Turbo Laser Lynx

Woohoo I got it working! Thanks Muddy! Now I realised why it didn't work earlier. I was doing: dim tilemap = $2200 incmapfile gfx/myplotmapfile.tmx memcpy tilemap myplotmapfile 240 plotmapfile gfx/myplotmapfile.tmx myplotmapfile 0 0 20 12 Although I should've been doing: dim tilemap = $2200 incmapfile gfx/myplotmapfile.tmx memcpy tilemap myplotmapfile 240 plotmapfile gfx/myplotmapfile.tmx tilemap 0 0 20 12 Oh, the joys of programming! I was probably trying to solve this for a week or two and I got a ridiculous bug earlier too with the platform collission that probably took 3-4 evenings to solve! Well, great feeling to have the basics of a simple static room platformer down now, done in a good/"standard" way.

Hi guys! What could be the best way to get Tiled maps to 7800basic with palettes- and retaining pokechar- capability? I'm just asking so I don't go re-inventing the wheel unnecessarily if someone already has got an easy/smart way of doing it. Plotmapfile is easy to use and draws everything in one call with pallettes and all, but even if I memcpy the map to ram I can't use pokechar afterwards to pick up stuff (coins or fruits etc). I guess I could use sprites for collectables, but that seems a bit wasteful. Then I got this idea that perhaps I could copy the map into "regular data" and loop through it and plot every char individually. But then I realised that I can't do _My_Data[variable] in a loop, so I can't use the loop increment variable (and I'm not sure if plotchars is viable anyway as an alternative to plot the whole tilemap tile by tile either). So my solution is now to incmapfile my tmx file, then memcpy it to ram, and after that use plotmap commands to get the correct palette on everything. Now I can also use pokechar to pick up stuff, and everything is working fine. The only issue is that it's a lot of slow work to sit and manually count tiles, calculate x positions and put in parameters into plotmap commands. As a next step I was going to write some program in C that would spit out a string of plotmap statements from the Tiled array map data, but perhaps someone already has made such a script and wants to share? : > Or perhaps I'm complicating things in my mind and missing something obvious / some much easier solution?

Thanks for asking, but I have too many projects going at the moment (and programming isn't my forte anyway).

Ah, this is a game that would be so much fun on the Lynx! Your mockups look exaclty like the arcade. Are you guys going to have the screen scroll? I guess that would be the tradeoff on the Lynx that you'd need to do to have the nice graphics. I love classic arcade games with static screen myself but also big graphics, that's an area where the Lynx really suffers a bit from the low screen resolution. I remember some mock ups of Donkey Kong on this forum, and it's either tiny graphics or vertical screen for static screen, or scrolling obviously. As a guy who thinks graphics and music are equally important as gameplay, I say go with the nicest graphics!

Looking forward to this on the Lynx, it's a fun game, I've played it quite a bit on the c64. Actually I've been thinking about making a clone for the Lynx myself a couple of times. @marss It looks really nice! What is the inspiration for the graphic style / palette? Is it a specific old computer or console? I can't pinpoint it for sure, but I'm guessing NES with the black outlines, although there's a bit more colors per 16x16 char than it could draw irl.

Couldn't... resist... linking this: https://youtu.be/a6iW-8xPw3k (I hope this video clip doesn't reveal my own phone pin too).

Number Crusher looks great! 🎨 Looking forward to see more of it!

Thank you so much for this @Trebor it's gold! 🙏 I wasn't expecting such a detailed and comprehensive answer, haha! This is extremely helpful as it highlights the most problematic colors. Unfortunately the "time zones" are all long enough to be taken into account, but it seems it doesn't have to be to much of a headache after all.

Thanks you very much for the help guys! It's good to have somewhere to start. Apparently my friend had already found the 7805 as a suspect too. Does anyone know if Best Electronics still sells Maria chips? At least it's there: http://www.best-electronics-ca.com/custom-i.htm Ah, damn it says "PAL Maria, call or email". I couldn't see any Marias on ebay either, not current nor sold 😧 Might become expensive to keep the faulty console, but it would be nice to try and save it. I need to try to come up with some deal with the seller.

Thanks @SmittyB that sounds very reasonable. Will investigate further with my computer club friend. It did the same when I tried this morning, however weirdly it seems to stop after a while when the console has run for a while. Then it might show up for a while when re-powering it. I need to contact the ebayer, because it was sold as working/tested. Some good news is that Rikki and Vikki started up for a few seconds again, so the fault is definitely in the console itself.

Woohoo! I managed to memcpy a map into ram and to use plotmap to draw it out + changing palette in the correct positions. Also I got peekchar working for collecting stuff and almost for platforms (the platforms still need some tweaking to work 100% with the fake gravity, but the peekchar part is working). Thanks again for all the help, pointing me in the right direction.

I got Rikki & Vikki already, the shipping was fast! 🥳 What a beautiful creation! Unfortunately it wasn't my day and I ran into problems fast. It's probably my console that arrived at the same time that's having issues. It's beautiful on the outside, my daughter wouldn't believe it's not new, it even had the protective tape on the metal part (that I immediately pulled off haha). However Rikki & Vikki wouldn't stay on for more than a few seconds, and then it would black screen. It seemed to help when I took out the game and put it in again, so I sprayed some electronics cleaning spray in the cart-port and jerked the cart around a bit, and me and my wife were able to play the game for about 10-15 minutes (Wife and kids loved it) before black screen , the music kept on playing after black screen though. After this I wasn't able to get anything but black screen anymore. Even more unfortunate was that I kept removing and putting the cart in many times, 'til I managed to get distracted by something and pulled the cart out a bit without turning off the power. Hopefully I didn't fry the game or something in the console. Even before I managed to do that the built in Asteroids game did show some weird behaviour a few times when starting up the console. It seems to split the sprites over a couple of zones. I wonder if this is a common thing with the game or if there might be something wrong with Maria (or something else)? Anyway, I'm not a hardware guy, but my computer club friend is good at repairing old computers, so I'll take it to him and we'll have a look. I'm still hoping that perhaps it's only a dirty cart-port or something that's possible to fix. Also, I wonder what the switch next to the RF plug is on the back of the 7800?

Hi! Thanks for this tutorial, peeking after chars was a new concept for me and it's indeed a very good way to find platforms and walls etc.

Thank you so much once again! This really explains it. I should've known or realised to check variables in the guide, so sorry about that. It makes sense that you can put them at specific locations in ram. But again one step wiser about Atari 7800 programming thanks to you. It would be nice to have full control over the map(s) obivously, but on the other hand it's so convenient when it draws the whole thing automatically. I will have to see, if the game for some reason would get too sprite heavy I will be forced to learn this. That is really nice! (Actually I wrote a bit carelessly earlier about the Lynx, it doesn't have video ram, you can put aside ram for the screen wherever you want, but anything and everything that you want to use has to be copied into ram first from rom).

What graphics mode does this (super fun) game use? I was counting colors and can't get it to match up with any of the standard modes.🤔