Retrospect

The racing game is having a good re-write right now. I did the old trick of putting bits of code at random spots ... I only knew what everything did for about 48 hours and after a break of more than 16 hours I was suddenly confused looking at the mess of spaghetti everywhere..... There's going to be six horses racing on screen .... sprites at magnify 3 because I want a little shadow under each horse, the test I did before I screwed up the code looked good enough to show, but I don't want to stack the thread with showboating videos every time I triumph.... The "leading horse" thing will be more advanced, and will show (hopefully) all the horses in order of position during the race.... I'm being very optimistic there..... Right ... so ... on with it, from scratch .... I'll have a title screen with attract mode to begin with. With an attempt to take advantage of the fact that we have 28 sets of chars (?!) which is going to be fun to play with.

Made another little demo here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77AwL2muACc&feature=youtu.be

Great video

I like this.

hehe .... here ya go dude. I think as a windows movie file it should be do-able screenscroll.zip and here's the classic99 file if you wanna play with that too COLORBARS.zip

Allowed myself to get side-tracked tonight. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tu_PhuyZM9M&feature=youtu.be

Thanks Owen I'm enjoying doing it so far.

Might use this one.

True - that's been done. I'm having fun doing the title screen graphics at the moment.

I've had a spare hour to work on the project .... I've moved the horses up 20 pixels, rewritten the graphics for the grass to make it appear less 'in form' and more random, and now there is a display of the leading horse's name , which I think may be slowing the scrolling down by a fraction. Still, it's fun to have. More updates on this later. Thanks everyone for the feedback. It encourages me to go further. For some reason my old video ended up on the end of the new one. Try the program on Classic99 here ... its not as fuzzy as the video ... >>> PROTOTYPE.zip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chXzRXS2MDU&feature=youtu.be

Hello .... Horse racing project using XB256 and the 256 compiler. Honestly, I've done this type of thing (scrolling a screen) both ways now - the way I did it in standard XB, and the way it's done in XB256 .... .and I can tell ya , 256 makes it soooo much easier. Thankyou Harry. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cywakqUaNwQ&feature=youtu.be

Excellent ... thankyou Senior_Falcon, I will do that. Assign as I would standard XB for sprites. I'll have that boat sailing in no time. I will keep posting to this thread with more experiments, playing around, and bits n bats .... it's a fantastic program, XB256.

Hello fellow 9900 obsessive people. Right - straight to the point - what have I done wrong here ? ..... I can't think why this doesn't work, and as far as I know, the XB256 manual isn't telling my why I'm wrong either - but i AM wrong ... somehow! My boat won't CHAR properly, it keeps wanting to be a group of letters. ! GET INTO SCREEN 2 MODE 10 CALL LINK("SCRN2")::CALL MAGNIFY(3) ! ASSIGN SOME CHARS 20 CALL LINK("CHAR2",104,"00000FFFFFFFFFFF") 30 CALL LINK("CHAR2",105,"000000C1FFFFFFFF") 40 CALL LINK("CHAR2",106,"00000081C7FFFFFF") 45 CALL LINK("CHAR2",107,"FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF") 46 CALL LINK("CHAR2",112,"0000000606043F7FFFFF7F0000000000000000406030FFFFFCF8E00000000000") ! SET THE SCREEN AND CHAR COLOURS 50 CALL LINK("COLOR2",10,5,1)::CALL LINK("SCREEN",15) ! PLACE THE MAIN WATER CHARS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SCREEN 70 CALL HCHAR(21,1,107,96) ! PLACE RANDOM WAVE CHARS AT POSITION 20 80 FOR L=1 TO 32:=INT(3*RND)+1:=X+103::CALL HCHAR(20,L,X)::NEXT L ! SET MY SPRITE (THIS IS WHERE IT GOES WRONG) 81 CALL SPRITE(#1,112,16,140,20) ! ASSIGN LINES 20 TO 24 AS A WINDOW 90 CALL LINK("WINDOW",20,1,24,32) ! SCROLL THE ASSIGNED WINDOW 100 CALL LINK("SCRLLF",1) ! KEEP SCROLLING THE ASSIGNED WINDOW 110 GOTO 100 BOAT.zip

Interestingly , in Classic 99, if you type CALL INIT :: CALL LOAD(-31866,159) and then do a SIZE command, it shows 65,440 BYTES of program space free. After a NEW command, it shows the normal amount again.

mmmm .... I would probably do none of the things you listed, and go the whacky route of installing Linux Lubuntu to a spare laptop (even a small one if you have 1gig ram) and downloading OpenShot movie editor from the Software repository .... in my opinion it's at least as good if not better than the windows free one. It's very flexible.

