SpiceWare

I stayed at the Doubletree in 2013, was nice. This time my folks are coming along, we'll also be seeing my mom's brother who's coming down from Tacoma, and dad booked us a place via airbnb that's fairly close to the convention center. Price is much more reasonable than the hotels. Not needed unless you're planning to travel outside of the city. $5 day pass covers the trains & buses. Train will take you directly from the airport to the Doubletree (and other hotels), convention center, downtown locations, etc.

On my street it's just up to the curb, but the Brazos river will be overflowing soon as the flood waters make their way to the Gulf. Hard to say what'll happen here. A couple of my neighbors drove around in a truck to check things out this afternoon - they said they couldn't get out of the neighborhood, so no chance of making it in my S2000. So tonight I'm stressing out a bit while I work my way through the house putting things up higher.

I'd hoped to get a few more things in place for this build, but my neighborhood's now in the voluntary evacuation zone: so I thought it best to make an offsite backup of the current source. revised logo menu font revisions vertical core graphic revised score luma reduced For Harmony or Stella (requires Stella 5.0.2 or newer) draconian_20170828.bin Source draconian_20170828.zip

Change Right Difficulty to B. I currently have diagnostic features compiled into Draconian, they're controlled via the difficulty switches. Left Difficulty A replaces the score with processing time remaining info. Right Difficulty A freezes the action to make it easier to review graphic changes, of which there are a number of in the forthcoming build.

Thanks! Other than lack of sleep and power outages, I've fared well so far. Storm's moving slowly though, so we're seeing massive flooding all over. From here, posted this morning, I live where the X is so we're looking at another 2 feet or more of rain in the next few days: It's also spinning up tornadoes, one touched down 2-3 miles from my home in the neighborhood across the highway. For those wondering about cd-w's mockup - blog posts last week saw the initial implementation of the spy ship as well as a reduction in the logo size which freed up 1.5 KB of ROM for the digital audio samples. I'd hoped to finish up the spy ship and post new builds here this weekend, but along came Harvey. Looks good, but won't work. The entire menu's drawn using the 2-color 48 pixel kernel, the players are black, the 2 colors are the background and playfield. Looks like Nathan took some inspiration from that flyer though, as this is what it currently looks like:

Yep, I linked to it in my prior reply. Stella uses the info to configure controllers, TV-Type when it can't autodetect (like for PAL60), if the sound is stereo, etc. It's indexed off the MD5 value for the BIN file, which you can view in the Game Properties page: I still need to work up the rest of mine, got a bit side tracked getting ready for Hurricane Harvey. Looks like it'll hit near my sister down in Corpus Christi, but we're still expecting to see a lot of rain and flooding here in Houston.

Done, though I didn't see a way to flag it as an enhancement.

Maybe add support for an input state batch file to Stella, something like: RESET 10 LEFT 5 FIRE LEFT LEFT FIRE ... hold RESET for 1 frame (1 is default) nothing for 10 frames hold left for 1 frame hold fire for 5 frames hold left and fire for 1 frame ... use your hack to figure out the frame counts.

Nice going, that shows it's possible

I used SW-01 for Medieval Mayhem, perhaps CG-01 for Lady Bug, CG-02 for Conquest of Mars, CG-03 for Scramble, and CG-04 for your forthcoming project. I see some Notes mentioning support for the Genesis controller, such as Princess Rescue, which would make sense for Scramble. On that note, looks like I need to submit some updates as well - I don't see Stay Frosty 2 or Space Rocks, and I don't believe Stay Frosty was stereo (entry was probably was cloned from Medieval Mayhem). Will work that up tonight.

I agree with Thomas - this is just a witch-hunt. Activision required you to submit a photo. If it were today, a photo wouldn't be good enough, but that was before photoshop so Activision's acceptance of Todd's score is good enough for me.

My original plan was to look into compression, but when I was reviewing memory usage I realized that the 96 pixel kernel & supporting C code used a lot of space as well. Nathan's worked up a new 2-color logo that adds back the station between the "fangs", I'll get that in place tonight.

