Thelen

Very sad...It shivers me... died so young...

Very nice to see these pictures and in-out shading on the VBXE, great job!

Thanks both, great feature of Mad Assembler!!

Great! Thanks for the quick reply!

Hi All, I'm putting bytes in the display ram in textmode- but these bytes don't correspondent with the ATASCII characterbytes... (so I'm always struggeling with this) - why is that, and is there a list of the characters with the corresponding bytes to put in displayram? Thanks!

Nice challenge! Looks good! When can we play this at home? 😀

Always a great treasure, the New years disk! Thanks PPS and all contributers!

Very strange, I use my tool also on a m1 Mac, it doesn't work slow on my machine. Also tried it on windows, but it did work properly. I would be happy to do an update to remove the slowness, but I can't simulate it.... Is it in in the whole app, also on the Save/load/prefs tab? It works as seen on my tutorial for me https://youtu.be/fFu4Zt4NtUo

Just a little thought about a 'new' 8 bit computer.. If Altirra works as bare metal on raspberry pi, then it would be really cheap (FPGA based is super but expansive like the Mist) to have a 'new' 8 bit computer, has already lot's of games and software. And if you want this 'new' computer to support better graphics/sound/more ram- or faster 16 bit cpu: Altirra has it! (in the way of the VBXE, Rapidus or 65816, Ultimate 1 MB).

thank you! Well, it was a bit experimental - I was curious when i should ran out of cycles with almost everything in it without disabling Antic...but I still haven't reached that point, and it amazes me a bit with all the calculations, animations, setting all blitterblocks etc.. I also thought it would be nice to have something 'real A8' in it and thus for the background and probably status bar etc. I really don't know, it would be interesting to test,! My programming time is to scarse....

It's almost a year ago since my latest update, It's been a busy year... But I haven't abandoned the project 🙂 I've updated the graphics to make more use of the VBXE capabiities -and use the Sharp X68000 version as inspirer, here's some footage of the latest demo. Well, still enough work to do 🙂

Thanks! And no problem 🙂

Hi Stephen, is it possible to get/use your sourcecode 'VBXE_SetPalette2' function which is in the hidden content? 🙂 (couldn't find it in your .zip file) I'm too lazy to type it over from the image and OCR messes things up... 🙂

Very nice progress so far!!

This is amazing, what a great job is done here!

Ghost chaser was fun, not horror but 'spooky'

I never looked before in this forum (Atari general) but I'm pleased I did...What a great story, and so cool to see these documents. Thanks for sharing- hopefully this can be preserved.

Just tested your software, works terrific!!

Great job so far, cool you're developing something for the VBXE! Is Popeye already moving over the screen?

Cool, I also did a RGB extractor for this in 2009 in Freebasic which I'm still using today 🙂 - but I was to lazy to do a raw bmp pixel data extractor.. - at the moment I'm using a hex editor for this rip out the pixel data, so this will save really some time! Do I need to mirror the BMP, or does your program this? Thanks!

Looking good!

I have separated the Restore operation from the Savemask & drawnew, with after the first 18 blitterblocks a end block, en then pointing the blitterlist to start with blitterblock 19 when saving and drawing...Sorry for the confusing explanation of doing 2 separte blitterlists - it are technically 3 different operations (but the blitterlist of sprites felt like 1 and for the tiles also 1 😂 )

Exactly, it's like that. When I first made Simon of Castlevania walk, it was done with a few blitters like that. Sometime later I needed more sprites onscreen, and I ended up with a very big blitterlist containing 54 blitterblocks.... It was my first try out to test if something can be ran with such a list. (the other choice was, and more effective would be to end the list before BCB's that do nothing will be done. But then there will be a extra process that the Atari checks which ones should be done and which not, and move them in the list. I was amazed that 54 blitterblocks and 11 separrate blitterblocks could be done! Now I set the Height and width to 0 for blitterblocks that doesn't do anything. Only thing is that the pixel of the BCB top-left should be 0/transparant otherwise there is a pixel somewhere onscreen 🙂 This is my spite blitterlist in Castlevania (I also have a separate blitterlist for the tile graphics): ;Blitlist sprites ;Blitterblocks 0-17 are all 'restore background' blits ;0 restore object1/enemy1 bg ;1 restore object2/enemy2 bg ;2 restore object3/enemy3 bg ;3 restore object4/enemy4 bg ;4 restore object5/enemy5 bg ;5 restore object6/enemy6 bg ;6 restore object7/enemy7 bg ;7 restore object8/enemy8 bg ;8 restore background hand back ;9 restore background whip back top ;10 restore background whip back bottom ;11 restore background hand front ;12 restore background whip front ;13 restore subweapon1 bg ;14 restore subweapon2 bg ;15 restore background Simon top ;16 restore background Simon bot ***NOT USED, all done by 15 ;17;restore BG EXTRA Blitterblocks 18-36 are all 'save background to a temporary space' blits (the same order like the restore) Blitterblocks 37-54 are all 'Draw sprite' blits (the same order like the restore) As you can see, like the original NES version, only 8 objects/enemy's can be onscreen. Whip saving/drawing could be probably done more efficient, but I didn't know what to expect with all the blits... It amazed me a lot that I at firstl could make a scrolling screen with 11 blittercommands...and still had enough cycles to draw all the sprites with all the BCB's, calculating X/Y positions to VRAM posititions, doing soft collisioncheck, let Simon and the objects walk threw the leveldata and react on it...and This with Antic on 🙂 (If I need more CPU cycles I can turn it off, but I don't expect that, I'm hoping to use a mode4 background behind the VBXE GX)

Excellent description of the blitter, @danwinslow Here a link to my blitter example topic;

Absolutely right! Can be done better before the blitter starts!