hardhat

That's looking a lot closer to something that I might be interested in. I don't think I understand the second keypad. Is it hooked up to joystick port 2? I might make the four shoulder buttons just be the same as the four regular fire buttons. I'm not sure I'm sold on the value of the switch to change the function of the spinner to work like the left and right joystick positions for this kind of controller. As for methods to make it, the best way may be to 3D print the case and hard buttons or mould rubber buttons. But then that's the way I make things at work. I suppose you could alternately hack some existing controller, as seems to be the popular method around here.

So the fundamental problem with the shoulder buttons being * and # is that like someone mentioned earlier, if you press any keypad button (or either of the 2 extra Super Action Controller buttons) you can't do 2 at once. So it is unlikely to be used in other games. As for using your new layout in future games, I could imagine programmers supporting it as an alternative but surely it is pretty unlikely that they'd require that controller. If I hold the usual ColecoVision joystick in the palm of one hand with my thumb on one fire button and my first finger on the other fire button, and then move my other hand back and forth from the key pad and the joystick it all feels quite natural to me. But then it has always seemed that way to me -- even if others have always complained. I've been toying with making a ColecoVision driving game where you have to hold the controller sideways. I think it'd be fun to have a shoulder button in your left hand, and use the keypad to trigger special car effects. But I'm not yet sure how playable that'd be.

Steve says that game save for LoD is already supported. So I'll have to look when I get mine to find out how exactly to make that work for other games. It is probably something fairly easy. But what it does is it saves the game save data into a file on the SD card.

Last update I saw from Russ, he said that he put his tracker project on hold and it was still incomplete. Do you know something I missed?

I'm looking forward to it, but it is missing the spinner part of the circuit. It has everything else though I think.

A couple of people including me have proposed to write a proper tracker, but so far, no-one has released one. Still a big gap in our music ability.

Okay so my SD cart is on the way and I at least asked him if he'd consider adding support for game saves to the SD cart. So we will see what he thinks about that topic. You never know. If it is easy enough, he might consider adding it.

Now that seems more my style. LOL.

Well switching banks in the NMI sounds like a fun way to do it. I will definitely look into that in the future. One of my future projects may be a DDR dancing game and keeping all of the songs in various banks will be needed, so I will use that trick for a project like that. But for this project I want to stick to my usual methods which is a 32k PCB. Amazingly big does not sound promising to me. I'd like to finish the game so that I can release it. You notice that although it is an action RPG type game, I did not say the RPG bad word for that is the classic trap of the "programmer's incomplete RPG". I would content that most games programmers have various games released and at least one incomplete RPG. That being said I did do an open source RPG as a PSP homebrew called "Hardhat's Battle Arena". Hmm...16k of animation for the wizard himself? You do know that there's only 2k in the sprite table. It sounds to me like overkill to do that much. Although about 2 minutes into that video you'll see that I've been known to do particle effects at times in the past. Well there are two basic reasons that I didn't do really nice sprites yet. First is that I wanted to recruit someone to work on the art. And the second reason is that I wanted to make the game play work well as my priority. Right now you can run around the map. Collect items. Interact with people that you meet. Be killed by lightning mages. Kill wolves, wumpuses and guards. Open cave doors, burned out bushes. And go through doors if you have the right key (doors are magic proofed, naturally). So the game system is working pretty well. You can talk to people and exchange items for other items. I need to up the difficulty on the enemies. The shop is still incomplete. For now all spells are auto equipped. So there are things to complete. If it goes well I will be done sooner rather than later.

Still using a 32k PCB. I'm not ready for the mega cart but maybe I'll try it for my next project. Harvey was talking to me about the lord of dungeon's PCB which allows for game saves, but I don't think that'll be needed for this project either. Plus I like to see what all I can squeeze into 32k. But I may do a mega cart in the future. The main character sprites are next on the list of things to improve graphically. Kiwi had just 3 or 4 tiles he is still working on for the map.

Hmm...well maybe. But I guess the game isn't done yet. I'm likely to do that when I finish. Certainly I'd like 2014 to be the year that I finish.

I've been working on a new game for ColecoVision/Coleco Adam off and on for about two years now. I think it'll be good when it is done. When will it be done? Well, if you're asking me for a prediction, I would have said January 2013. Clearly I missed that date by a country mile. But still I've made a fair amount of progress in August. And I made some progress in December as well. Kiwi looked at my work in August and he provided me some amazing new art. I really love it. Here is a bit of a preview of my progress. Rich DiRocco challenged me to make a game that uses the numeric keypad more. So I made a game where you can equip spells in the slots on the numeric keypad, as seen on the right in the screenshots. It is a map based game, with 128 screens. In the map there are 3 castles, a river and a cave system. As you travel around you battle guards, other wizards, wolves in the forest or wumpuses in the caves. To help you along the way there is a hag, a shop keeper and bridge keeper goat as well as the first mage of each castle. Your goal is to gather the nine crystal fragments to reunite them on the sacred alter, and unleash the dragon. That would make you a dragon master, who can unite the three kingdoms of Thundera, Fiera and Freeiza. I actually have a second mission worked out, but at this point I don't think I can fit both into one cart, and I'm not ready to go the mega cart route yet. So probably I'll end up making a sequel with some enhanced features and the new map. Here are some screenshots: I will work on a video, but the last one I made in BlueMSX I didn't really like.

