Sheddy

Isn't that 'confused with the confounded'? I thought it was NTSC (Never The Same Color) that was "that confounded TV standard"

must check out SMS Galaxy Force vs arcade. Sure the Atari must be able to come close to the SMS

C'mon Andreas ! Tell them to switch the contest to cartridge ! While a cart is so expensive to produce that it wouldn't be a solution if distributed through ABBUC's magazine, at least it would augment the limits of the contest and make possible some incredible realizations like Space Harrier XE. AB. Ha Ha! Please don't get your hopes up too high about the quality of the game though. Of course I want to create something that's playable, but we're not talking about any vast improvements over the existing disk demo here. My intention is to have the cart image freely available for emulator users. Details of a real physical cartridge are still undecided.

Look forward to that

Ha, ha! Afterburner amd Galaxy Force throw a lot more sprites around than Space Harrier (especially Galaxy Force), and they tilt.... There might be some hope for an Out Run like game, although I imagine the road would have to have a more complex approach (IE slower) than the one taken with the Space Harrier floor. Seeing how long this game is taking me, I don't volunteer to do it myself either! C'mon Chris, how big of a cartridge will it take? (grabs soldering iron). -Bry Get out the big iron, Bry! - the full 1MB/8Mbit. Could make good use of an even bigger cart, but as far as I know that hasn't been done yet. I've got a bit decadent on memory usage with the new sprite drawing routines. To keep the speed up, the largest frames of objects are using a method that takes around 4 or 5 times the amount of memory of a "normal" routine. With a larger cart I could make more use of that method.

Thanks Al (and everyone else) I sorry, but I haven't got a clear estimate on completion/release. It certainly won't be before next Summer. Just depends how much time I can put in.

Beyond the bank switching, I'll also need to take a look at how Sheddy can get more out of the XE just by using a Cart instead of a Disk. Sounds very interesting. AB. No great puzzle really Access to 64K plus 1024K (cart) quickly vs 64K(or 128K on 130XE) quickly plus 130K (disk) very slowly.

Ha, ha! Afterburner amd Galaxy Force throw a lot more sprites around than Space Harrier (especially Galaxy Force), and they tilt.... There might be some hope for an Out Run like game, although I imagine the road would have to have a more complex approach (IE slower) than the one taken with the Space Harrier floor. Seeing how long this game is taking me, I don't volunteer to do it myself either!

Umm...congratulations on spotting the deliberate mistake. Nearly always have to change something on the web page after it's up!

This'll be really nice I can't fully follow your code, but I figure you must have a sorter of some kind as you must still update x positions and colours in the display order of the screen (y position) - maybe it doesn't need to be as accurate as the C64 method though? A Radix/bucket sort could be OK? The Y data can be written anytime of course

Might be helpful if I actually post what it says in there! Hello, and welcome to the Castle Crisis ROM image. I've got a little bit of free space here at the end of bank 1 so here's some info about the game. This project started over 2 years ago because I wanted a portable way to play the awesome Warlords arcade game. I had a 2 player upright machine that I'd converted to 4 player (using modified Atari paddles) and it was a major hit with my friends. This may be why I prefer the upright color scheme - the cocktail just looks too wierd. Anyway, my original goal was to have a 16K A8 cartridge that required 16K of RAM. This eventually grew into the 32K bank switched cartridge that was released. There was just no way to keep it fast and shrink the code enough (6502 code can be very compact, but unrolled stuff is much faster). Another goal was to represent the castles properly as 10x10 character blocks in a 32x30 environment. Since the Antic has no modes even close to this, the castles are managed in 5x7 pixel blocks. This keeps them from having that "stretched-to-fit" look that so many A8 games have. My friends and I have been play-testing it, and I think it preserves the arcade feel quite nicely (for instance, Castle Crisis seems to inspire just as much trash-talk in 4-player mode as Warlords). BTW... press SELECT for extended deathmatch modes, and hold all 4 paddle buttons at start-up for the hidden greetings screen. Game LEDs are supported as well (like those inside the arcade buttons). Pins 1&2 of each game port are pulled low to illuminate a player's LED. Also, the 1200XL's panel LEDs are used. Anyway, the 5200 version is next and will support those wonderful 5200 sticks (ack!) or paddle controllers. -Bry Dec 1, 2003

