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SmittyB

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  1. To get the most action on screen with the fewest glitches and slowdowns I can manage I'm making a big effort to minimise the amount of objects used to build the background. In that gif everything is zone-aligned so doesn't need to be drawn twice, and it's all 160A to give MARIA more time to process the 160B ducks and dogs. The clouds and bushes are separate objects, but each section is only as wide as it needs to be, and the scrolling is done by updating the position of the existing objects rather than re-adding them to the display list each frame. Objects can't be as wide as the screen on the 7800 so the wall is 6 objects (2 halves across 3 zones), and the scrolling is achieved by reducing the width of the left half while increasing the width of the right half and shifting it across using the same method as the clouds. Once it gets far enough for the pattern to repeat it's all reset. The grass is also 6 objects (2 halves across 3 zones) but each zone has its own copy of the graphics in RAM. 6502 assembly conveniently has a 'rotate left' command for shifting multiple bytes of data, only in this case it's graphics data and by rotating a line twice to account for 2 bits per pixel it'll move that line. If I move some lines more than others I'll get the effect and all without MARIA having to do more work. I'm in the process of moving where these graphics sit in RAM to free up room for the player graphics alongside the ducks. The benefit is that when things aren't zone aligned I only have to draw 2 objects instead of 3 and it all adds up.
  2. Experiments in parallax. I need to adjust the speed of each layer but this goes to show it's not going to be a problem scrolling the grass texture.
  3. Now I feel like a chump for having paid more. Thanks Atari 🥸
  4. That's a dead horse that's been so thoroughly beaten it's now a Tesco lasagne.
  5. Just for you I've had a look to see what I might be able to do and this is what I've come up with on the mockup I use for testing ideas. By moving one of the greens from palette 0 to 2 I was able to give the clouds an extra colour for shading, and as the clouds and bushes share graphics it's improved both. I've adjusted the shades of green to allow the green player markers to stand out a bit more, and with 2 shades of green in palette 2 I was able to make a rough pattern that could be considered grass. In my old proof of concept version I had some brown areas that was intended to be the dirt the vegetables were grown in so I had a go at drawing some dirt mounds using the existing orangey palette but I'm not sure if I like them yet.
  6. It's something I've considered but I don't want to do it unless I can make it look right with the scrolling, not be too distracting, and I have to be very careful about the palettes I'm using. There are many plans, it's just that graphics have been a low priority for a while.
  7. Using those figures, if you take the average of the results where categories have been combined then it comes to only 27 fewer votes mainly from the 5200/8-bit categories. This keeps in mind that for each combined category you're removing a potential vote from each person.
  8. If I had to guess I'd say somebody on the nomination committee is a trigger-happy duck-hater because Ducks Away has been nominated for an award in the 6th Annual Atari Homebrew Awards! Thanks again to the nomination committee, to James for all the unseen work it takes to make these awards happen, and to the AtariAge community for whom this game was made. Don't forget to don your stale bread-armour and dive to the polls before the deadline on the 18th of February.
  9. Awwww shucks it happened again. Plumb Luck DX has been nominated for another award in the 6th Annual Atari Homebrew Awards! Thanks again to the nomination committee, to James for all the unseen work it takes to make these awards happen, and to the AtariAge community for whom this game was made. However as the late, great Bruce Forsyth would say "You don't get anything for a pair, not in this game." so don't forget to vote for your favourite games in each category before the deadline on the 18th of February.
  10. Looks good. I'm proud to have inspired, and that my rendition of the AA logo would come in handy
  11. You both flatter me, thank you very much. As I define more waves it'll definitely get crazier. At the moment I have 20 defined that it just loops through and 99 is the current limit, so I do intend to balance things so that getting anything close to 99 is a challenge. I have to balance it so that anyone can play so the first few waves at least will be easy enough. There's also a limit to just how much chaos I can have on screen at once because potentially with 4 dogs the whole thing will slow to a crawl. At least it turns out 4 lightguns isn't unplayably flashy even if it is hard on the eyes.
  12. My first thought would be to use a spreadsheet with the name in one column, length in the next column, a third column to calculate the address based on the address and length of the previous record, and then the 4th column would be the text output ready to be copied over to your project as necessary.
  13. An SMB2 clone would be very doable on the 7800, and it's a game I think is an underrated part of the series.
  14. The 7800GD has the option to somewhat calibrate the gun on the NTSC version of Crossbow as part of its cheats functionality, but besides that no. The way most lightgun games on the 7800 work is by flashing the screen white and then using strict timing to calculate where on the X axis the gun is pointing. There's a limit to how accurate this method can be on a relatively slow system like the 7800 and there's a good chance the accuracy will depend on the specific console. It also doesn't help the developers hardcoded their own offsets into the game instead of allowing for manual adjustments. Best you can do is make sure the brightness / contrast of your TV is high enough for the gun to more easily see it, make sure the lens is clean, and sit as square-on to the TV as you can.
  15. Detecting the QuadTari works so that if INPT0 is clear and INPT1 is set then it's plugged into the left port, and likewise if INPT2 is clear and INPT3 is set then it's plugged into the right port. Setting bit 7 of VBLANK to dump them to ground enables reading of controllers 3 and 4 so during normal gameplay that bit is toggled each frame. Unrelated to the QuadTari but I'm also toggling bit 6 of VBLANK during the gun's hit detection to latch the fire button as the light sensor is equivalent to a button press. The gun's trigger is equivalent to holding up when released, and releasing up when it's pulled. I auto-detect the presence of a lightgun by whether up is held shortly after the game starts. (James let me know to delay this a bit to give the Mega7800 time to kick in its appropriate mode). Oh and I'm disabling the 7800's 2 button mode as the first thing I do because that just breaks compatibility with every other controller and I'd love to know what GCC were thinking.
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