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Tron Light Cycles for Colecovision - Work in progress


parkfun101

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I edited the Orb idea above slightly. Instead of preventing ALL bikes from drawing their lines, it is now ALL bikes except the bike touching an orb. This gives you a better feeling when you are collecting orbs knowing that the enemies can't block you in as easily and becomes more of a weapon than just an obstacle. Of course, the enemies can do the same to you as well. ;)

This plays much better than before now that touching the Orbs keeps your line going strong. If 2 players are touching the orbs at the same time, both still can draw their lines, all other bikes lose theirs for a short period of time. It is based off of a timer.

Orb example

 

 

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When this is done are you going to remove Tron from the name so you don't get a nastygram from Disney?

The official name of this game with be "Light Cycle Racing". Toby came up with that at Collectorvision. I don't think it matters too much for the Forum title though.

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The official name of this game with be "Light Cycle Racing". Toby came up with that at Collectorvision. I don't think it matters too much for the Forum title though.

Yes, I thought "Light Cycle Racing" would be nice :) But I'm open to suggestion it looks like its more than just a racing game ;)

 

Also Todd, let me tell you that I'm so happy that I ask you to do this game!! It looks Fantastic. You are doing an amazing work.

 

I can't wait to release this game! By reading all the comments I see I'm not the only one :thumbsup: :thumbsup:

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I've come to like the name "Light Cycle Racing" now...you are having to race in way, race to stay alive! I've really having a good time working on this game. This past weekend, I got great feedback from my tester, Aaron and he loved the Orbs...which he accidentally renamed DISRUPTORS since they disrupt the creation of lines. He also was loving the BONUS stages and threw his arms up in the air when he collected all the disks and got the BONUS. :D

 

Right now I'm doing some testing on a major glitch in the game that only happens at round 50. What happens is you play the stages, when you get to level 50 which is a BONUS stage, you then touch a disk and the game either turns BLACK or just freezes and weird graphics appear or just totally restarts the whole game. :? At one time I had a similar issue with this and it was just a nmi issue that I corrected, but this is much further in the game. As a test I've commented out some code so I can cheat my way to level 50 in 3 minutes by pressing a button to kill all CPU bikes. This gets me there quick for testing and I still get the error. I tried commenting out the code that displays the score to see if that was the issue, it allows me to get to level 51 and then freezes up so I'm not sure what is going on. I feel like it is some sort of data corruption or that I need to put some sort of code that kind of freezes up memory or something. I'm not sure of any C code that frees up memory for Colecovision. If anyone has any ideas, I'd be more than happy to try them out.

Just a note, getting to level 50 in 1 try so far has been impossible for me even though I designed the game, so it is not very likely. However, if a player presses continue they could easily get to level 50, so I don't want the game to break.

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You probably want to open the crtcv.map and see how much RAM you are using.

Also check if your array is going out of bound.
for example, your array is data[240] and you tried to put data into array data [240 or above] then it'll start glitching up since the compiler doesn't warn about that. I got that problem glitch when I was working on Sparrow's Flap when the game tried to add new object into slot 7, but the array is 6. So that might be the issue of the crash.
And sometimes, I forget to add 'const' to my graphic data, which will get me the colecovision cartridge error screen.

Hopefully you'll get figure out the bug.

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You probably want to open the crtcv.map and see how much RAM you are using.

 

Also check if your array is going out of bound.

for example, your array is data[240] and you tried to put data into array data [240 or above] then it'll start glitching up since the compiler doesn't warn about that. I got that problem glitch when I was working on Sparrow's Flap when the game tried to add new object into slot 7, but the array is 6. So that might be the issue of the crash.

And sometimes, I forget to add 'const' to my graphic data, which will get me the colecovision cartridge error screen.

 

Hopefully you'll get figure out the bug.

If I may add something, also be careful about doing calculations that involve both ints and bytes. You may get strange results, especially where using ints and bytes to index arrays in RAM. I had this kind of problem with Jewel Panic recently, where I had two arrays (one of bytes and one of ints) and the byte array was being incorrectly indexed like an int array, so I fixed it by using ints for both arrays.

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Interesting ideas for me try, thanks Kiwi and Pixelboy. A couple of questions:

 

1) I've never opened the crtcv.map file before, how do I know if I've used too much RAM by looking at this file?

 

I'll check for the int and bytes issue as well. I may be doing something like that.

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When this is done are you going to remove Tron from the name so you don't get a nastygram from Disney?

 

 

The official name of this game with be "Light Cycle Racing". Toby came up with that at Collectorvision. I don't think it matters too much for the Forum title though.

 

FYI, I looks like Disney registered the trademark for Light Cycle so you may want to consider some other "creative" titles.

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I like Grid Racer, but some games already have that. Light Grid Racing??? Less work for me to change the title graphics from "Cycle" to "Grid".

Light Grid Racing (or Light Grid Racer) would work, I also like Grid Bike Racer, I'd also hide the original graphics for but show them if the # key is held down at powerup... ;)

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Interesting ideas for me try, thanks Kiwi and Pixelboy. A couple of questions:

 

1) I've never opened the crtcv.map file before, how do I know if I've used too much RAM by looking at this file?

 

I'll check for the int and bytes issue as well. I may be doing something like that.

You can open it in a text editor. It has the list of functions that are located in ROM, which is the byte address where they reside. Then it'll list all variable and their byte address where they are reserved at.

 

It has this table that let you know how much memory are used.

 

example:

Area                                    Addr        Size        Decimal Bytes (Attributes)
--------------------------------        ----        ----        ------- ----- ------------
_DATA                               00007000    00000169 =         361. bytes (REL,CON)

I am using 361 bytes of RAM in this project. This includes the RAM is being use by the BIOS, and function that need them. If you're over 1024 bytes, then you used too much.

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Kiwi and Pixelboy, I think you nailed it on the head. I started fixing some areas where I have bytes being assigned to integers and it has reduced that figure in crtcv.map. Mine is at 27,350 bytes. I think I need to start using some pointers, I don't think I have even one in my game. After fixing some of the issues, I got the game to go from level 50 to level 55 before it broke. Unfortunately, it looks like I have a lot of work to do to resolve this issue completely.

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You can open it in a text editor. It has the list of functions that are located in ROM, which is the byte address where they reside. Then it'll list all variable and their byte address where they are reserved at.

 

It has this table that let you know how much memory are used.

 

example:

Area                                    Addr        Size        Decimal Bytes (Attributes)
--------------------------------        ----        ----        ------- ----- ------------
_DATA                               00007000    00000169 =         361. bytes (REL,CON)

I am using 361 bytes of RAM in this project. This includes the RAM is being use by the BIOS, and function that need them. If you're over 1024 bytes, then you used too much.

Good News, I was looking at the wrong area. For the _DATA area, my Size is only at 449 bytes which is well below 1024bytes. Also good news, as I am converting ints to byte, I've noticed my game allowing me to go further and further into the levels, so I will continue working on this. Thank you guys so much for your help on this. :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :-D

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