playsoft

Thanks everybody for the encouraging words. I think we started on this towards the end of 2020 and it's been on and off ever since. I didn't think we'd get anything playable from it and was happy to chalk it up as a learning exercise, but Harvey had some time available this year and wanted to continue with it. What helped was switching from lives to the shields, something I was previously against. It will always be a mindless shooter but it has some degree of playability now. It was good to see it on @ZeroPage Homebrew and useful to see other people play as a reference point.

@sramirez2008 & @Philsan glad to hear it's working on the GD. With regards to PAL, I anticipated a big difference in difficulty compared to NTSC (because of the slower frame rate) but there wasn't. I felt I should still do something to equalise NTSC and PAL, so you have to hit the turrets one additional time in PAL.

Oh that's great! He does some fantastic games on the Speccy and was gracious enough to let me port one of them to the 5200/A8.

Is that Dave Hughes of ZX Spectrum fame or one of the other (lesser) Dave Hughes?

Thanks for the suggestion, I have a couple of ideas to try out.

No. So that it's accessible to as many people as possible, I'm sticking to a regular cart format. In this case a 128K supercart with 16K RAM as used by Epyx in their Summer Games and Winter Games. Not that I've extensively tested it, but it seems to run OK under ProSystem. It also seems to run well on Concerto, just some minor glitching on the title screen.

I made a youtube video of it in action:

@kiwilove and I worked on this quite some time ago, but it was sidelined for various reasons. We've picked it up again and hope to make something playable from it. Your task is to destroy all the turrets on the dreadnought, collect a hostage and return to the launch bay. This is complicated by a host of different enemies attacking you. Use the joystick to move your ship, left trigger to fire and right trigger to flip direction. If you destroy a dragon, it will be followed by a pickup that you can collect: S = Shield boost P = Protector W = Weapon upgrade The game finishes when your shield is fully depleted. There will be 7 dreadnoughts in total, but I've only sequenced the first 2 so far. ttda_0.1.a78 ttda_0.1.bin

From the VGM file you could (write a program to) generate a SAP-R file. For each frame, the SAP-R holds a record of all the POKEY (audio) registers. At 50 or 60 frames per second this can be quite big, but you can compress the SAP-R with @dmsc's SAP-R compressor and player: GitHub - dmsc/lzss-sap: LZSS compressor for Atari SAP music files

It looks good to me. I built a quick test program and it is working correctly. I don't think I made any changes (other than to adapt it to ca65) although I hardcoded it for NTSC only. scroll.a78 build.zip

I wrote the code, @TIX did the graphics and @miker contributed the C64 POKEY music. Prior to the Atari take over, @Albert had suggested changing the name and releasing it in the store but I was not comfortable doing that. If you are interested and can get licensing then I have no issues with it being released.

Thanks for playing Dungeddon! I didn't have time to add difficulty options, so the first three rounds are really for beginners and the fourth round is harder with enemies requiring multiple hits. It was disappointing to see the "Might it be that you have your cooked game and wait for the tile set to use?" comment by vitoco8bits. I imagine I'll be told it was a completely innocent question but to me it's an implication of cheating. The source code is in the zip file so anyone can see what I did and, by looking at the timestamps, when I did it.

I have 8 different enemies. They use simple paths but the graphics make them nice to look at if nothing else. For most of the enemies I can vary their number and how many hits they take. I may try for lots of enemies in the early rounds where a single hit kills them. Then in later rounds, where they need multiple hits, reduce their number. That's the theory anyway. I also have a large boss like enemy but it's very basic. I'd have liked to have done more with it but I have run out of time. None of the enemies are sequenced yet so that's what my remaining time goes on. Yes, I draw them as 77 tiles, each 16x16 pixels. It's good to know that drawing larger blocks will help - that would be an interesting part of owning a Lynx, trying out different blocks and seeing how they behave. I reduced the number of enemies yesterday but I still felt anxious because I can't tell when slowdown occurs under emulation. So I had a late night and made most of the changes for 30Hz. It doesn't look too bad as a lot of the enemies only moved left every other frame anyway. Probably the thing I notice most is that the flight of the arrows is not as smooth.

Thank you for checking. I will reduce the enemies down to a maximum of 15 and proceed with that. I already chain all the sprites together and only call tgi_sprite once per frame. There are a couple of optimisations which I haven't made. I'm used to coding on the 6502 and I missed that the 65SC02 has a jmp (abs,x). That would make my state machines quicker but I would have to swap my usage of X and Y in a lot of places and I would make too many mistakes. I can optimise the arrow collision detection by sorting them, it's just a question of time...

Thanks! DUNGED.LNX