TheMole
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Posts posted by TheMole
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Small update:
- Somewhat improved collision detection (all the collision points are there, but the location of them isn't perfect yet)
- Alex can now turn left and right (I simply swap the sprite pattern table pointer to a mirrored version when he changes direction)
- Slightly tweaked physics, Alex can now no longer reverse direction in mid-air on a normal jump
- Added punching animation and the ability to punch the blue blocks in the level. Still some visual glitches here due to rounding errors when calculating the part of the screen to refresh (you can see it in the video at the 30 second mark)
Next I plan on cleaning up the codebase a bit, fixing the smaller bugs. Then I'll release a disk image for who's interest in playing with it. After that, I'll have to refactor everything to work with disk files instead of storing all the graphics in one big binary. Currently the game fills nearly the entire 32k, but almost half of that are patterns that can easily be loaded into VRAM and then discarded from memory. I'll also need to optimize a bit here and there as I'm nearly at the limit of what I can do at 60fps and I still need to add enemies.
Small video showing the new features:
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Just because it is "common practice" in other places does not necessarily mean that not providing such a "service" is the equivalent of not being "caught up." The security of this practice is actually a project which I am currently researching.
When a certain market starts providing a service after it has been well established in other markets, I would call that catching up. But I didn't mean to offend, I was simply expressing my surprise about the fact that you're only now getting this. I'd be interested in hearing your findings on the security aspect, but I do want to clarify that I know for a fact these system are at least designed to strictly separate both types of traffic (I work for a company that makes modems and routers, we integrate this stuff in our product lines). Of course, that doesn't mean the design implementation is by definition perfect, but at least all parties involved are aiming for a secure solution.
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Not here in Germany, I think. They are all avoiding any kind of open WiFi as hell because of a law that punishes people that willingly or negligibly provide support for a crime or offense. That is, if someone distributes unlicensed material (movie, music etc) over your WiFi, you will also be prosecuted.
Ever wondered why German airports or train stations don't have free Wifi?
As far as I know at least Dusseldorf, Frankfurt and Munich airports have free WiFi. The only one that I don't recall having it is Berlin Tegel, but... well it's Tegel... That said, Germany is indeed one of the few countries where you need to provide an email address or other means of identification to get access to it.
That said, this is something different. This service requires you to log in with your internet provider credentials, so it's not anonymous at all. In Germany T-Mobile calls it WLAN To Go, Kabel Deutschland calls it Homespot service. It's true that Comcast's twist of giving 10 minutes for free to everyone isn't very common, but the core service is exactly the same.
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WARNING FOR COMCAST INTERNET SUBSCRIBERS
Comcast is turning peoples home routers into public WiFi spots WITHOUT ASKING...
If you have an Arris WiFi router and are a Comcast subscriber, you may want to read << THIS >>.
This is common practice all over the world and I'm surprised the US is just now catching up on this. It's actually a good thing for the majority of customers. Here in Belgium my cable provider (Telenet, a liberty global subsidiary, the largest cableco in the world) does the same thing. The result of this is that I as a subscriber have free WiFi access wherever I'm in another Telenet customer's home. I no longer need to ask friends for access to their WiFi network (meaning they no longer have to share their password with me).
There is no adverse effect on internet speeds, since the primary SSID (your home network) has priority over the public SSID. If I'm saturating my connection, the free WiFi users get nothing.
In terms of privacy, it's all done on a separate vlan, so it's not like everyone all of the sudden has access to your computers on your LAN.
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On entry, joystick to scan should be in R1:
R1 = 0 = Scan first joystick
R2 = 1 = Scan second joystick
Side Effects: R1 Changed, R12 Changed
ai r1,6 ; use keyboard select 6 for #0, 7 for #1 swpb r1 li r12,36 ldcr r1,3 li r12,6 stcr r1,5 swpb r1 inv r1 andi r1,>001fOn exit, R1 contains the direction and the firebutton status, as follows:
The returned value value is a bit-code which can be decoded as follows:
1=Fire
2=Left
4=Right
8=Down
16=Up
As you can see, these are binary bits. Fire has a value of 1, so if the routine returns 5, then you know right and fire were detected.
Hope this helps. Should be easy enough to put that into the GCC compiler. This code was taken from TurboForth and is tested.
Thanks Willsy, I compared your code to Tursi's in libti99. They're very close to each other, but libti99 simply doesn't export a way to check for the fire button (in that function at least). I duplicated that function and added the check for 0x01 and it works.
