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QbBertari DPC+


iesposta

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Gameplay proof of concept works!

"If you are careful and do not change direction mid-jump" you can play Round 1, Round 2, Round 3, and a 4th Round with different start colors.

FEATURES: Level Music, Round Clear Music, Fall Off Game Board Sound Sample.

QbBscroll220131009c.bas.bin

med_gallery_29575_1021_22786.png

Ok. That original binary (at bottom) turned out to be not possible in batari Basic. (The colors can't change. Maybe it will inspire an assembly programmer some day??)

Here is what will work in batari Basic:

I have chosen a full-screen double-line play field.

Binary for double line: QbBscroll220131001a.bas.bin

med_gallery_29575_1021_8207.png

 

 

Original Post:

He blinks! He is 9 pixels wide ?! He only moves down and right!

It really, really flickers!! (Future option may have Parker Bros-like no-flicker shading).

I got frustrated working on DKbB2600, so I mocked this up!!

 

Edits: = many, many, many...

 

Edited by iesposta
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:dunce:

Doh!

This won't work out the way I had hoped.

Here is the problem.

When I turn off playfield pixels in the first PF, and turn them on in the 2nd PF (to change the color), when it loops back to the beginning, the 1st PF wipes out the changes then the 2nd PF resets the 2nd changes.

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It is not pfpixel, pfvline, pfhline, or pfread. They all work now.

I guess I really need pfscroll, which batari was planning to add.

Since I can define 2 PF (and they are in DPC+ RAM), I want to flip between them without losing changes made by pfpixel, pfhline or pfvline, like scrolling 88 lines down, then back to the top.

Ladybug flips 2 playfields and keeps the changes (or else the turnstiles would all reset.)

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I need help with "not changing directions mid-jump" and any bogax optimizations anyone wants to write! :D

 

With playfield scrolling now working, this is what I was trying to accomplish.

 

QbBscroll220130929e.bas

 

post-29575-0-76189200-1380497670_thumb.png

 

QbBscroll220130929e.bin

 

Edit: Updated .bin (older one may jitter on real hardware)

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That looks really good. The shading on Q*bert looks great and I love how he even blinks. The controls are really nice as well.

 

Your first version looked really good also, even with the extra flicker. I'm not sure which I like better.

 

When I first tested, I didn't notice that you could change in mid-jump, but after reading your post, I had to try it out. :evil:

I was seeing just how much I could mess it up before making stella crash. hehe

 

post-9364-0-32864200-1380513318_thumb.png

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Thanks!

Too bad I can't get the higher resolution playfield to do color changing in bB. Parker Brother does mid-line color changing I think.

I can get three "top color" like the Arcade. If I turn on both the blue and the yellow, I get an almost-white.

There are lots of other three-color flicker colors like orange + green = yellow, green + red = orange. The "mix colors" flicker least. They don't mix like paint.

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Just wanted to say that this is looking really good so far. Being really ignoraant of such things I thought i'd ask: When Coily starts to move will Q*Bert start to flicker? Also, will that cause the coloured squares to flicker more?

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Q*Bert will not flicker because that is Player0, all other Players are Player1 like Coily. The more objects horizontally, the more they share Player1 and flicker.

The coloured squares will not flicker any worse then they do now (30 frames per second), they are playfield pixels (32 x 88-double line, or 32 x 176-single line).

 

Rant: Film in theaters was 24 frames per second and although it bothers some people slightly, I never knew anyone who refused to go to the movie theater. It is just a great accomplishment if you can make an enjoyable game without any flicker.

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After playing with it some more, I've decided that I definitely like the flicker playfield best. :) It's really not bad at all. Only the one side and top appear to flicker and it's not distracting. I think it's a better effect than the PB style with thicker lines. Especially since the tops in PB style one flicker anyway and thicker lines make it look more blocky. That first version is nice and smooth. That's just my 2 cents -- not that it matters.

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Thanks iesposta for the info. I've never really understood why some things flicker in games and some things don't. I understood about sharing a horizontal space but now the rest makes (a little!) more sense to me.

 

I've never really minded flicker either. as long as it's constant my brain gets used to it. Ladybug is a good example in my opinion. At first it causes eye strain but after a while my brain settles and it's totally fine. It's when I play a game that 'randomly' flickers at different frequencies that my poor addled brain starts to cry... :)

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I prefer the double line. I like that the screen looks filled up. :)

I agree. I can't see waisting 1/3 of the screen.

i have not figured out changing direction mid-jump, but I added sampled sound.

Press Game Reset to hear it. Wastes 2,434 bytes. Maybe I can get that down to 1/2 a bank?

What else would be a good 2nd sample? The $!&?! sound?

QbBscroll220131001B2sound.bas.bin

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I am calling another bank of "inline Qfall2.asm" upon jumping off pyramid.

I gosub and come back now, but some things are weird.

Little help?

Do I need to save registers and restore them or some such?

The assembly is quite simple.

Qfall2.asm

 

Very f'ed binary. Only run to check out progress and see what happens after calling inline asm

(I have 3 Rounds which I am incrementing after each death to just show them. The first round has has wrong colors due to the ease of which rounds 3 and 4 are set.)

QbBscroll220131004aS.bas.bin

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Instead of blanking the screen and playing a sample, how about playing phonemes with TIA? It's a bit deep pitched and unnatural since the F0 frequency is 60Hz, and F1 and F2 are square waves, but I think it's good enough to convey Q*b's alien language.

 

Press the fire button to hear a random sequence out of 8 phonemes...

 

qbertsound.bas.bin

qbertsound.bas

 

...it may sound a bit better if you randomize the volume level of each phoneme a bit.

 

Or you could always just require AtariVox, and borrow the sequence from my q*bert arcade hack.

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Those sound amazing! Wow, really wow.

I will use all 3, samples, phonemes and AtariVox until space forces me to take something out.

I didn't read of any work done with phonemes. Going from saying some of the Atari sounds "sound like a t or an s" to actually hearing something is huge. Now I want to hear the TIA swear without samples!

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There hasn't really been a whole lot of phoneme systhesis on TIA. xxl put together a demo though only posted the resultant sound file. Since he says it used 100% CPU, I figure it must be using a soft-synth technique, unlike the q*bert phonemes.

 

A bit before his demo was posted I had started an atmega voice synth, but only partially finished it. (All vowel type phonemes and some consonants were coded before I shelved it.) This work gave me insights on how lower-end/older hardware could get the formant frequencies F1 and F2 without cycle-expensive notch filtering calculations.

 

That said, it would take a lot more code to create a decent phoneme set on the 2600, as some phonemes need to have F1 and F2 change over time, some are voiced/breathy/voiced+breathy, there needs to be envelope control, etc.

 

For q*bert speech I just put in data for 8 voiced phonemes that have a static F1 and F2. Good enough for his gibberish!

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