Tickled_Pink
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UK having to shut many schools because of weak concrete. First two schools in Wales to shut are on the island, including my daughter's old high school.
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As far as I know, no incidents as yet but the affected schools are being closed as a precaution. One of the issues with this concrete is that it's full of air and when it starts to crack or crumble, water can get in and start attacking the rebar. The island has five high schools. One is relatively modern, having been built in the 80s, so it's of brick construction. The other two schools are my old school and Llangefni, which I would have gone to if we hadn't moved in '78. Both schools are almost identical in design and are currently being examined. They were built in the 50s, which is around the time the concrete was mostly being used.
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I'd moved my timer content display variables to 'x' and 'y', I think. The clue that they were being constantly overwritten and rewritten was the flicker and one digit being replaced by a control character. Moving them to var50 and var51 fixed it.
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Yikes. Almost a month without an update. Last week I did some refactoring. 7800 basic code can quickly become a bit of a mess. This caused an issue with the display of the timer. Took me a while to pin it down. I think a couple of standard variables are reserved? I just moved the variables to other standard variables and timer worked again. Just working on the laser firing mechanism and animation at the moment. More state management. For each laser.
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Workmate today told me how excited he was to play Starfield in a few days. Had to tell him I'd played 10 minutes of it before work this morning. Got the Premium edition with my RX6800XT which seems to have an earlier release date. <smug>
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Just spent a couple of hours on it. It's kind of like a cross between Skyrim and Mass Effect. In some respects, the combat is more enjoyable than in Skyrim and the interface seems to be slicker IMO. BUT there are some issues on my system with the audio. It also freezes for several seconds as it seems to be constantly loading content, which usually causes dialog to be mismatched with the NPC's mouth. Just checked the specs and everything apart from my CPU is at the recommended. When it doesn't freeze, it runs well with everything cranked up to Ultra, although I've noticed some graininess in the image. Possibly due to FSR.
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BBC News Article: "What has India's rover been up to on the moon?"
My brain: "Opening a convenience store." -
If we performed as badly as Larry, we'd be fired on the spot. What is he holding over the Government? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_(cat)
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He's a furmidable opponent. Furtunately, he's friends in the press, and if his dead letter gets published, it would be catastrophic there will be now purrdons. Besides that, he's got a great purrsonality. Anyone who wants to challenge him should ask if that's the meowntain that they want to die on. For the meowment, there's not much to be done.
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Using negative values in plotsprite
Tickled_Pink replied to Tickled_Pink's topic in Atari 7800 Programming
That might explain the issue. I noticed previously, at least this is how I'm remembering it, that when I allowed my player sprite to move horizontally under joystick control, it would go off screen okay. I'm fairly sure it went off the bottom of the screen when I applied a simple gravity to it before I clamped it. I've been trying to test its top screen vertical behaviour with a static negative y number and the compiler doesn't accept it. What you're saying makes sense. However, I do think I tried this method at one point and while it did work, it got stuck and wouldn't move from that initial position. So, maybe I need to have a little play around with that logic. -
Is there an easy way to use negative values with plotsprite? I'd like my sprites to disappear gradually off the edges of the screen but it seems that plotsprite doesn't work with negative values.
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Managed to do a little bit on it today. One of the problems I had was the issue of the player ship either appearing behind or over the scoreboard as it started its descent at the beginning of the level. The same thing would happen with the enemies if I didn't find a way to fix it. My first attempt a couple of weeks ago failed. I created a couple of black sprites and changed the sprite draw ordering by moving the scoreboard display to the end of the draw routine. It worked but it also caused a glitch with the ship where half of it would periodically flicker. So I spent some time creating 30 animation frames so that the position of the sprite would be static for the first 15 vertical positions but the ship would be gradually revealed through a sprite animation. But then I realised that would lead to a tonne of work and IF statements. So I looked up the documentation to see if I could find anything else. In the end, it was simple. Use lockzone. e.g. _mainloop clearscreen unlockzone 0 gosub drawScoreboard lockzone 0 . . . gosub drawShip goto _mainloop That way, with lockzone on at zone 0, which is the zone that includes the scoreboard, any part of the ship or enemies that overlap the score area won't be written to it. That is a pretty neat feature.
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Granddaughter just reminded me why I hate Apple products. You have to jump through rings of fire just to change your password.
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@Emehr Granddaughter's iPhone is really horrible when it comes to passwords. I remember the last time I had to do it. Must have taken me 15 - 20 minutes to enter a password it would accept. Had similar issues today. In the end, I said "fuck it" and used the WiFi password. At least she has it written down now.
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Diolch. I've struggled for time last couple of weeks but I'm off work for about 10 days from Friday, so hopefully I can make some progress on this.
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Ooof!! Tough return to the league for Wrexham and Notts County. 🤯
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Somehow I have a feeling both of these teams would do fairly well in international cups versus Swedish league teams, even the ones from the top flight Allsvenskan. This past week all four Swedish entries lost in their international matches against teams from the Faeroe Islands, Armenia, Switzerland (ok, somewhat tough) and Netherlands (very tough).
