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RobS

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  1. The images in the previous post are of my custom map editor. I also use the same editor to edit the 4 characters for each tile. The map scrolls so you can move around like a "real" editor. The tiles that can be selected are on the right hand side, but only 32 at a time, so you have to "page" through them to get to the right area of the tiles you want. It's very "hacky" and only suitable for internal use as it has zero polish or code to catch bad inputs and so on. The real trick to optimizing the set is to try get anything at all into an 8x8 character, and in a shape that can be used for other things. So the grass is 2 characters in a 4-character tile, but the top and bottom 2 are reversed, so it isn't too repetitive. The wall sconces only need 4 total characters to be able to make 2 full tiles of torches, and the flame element (1 char) can be reused anywhere flame is needed. As for colors, we get 5. You also have to pick and plan these carefully. I chose mostly primary colors except red. Red on the 8-bits doesnt look very good - usually too dark and not vibrant enough. I went with a medium orange so it could work as wood, fire, brick, planks, decking, bridge, barrels, doors, tables, chairs, trees, and especially dirt as seen in the 3rd image. That lets me have other environment types too - tundra (white "grass" since green and white flip for each other, same character! just high bit and now its "snow") and arid (dirt). Having the dirt also let me do roads, which are costly since you need 6 chars to do all the corners and straight pieces but since that is only on the world map (so far, might be able to use it in a rustic village if you leave out other tiles/chars) there is enough room to include them and it makes the world map look so much more interesting. Since the high bit of any char flips the 5th color, I went with white and green, since those 2 colors seemed to be the least used within a single character. They are more effectively paired with other colors than each other. You can get around that partially by careful design of the chars so you put a green char next to a white one. Of course, the biggest drawback is you do not get the full hi-res 320 pixel addressable, you are stuck with "Fat" 160 pixels, which does suck for certain fine detail, but its a trade off for the other benefits.
  2. "Now all you need to do is to modify the routines pushing data to the screen to push the data to appropriate places in the character sets. You are losing 8*8 bytes per 3 lines, but it is generally a small price to pay. The next level is to rearrange the video memory bytes to better suit your needs and speed up soft-sprite routines. You also have these additional 8 chars that could be used for some purpose (normally these are scroll buffers and such). And now you can sprinkle the video ram with high bits set for the 5th color. " I considered this method and similar ones and decided for now they were too complicated to implement and track everything. But I did come up with a partial use of this, where I have multiple char sets in memory and move portions in blocks into the main c-set for things like a town, dungeon, etc. This extends greatly the variety of tiles that can be made. The other trick to go along with this is to meticulously arrange the main c-set so that it is in sections that you move in and out. So for instance, the first 35 or so chars are all universal and never get swapped. So like the chars for water, grass, trees, etc. Basically the main environment tiles. This allows uniformity on all maps since most maps/areas would use some of these. The very last block of chars in the c-set are reserved for swappable tiles for the actual characters (the onscreen tile pieces for like the monsters, npc, etc). Of course, with such a limited cset you can only have 4 or 5 unique chars per town/dungeon, but they could also be swapped on the fly once you dispatch a particular monster. So it would give the illusion that there are dozens of monsters, just not on screen all at one time. With these, I can make different types of maps. If you can see the screenshots, these are some of my test town and dungeon maps. I also have it set up that any of the locales can be any X by Y size. That last one for instance is supposed to be a mine or dungeon 128 tiles wide and 16 high.
  3. I would like to, but for now I may be too busy with other jobs. I might see if I can get back into the code and maybe do a video showcasing what I was doing, and to show off the principles and the tech. I like to think I pulled off a few fairly clever tricks in making a game like this fit into a character set. Lots and lots of tile swapping! The VBI stuff was pretty good too. I have editors built for the world, the characters, and the locales (towns, dungeons, etc) so those can all be built. I even had a method so the locales could be a defined x-by-y size, so they weren't all just 32x32 tiles. I had one Mine I was designing that was like 12x128 tiles or something, long and thin like that. I was in the middle of trying to sort out basic combat and the screens/maps for them and was then going to move on to the locales and NPCs, but life happened and all that. Anyway, maybe someone could benefit from the ideas if I do a video.
  4. Thank you. For some reason, it wouldn't embed the images when I added them.
  5. I worked out the framework and methods in Basic, specifically Turbo Basic, and then decided to from-scratch it in pure 6502. Necessary anyway because of all the interactions with the VBI routines and also using the memory under the ROM. It was interesting, as I had never done a ton of 6502 coding, but after doing other coding over the years, I picked up ASM pretty quick and got comfortable figuring out (most) things in it. Hardest was stuff like division, so I just looked up some optimized routines and made sure all my dividing math fit within the 20-or-so number range that those routines had worked out. Saved a TON of time. Also used an off-the-shelf 16 byte-to-ASCII converter. I did write the entire routine to handle the map loading from disk, moving around, and the line-of-sight blanking, along with all the VBI routines.
  6. Sorry, that is the 8-bit Ultima-like RPG I had worked on a couple of years ago. Would be a pretty poor showing if that was an Unreal effort! Those screens show some of the testing with tiles I was working on. I had it working with a world map, moving around, the sight-line blanking, animations (most of those tiles at the top are animated, so I was doing it that way so I could observe the anims) and a few other basic functions. I was last working on some ideas about combat, particularly a way to have something like 100 different combat map/arenas, and having the spawned enemies come at you on the main map, or go away if you moved and they went offscreen.
  7. Hello, just wanted to hop in and offer my congratulations on the work and progress you have done with your version of U5 for the Atari. I am the one who did the "original" incomplete U5 back in the 90s. Those discs were never meant to get out in the public, but what can you do? The images must have gotten mixed in with others when I was doing physical-to-images for people. Anyway, my original attempt was not to make a complete game, but to make the framework/bones and sent to Origin to see if they would give me the job to do the conversion. It was never any official anything, I did it on my own, on spec. They sent me a nice refusal letter I haven't been on these forums in a while, owing to other life stuff and getting into modern game design with Unreal Engine. I was working on my own Ultima-like RPG a couple of years ago and had gotten some of the game built. I see some of the same or similar techniques you are doing, but I think there are a few other areas you can go to that might help. I will write more with some screenshots and code later to show what I had come up with. The big one I came up with was a sort of "VBI processor" that would execute on every VBI, so 60 times a second it would do 1 "thing" and that was managed by a list (mostly just jump addresses to routines.) I was able to do all the animations this way, and I was going to add in sound this way as well, so every "frame" it would do some animation, and then also the next frame of music. This way those are all "Free" and run mostly independent of the game. I was using the 5 color Antic text mode, because I really needed that extra color to give me a decent palette, essentially white, black, green, blue, and orange that could stand in for red, yellow or orange, like for wood, fire, dirt etc. The real trick is doing the tiles with only 128 total characters, but I came up with some clever (I think) ways of reusing characters in various tiles. Swapping part of the character set depending on the environment (town, dungeon, etc) goes a long way toward economizing. I'm including a couple of screenshots so you can get an idea of what mine would look like. I will post more if there is interest, maybe it will help give you some ideas. Anyway, just wanted to (re)introduce myself and I look forward to seeing your future endeavors with this version. MyRPG1.tiffMyRPG2.tiff
  8. Yes it is very odd. It resided on an external drive for a long time (v 2.9) and never did this. I moved it to an internal drive and nothing changed, then when I set up 3.2 now both versions exhibit this behavior. I tried to a full settings reset then made it portable, hoping to "fix" this (thinking something with the settings being stored in the reg might be doing something weird or retaining some previous settings or something). The other odd thing is it also hard-locks (goes non-responding) if you plug or unplug any USB device - anything, even a charging cable. Maybe my windows is just screwed up (windows 7). Works a treat otherwise!
  9. Can anyone tell me why this takes 1-2 minutes to start up?? I moved the previous version I had from an external to an internal drive, installed this new version (3.2) reset all settings, and made it portable. All I get is "not responding" for almost 2 minutes before it boots into anything. Thank you.
  10. Thanks for ruining the forum search. Didn't need to be changed, but make sure to change it anyway and remove all the things that make search useful. Now I cant even search any posts by just an author, since you HAVE TO also include some other search term/tag.

