mindlord Posted January 5, 2017 Share Posted January 5, 2017 All the art assets are in ROM, I just need to squeeze in some code to make a game of it. I have about 1.5k left to play with and there's some bytes left floating around in the character set that I can squeeze out. https://youtu.be/AB0aax0xGUc graxx.bmp 14 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Schmitzi Posted January 5, 2017 Share Posted January 5, 2017 great :thumbsup: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+arcadeshopper Posted January 6, 2017 Share Posted January 6, 2017 Very nice! Sent from my LG-H830 using Tapatalk Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Lee Stewart Posted January 6, 2017 Share Posted January 6, 2017 All the art assets are in ROM, I just need to squeeze in some code to make a game of it. I have about 1.5k left to play with and there's some bytes left floating around in the character set that I can squeeze out. ... Have you compressed it to get as much space as possible for programming. If not @Tursi has a compression/decompression routine that could help. If you need it, I will need to look for the thread than contains it. Otherwise, perhaps, @Tursi will chime in. ...lee Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mindlord Posted January 6, 2017 Author Share Posted January 6, 2017 Have you compressed it to get as much space as possible for programming. I have not, I wasn't sure if I could pull that off and keep it running on an unexpanded TI. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Lee Stewart Posted January 6, 2017 Share Posted January 6, 2017 I have not, I wasn't sure if I could pull that off and keep it running on an unexpanded TI. It should be possible (but likely more difficult) with judicious use of scratchpad RAM. ...lee Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Iwantgames:) Posted January 6, 2017 Share Posted January 6, 2017 Looks sweet! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tursi Posted January 6, 2017 Share Posted January 6, 2017 I did a few FR99 carts using a standalone version of my VGM compression tools. While it wasn't meant for general purpose compression, it does "ok", and decompression is both fairly fast and does not require additional buffers. It DOES require a fair bit of RAM, but you could backup scratchpad and store its work data there during the decompression, and then restore scratchpad when you're done. If you want that, I can post it, not sure if I ever did. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fabrice montupet Posted January 6, 2017 Share Posted January 6, 2017 It remembers ALTTP Zelda artwork. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mindlord Posted January 6, 2017 Author Share Posted January 6, 2017 It remembers ALTTP Zelda artwork. Strong influence there for sure. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mindlord Posted January 14, 2017 Author Share Posted January 14, 2017 (edited) Here's some progress on Graxx. Still have a little bit of ROM left, and I've come up with some clever tricks to swap "rooms" of data with the VDP to recover some RAM. I'm not really happy with how the torch makes the darkened rooms flicker, but there's room to improve that. I should stress that the framerate of the video really makes the smoothness of the animations suffer. I'm working on a better capture method. https://youtu.be/dFX4kyevtf8 Edited January 14, 2017 by mindlord 6 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Vorticon Posted January 14, 2017 Share Posted January 14, 2017 I love the animation of the objects based on the character orientation. Very smooth and original. Great progress indeed. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sometimes99er Posted January 15, 2017 Share Posted January 15, 2017 Very nice. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shift838 Posted January 30, 2017 Share Posted January 30, 2017 sweet! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Opry99er Posted February 19, 2017 Share Posted February 19, 2017 Whoa!!! Progress report? This looks great!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mindlord Posted February 19, 2017 Author Share Posted February 19, 2017 Whoa!!! Progress report? This looks great!! Yeah... It looked like I dropped off the radar there for a minute didn't it? I am currently working on saving and restoring room data to VDP RAM, which mostly consistes of enemy data. I've also been working out enemy AI. Basically the toughest part of programming the game. Collision detection, and making sure things aren't "Out of Bounds" are working really well. I want to make a better maze with sub-areas. I've already decided on the win condition for the game. I've also been working on a printable PDF booklet with art to go along with it that contains back-story and gameplay instructions. I'm starting to run out of ROM space and it's time to start making sacrifices to make it all fit. If I just could figure out how to put all the graphic and map data in one 8K bank and load it into VDP and then jump to the next 8K bank that contains the logic I'd probably be golden. Alas, this voodoo is too much for me to handle right now. I'm studying to be a Linux System Administrator and can't spare the brain cells to learn anything new right now. Enemy types may have to be dialed back, as well as item types. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Opry99er Posted February 20, 2017 Share Posted February 20, 2017 There are some cart banking wizards on here... I am sure they would be happy to lend a hand with that difficulty. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
