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Mord's Blog

A blog by Mord

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About this blog

I'm really not sure what I'll use this blog for so I should probably leave this blank, but that would require backspacing. Much easier to just hit a period and stop typing.

Entries in this blog

 

(Action RPG) Version 0.009-wtf2

I mentioned what had happened with version 0.009 prior to my scrapping the code and starting to work on the Real Deal. Due to running out of cycles the WSYNC in the player-draw lines were generating 2 lines instead of 1 since it would overrun the normal wait point then sit and wait for a full line. This generated an interesting, if shakey and in the end unusable, magnifying effect. You'll notice the glitch in the status bar as well - that part confused the heck out of me as I don't think I d
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Sell A Band

Lately been listening to various bands on this site. An interesting method for helping artists get CDs recorded without the need of a record label that would potentially put them into debt and/or give them just a couple pennies per CD sold, etc etc.   Yeah, I'm not a big fan of record labels.   At any rate, I recommend poking around and listening to a few bands and reading the How It Works page. I signed up mostly to download the few free downloads available, but listening to songs with
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Gaming Activities

I recently finished Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain. I plan on going through all 5 games throughout 2010. We'll see how that goes. However before I dive into Soul Reaver, I'm going to take a break and re-complete a couple of games for my Games Complete list. I already "completed" these, but it was before I started my list. And I gave myself the requirement of having to re-complete such games if I want to add them.   Those games are:   Evil Zone (PS1) - a 3d fighter. Simplistic with the moves etc,
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Dang, been a while since I posted here.

Granted, I still post on my Livejournal a bit more regularly.   Been starting to buy games for the Wii/360/PS3 generation even though I still don't own either of the systems. I know I'm going to end up getting them eventually so what's a prepurchase here and there amirite?   To this end, almost all of the games I've been buying are in the > $20 range. I think all of the Wii games were at the 10 dollar price point. The only game above the 20 dollar mark was Deathsmiles since I bought the l
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Projectz

Spent precious little time on the rom this month. Most of the (free) time I have has been split between the Scrapyard Dog Project, Ar tonelico, and working on my Aardwolf Area on their builders port.   I have been sitting down and thinking about how I want to handle objects and monsters in the game, but haven't decided on a method just yet. Since most objects will go into inventory and can't be stolen, things can be compacted a bit by declaring various things "regional" to a specific portion
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What to play, what to play.

Persona 3 FES is probably going to be shafted again as I'm having trouble really getting into the game. I'm not giving up on it just yet of course, as I haven't gotten into it too much yet and still have more characters to meet etc.   However.   I own War Song on the genesis now, and I've been dying to play through that for the longest time. I played it a few times on my cousin's genesis in the past, and really enjoyed it. I never did play it enough to finish it however, or even get close
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Gaming Activities 2

I "finished" Evil Zone as planned over the weekend by unlocking everything, which basically makes you complete all the story modes, play 1P and 2P modes a lot, etc. I ended up losing a good chunk of the unlocking the first time on Saturday however when the game froze on me when I was over half way through them. I had the game set to auto-save but apparently that only kicks in when you complete story mode or 1P mode. When you're fighting it out in 2P mode to get all the character's selection comm
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This month.

Since christmas I've been on and off of all sorts of my little projects. In the end nothing got done for programming. I have a future php powered website all but planned on paper for myself, but I likely won't get around to making that into a reality as early as I had hoped. It'd be nice if I could have it done by next christmas but we'll see.   Essentially I've been reading up on php and css a lot and playing Dynasty Warriors Empires 5 a lot. Trying to max out all the characters for fun.
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Minecraft: Main Base

Seems most of my gaming went off the table once I managed to fix up Minecraft so it would technically work on my comp. (The black screen bug affects it, so I ended up having to delete the .minecraft folder and redownload the modified client launcher.)   Still, even with that out of the way I have to keep fog up high to have any chance at an acceptable frame rate. And even then, if I'm near a lot of mobs or if the weather stuff is happening, or BGM is playing, or if there's lots of running wate
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Back to Coding

I've given up on the last attempt to add animation to the rom. The errors were weird to the point of me not knowing where to start looking. It might have just been a simple thing here or there, but finding that simple thing was more of a headache than a fresh start.   And so I reverted the source code (but not the variable/constants files) to version 0.018. I checked and it still compiles fine (which means I didn't remove anything from either file) although I'll double check it to see what,
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Display Code Yet Again.

I've been trying to build up the scanline pairs for the first stage, the rest of it after that is generally an issue of copy/paste with a few modifications. I was topping out in cycles again so looked for ways to remove things from the kernel without removing anything from the kernel. I think I managed to do that although it cost a couple bytes of ram. By doing this it also freed up a lot of color selection choices for the playfield alterations.   As a result, hopefully I'll have version
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Room Format Modifications

I've been tweaking with the room loading routine and added a few things to it to allow me to reuse roomdata. There's no need to explicitedly set byte-for-byte all the playfield data for all the zones of a room in all rooms of all regions. Especially when you consider how many 3-byte strings will be identical.   Now in the room data I just specify the starting offset (low-address) for where a 3-byte string will be taken from. The highbyte/page has been pushed into the high nybble of the Z
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Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow

Finished Dawn of Sorrow today, and added it to my little Games Complete list on my website.   Had it solved long ago, but I'm not adding games to the list unless I complete them after the list was started. Which means playing through a lot of games again. Nearing the end of Mana Khemia. I'll have to pick some more games to continue on with soon.
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I blog way too often.

