RevEng

Generally speaking, digital controls are less accurate when you have a games where you need to move at less than full speed at times. While you don't have precise control over your speed, it's more precise (and pleasant) than tapping a digital joystick a bunch of times per second.

From scratch means a non-derivative work. Movie posters are not attributed works. If the real world source is attributed, it would be equally wrong to remove the attribution and replace it with your own.

If someone wants to put his name alone on a work, he should create a work from scratch instead of pretending he is the sole author of a shared work.

In countries that are part of the Berne Convention, copyright is automatically granted to artistic works on their creation. Even if the first digiotal version of the picture was a derivative work, if the conversion had any artistic choices made along the way it is protected by copyright, same as a book. (Enforcing said rights may be more difficult, though) My vote is for both sigs to appear. If space prohibits, you should credit the original author before yourself.

Thanks for the confirmation, OmegaMatrix and Michael! I've gone ahead and moved the visible display to give overscan 2 more lines of time, and the cycle issue is gone. I'll give it a test on real hardware, but I doubt 2 lines is going to hide any graphics, even on older more-clipping TVs.

Thanks for the suggestions guys! Nukey, that's all good advice. If it was my own code I would have reworked the code and eliminated the cycle overages before I even posted this. But it's not, and I don't see any particularly bad hotspot when I'm looking through the code, so I'd likely have to optimize a big chunk of it. I don't relish all that rework. Thanks for the confirmation SpiceWare. I'm only looking for a small change, so it looks good. I think I'll just aim for 264 lines in the end - if it's good enough for Stella's Stocking, it's good enough for me.

It's a cycle issue. But it's someone else's code and it's already filling up 8 4k banks and there's a boatload of conditional logic happening in each frame. Cosmetic changes are painful due to the bank with the main loop being stuffed (fight for a few bytes here and there) and shuffling code to other banks would make the cycle issue worse. Any less-than-cosmetic change would really need to amount to a rewrite. So I seek the path of least resistance.

Agreed. But I'm trying to find the lesser of two demons - is it worse for a program to sometimes to run over overscan time and cause an overall linecount bounce, or to always have 2 less lines of vblank and 2 more overblank lines. If I had to guess, I'd say the latter would be compatible with more TVs in the wild. But its not much more than a hunch that TVs would prefer a stable slightly-off frame. I'm thinking along those lines too.

I'd like to have a kernel with 35 lines of vblank and 32 lines of overscan, instead of the usual 37/30 split. The overall line count would still be 262. Does anybody have any insight if this would cause any compatibility problems? I'd expect not, but I thought I'd fire it out there to see what you guys think.

Yeah, online is the only option I'm aware of, other than used controllers thrift stores or pawn shops. My own thinking is that reading the second button is trivial, so its worth putting it in as an option. I.e. the menu pops up if the player holds the regular fire button button for X seconds OR if the player presses the second button. In the case of action games that *need* another button, action Y happens if the second joystick fire button is pressed OR if the second genesis button is pressed. Judging from the number of downloads in my 2 button hacks thread, the number of people who have genesis pads *and* have a way to play hacks or homebrew on real hardware isn't insignificant. Why not support them optionally? [steps down from soapbox]

Hey PMR, its a shame that a lot of your hard work is getting buried in the forum pages. Ever think about putting it on a web page, or letting RT host it on a 1-bit graphics page? Either way it would really be cool if you highlighted some tips for 2600 graphics creation at the top, like the way you use shadow on the body to introduce color elements, etc. Anyway, just a thought I had.

2 genesis buttons without modification to the pad. I believe all buttons could be supported with a swap of 2 wires and the addition of a pull-up resistor, but I haven't had time to test that out.

Well, it's not possible with the code as it is now. With some modification to the bB kernel, it's possible that one could have a "topminikernel" for stuff like sunrise displays. But in truth I'd like for such an interface to be official before I started modifying minikernels for it.

Thanks!

That would be perfect!

No go with wine... I'm not entirely sure if wine works well with apps that redirect stdout/stdin, but in any case it errors out. The stock Linux compile at batari's website works great, but a lot of times when I'm trying to help someone out they have code that relies on the newer version.

Any chance I can get a linux x86 binary, or failing that, the source?

I was curious, so I ripped the sprites from Atari's SwordQuest:Fireworld and Intellivision's NFL Football... (click on the image to see the animated gif) I can see some resemblance, but I think it's only inspiration or co-incidental.

Yeah, I see what batari meant. Setting CTRLPF=$01 does "none of the below" for certain. It also sets the playfield to reflected, which is how it needs to be for the bB asymmetric playfield timing to work, but I guess that's a behind-the-scenes detail that the user doesn't need to know.

CTRLPF=0 makes it repeat. To have the sprites back in front and reflected playfield (which is the way bB wants it for asymmetric playfield) use "CTRLPF=1"

It's by design. Your entry on CTRLPF says the following "$x1 none of the below" when it should say "$x1 reflect the playfield". bB relies on a reflected playfield setting to make an asymmetric playfield. You've inadvertently changed it to a repeated playfield.

Here's the thing. The moment you create an artistic work, in the US and most other countries, its automatically copyrighted, and you are a copyright owner. Copyright registration just makes it easier to prove ownership in court, but otherwise gives you no other benefit. You have every right to put a copyright symbol on your own work. If you put your name on the manual and have ID on you, you can probably get the Stinkos cop to lay off. Or take your business elsewhere.

No frownie required - its not like I announced the name variation anywhere. I just started using it. But I won't object if anybody refers to it as TSKernel, TSK, the title thingee, or whatever. "The Titlescreen Kernel" is a bit much to type over and over again.

It's the Titlescreen Kernel, when I get tired of writing the name a bunch of times. I'm not sure what other kernels exist.

The TSKernel uses the "gosub titledrawscreen" as its drawscreen.