I was surprised by that as well. The logo's drawn using the menu loop, so it's actually a 2-color 48 pixel image. Yeah, it's still "Early support for the spy ship". It's very rough, which is why I've not posted it in the homebrew forum yet. I think the problem you're seeing (or not seeing) is the spy ship's appearing too close to the corner on one edge, and exiting on the adjacent edge right away. I need to rework where it appears, the current logic was cloned from the I & P-Type routine. Thanks, I'll drop that change in tomorrow.

To free up some space for the samples, the logo's been reverted back to a 48 pixel image. Replacing the image alone freed up 876 bytes. The logic and kernel to show 96 pixels was removed for another 714, for a total of 1590 bytes. I also ran the image data through Thomas' DOOD for a savings of 313 bytes. Besides saving some ROM, this freed up vertical space on the menu to add the much requested Last Score display as well as a High Score. If you change an option, other than TV-TYPE, these will reset to 0. Free space was used to put in new samples from iesposta for Spy Ship Sighted and Condition Red. I'm aware of an issue where the Red Alert scenario is sometimes triggered after just 1 pass of the spy ship instead of 2 (on Normal). For Harmony or Stella (requires Stella 5.0.2 or newer) draconian_20170821.bin Source draconian_20170821.zip Please reference Rules of the Game for what's been implemented and what's to come.

changing the logo freed up 1590 bytes in all.

Yes. RL has kept me busy the past couple weeks, but those demands are over with so I'm back to work on Draconian. Tonight I'll be removing the 96 pixel logo and supporting code. It'll be replaced with a 48 pixel version, similar to the one in the initial release, which can be drawn using the menu's kernel. The savings for just changing the graphics is about 900 bytes. The C setup will be simpler, plus the 96 pixel Kernel code can be removed.

Early support for the spy ship. When it appears "Spy" will be said (I need to free up some space!). Spy ship will make a number of passes; if it's not destroyed by you, or by something else, the Red-Alert Scenario will be triggered and both I and P type missiles will swarm after your ship. The number of passes is based on the difficulty level: 4 - Kids 3 - Easy 2 - Normal 1 - Hard For Harmony or Stella (requires Stella 5.0.2 or newer) draconian_20170820.bin Source draconian_20170820.zip Please reference Rules of the Game for what's been implemented and what's to come.

Stella 5.0.2 has been released, so you can now play this build in Stella. Thanks stephena!

Didn't know about the VisionDapter. Looks like it doesn't support paddle controlers, so it wouldn't get confused by the Genesis controller. What's going on is the C button on the Genesis controller is wired up to one of the Paddle Input pins on the 2600 & 7800. When the 2600daptor detects that connection it switches to Paddle Mode, which features 2 analog inputs and 2 fire buttons. Your welcome.

Per dualcam, who created the 2600-daptor, the Genesis controllers don't work:

This morning I realized I was still running 5.0. After updating to 5.0.1 I can now throw snowballs and drop bombs by hitting '4', so it's possible you need to update as well. Autodetect still required a reload by hitting CONTROL-R after loading the game.

I'm pretty sure the detection occurs the same way as in Stay Frosty 2, when the game is first powered on (so if you swap controllers you have to power cycle the console). SF2 shows detected controller so makes testing easy - I just tried this: loaded Stay Frosty 2 changed controller to Genesis reloaded game (hit CONTROL-R) I see the game pad on the titlescreen: However, if I now exit the game and then load it from the list of games, the detection fails even though the Genesis controller still shows being plugged in: Same occurs in Scramble. Detection is this in Stay Frosty: lda INPT1 ; Bit 7 will be on if genesis controller is plugged in and #$80 ; and button C is NOT pressed. Bit 7 will be off if sta MMcontroller ; standard joystick is plugged in. I see the same logic in Scramble during it's startup sequence: However, even though the controllers detected after hitting CONTROL-R, I can't figure out how to get that button to work. I think it should be 4 or 5 on the keyboard, though also tried those on the numberpad. In Stay Frosty 2 that should let you throw snowballs on level 4 after collecting the carrot. In Scramble it should drop bombs. The C code for SF2 is: throw_held = CONTROLLER ? (INPT1 & 0x80) : (SWCHA & 0x10); throw_held = !throw_held;

I did not notice this:

I planned ahead and carried a week over from last year.