was a compromise. The original concept originated about 25 years ago as a possible C64, Apple Basic, or Q Basic game but I could not quite figure out some ideas and moved on to other projects.

Fast forward almost 20 years and I learned of batari Basic and tried again but thought I wouldn’t be able to accomplish my goals so I settled for making a kind of Frogger-style game. I got pretty far, having multiple cars, power-ups, and then levels. I still was learning and put the project on pause to learn other concepts. Several years later here I am returning to Bag Boy. Having the carts attracted to the cars where the cars act as little gravity wells was the original plan. I am confident PXE might allow for the multiple cars and shopping carts my original plan called for.

Grocer Games Bag Boy - GRAVITY CHECK 2

Been stuck on some parts of Room Raiders and part of me thinks the issues I had experienced (same as with Beyond Parsec) had more to do with how it was compiling. In both I use a similar method of alternating frames for various purposes but I had noticed in Room Raiders there was one spot where I changed something but it had a completely unrelated adverse effect.

So while I use SuperChip in Room Raiders, I was trying to learn a bit of PXE so I can test converting them to that kernel and see if it improves. A couple benefits would be tha I would not have to flicker the sprites.

After 2 months of computer issues and file recovery I am finally back on track. I fixed some issues with Room Raiders bringing it close to being ready for a demo.

Noticed some weird things when I was working on Room Raiders as this game was designed with flickering in mind (much like my Beyond Parsec port) but I noticed a weird thing when I added a line of code where the player would shift positions despite the added code have nothing to do with it.

I had wondered if this was an issue due to compiling or just how the code is structured and I am missing something obvious. But a positive of this discovery is that this could possibly explain the skipping asteroids in Beyond Parsec, as I recall trying to clean up the code early on and it was shortly after that I started to notice the skipping asteroids.

If I can figure this out I might actually be able to fix Beyond Parsec to completion!

Weird Issues When Alternating Frames I was curious. I had been playing around with flickering sprites for a bit where on Frame A I pick one sprite and on Frame B I pick another. I had noticed that if the code in each section of alternating code are not close then weird stuff may happen. For instance, I have one section of code where...

Found one of my old disks that had the origin of Bag Boy dated 2002.

After saving my laptop, it looks like my game Lake Eola is gone. I’m there is a chance they accidentally got deleted years ago when I was making backups. Luckily it isn’t too hard to make and a shame because I really liked how it looked but with PXE, I think this could be one to revisit in the future…

My Laptop had a kind of failure. It is an older Windows 7 laptop where I had some older game projects saved. I had to use slo mo video to capture the blue screen displaying the error message. It would flash so quickly and then I’d get the message that Windows couldn’t start.

I tried different restore points but it started deleting them stating there was an error that occurred in the restoration process.

I tried repairing the files and all attempts failed.

My last attempt was I found an old Windows Vista disk and used that to boot up and install. My saved files migrated to a windows.old folder and a couple days of fiddling with my laptop and I rescued my files to a SSD.

Most of the files I had were already backed up but when I made my last backup for some reason several of the folders were empty. Some didn’t copy at all. Some of these games I wanted to attempt converting into PXE games and see if that would get them over the hump to completion.

As a side note, I forgot what Vista looked like and it feels so weird.

Room Raiders is almost to a point to where a full game can be played. Just finishing up the boss generation and then cycle into a new dungeon.

My view for the next couple weeks!