SpiceWare

April 2, 2020

On 3/30/2020 at 12:05 PM, Karl G said:

4 - You are the judge of an Interstellar beauty pageant focused on finding the best legs in the galaxy.

Gammed

-or-

Space Dame

April 2, 2020

On 6/27/2019 at 8:18 PM, spspspsp said:

I noticed one issue, however: when playing mode 3 and P1 is the bomber, the difficultly switch for P2 seems to be stuck on the "a" difficulty. That is, P2 can only use the small buckets (or whatever they are) for catching bombs. If I flip the switch from "a" to "b" the large buckets appear for a split second but them immediately shrink again.

Had this on my To Do list and finally got around to taking a look at it today. I am not able to recreate it - only thing I noticed was if the difficulty switch is set to A then the buckets are smaller and the Mad Bomber can go a little further to the right. Still plays fine, so not something I plan to change.

If you're still experiencing it then your difficulty switch might be at fault. Easy way to test that is to play a 2 player game of Space Invaders and see if player 2's base is always big. Easiest way to do that is with the Menu version of Space Invaders by @Omegamatrix:

April 2, 2020

Just finished! Enjoyed it, found it interesting and informative. Made me aware of things I never knew like the segregation of sales - "clothing for you is on the 3rd floor". Was sad to see the blurb at the end. Spotted Tanya & Aerlan in the credits.

April 1, 2020

Awesome! Watching it right now.

April 1, 2020

7 hours ago, Emyxox71 said:

when will I receive the package in Italy?

Probably hard to say at this point - I'd ordered the animated recreation of Doctor Who's The Faceless Ones on Blu-Ray from the UK as they're only going to release the DVD version in the states(and it's not even available yet). It arrived in Houston on Friday with a status of expected delivery by end of day Monday. It wasn't delivered, and the status no longer has an expected delivery date:

March 31, 2020

Inconsistent scanline counts will cause jitter on real hardware.

March 30, 2020

6 minutes ago, Karl G said:

Are the earlier Wednesday shows gone for good?

Twitch only keeps them for so long, should be able to find them on the ZPH YouTube channel.

March 29, 2020

Game variations 3-8 are Pitch and Catch
Throttle routines are in place
Finished attract mode
Games 3+ uses ball behind the score to show paddle position for player controlling the Mad Bomber

The throttle routines use Game # + Level #, so the max distance the Mad Bomber can move per frame is:

Game 3 moves 2- 9
Game 4 moves 3-10
Game 5 moves 4-11
Game 6 moves 5-12
Game 7 moves 6-13
Game 8 moves 7-14

I can adjust the throttle amounts, such as use Game # + (Level # / 2), just need feedback for how this works for y'all.

TODO:

update difficulty switch routines to work correctly for games 3+

NTSC

kaboom_deluxe_20200329_NTSC.bin

PAL

kaboom_deluxe_20200329_PAL.bin

PAL60

kaboom_deluxe_20200329_PAL60.bin

March 29, 2020

FYI - since dasm is used for development for a number of systems we've started club dasm as a central place for dasm Q & A.

March 29, 2020

1 hour ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

Are you sure that there a no magic numbers (pointers) affected now?

Turned out to be the paddles plugged in with Stelladapter while Stella was configured for Joystick. The paddle was turned just enough to sometimes trigger joystick left/right, which is equivalent to pressing paddle buttons. Pressing either one resets the attractMode counter in Kaboom:

Overscan SUBROUTINE
   lda #OVERSCAN_TIME
   sta TIM64T                       ; set timer for overscan
   ldx SWCHA                        ; read the paddle fire buttons
   inx
   beq CalculateBucketPosition      ; branch if fire buttons not pressed
   sty attractMode                  ; y = 0 from above copyright loop

Installing the latest Stella fixed that due to Stella's new controller detection.

Latest thing that broke is the bombs are no longer smooth scrolling down the screen, they're now jumping row to row like an LCD game.

March 29, 2020

On 3/28/2020 at 7:22 AM, Kaboomer said:

Really looking forward to this Darrell!

Yesterday I updated the skyline & buildings kernel to color cycle during attract mode:

The added code shifted the graphic data for Activision just enough to cause a page break, which throws off the time critical logo loop by 1 cycle. That results in scrambled text:

To fix that I moved the graphic data to prevent the page break, but now attract mode no longer activates. Moving data shouldn't change program logic, just execution time - the fact that it's doing so is extremely frustrating.

March 28, 2020

18 hours ago, bradhig1 said:

how do you undo a trapwrite command. game stops won't let me leave the debugger.

If you type help in the prompt you'll get a list of commands.

cleartraps clears all traps
deltrap clears a specific trap #
listtraps shows the trap # needed for deltrap

NOTE: if you have multiple traps and use deltrap, the remaining trap #s can change.

March 28, 2020

21 minutes ago, Dionoid said:

But I swear it didn't work on my regular Harmony cart before I flashed it to 'single program' mode. Maybe it had an old bios?

Hmm <search> BIOS 1.05 was released May 23, 2010, so predates this reply by batari about 7800 detection being on the todo list.

On 12/25/2010 at 3:29 AM, batari said:

There have been a few small changes to the code but not enough to justify a release. There are a few things on the todo list (such as the 7800 detection code) that when finished will justify a release. However, the team just hasn't had time to work on it. Maybe early next year.