Code looks like this:
#define JOYST_1 0x0001 #define JOYST_2 0x0002 #define JOYST_LEFT 0x0002 #define JOYST_RIGHT 0x0004 #define JOYST_UP 0x0010 #define JOYST_DOWN 0x0008 #define JOYST_FIRE 0x0001 unsigned char read_joyst(int joystick_id) { unsigned int result; unsigned char retval = 0; __asm__ ( "li r12,>0024 \n\t" "ai %1,5 \n\t" "swpb %1 \n\t" "ldcr %1,3 \n\t" "src r12,7 \n\t" "li r12,>0006 \n\t" "clr %0 \n\t" "stcr %0,8" :"=r"(result) :"r"(joystick_id) :"r12" ); if ((result & 0x0100) == 0) retval |= JOYST_FIRE; if ((result & 0x0200) == 0) retval |= JOYST_LEFT; if ((result & 0x0400) == 0) retval |= JOYST_RIGHT; if ((result & 0x0800) == 0) retval |= JOYST_DOWN; if ((result & 0x1000) == 0) retval |= JOYST_UP; return retval; }The compiler doesn't let me immediately return the result variable (which I think it should, so perhaps a bug...), but other than that I had no issues...
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I could also pimp my (completely non-standard) library for the TI here: https://github.com/tursilion/libti99
Tursi, you've added a fast joystick scanning function in one of the later updates. Is it possible to scan for the joystick button with that? How would one go about doing so?
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Add me to the crowd of Notepad++ lovers. All my TI endeavours are written in it.
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I was facing the same problem for Scramble in order to explode and remove ground objects. As you probably know I ended up using a combination of sprites and characters. I wanted to use characters as much as possible to limit sprite flicker, but I was forced to use some sprites because I ran out of characters. It would have been much easier just to use sprites provided you could accept the flicker.
Anyway, what I did was to make a lookup table for each character transition, for instance "from space to left side rocket", "from left side rocket to right side rocket", or "from right side rocket to wall". For each transition you could look up a data structure that contained the number of the replacement transitions you needed for different actions.
One action was to remove an object. The 'remove' entry for "from space to left side rocket" pointed to the transition for "from space to space" (rocket replaced by space), the one for "from right side rocket to wall" pointed to "from space to wall" and so on. I also had an action to explode an object. The 'explosion' entry for "from right side rocket to wall" pointed to "from explosion frame 1 to wall", which in turn would pointed to "from explosion frame 2 to wall" to animate the explosion. The last explosion entry pointed back to the first to form a loop. You could take the loop a number of times and then follow the 'remove' pointer to finally remove the object.
The table was a great performance benefit compared to large number of 'if statements' you would otherwise have to write. If an entry in the table was null I knew the required transition character didn't exist and a had to use a sprite.
If you do something like that I suggest to write a program to generate the tables for you, because a spent a lot of time setting up the table manually for each level.
Good point, I forgot you must've had to face the same problem with scramble. My goal is to have the block disappear (replace the map data) and do the animation with sprites. The replacement pointer is a good idea though, I'll probably use that.
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Hi All,
I've found some more time to work on my Alex Kidd port. I manually converted one of the original games' maps to a format that is compatible with my scrolling routines. Naturally, I lost quite a bit of detail, but the end-result isn't too bad. This is what the original looks like:
And this is what the same map looks like on the TI:
I had to move some blocks around, or remove some blocks to avoid color clash(can't have two different colored blocks directly next to each other), but all-in-all, most of the details are there. I also originally did a very nice conversion of the cave the old man is sitting in at the end, but I ran out of patterns and had to ditch both that and the clouds. I'm thinking of adding it in a static screen that gets tagged onto the end of the map, but those are details for later. Either way, I'm only using some of the original game maps to test playability and will probably design my own at some stage (so it'd be a sequel/prequel instead of a direct port), so I'm not sure how important those issues are.
Next up, I started working on real collision detection and fine-tuning the physics to be a bit more in line with the original game. Seems to be working well, although I still need to add a collision check for the top of the sprite (you could jump into one of the blocks now and get stuck if you really try).
Next up: finish the collision detection routines, find a way to make Alex face the other direction and implement punching. Also, add the jumping and punching sound effects. After that, I'll need to figure out how to make the blue blocks and the gold boxes destructable in the scrolling data... punching and destroying blocks is kinda the main mechanic of the game
. It should be doable, but it will be quite convoluted as I have to decide which patterns to put in place depending on the object on the other side of the block.Finally, here's a video recorded in MESS. Normal caveats apply: youtube makes it a bit more choppy than the real thing, and of course the colors are a bit more washed out here.
