Today my wife went back to work, and I stayed home with the little guy. It seemed to go well on all fronts, though there were one point during the day where he was crying his little head off because, for the first time, his mom left him home with me for a significent length of time. (I’m pretty confident that was the cause – I changed him, bathed him, fed him, tried to play with him and get him to calm down, gave him some tummy time, sang to him*, played him some new music, sat him in his bouncy chair, laid him in his crib and every bed in the house, you name it. Inconsolable.) I felt like I’d struck out on my first daddy day because I pretty much had to let him cry that one out. On those occasions, a couple of times a week, where he gets like that – usually at bed time – I wind up ushering any and all cats out of his room like Geordi La Forge evacuating a bunch of non-speaking-but-clearly-panicked extras away from a warp drive that’s about to explode on Star Trek, and closing the door as the last one out. Then I go and turn on the baby monitor and listen to him cry anyway. But today, since he’d resisted any attempts to sleep all day long, I set my alarm to get me up in an hour and then went to take a nap in the next room. There was nothing I could do for him, and I was exhausted.
Of course, his mom came home and he was a perfectly behaved little angel. 😛 (He had actually calmed down before then.)
But overall, it was a good day. I’ve got to do some serious work on his sleeping patterns, but I thought that today was a good start. The only time I got frazzled was with the crying fit, but that was more a case of being worried about him than being upset or exasperated with him. Even when he was waking me up every 20 minutes or so, I’d go and look at him and he’d flash me that little smile (which he has clearly learned to use to his best advantage) as if to say “Yeah, dad, I gotcha. I just blasted my binky and made you come and give it back to me. Ain’t I just a stinker?”
I’m disappointed that I’ve had no bites in the O2 community on helping me with the Binky Blast! game, by the way. I know that, in execution, it looks like an average O2 game, not a trendsetting, flashy G7400+ game that pushes the bounds of what the system can do, so I suppose it’s failed to capture the imagination. Maybe someday I can figure out how to program it myself.
Anyway, back on track: infinite respect to the stay-at-home moms and dads out there. Today was my trial by fire, and I know there’ll be days both better and worse than this ahead. But one look at that little face is more than enough to know it’s worth it. And my reward for today? Evan’s mom came home and cuddled him all night and then went off to snooze with the little guy.
I guess she missed him too.
Did you post your idea at Atari Age? There are a lot of programmers there and, although they won’t make an O2 version of the game, a 2600 version of the game should do in a pinch.
Congrats on the flying solo thing. I don’t think I’ve ever been alone with a kid (except when I myself was a kid) and so I don’t quire know what you went through. Personally, I’d be terrified.
I’m boycotting the homebrew programmers’ forum at AA because all they do is bitch about what a horrible machine the Odyssey2 was, and how horrible all of its games were…and then start talking about how great it would be to port Pick Axe Pete! and Smithereens! to the 2600. OK, guys, whatever. 😆 OK, granted, not everyone there is like that, but enough of them act that way that I’m not going to bother with them.
In that case perhaps there is a Flash forum out there somewhere with eager programmers ready to test their skill or at least eager to find a project to practice their skills upon. I might want to give it a try but I don’t know yet how to do collision detection. If I do figure it out then I’ll let you know.
I mentioned Flash because I think it would be a perfect system for this kind of game. It would also be a perfect prototype for a more difficult platform to program: i.e., the O2.
Actually, I’m surprised no one’s come up with an idea like that – a plug-in-the-ROM Flash emulator for something like the 2600, so people can try out a game online before they plump for a cartridge. As proprietary as everyone is about their ROMs anymore, I’m amazed this hasn’t been done. And to me it seems like the logical successor to “you’ve played it in the arcades, NOW BRING IT HOME!” Except that for folks who never touch anything but an emulator anymore, both ways you’re basically playing the same game on the same platform. *shrug*
Very wily thinking there, Ubik. Even if that wasn’t exactly what you were thinking. 😆
>>Very wily thinking there, Ubik. Even if that wasn’t exactly what you were thinking.
No kidding since I was just talking about programming a game in Flash and not using Flash as an emulator for the 2600. Nevertheless that is a good idea: testing a ROM on the web with little risk the ROM being stolen. Speed issues and artifacting might be the only real problems with using a Flash 2600 emulator. (Well, on second thought, speed might be a major issue. The emulator might only work on powerful PCs).
I think a big reason no one has done it is because Stella is out there and, although it’s a lot harder to program a game for Stella, it’s a lot easier than writing a whole new emulator. There are probably not very many really good Actionscript programmers out there who could write a chip emulator (writing a shmup on Actionscript is a lot easier than, say, a emulator). However, I’ve seen Javascript programs that perform emulation and so porting it to Actionscript shouldn’t be hard.
Since Flash’s Actionscript is a lot like C++, it shouldn’t be hard to write a 2600 emulator. I don’t know if I’m up to writing a 2600 emulator (it’s been a long time since I wrote an emulator and that was for a simple processor) but that would be a cool project. I’ll put it on my list.