Just dug out my original Harmony:

Original has 1.05, SF2 detects 7800 as 2600
Encore has 1.06, SF2 correctly detects 7800

March 28, 2020

4 hours ago, Dionoid said:

If I run the Harmony cart in multi-game mode, the specific 7800-detection zeropage addresses (e.g. $d0 and $d1) are changed (cleared?) before my rom starts. So the routine will detect a 2600 instead of a 7800 machine.

My understanding is the Harmony Menu will restore $D0 and $D1 when it launches a game so the game can detect the console. SF2 uses this to detect 2600 vs 7800:

InitSystem: ; DPC+ always boots in bank 5 so we don't need to select it
; detect 2600 or 7800 for pause routines
    ldy #1
    ldx $d0
    cpx #$2c
    bne .is2600
    ldx $d1
    cpx #$a9        ; <-- evil7800 note - this A9 is OK as FastFetch is not active
    bne .is2600
    dey             ; 7800: y=0
.is2600             ; 2600: y=1

I just confirmed it works correctly on both my 2600 and 7800 when the game is launched via the Harmony menu, as well as when run on the stand alone cartridge.

March 27, 2020

16 hours ago, fdr4prez said:

I vaguely recall seeing this mentioned as an issue in one of the "site" subforums, but I can't find it now

Found it:

March 27, 2020

Still missing. Super/sub script disappeared again too.

March 26, 2020

8 minutes ago, bradhig1 said:

What score do you need to reach to enter No Man's Land?

No Man's Land is triggered from the main menu. See the spoiler/hidden contents in reply 551.

That does bring up another question though, how does one do spoilers in the upgraded forum?

March 26, 2020

I used just the mask in Stay Frosty 2, no HMOVE bar on the left. The boss fireball is a 4x player, you end up with some black gaps at the edge of the screen for 3 out of 4 frames, but it worked well enough:

March 26, 2020

If your players are 1x in size then you only need to use the HMOVE bar down the left.

The other way to do it is to use additional graphics for the right and left edges of the screen. These would be used for a box that moves off the right side:

If your players are 2x or 4x in size then use both the HMOVE bar and the additional graphics. I do this in Space Rocks and Draconian, though I use the ARM to create the additional graphics on the fly.

March 25, 2020

New visuals - stop lights and road markings! These don't show up by default though, you have to turn on the new visualization feature.

Had to re-pair my phone for bluetooth calls, but other than that everything else appears to have carried over. Wasn't sure as I'd heard of some people losing all settings, while others lost just a few things.

March 25, 2020

They finished at 3, will be heading over at 4 to pick it up.

They also took care of an outstanding bulletin having to do with the Model 3's charge port pins.

March 25, 2020

Dropped Talith off this morning. Their workload is low, Houston's mostly shut down due to COVID-19, so Tesla offered me a loaner after all. I declined as I'd already decided it wasn't a good idea to hang out in the lobby, so had asked my dad to follow me over.

They have the desks roped off to keep you away from the employees. There's a table by the door with a couple tablets set up to check in. When they're ready to check in your car they ask you to drop your keycard on the table, they pick it up after you walk away.

March 25, 2020

Finished up the Activision logo area, it now looks like it should during attract mode. I was also able to make the rainbow and white text color cycle.

Somehow the issue with the attract mode aborting fixed itself - I hate bugs like that.

For games 3+ I've added the ball object to the top to show the Mad Bomber's paddle position.

At the moment they always line up, but eventually it'll help the player controlling the Mad Bomber. If you're not clear on how that'll help then check out the Dancing Dragon easter egg in Medieval Mayhem. Trigger it by pressing the buttons on both paddles plugged into the left port.

Player 1's paddle controls the line below the dragon. In this image the dragon is dancing in place:

In this image the dragon is dancing to the right:

March 23, 2020

In response to a tweet requesting help getting N95 masks to hospitals in Louisiana, Elon Musk say's he'll do what he can*. He also makes an offhand comment that N95 masks are a pain to wear.

Business Insider reports it as:

When the media publishing outright lies about things you're familiar with, you can guarantee they're publishing lies about things you're not familiar with.

* Tesla uses the masks during manufacturing and, like many businesses such as Harbor Freight Tools, are donating what protective gear they have to hospitals.

March 23, 2020

Finally felt inspired to work on this again and made some progress this weekend.

Player controlled Mad Bomber routines were so messed up it made the Pitch & Catch variations unplayable, and it's been so long since I'd last worked on the routines that I didn't remember what I was attempting to do. So I tracked down a copy of the source from February 7, 2019 and used it to restore my original logic. Now that it's back to being playable I can start over on the throttle routines.

I fixed the extra black bars that show up around the logo when in attract mode (scroll up to Reply 57 to see them).

While working on that, I realized something's messed up with the attract mode as it's aborting the color cycling after ~17 seconds. There's a variable called attractMode and in Kaboom it does this:

count up from 0, incrementing once every 256 frames
when it hits $80 the color cycling starts
When it increments from $FF it the goes to $80, not $00 - this keeps the color cycling going

In Kaboom Deluxe it's doing this:

count up from 0, incrementing once every 256 frames
when it hits $80 the color cycling starts
When it increments from $83 it goes to $00, turning off the color cycling

Current To Do List:

throttle player controlled Mad Bomber movement based on Game # and Level #
update difficulty switch routines to work correctly in new game variations
figure out how I broke Attract mode, and fix it
during Attract Mode the background in the Activision logo area shows some extra on the left & right vs Kaboom, need to figure out how to hide that

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