*edit* The latest work-in-progress version is attached to this post for those that are interested in trying it out.
Latest version is from august 24th, 11pm CET.
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I have started to add support for the F18A. Try enabling the F18A on the options tab, then try out the Dungeon demo and the F18A scrolling demo from the Preloads menu.
https://googledrive.com/host/0B68J8LwEkfDyTUdTQWlVN0VPaEU/index.html
After you're done you may want to disable F18A support again, because it's pretty CPU intensive and probably buggy.
Edit: The two demos are based on emulation of a yet unreleased F18A firmware version, so you cannot run them on real hardware yet.
Excellent, great to see the F18 supported by an emulator! Thanks.
I also like your feature prioritization: scrolling and ECM (and to a lesser extent bitmap support) are in my humble opinion the most pertinent for games.
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No, this statement is not true. There is very little software on Windows that depends on services. I'm not saying you can't give five examples, but I am saying it's not anywhere near a majority. I am not exaggerating when I talk about old software compatibility with Modern Windows, nor am I just supposing. I actually run tests to see what works. Likewise, I am forced to do similar on Linux.
/Drivers/ are a different case, and Windows DOES change the underlying architecture to make the new ones run better.
I'm not talking about not working. I think it's beyond discussion that Windows provides much better backwards compatibility than Linux distributions typically do, so of course I'm not going to contest that this compatibility exists. But it's also clear (to me) that running programs from "different generations" will contribute to your computer slowing down over time. I mean, there's no way that offering MFC, Winforms, WPF, ... will not lead to multiple libraries offering same-ish functionality being loaded in memory and thus more memory trashing and swapping. Simply dropping support for older libraries will help force developers of active projects to migrate to the newer versions, which imho is a good thing. Of course, it is also more common on Linux to have the many competing implementations of a certain library installed at the same time, but at least that's a choice (I only use GTK-based applications, for example, so I don't have Qt installed).
I /personally/ prefer this early deprecation approach as in my experience and for my workflow the backwards compatibility is not worth the price.
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I'm not entirely sure what point you were trying to make, though. Mine was just that saying XUbuntu was better than Windows because you can get updates on the modern distribution of XUbuntu but your options are limited on XP is a silly argument.
(And sorry, ArcadeShopper )To be honest, neither am I
. Like I said, sometimes it's just fun to talk about this stuff, as long as it remains civil and good natured of course .-
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Seriously? The same /binary/ from 1999? Or UT99 that has been ported to the modern libraries? The program being updated to work doesn't count for my argument.
If it is the same binary, my hat's off to that developer for somehow getting it right! I'd love to see that!Loki's original UT99 binary has worked for me for all of this time. Of course, it's a bit easier for a game that only links against SDL1.2, OpenGL and libc, basically. But it is true that Ryan Gordon is a bit of a god when it comes to these things.
Using both, every day, all the time, I don't feel that Linux at the GUI is any snappier than Windows. (I do like the command prompt more
). Some people do, but, some people don't keep their Windows machines maintained, and let it get loaded down with crap. If you don't /like/ the system, how can you be expected to understand it well enough to keep it clean? I like Linux just fine. I just like the Windows model better.Well, I have to admit that my experience with Windows has been limited to my work laptop where there's a bunch of company mandated crap probably slowing things down. But I can definitely say that my Ubuntu install on the same device feels a fair bit quicker and while covering my needs in a way that better suits my workflow. But it's mostly preference and having been a Linux enthusiast since before Y2K was a thing it's not unexpected that I lean towards the Linux-y style of working.
I covered re-compiling old software for modern distributions. For the average user this is difficult, and if it fails and needs re-coding in sections, just as impossible as reverse engineering an old binary. That said, Qbox Pro (which is that software) runs on modern Windows systems as long as they are 32-bit, since it is a 16-bit app. Out of the box and without any modification needed. (It just has path assumptions that need to be satisfied and suffers from old-software-design-itis.
)That's not entirely true though. It's not just the DLL's, it's also the legacy services that need to run in the background and the age-old components that in some cases have not been updated/modernized/optimized because they feel that backwards compatibility is so important. I also disagree that it's just as difficult to patch an open source project than it is to reverse engineer an old binary. Most of the incompatibilities stem from evolved API's, or libraries that have been deprecated in favor of newer ones that offer similar but improved functionality in a non-compatible way. If you have the source, you're mostly concerned in updating/replacing/refactoring the calls to those deprecated API's. With binaries only, you can hope that the changes are small enough that a simple binary patch might be doable or you're stuck reverse engineering the entire functionality.