    1. Show previous comments  4 more
    2. Random Terrain

      Random Terrain

      That's the main thing I used it for, something I posted.

    3. CPUWIZ

      CPUWIZ

      I suggest purchasing a subscription, instead of being a whiny little kid.

    4. RobS

      RobS

      Albert, ok that is fair. You definitely would want it to be more efficient vis-a-vis resources. I didn't know it was still building, as I was getting 0 results from ANY search at first.

  11. I got it figured out! I took apart the connector, and one of the pins was pushed all the way back, so I gently pushed it back into the connector and I heard it "click" securely into place and now it works in the drive chain! I am using my home-grown custom sector copier program and so far it seems to be working, I was able to boot from it and sector copy a disk from D1 (sio2sd) to a physical disk in D2. Thank you all!
  12. Thank you for the confirmation. So I was sold a bad SIO2SD then. It will only work plugged directly in to an Atari. -Rob
  13. Ok so I now also have acquired a 1050 drive with another data cable, and the SIO2SD still will not work in the chain. All 3 physical drives work on the 2 computers, and the SIO2SD works when directly connected to the computers, but it does not work (doesn't even light up) when connected in any combination of drives, cables or drive# selectors. Unfortunately, this makes the device useless to me as I am developing on the PC and need to be able to transfer the images to real disks to do actual testing. Unless there is some other trick to getting one of these to work with physical drives??
  14. I suppose it could be, but I have 2 drives and 3 cables, I cant imagine they are all bad in that specific way when they boot and run fine with the drives otherwise.
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