No Quarter

8/31/26: Oh yeah, things are coming up Jess-house now! The difficulty has been adjusted, and there's a lives indicator after every lost life, and there's that weird color cycle 2600 games do when left on idle! No Quarter 8K is the preferred version of the game at the moment.

8/30/26: Experimental 8K build with a gentler difficulty slope added. Is it too gentle? You be the judge.

This could probably be added to the 4K version if I do some trimming elsewhere. I'm sure there's some inefficient code that could be removed, scratching back about 100 bytes. Right now, I'm at 84 bytes, which is the danger zone for Batari BASIC... anything less and it drops to -44 bytes and won't compile.

Thing is... I COULD make this 8K. There's really no reason not to, aside from getting an edge in the "small size" category of a meaningless homebrew game contest. The extra ROM space wouldn't get me a titlescreen, but it COULD get that color strobing background I wanted, and maybe some other stuff I couldn't do in 4K.

8/28/26: We have a release candidate! The following changes have been made:

* DEI mode is no more. As much as I like to tweak off the people who wear red hats like a brain slug from Futurama (with similar results), it served no functional purpose, and I'm all about function over form. The hand is now a racially neutral gloved white, also making its accompanying missile white, making it more visible.

* But wait, there's more! The right difficulty switch now regulates the number of acid rain drops that appear. Switch it to easy for one drop, and switch it to hard for two. Easy is not the standard difficulty, and if you play it that way, Byron will know! Don't try to flip the difficulty switch back to hard after a game over... he'll know that too!

* Sound bug squashed when you jump at the hand to finish a level. Byron is also brought down to the ground, so the victory sign animation isn't broken.

There is 84 bytes left, which is effectively Batari BASIC at its ROM limit. Anything more crashes the compilation. Sorry, but this is it for tweaks! I couldn't even add a COLOR CYCLE to the background in the game over screen without going over the limit!

Effectively, we're done here. I'm holding it to the 4K limit, because bankswitching is a pain, and attempts to merge the game with a title screen ballooned it to 16K, due to the way Batari BASIC handles players. It also weirded up some of the colors, and I haven't found a solution for this.

Special thanks to Fred Quimby, the creator of Batari BASIC, which keeps on truckin' after twenty years, Random Terrain, whose Batari BASIC web site covers everything you could ever need to know about the compiler, Mike Saarna (RevEng) for his hearty collection of sound samples, Karl G for assistance in harnessing his sound engine, all the AtariAge folks, and especially ZeroPage Homebrew for playtesting and promotion. You guys help shaped this into the finished product you see today!

I've also included a 16K version with the old code and a title screen. I'm not going through with this one; it quadruples the ROM size and the flicker is pretty intense. Doesn't Byron look cute, though? When you're not having an epileptic seizure from looking at him, I mean.

Get No Quarter while it's hot. I'm dropping a paywall in front of it in a week. Hey, I like money, and you can't tell me I haven't worked for it.

8/26/26: Holy hell, we have a basically finished game in the span of a WEEK.  What wonders and horrors this century hath wrought, I swear.

Anyway, as the file name suggests, we have SOUND! Thanks to Karl G for building the sound engine, then making it more readable for my convenience. Thanks also to RevEng for his sound library, full of neat noises I wouldn't be able to make on my own. Some of the sounds in the game are mine, but it's mostly the ones in events... Byron flailing in mid-air and falling to his death, for instance. Those weren't hard... just tie the audio channel frequency and volume to the variables in the FOR/NEXT statement that's already running. It's a time-saver! And a ROM saver!

Speaking of that, we have 112 bytes left. That's less than half of a modern social media post, so... don't expect too much more than this, unless I use bank switching. (I'd rather not.)

---

Byron's back, but this time, he's not hungering for fruit... now, he wants a diaper full of quarters to take to the local arcade. Problem is, the skies are anything but friendly, dropping a trickle of acid rain that quickly turns into a deluge after he's grabbed a paw-full of coins. Get $1.50 and you'll move on to the next level, with less protection from the elements and gaps in the floors that threaten to send Kid Kodiak to the center of the planet, where he'll be forced to listen to Rick Wakeman concept albums for all eternity. The horror!

This was made with Batari BASIC, and it's my first Batari BASIC game in twenty years. (Ow.) Sure beats the crap out of Solar Plexus, even if there's currently no sound yet. I'm working on it, but for the moment, the game is fully playable, with four levels of acid rain dodgin', hole hoppin' action. If you make it to level four, give yourself a pat on the back and a patch with a bear on it. Steal it from a Cub Scout if necessary.

The tools used to make this game include the bespoke Batari BASIC (gotta love alliteration), Random Terrain's web site covering it in exhaustive detail, and his handy sprite editor. In the interest of full disclosure, he vibe-coded it, like Amy Bienvenu's sound generator which was used in my later ColecoVision and Master System games.  I personally don't use AI in my games, and crafted everything you see here with my own two hands, but just know that this was made in a factory that may contain peanuts. (Or Sam Altman's nuts.)

Itch.IO mods, what's your call on this? (Please respond for once.) The folks at SMSpower seemed to think it was fair game...