Any examples on how to generate a first person view like Tunnel Runner?

[wallaby]

Or Escape from the Mind Bender (or is it Mender?)

 

I think with the power of DPC+ it should be possible to get that cool little movement animation that Escape has but not the smooth lines due to not being able to change the missile and ball graphics. That said, the playfield can be a higher resolution, so maybe you don't even need them?

 

[+Random Terrain]

I saw something in some forum around here and it was a flickery mess, but he probably wasn't using DPC+. You could experiment and try making a little demo to see how it looks. If it's easy on the eyes, I could adapt it for an example program and you'd get your AA username on the bB page.

[wallaby]

I'll give it a shot. Shouldn't flicker just using the playfield. I've always wanted to try making a game like that.

[STGraves]

I tried some time ago to create that illusion using the playfield method, but was not fully able to, I thought on using multiple playdield drawings and to trigger them whenever you moved either forward or backwards, I did finished the playdields but was not able to trigger the change, I'm anxious to see the cool idea that you have ok action, good luck with your game man

[+Gemintronic]

 

I did this using the extra playfield resolution of SARA RAM. Maybe you can do better using pfheights to shorten the far away walls and heighten the close ones.

[STGraves]

Now that I remember I saw a video on YouTube about an fps game for the Atari 2600 which was a wolfenstein "port" which he never finished or even made the code available, that's where I got the idea and tried to create it but failed

[+Gemintronic]

The best you could do is "pre-rended" playfield animations to simulate 3D. Could probably pull something off akin to Xybots. Use each of the 4k banks to have one animation type loaded up. Kind of like the dungeons in Phantasy Star for the SMS.

[Papa]

Uh..I do this in Run Out if you remove the car (it feels like your running at an incredible rate, Harry!)

Edited September 30, 2016 by Papa

[+SpiceWare]

Or Escape from the Mind Bender (or is it Mender?)

 

 

 

Are you familiar with C? Just think of what could be done with a 128x200 bitmap display.

 

 

 

We're at Release Candidate 1 for BUS. I'm still updating Stella to support it - most of that's already done:

 

 

I just need to finish the 3-voice audio support, which I'm hoping to wrap up this weekend. Audio support is like DPC+, with the added ability to set the waveform buffer size:

• 20 = 4096 bytes
• 21 = 2048 bytes
• 22 = 1024 bytes
• 23 = 512 bytes
• 24 = 256 bytes
• 25 = 128 bytes
• 26 = 64 bytes
• 27 = 32 bytes DEFAULT VALUE
• 28 = 16 bytes
• 29 = 8 bytes
• 30 = 4 bytes
• 31 = 2 bytes
• 32 = 1 byte

Which will make it easier to do things like play back speech samples. Once that's done we'll be working up some demos to test out the BUS Driver, as well as Stella's emulation of it. After that we'll be releasing BUS for general consumption and I'll work up a tutorial on how to use it.

If you're not familiar with C it's possible somebody will come up with a bB BUS Kernel option like they did the bB DPC+ Kernel; though BUS will be best utilized with C as a lot of the features, such as the 3-voice audio, are no longer accessible to 6507 code.

[Papa]

..and you could do an FPS.

[wallaby]

Are you familiar with C? Just think of what could be done with a 128x200 bitmap display.

 

Yes. I'd rather write in C than Basic, that's for sure. But it depends how involved it is getting a development environment set up. Being able to use a premium tool like Visual Studio would make much better Atari games in the future. That said, batari basic is really only a pre-compiler and everything ends up as assembly.

 

A lot of my project has ended up as inline asm, which is a great feature and learning tool. C would be running on the ARM chip right? Does having to manage the interplay between the C code and assembly make it more difficult to get started?

 

With batari basic and Sublime Text I've made a quick and adequate development environment where I can test my game on a Harmony Cartridge seconds after building it. It's not as powerful as a Visual Studio set up, but its great for batari basic.

 

Where are the high resolution screens stored? Are we still limited by 32kb?

Edited September 30, 2016 by wallaby

[+SpiceWare]

The C to ARM compiler we use is installed under Linux so I set up a virtual machine to run it on my Mac. I cover setting it up parts 1-5 of my blog series, DPC+ ARM Development. Going through that blog series will let you see what's involved as everything for BUS will be done the same way - just have to include a different header file and Harmony/Melody driver.

 

At the moment my 2600 development is done via jEdit, from which I can launch dasm and Stella. To compile the C code I just use the Linux VM which has access to the source directory on my Mac.

 

cd-w's some up with a really slick Makefile for building the programs under Linux. The Makefile would work just fine on my Mac, except for missing C->ARM compiler, so I'm debating migrating my 2600 development to Linux since jEdit, dasm, and Stella can all run there.

[wallaby]

Any possibility you could create a Linux image that has everything all ready to go? Then all anyone would need to do is run the VM to get started.

 

The annoying thing would be keeping the image up to date I guess.

[+SpiceWare]

I'll think on it, though considering how far behind I am on various projects, blog series, etc. I don't think I want to take on anything else. Maybe somebody else would be willing to do that.

[Papa]

Maybe using a distro like Puppy could be whipped up!? That would boot in RAM, be fast, and work on a plethora of machines!

[+SpiceWare]

Maybe using a distro like Puppy could be whipped up!? That would boot in RAM, be fast, and work on a plethora of machines!

 

 

Looks interesting. I write up my blog entries offline:

 

And put this in the stub for the first entry for the BUS Tutorial: