Little Endian

The 6502 is little-endian. If I just remembered that, I'd save myself a lot of trouble and time. That is all.

Well that changed quickly

Once I finally got on here to complain about how I was getting discouraged by a lack of visible progress, suddenly things start working! Today I managed to get an hour or so to work on the game, and only about 15 minutes in, I got the last bugs sorted out that were preventing the items from actually appearing on the screen.

For the zillionth time, I fired up the emulator, killed the green slime in this room, expecting nothing to show up (as usual) and lo and behold, the key appeared! Once it showed up, it was pretty easy work to set it up so collisions made it disappear and play a nice musical note to make you feel happy.

Now that I look at it, it looks like somebody took the yellow key from Adventure,
turned it sideways, and painted it lime green. I'm pretty sure it's not supposed to be green. Oops.

I still have to make it properly add to your inventory, but at least I feel like I'm making progress. So ignore all those things I said in my previous post!

Stuck on Items

It's been slow going the last month. Sick kids, more sick kids, a messed up tooth that hurt too bad to concentrate, I've been way too tired to really get much done.

I've added a room or two onto Robo-Ninja, but haven't done much else it with.

On Atari Anguna, I've been stuck on trying to get item drops working. When the enemies all die, an item needs to (maybe) spawn, which means reusing all the enemy state & graphic variables to display and track an item instead of an enemy.

Should be pretty easy. But ugh, it's going slow. Just a lot of code to update all over the place, and somehow my brain isn't able to track it all right now. I sit down to code and I spend 30 minutes and finish about 10 lines of code. (And in 6502 assembly, 10 lines will get about NOTHING done).

Part of the trouble is that it's not very to make incremental visible progress. I need to get a huge chunk of the item code in place before I can really SEE any of it in action, so I don't get that positive feedback of seeing it on the screen.

I'm sure I'll get it figured out eventually. But dang, it's going slow.