My brain is frying but that's ok! The code is starting to take shape. Been spending most of today analysing and editing the PrePlayer branch. The rest of the code is just a copy/paste + minor editing affair I believe so as long as THIS looks like it'll fit in the scanline properly the others should as well. (And I want to make sure PrePlayer is perfect before I copy/paste otherwise it'll mean a lot more editting later!)   As a bonus to me I added a check for screen termination that will en
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Optimization/Re-implimentation

I got the animation mod working (although it wasn't being used - I'd have to modify the AI for that.)   The new code was displaying the objects properly at any rate. But I noticed some Bad Behaviour shortly after as I mucked about. Screen jumping. At predictable points.   In short, it looks like the Vertical Blank is taxed beyond capacity under some conditions (holding an object while pushing against walls was a sure way to do it if there were a few other objects on the screen) etc. I d
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Test Realm

Ok got the new roomloader working. Here's a little map of the realm. I've moved the sprites to push them off the screen for now. They're not serving a purpose yet anyway.     You start in room 1 when you start up the rom. Room 2 is the only room right now that is using relative-exits. I had problems with it in the code at first so changed all the rooms to explicit then turned 2 back into relative to test. The problem was me, not the code. Basically I was adding the wrong thing to th
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Action RPG v013. Finally.

Spent about 4 hours today hunting the code for what was causing problems with the glitches. As per the replies I got in the Atari 2600 programming forum, the glitches were being caused by the routine I was using to clear main ram. It simply wasn't doing what I thought it was doing, and since it was copied code I didn't suspect it as a problem. Since I'm positive I copied that code with copy/paste, I guess I copied it from one of the chapters that had an error in it. The proper routine (8 byt
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Too. Many. Games.

That's it! No more purchases until September!   It's a shame there's so many deals one, but if I want to make sure I can go somewhere on vacation next month, I seriously gotta button down the budget for the next few weeks.
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new mp3 player

I broke down and bought a new (cheapish) mp3 player to listen to at work. I've been using my failing cd/mp3 player (uses cd-r's) for a while since the last mp3 player started to break down in the earphone connector. overall it was just 10 dollars more expensive than the last one but I don't really expect it to be much better than the old one. Still, this one wasn't on as big of a sale as the last one when I bought it so... Listening to the sound on it, it seemed to be about the same as the o
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Close to a Year

You know I had almost forgotten about having a blog on Atari Age. It's not from the lack of visiting the site, as shown by my string of posts in the 7800 and Modern Gaming forums.   My Livejournal isn't doing much better for activity however, if that's worth anything.   Don't really have much to say this time either as I haven't been very active with homebrew in the last year or three, so instead I'll just post a screenshot from my minecraft single player. It's basically a dark room tower
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(Action RPG) Version 0.009 Beta 2

Thanks to vdub_bobby I fixed the ball routine so that it no longer pokes over the top - and it doesn't wait until when a sprite is suppose to start drawing before working. To keep timing in the HBLANK however I had to modify the way the player appears. Instead of being a pure strip we now have a dual-colored box! The colors naturally changing based on the colors of the sprites currently on the screen.   Doing this caused an unnoticed semantic bug to stare me in the face.     Notice t
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Apartment Hunts

It's possible that I've got a new apartment to move into for the end of the month now. Damage deposit etc all paid, so unless they have issues with the application it's a done deal. They seemed to be ok with it and aren't expecting any problems at least, so I'm going to pray everything works out as planned. I'd rather worry about how I'm going to move and when, rather than the Where. (And seriously, if they take longer than friday to get back to me about it, it's really going to screw over my
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(Action RPG) Sliding against walls

Adding simple collision detection was easy. Test missile vs playfield/ball, back up the player if collision detected. Of course, that gives the predictable result of sticky walls. I wanted to be able to slide against the wall. Less frustrating that way.   That wasn't quite as easy, and failed brilliantly... and comically... a couple times as I wondered why the heck touching upper walls acted like some sort of player trap that would drag their butts violently off the screen regardless o
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*sob*

Well gee. I wonder why the heck my test item here would never show.   Item_Heart .byte %00000000; ........ .byte %00000000; .xx..xx. .byte %00000000; xxxxxxxx .byte %00000000; .xxxxxx. .byte %00000000; ..xxxx.. .byte %00000000; ...xx... .byte %00000000; ........   Excuse me while I put my head in the oven.     So anyway. Once I actually filled in those magic zeros. ... Something started to display, but not the entire item.   At first it looked like it might be upside down,
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Maze Realms reformatted

Took a while for me to get to this point since I was also mapping out 7800 games, listening to music, attempting to design a few big complicated and likely unworkable 7800 cartridge formats, and various other little projects. After all that, I finally have the source code for Maze Realms (The old Action RPG code base) reformatted and compiling.   It doesn't FUNCTION correctly however since I ripped various things out as I went. That's the next phase.   Have to clarify in my head again exa
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