Okay, so I finally got back to it, and found that I'd missed something else that's different in the newer SDCCs. The initializations of global variables is now in crt0.s, and so I need to migrate it to crtcv.s. It now looks like: .area _GSINIT gsinit:: ld bc, #l__INITIALIZER ld a,b or a,c jr z, gsinit_next ld de, #s__INITIALIZED ld hl, #s__INITIALIZER ldir gsinit_next: .area _GSFINAL ret ; And from what I can see, I can now use the daily build from Jan 11. Most excellent. I've requested that Daniel run his test suite and see if it works for his games. When I was looking at it a couple of months ago I got errors that the symbols didn't exist, so I added some new globl lines and that did the trick. ;; global from C code .globl _main .globl _nmi .globl l__INITIALIZER .globl s__INITIALIZER .globl s__INITIALIZED just those l__ and s__ symbols were missing.

Yeah, the relevant BIOS calls in OS7 are: ;Music/sound effects related SOUND_INIT EQU 1feeh SOUND_MAN EQU 1ff4h PLAY_IT EQU 1ff1h PLAY_SONGS EQU 1f61h TURN_OFF_SOUND EQU 1fd6h which is a background music player. There is an explanation of the background music player format in the ColecoVision programmer's Manual. You can have a track for each voice (noise and all three frequency), with frequency sweeps, volume sweeps and both. In addition there can be sound effects that override the background music. It works fairly well, and the player is all in ROM. Just call the PLAY_IT call during the video interrupt (60 times per second in North America or 50 times per second in Europe). I think the music format could have been more compact. But I use it in my projects, so on balance it works well. Daniel has done some presentations on the OS7 music format at AdamCons recently, but I'm not sure where those presentation notes are on the Internet. He has also made some tools in Java to preview sound effects or music so if you can find his blog at http://newcoleco.dev-fr.org

So I see that I misspoke a little. The AdamNET actually does DMA, which causes wait states on the z80 CPU while the DMA is happening. So if there are more active AdamNET devices, there will be more wait state cycles that delay the CPU in ways that aren't as predictable as you might like. While playing a cartridge game, most of the RAM that the AdamNET controller is accessing is not visible and should cause minimal side effects on timing loops. The spinner is on the maskable interrupt in interrupt mode 1, which uses the RST 38h vector. That vector is forwarded to the cartridge ROM, without doing any handling in the OS7 ROM.

So the 9928a VDP is similar to the one in the original MSX as I understand it. So that means there is a frame interrupt that can be turned on, but there is no scan line interrupt available. So the only option for doing multiple sprites is to either switch sprite tables at the end of the frame, or have an idle loop that delays until it is time, and have the CPU switch the sprite table. As you observed it isn't that reliable, as there can be various things that can delay the timing. Ages ago (maybe 1987) I did the rainbow edge demo, where you change the background colour every few scanlines. And I found when I ran it on the Coleco Adam, the AdamNET devices which do NMIs can affect the timing. Also the roller controller/super action controller/turbo steering wheel spinner interrupt of course takes CPU cycles to service. If you are on a ColecoVision without those things, most likely it would be consistent from frame to frame. Unless there is something I missed, I think that is the only way to get 48 sprites.

You didn't really say if you're doing assembler, but I use the assembler header here: http://adamcon.org/~dmwick/mayan/os7def.txt And it covers all of the most useful functions, with the same names as the ColecoVision programmer's manual. You can look over my source code to a SuperGame (for Adam) here: http://adamcon.org/~dmwick/mayan/ which has examples of how to use the ColecoVision bios calls, once the data loads from disk.

Sounds like a great list though. I look forward to some fun games.

Okay, so I worked out the cost to Canada, and I'm in for one.

Yeah, I thought I saw a post from you like that. But when I was talking to Daniel earlier this week it seemed like he might need more than he ordered from you perhaps. I'm a little unclear. Which is why I was hoping he could post a status update.

I reminded Daniel that an update on the shipping status of Strip Poker is desired, so he promised he'd take a minute and take stock and post an update on how many are shipped so far, and then he is waiting on Harvey for some more parts I believe.

I haven't heard from Steve Tucker recently, but I did order an AtariMax SD cart this week, so there is always a chance that he'll fulfill it and I could ask him about supporting that. I was recently re-reading a thread he posted three years ago suggesting that the RAM in the SD card could be used in the ColecoVision or Coleco Adam potentially. I'm sure it could also be used for the game save for Lord of the Dungeon or Black Onyx.

I think you need to hit F9 to switch to joystick keypad, when running game roms. Give that a try. On a mac, F9 tends to do something like show the desktop, so you might need to hit fn-F9 or similar.

I greatly look forward to your completion of Jewel Panic. If it goes really well, maybe I can convince you to make one of those Canadian mini-games sometime this year, for my CMG2 collection. Best of luck on the job hunt. But I will say, that between my last job and this one I also took the summer off and it was awesome.

The thread that was posted was more a tunnels and bats game, since there were no trolls. And it didn't use the classes or RPG elements of the original Wild Buffalo game.