Just wondering - anyone notice the hidden message in the Castle Crisis beta Bry posted here on AA? Have a look through the ROM image with a hex editor (around $38E0) - very interesting - looks like there's an Easter Egg

I'd just like to add my congratulations to Bry on a job well done. Superb version, spot on to the arcade

2 little divides and you can avoid all that trouble google seems to come up with quite a bit: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=bresenham...F-8&hl=en&meta= Basically, the slope has to be less than 1 or the "decision" variable can't work. So you use the other axis. IE if y1-y0 > x1-x0 then y = y+1 every time, but if x1-x0 > y1-y0 then x = x+1 every time. you may need to create different routines for the different directions the lines could go ie left to right, right to left, up to down, down to up etc. Or how about 2's complement for dealing with when your line goes the other way? There's nothing to stop the decision variable being negative, and replacing the inc's with a signed add. I do something similar for the aliens' missiles in Space Harrier, although it has a few other wrinkles too - it's in the init_missile routine in the demo source code if you want to look. [Edit] Oh, and you might want to see move_missiles too!

Had same problems with my Athlon XP2400+ system, with NVIDIA based motherboard though. Steven Tucker suggested I try a PCI serial card based on 16550 UARTS - Unfortunately it did not work for me, and I had to go back to using APE on another PC - but maybe it could be worth a go for you. But...I wonder if it is an Athlon XP issue, because Stephen had said he tested with no problems on fast P4 systems.

Nice. And before Christmas! Quick work there. (Note to self - hurry up and finish something!) Is this going to have the MCS scrolling, or are you saving that for something later?

Nice work - Awesome

"You're doing Great!"

What a great little game - it surely would have had a good chance to do well in the competition. Must have only just missed the deadline.

Definitely more practice required....At least one of the things I was doing wrong was leaving a space after the comma in the "from" and "to" - just like it shows it on the screen though "copy--from,_to" God, I'm getting old

I concede, that the definition of the word parallax as applied here doesn't necessarily imply "overlaid" graphics - It's just that we've come to expect it now (aren't we all spoilt these days!)

Maybe I'm just being stupid, or have just forgotten all about dos 2.5, but I couldn't get that to work whatever I tried! copy wouldn't work from one disk to another - only one file to another file name on same disk???

Thanks! I had read your earlier post...It was just the pain of actually getting it over to an Atari disk that was the problem... Atari DOS (2.5) and emulators....frustating combination for this purpose...no good having H: drive mapped to hard drive, as you can't insert the H: disk to duplicate file...and can't use the copy to copy a file from one disk to another Luckily APE maps to a "normal" D: drive though and let me Duplicate the files . The intro is fine - but I wouldn't count one sprite moon overlaid as proper parallax though

If I understand your question correctly, which on reflection, I didn't and so have just edited the post, to say I don't know how to do that on XASM! I think you're going to need to create two sets of equates though - one for area of memory where they're coming from (for the benefit of the loader), and one for where they're going to (for when they are called) As to the easiest way to do this in XASM - I don't know. In ATasm, it is awkward! This lot under here from before my edit - I assume you know already then!: you're going to have to load into another area of RAM and then copy back into this area - for the following reasons: As you know - this area back can be turned into ram on XL/XE with bit 0 of PORTB (54017) - but since this in effect loses the OS as well (only hardware registers remain mapped), you need to provide your own interrupt handler if you leave VBI and DLI etc. running. If you want to load into this area using the disk handler routines, you will need to load into another area of memory first. You could, for example load a disk sector into normal RAM, switch off the OS ROM, copy back into this area, then enable the OS again for the next sector. Or if you have enough RAM - just copy the whole thing at once from another area. Mapping the Atari has quite a good guide about PORTB and memory switching (appendix 12 XL/XE) BTW - just tried your scrolling MCS demo - Me Like!