matthew180 Posted February 23, 2017 Share Posted February 23, 2017 You never stated design goals, so it is hard to offer suggestions. Some thoughts and suggestions as I read the thread: * Why the limitation of running on an unexpanded console? A base system of 32K and single disk storage is not an unreasonable expectation. And if that is unreasonable, might as well throw out all the mega-carts with tons of memory people are developing. Why develop those if everyone making new software targets an unexpanded console? I think it is more unusual now for people to *just* have a console, and easy enough to get some expansion. * Why are you moving the entire 8K around, into VRAM, etc? If you are willing to use bank-switching and have multiple banks, just swap to the bank with map data and load the room the player is entering. Also, IIRC most of the bank-switch carts support more than two banks. * I don't know how you are storing map data, but it seems like your passages and walls are always at least two tiles wide. So work on 16x12 grid instead of 32x24. That will effectively cut your map data size in half. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Asmusr Posted February 23, 2017 Share Posted February 23, 2017 That will effectively cut your map data size in half. Or in quarters? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mindlord Posted February 23, 2017 Author Share Posted February 23, 2017 (edited) * Why the limitation of running on an unexpanded console? A base system of 32K and single disk storage is not an unreasonable expectation. And if that is unreasonable, might as well throw out all the mega-carts with tons of memory people are developing. Why develop those if everyone making new software targets an unexpanded console? I think it is more unusual now for people to *just* have a console, and easy enough to get some expansion. Somewhere, someone said - and I'm paraphrasing - "Sure you can compile something using GCC for an unexpanded TI, but you'll won't be able to do anything really interesting." I took that as a challenge. Also, call me unusual... but all I have is the FlashROM99, and only that because my brother got it for me as a gift. I'm not a person of means, and I push what I have to it's limits. But the hard answer is, why not make a game that runs on an unexpanded TI? It's fun, it's a challenge - to squeeze every useful byte out of the hardware. Amazingly, I still have quite a few bytes of RAM left, so I can still easily avoid a 32K RAM requirement. * Why are you moving the entire 8K around, into VRAM, etc? If you are willing to use bank-switching and have multiple banks, just swap to the bank with map data and load the room the player is entering. Also, IIRC most of the bank-switch carts support more than two banks. Right now, I'm not even doing that. 8K ROM. No bank switch... If I could bank switch, all I would need if for is to bounce up, move all the game's characters, maps, and monster data into the VDP for easy access, and bounce back to the executable code. That would free up enough of the lower 8K rom for me to code the rest of the game unhindered, and I wouldn't have to cut any features - maybe even add a few. * I don't know how you are storing map data, but it seems like your passages and walls are always at least two tiles wide. So work on 16x12 grid instead of 32x24. That will effectively cut your map data size in half. Each complete room is stored as a 8 by 6 bitmap, with 12 extra bits for room feature flags. Each room is stored as one 64bit long long INT. Which is conveniently the same size as a normal TI Text Character that I can edit using available tools like Magellan. The rooms are rendered on the fly as the player moves from room to room in a very fast single pass using a super tight edge detection algorithm, and 3x3 character tiles. My current map is 7 rooms wide by 4 rooms high A total of 224 Bytes of ROM. If I could bank switch and store more 64bit long long INTs in the second bank I could have an extremely large map, or at least as big as Legend of Zelda's overworld + Dungeons. Edited February 23, 2017 by mindlord 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Vorticon Posted February 24, 2017 Share Posted February 24, 2017 I get what you're trying to do. Looking forward to the finished product Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shift838 Posted February 27, 2017 Share Posted February 27, 2017 the movements of the objects look very smooth. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mindlord Posted May 13, 2017 Author Share Posted May 13, 2017 lub-dub-lub-dub... Yep... This project still has a heartbeat. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mindlord Posted July 5, 2017 Author Share Posted July 5, 2017 After breaking the 8K ROM barrier, there's been some significant improvements to the map features. Stylistically it needs some work, but technologically I'm pretty happy with the direction things are going. The map is now 2K instead of 512K, but it is almost 4 times larger in scale, and have multiple tile types. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsbV9_Sqiq0&feature=youtu.be 6 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PeteE Posted July 5, 2017 Share Posted July 5, 2017 Neat! Looks great. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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