Lamer Deluxe tm

I remember getting the cheat to work and playing multiple levels. So there's a working cheat. The stupid trick with Batman Returns on the Lynx is to just keep on running and not waste time on enemies. I used to die a lot at the exloding building, but with just running I finished level one on the first try.

What I think it's doing is modifying the image data of a single (compressed) sprite for the road image. With compressed data, changing a single number can alter the length of a line (and change the color of stripes on the road). It's a pretty cool idea. Blue Lightning also seems to be altering a single ground sprite, but I'm unsure what it's doing exactly. The dither pattern in the sky is drawn as lots of small blocks, that's a bit puzzling, that can't be helping performance. Watching how STUN Runner builds up it's levels is really cool BTW. Well, they seem to be using the CPU to feed new sprite data for every line of the road and the roadside objects, instead of building a linked list and blitting in one go. I think that's what is slowing things down a lot. Your game is a good example of the Lynx being capable of excellent framerates, even with lots of very large sprites, as are Roadblasters and Shadow of the Beast, for instance.

No it isn't the most optimal way, look at Roadblasters with the debugger to see what a cool solution these programmers came up with That game has a flawless framerate.

The debugger of Handy is very useful in detecting Suzy abuse. Many games seem to be blitting one sprite at a time, feeding Suzy directly with the CPU. That slows things down a lot. Look at Checkered Flag for instance, it draws the road scanline-by-scanline. No wonder it's framerate isn't very good.

Very nicely done. I like the presentation of this game, with the intro and all the nice details. Good to see the 'flicker transparency' effect being put to good use. I've used that effect in a couple of small unreleased demos, there are a lot of interesting things you can do with it. Also great that you've achieved a steady 60fps framerate, lots of Lynx games don't have a very high framerate. Do you have a version of the demo that can be used with the BLL loader? (guess it's too large). For some reason I always thought it was a platformer, like Sonic

Good points, those Lynx functions would indeed work perfectly for IK style characters.

Thanks Here's a quick drawing of a 'karate guy', just for fun: And here's what Ms. Pacman could have looked like on the Lynx:

8:8 would probably be faster, but positioning within the large display buffer would be more complicated. I'm not used to doing asm combined with C in CC65, but I'll see if I can mess around with it a little bit

Very nice, keep on going, this could become a really cool game. You are using a lot of memory with the large buffer, but with this you are saving on screen redraw, which leaves you extra system power to do neat effects with. You could speed up getpixel and setpixel by using a multiplication table (y*80) instead of the <<6 and <<4 you're using now. calc_ship_verts could be sped up by not using generic sin and cos tables but premultiplying them to give the right distance from the center of the ship. I see you are already using mean(?) (point1+point2)/2 values to create extra interpolation points with little calculation cost. You could also interpolate from the bottom two points to the center of the ship, for a nice spaceship shape. Programming the Lynx in C looks nice BTW, I've been using ASM, which is fast but cumbersome. Your game is inspiring to look at.

It's not that the development software can't go above 64K, the BLL cartridge can't. It simply loads executables into the Lynx's 64K memory. The Handy emulator seems to have some timing problems somewhere with raster interrupts (or maybe it's raster polling?), try Shadow of the Beast and Roadblasters to see what I mean. Highcolor indeed usually uses multiple frames of changing colors, though one of the versions uses 16 colors per scanline which works perfectly with Handy. If Handy would be able to mix two or three successive frames together, the other highcolor modes would work as well. And I agree that many games can be ported if you degrade things here and there.

Wow, a 16Mb flash cart sounds perfect! I'll do some digging in the forum, I vaguely remember a topic about a flash cart, but didn't know it actually materialized. Can't wait to try TailChao's game BTW, I love Sonic. Ofcourse most games from the GBA can't be ported to the Lynx, it can't do sprite rotation for one thing. I'm also pretty sure some Lynx games would be hard to do on the GBA, because of it's sprite size and number limitations. I was thinking about games inspired by Advance Wars, Wario Ware, Chu-chu Rocket, those should be possible to do on the Lynx. But creating all the levels would take quite a bit of time. Bjoern (sage) actually came up with a cool highcolor mode that uses 216 colors and can be used for moving objects as well. The graphics do use more memory ofcourse, but he already made a demonstration game with it that worked well. I'd also been thinking about a game using elements of International Karate+ and Tekken. Which would be something like IK+ with more moves and nice backdrops with some parallax effects. Making the character animations look good would be the most work. If you kept the number of colors of the characters low, it would allow for some more frames.

