Since, without some Assembly wizardry that the standard batari basic kernel does not allow for, the Atari 2600 only has two–count ’em, two–sprites available, I’ve been spending the past few hours fighting to find a way to fake up to three with flickering, but in the end, I gave up because of all the trouble with collisions on a flickered sprite. It’s just a mess.

So I’m rolling back to the last fully working version (as seen in the video in my previous post) and I’ll go at this again, but this time with the intent to only have ONE possible sprite on screen at once, either an enemy (an owl) or a power-up (an insect).

If I hadn’t spent so much time trying to get two sprites on screen at once, I’d probably be done with the game by now. Ah, well–still plenty of time left!