Hi everyone. I decided to write this now so I won't forget later. Just to say, I've only really got while June/July and then work changes, hours change and I have pretty much zero time for hobbies as travelling will be biting into that time. I may or may not be around much who knows..... I should just change my username to "Occasional99er" .... I think that would be rather apt. So the point is .... just wanted to express my thanks to everyone who has helped me to add more words to my spaghetti xb-code and make it work better, thanks to the guys who wrote the emulators, because without them I wouldn't be able to use the real iron all the time. And also to harry , seniorfalcon, for all the enjoyment i've had using the compilers, xb256, and dabbling with the missing link. I'm probably not gone .. .but more occasional.... great forum, great people. I will however, open a special little thread on here somewhere with humourous TI related pics, if such a thing is allowed on atariage (the offtopic thread is so I don't see a problem if its TI specific and not a cat, or something) . Anyhow , quit rambling .... You'll see me bobbing around somewhere. Edit: Look at this ........... http://darkbasicgames.altervista.org/parsec2011.html

Thanks Matthew ..... sorry. it looked slightly python-esque. I'll give it a try

Lifes Reality - does owning a TI require a soldering iron .... Well .... I do have a real TI at my home but it's not getting used too much because of circumstances .... but if it was to be used all the time I feel it would be inevitable that at some point a soldering iron, or some other fix, would be necessary .... however .... I have noticed that a 30 something year old TI can still run reliably at the side of laptops that break down frequently ..... now, there's a theory from a friend of mine that it's because they don't use lead in solder these days so the parts can be dicky .... back when the TI was made, it was made to last, TI really did build those computers solid, if yours didn't * start * with problems it probably wouldn't get them anytime soon. One day though, the parts will run out and the systems will start to fail - the most common part to fail I think is maybe the 9918A / 9929 chip .... that can be gotten around thanks to Matthew Haggarty's F18A which pretty much over-rides the whole thing anyhow. In an ideal world, I would have a TI sat on my desk with a little monitor, and most if not all of my coding would be done on the real iron.

I did that. Changed my name. Only because I lost my login details. I used to be Texas Joe. I remember reading posts and comments from Kevan.

Cool..... I'll give it a good look at, when I get my linux box out tomorrow.

I see it's Python based ... hey, if there are any plans to make it output to a readable .DSK image that means I can develop on linux for the TI a lot easier, as well as windows.

I think I might benefit from this tidbit.

Today I decided to rip it up and start again (Castle Conquer) .... I need a good run of quietness and calm to get this thing done, and living in the house I live in, those moments are few and far between. Anyhow - I've been playing around with character tiles a little and came up with this, just an experiment.

The Texas TI - 99 .... a machine I dearly love ... but for these reasons it failed to gain momentum in the UK.... The computer was given a TMS-9900 when it should have had some other chip they were planning, which failed at a late stage, so in the end it ended up with the 16-bit chip instead the 8-bit, on an 8-bit data bus, with no direct access to the Cassette deck ... now, you might think, what's the tape deck got to do with anything? Well, I'll tell ya .... that's why it failed, in Britain ... you couldn't save, or load, any Machine Code onto the tapes ... that had to be on Disk only (or cartridge) .... the TI was selling in a country where even the ZX Spectrum with it's .... keyboard thing .... could have M/C games on a tape, which would cost around a fiver each. Ti games were getting made on tape in TI basic and Ext. Basic costing upwards of a tenner a-piece .... and they did not sell well. To get the disk drive you had to fork out for the disk controller as well, which between them in 1981 would cost you upwards of 800 quid.... then there's the 32k expansion too. Another thing was the joysticks .... two rather obscure sticks on one lead. Having said all that, for my own reasons I love the TI 99 but from a marketing point of view it was doomed over here.

I got 7.9 seconds, using Chrome on a five-year old Samsung R519 dual-snore notebook with 2.1 Ghz and no dedicated graphics ram.