I'll gladly concede that even with source code this is beyond most user's capabilities though
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Ignoring for the moment what a stupid thing this is to argue about.
Attempting to run a Linux program from 13 years ago on a modern distribution has a medium-to-low likelihood of working, running a Windows program from 20 years ago is highly likely to work on a modern version of Windows (excluding 16-bit software, which will work on a modern 32-bit Windows but not 64-bit.)
It's stupid to argue about, but it's fun to debate
. As long as no-one gets their internet panties in a bunch I'm all for it.That said, I'm not on board with your reasoning here. First of all, there are plenty of age-old programs that run perfectly well on modern Linux distros (I still run UT99 on my Linux machines, granted it's only 15 years old but still). Secondly, you're making it sound as if the choice to drop backwards compatibility with apps that use deprecated libraries is a bad thing. It's exactly the reason why it is (or can be) so much more snappy than Windows and one of the reason why I prefer it. Apple falls somewhere in between with OSX and it shows some the same benefits. Thirdly, due to the nature of the ecosystem, at least with open source programs there is something that can be done about it. Try that with 20 year old software that you just found in an obscure corner of the internet (what is that application that can generate speech synthesizer compatible data again?).
But as you said, it's a silly argument. If you want something lean and mean this thing beats it all: entire OS + GUI + web browser on a single floppy disk: http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html
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Short work-in-progress video of my Alex Kidd game that I work on every now and then when I get some free time. Got the scrolling and most of the physics worked out (jumping, gravity, acceleration and friction), spent a lot of time on that 'cause this type of game completely breaks down with bad controls. I now need to add descent sprite-world collision detection.
Oh, and you can't hear it in the video, but it has the exact master system song running in the background thanks to Tursi's gcc music player. Cool stuff!
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I'm also working on the project that you can see in js99'er as "Dungeon demo" (under Preloads). It's planned to become a dungeon crawler game, and the idea is that when you run it on a F18A enhanced console the scrolling will be pixel smooth and there will be more colors for the tiles and sprites. It's not progressing as fast as usual because I ran into some problems with the right side panel on the F18A. Matthew is working on fixing those problems in a firmware update. I will probably also implement some level of F18A emulation in my emulator before I continue with the game.
Looking forward to that (the game as well as the F18A support
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Maybe post what you've got, otherwise I'm only guessing.
Nevermind, I figured it out. Turns out I was overflowing my low memory expansion by defining the music as const unsigned char. Dropping the const puts it in high memory and that works perfectly.
Cool stuff!
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Tursi, I tried using it today but the results aren't quite what I hoped for. It sounds like it's stuck playing the first note. Now, I might have screwed up the conversion of the .spf file to a C constant (I assume I can simply take the binary file and have it encoded as an array of bytes, right?). Other than that, I just converted a vgm with one song using your tool, converted it to a constant and embedded the necessary parts from your example code in my project's main function. Anything obvious I might be missing (I did enable interrupts in the main loop, of course)?
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Eeeeeenteresting... is this an MSX with 9918, or an MSX2 with the 9938 (and 512k)?
MSX1, so with 9918 and 16k VRAM. I think everything you see there is perfectly doable on the TI. The video you posted shows per-character scrolling, and of course there are those typical 9918 colors. If this were v9938 based, you'd have better colors, smoother scrolling and flickering screen edges
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Very cool. I do think the arpeggios are a bit much in the song itself but being able to put that much information in a single song is very impressive. Can you tell a bit more about the visualisation? As in how does it work, what do the colors and locations of the bubbles mean?
Since the compressor is a command line application, any chance this can easily be ported to Linux or OSX?
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This is awesome. Makes me anxious to be able to pick up working on my platform game again, if only work wasn't such a time sink right now...
Just out of curiosity... How many CPU cycles does every tick take, on average?
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In a few years it will probably be fine on phones, on my 3 years old laptop it runs at 60 FPS.
Yeah, same for my 2013 lowest-end Mac Mini (using Chrome). Nice job man, really slick.
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Runs without errors on my Nexus 5, although fairly slow (15 to 30 fps). Can't test keyboard functionality though, so maybe an onscreen joystick would be good?
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That could make for some interesting behavior though if someone uses another wors that uses the stame starting letter sequence at the right wrong point in time. . .
Qoud erat demonstrandum...?
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512K Cartridge Status
in TI-99/4A Computers
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Very nice, hope you find that last bug soon.