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While the rest of the world seems to be breaking temp records, I swear that this will be the wettest July on record for Anglesey. #soggy
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Lots of rain here too the past couple of months. Not that I'm complaining as tonight is only the second night all Summer that I've turned on my sprinkler system....Usually my water bill is too high anyway. And we had a lot of rain for Frontier Days (local thing, the last 2 full weekends in July), which is how it used to be in the old days...
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Starting to think that Musk's autobiography will be called "A lucky idiot."
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New RX6800XT came today to replace 6 year old 4Gb RX570. Still a decent card for most games, just not really good enough for sim racing.
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Yeah, I've certainly noticed that. There are a tonne of games on the Speccy that weren't released on other platforms that would be a good fit for the 7800. I've already started thinking about the next project and want it to be an original title. A rough concept I've had for more than 30 years is a puzzle game I started developing with a couple of college friends on the ST back around '91. It was always only a rough idea although I did create the graphics for it and there was some functionality. Can't remember if I wrote it in STOS or 68000. Possibly the latter because these guys only had Amigas and we wanted to port it to that platform as well. Think I have the idea more or less fleshed out now with a two-player (or more?) mode turning it into a turn-based strategy game.
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Just a small update. Didn't get much of a chance to work on it this week with work pissing me off (coding's my day job as well) and wife insisting on binge watching Star Trek Strange New Worlds with me, even though I'd already seen it. But it's a good show, so not much of a sacrifice. Timer's working and the text display been finished. Added animation for the guns firing. The ship is now two sprites, not including the engine burn, so that both left and right have an additional animation frame for when the guns are fired. They have to work independently. It seems that the 7800 can display more characters than the Spectrum so I've moved the text in a little bit from the borders just to squeeze the space a little bit. And the ship descends from the top of the screen at the start of the level, although its positioning needs adjusting as it doesn't descend exactly down the middle. A slight issue I need to address is how I'm going to deal with sprites appearing gradually. In the original, the sprites are actually off-screen initially but can both fire and be killed whilst off-screen. I'm not that bothered about simulating that aspect of the original but having them just suddenly appear at the top of the screen seems a little janky. I'm thinking I could create additional sprite frames that remove some lines that would be hidden so that it would slowly reveal the enemies from behind the score area. ff I'm not sure what to do with this once it's complete. The plan is to release an early preview version once the first level is done. I'll do that once I figure out how to do the sound.
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Can't seem to find the answer to this. Up/Down/Left/Right were obvious. Is it Ctrl for fire? Not sure as my project doesn't do anything when detecting fire at the moment.
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Pretty much figured that out from this thread. Sooner or later he's going to run out of parts that everyone wants. And it would probably take him longer to fulfill and ship out many smaller orders than a few large ones, so he's not necessarily restricting order sizes to make his life easier. Unfortunately, it does mean that it probably puts an end to international shipping because of the cost of shipping from the US. Even small items can cost stupid amounts of money when ordering from over there.
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At this point, it's now making sense why so many Atari consoles were named after cats. Revenue of around $5million is tiny given the size of the video games market and the fact that Atari is such an established brand, irrespective of who owns it. They've lost, what, $10 million-ish in two years? But every time they look dead and buried, they come up with some scheme that gives them enough cash to bump along for another 5 years.
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After the two weeks I've had, I really didn't want to go in to work today. I need to do something else. Undertaker sound like a more interesting and less stressful job.
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Finally got the score system working after 3-4 days trying to work out what the issue was. Found an alternative by tweaking the code from a post I found here on AA. An adjustment had to be made to add 48 to the digits as that's where they are on the character set I'm using. I tried other character sets but strangely could never get them to work with plotvalue. So everything's done with plotchars. The high score to do and adjust some positioning and maybe one or two of the colours. Then I'll get working on the firing mechanism. I've plotted out the first level enemies. Surprised that they only seem to have two animation frames. I think it's the randomisation of the timing of the frames when each enemy is spawned that tricks the brain into thinking there's more as it gets really busy early on. Hopefully by the end of next week I'll have the firing mechanism done and maybe the first level, time allowing.
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Colleague at work today: "So, who's your bet for who that person in the BBC scandal is?" Me: "I don't watch much BBC and the only presenters I know are Gary Lineker and Huw Edwards. Wouldn't it be funny if it was Edwards?" I'm playing the lottery this week.
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What might be causing this weird character display issue?
Tickled_Pink replied to Tickled_Pink's topic in Atari 7800
Honestly, I've given up with it. The manual isn't great on this. Makes it seem far easier than it actually is. I finally figured out what my initial issues with Plotchars was but I cannot for the life of me get plotvalue to work. At all. I noticed what it seemed to be doing. It was offsetting the values against the first special character in the character set. So I though, okay, I'll copy the numbers over the top of the first 10 special characters. Job done. Except NO. Although those special characters no longer exist in the PNG, it's STILL displaying them. WTAF?? I've removed the cache files from VS Code. Still the same. I've now created a new font image with just the numbers and uppercase. Now it's displaying weird characters. So, yeah. Only way I'm going to get this working is to write my own code to convert the numbers into text and use plotchars as that's the only thing I can get working.
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