Retrospect

looking good Jacob. I like the demon heads

Another quick re-write of the program ... Here's the first few screens in the Haunted Woods ... it's compiled, but there are bugs in later screens so I'm only showing three. No sound yet, that gets done last

There may be another way, if you could get it to pad out the 1st column or more if needed, 2 perhaps, and the last 2 columns, 31 and 32, downwards to row 24 with blanks, every time the screen updates. It may run fast enough to black out the chars coming in and changing? Or would you see the flicker?

Added a banner at the top of the screen, displaying the title and how many lives Eric has.

Also, I was using Window's movie maker whilst doing my older videos, some nice transitions can be done with it. Openshot Video Editor for Linux is great too, but too chuggy on my old laptop, it switches off after hitting a high temperature too. So chromebook at the moment is being used for all my programming. Speaking of which, the game is coming along nicely. I've improved the sea scrolling screen slightly, the bird isn't 99 percent impossible to get around anymore and the sea looks nicer. I'll have a video later. After a re-write it's now using less bytes than it did before, some routines were amended.

Thanks. I'm really enjoying doing it when it goes right!

Yeah I did have a little belter of a laptop at one point, it was an Acer Touch-screen with Windows 10 and it came with its own desktop recording utility, that is, it could record Minecraft fairly smoothly (so long as I used a flat-land map) and it was awesome for recording the emulators. It suddenly died without warning last year. It never even saw 12 months of life before it kicked the bucket. I do have three other computers. One is an old samsung with Linux Lubuntu, that gets by ok but over-heats a lot, one's a 2003 xp, and as mentioned, my main computer is a chromebook which just happens to run JS99er at 62.5fps so I'm very happy with that. I've had trouble compiling with the chromebook though with JS99er - i must be doing something wrong, it's not the environment im used to when it comes to running the compiler. It gets to the assembler stage and says it can't open the object source file! So I port it across to the xp machine and that does it in classic99. I'm all over the place. haha.

thanks karsten, yeah we should do more. the only reason i don't do lots more is because with screencastify lite it drops the frame-rate somewhat, and makes the emulator look at fault. There are lots of other options for most but I only have a chromebook and a very old (2003) winxp "time" laptop at the moment. Classic99 runs at 43fps in size 1 window with the xp machine!

One more for tonight ! Video includes character repeating issue in XB with either real TI99s or JS99er.

Done some more tonight. New background chars, and I've opened the screen up by removing my border. It took more bytes trying to tell the program there's a limit to the left and right for sprite movements than it was worth. New enemy: The apple falling out of the tree from Dizzy. Video of game running in XB , not compiled.

This is great. Nice Zero-Zap ditties ... I'm rubbish at it, but it's really cool!

Haaa! Of course! thanks! Darn it I've been caught out with this type of thing a few times now.

Thanks Tursi, yeah I did make a little test program myself and it resulted that it was indeed picking up the joystick diagonals ... both in classic99 and js99er .. however, in both , the diagonals don't work in my game. I'm thinking maybe my code is wrong? I've literally typed : 7000 CALL JOYST(1,PY,PX) 7010 IF PX=4 THEN 7100 <--- jumps Eric up 7020 IF PX=-4 THEN 7200 <--- Eric crouches 7030 IF PY=-4 THEN 7300 <---Eric walks back 7040 IF PY=4 THEN 7400 <---Eric walks forward 7045 IF PY=-4 AND PX=4 THEN 7500 <--- Eric jumps back, (only he doesn't!) 7046 IF PY=4 AND PX=4 THEN 7600 <--- Eric jumps forward, (but he won't!) 7050 GOSUB 3000::PX=0::PY=0::GOTO 7000 <---- goes to subroutine that updates all things, then comes back again There's gotta be another way?

I've hit a problem. I'm currently writing joystick support into the game. The man moves straight up, ducks, goes back and forwards but he won't jump back or jump forwards. These moves require the joystick up/right up/left combination. IF PY=-4 AND PX=4 THEN xxxx isn't working for jump back, IF PY=4 AND PX=4 THEN xxxx isn't working for jump fowards either. What am I doing wrong?

I don't use any compression, I should, probably! At the moment, the screens are made up by having subroutines that can plot the different types of trees, and the holes, etc, with a variable to tell it where to place each thing on the screen. This is one of the reasons it only has 8 screens.

Thanks again guys. Well, so far it's doing great but could do with more left-over program space. It now has 3 speed options at the start-up screen. A score system will not be programmed into it, unless I can figure out a way to do a "time it takes to complete the screen" type of score. For that to happen without seriously slowing anything down, I would probably have to do a CALL PEEK to the VDP Interrupt Timer, if there's anything I can do with that, I don't know! It's gonna have another re-write, it takes up too much program space as is. I do have an awesome idea for sprites and enemy attributes, that would probably halve the size the program is, but it'll only work if there's the same amount of enemies per screen, and at least one of the same type. (Every screen would have a spider riding the web). I don't really want to make it boring like that. There is a screen that has you out at sea, on a floating ledge, that bobs up and down as you go, there's a "Bird of Death" that flaps to the left and back to the right side of the screen ... the player can jump back, up , and forwards and the ledge will follow the player, bobbing away in the water. The bird is lethal and so far has a kill count of about 40. That's right. It's winnable but boy is it hard, it'll make Ghosts n Goblins look like Milleken's Early Learning cartridges. I'll have another video later if my progression is worth showing.

thanks guys! Your kind words, give me the encouragement to proceed with triumph. Over the next few days I'm going to be attempting some tunes or sound effects to put into the stack space and run from there. There's about 5K of stack free which is great for what I need

Right I learnt more today than I knew yesterday.

Cheers Ciro. I should take this time to thank Senior Falcon for his XB256 extensions and compiler (for anyone new reading, you can get these in the development thread and they are truly awesome) ... without those, this game wouldn't have looked the way it does.

More done. Compiled it and tested it, it seems to run okay, no sound yet, and certain things need tidying up ... but it's running.

Doesn't the TI have an internal GPL interpreter that means GPL is it's native code and you can run GPL cartridges with a 16K machine? I know one thing - anything in assembly or machine code definately needs the 32K expansion because that's where that particular code has to sit - in the expansion ram. Most other computers weren't like the TI99. It's the unique (obscure?) way the TI was made. It was made so that GPL could sit happy with VDP ram. They (TI) encouraged developers to use their GPL over any other language.

Cheers.

Thanks Vorticon. I've just added a spider on a web to the tree. I'm toying on the idea of adding a hole in the ground forcing you to jump into where the ghosts can stray. I found a way of saving bytes by having holes in the ground, trees, and gravestones all in subroutines with a variable that tells it which location to build the object. So in theory a tree can be planted with only the bytes it takes to command C=20 :: GOSUB 9400. Of course, each RUN test usually sounds out the error beep ... I've never had a hobby that is as much fun as it can be hair-tearingly frustrating

One of the Haunted Graveyard screens.

Thanks. Here's some more footage, again, running at standard XB speed, so it's pretty sluggish. Once compiled it'll need delays in place though. 1st 3 screens. Haunted woods going into the Graveyard.