Slimeworld and Xenophobe are awesome in multiplayer mode. Super Skweek, Rampage, Robosquash and Zarlor Mercenary are nice as well.

There are a number of titles there I'd love to have. But if you want to get the best prices for them, put each of them up on e-Bay (US or UK) starting at $5 or $10 and you should get a very good price for them.

I think the problem is if you're making a game larger than 64kB and want to test some effects that don't work on an emulator. I'd really love to have a flash cart for the Lynx. Is anyone using an eprom simulator for the Lynx? And if so, which one, where did you get it, how expensive is it? A couple of years ago I programmed a number of small demos for the Lynx, in assembly, for a project of Ray Ryland. (After coming up with the high-color idea for the Lynx, which Bjoern went on to make). Right now I'm thinking about making a game for the Lynx, so I'm also thinking which game I'd like to do the most. Ray was also thinking about doing a flash cart back then, but I haven't heard anything about it anymore. There are lots of classic arcade games that should work very well on the Lynx. You could even make Lynx versions of GBA games, though that would be a lot more work.

Power Factor has the most impressive music, strangely enough it only plays completely at game over, it's cut short at the intro. This music has obviously been made with a custom music engine, you never knew Lynx music could sound this good. Dracula uses the same music engine and also sounds really good (and creepy ) Rampage has really good music. I like the intro music of Hockey. Dirty Larry has cool intro music with a stereo effect. Shadow of the Beast has great music, but the original Amiga music it is based upon is obviously a lot better. The Gates of Zendocon music is quite good. Xenophobe's end-of-level music is nice. Basketbrawl's music is pretty neat. Super Asteroids/Missile Command has classical music Klax has fully digital music ofcourse. Electrocop's music is indeed pretty good. LX Rudis made a lot of Lynx music and it's usually quite good.

I don't think it's very different for the Lynx II, I remember reading a message in a Google Groups search from someone who overclocked his Lynx II. The procedure is the same. There should be shielding in there, soldered to the PCB. If not, you won't have to remove it You won't lose the sound at all. The pitch and speed of the sound will be increased somewhat, like the speed of everything else.

I don't think there's a heat problem with the Lynx's chips. It's a portable, it isn't supposed to use much power or generate much heat. Most of the power is going to the backlight. If heat was a problem you could always add some passive coolers. I put the Lynx I turbo switch at the center of the bottom of the unit, to the right of the brightness dial. I used a miniature black sliding switch that could be fastened with two screws. I only found one suitable screw upto now Did you find a link to the description yet ?

Just finished overclocking my Lynx I to 20Mhz, with a switch. It wouldn't work properly at 24Mhz, it actually became slower at that speed. I overclocked another Lynx I to 24Mhz a long time ago, it needed to be switched on multiple times before working at that speed. Somehow I managed to destroy that Lynx *cough*, don't remember exactly what happened. Apparently I attempted to overclock my Lynx II to 24Mhz but I guess that didn't work. I've been thinking about trying 22Mhz, though I read that these crystals are a bit hard to find. I added a dual throw sliding switch to switch between the normal 16 and the turbo 20 Mhz. Didn't turn out as neatly as I hoped, but anyway But most games already improve a lot at 20Mhz, even the display frequency is increased, as well as the pitch/speed of the music, sounds and audio samples The games become faster, smoother and more responsive, especially the slower and more choppy ones.

It isn't too hard to do. I was lucky that my Lynx I's don't have shielding to remove, my Lynx II's do, though they are not that hard to desolder. I used desoldering braid, which works pretty well. It is recommended to use a switch, for the games that might be too fast with the faster crystal or when you want to comlynx. You can easily find the description by doing a Google search for 'lynx 24 mhz hack'. Multiple sites carry the description. Though again, 24 Mhz apparently doesn't work on all Lynxes. The maximum speed tolerance varies between units. But the added speed is really great, a lot of the games really improve.

Wow, you fixed that really quickly! Great to hear that it's fully working again!

(in no particular order) Xenophobe! - It's a really great game, also in multiplayer. Slime World - Relaxed game, great in multiplayer STUN Runner Road Blasters Robotron APB - Extensive levels, great humor Shadow of the Beast - Awesome graphics and sound, great gameplay More than five, but anyway

I just checked the plugs of a regular powersupply and this type fits perfectly: It's marked with an 'H', don't know if that means anything. Size is marked as: 3.5 x 1.35 (that's most probably in millimeters) Hope this helps, good luck.