Asmusr

It's almost cruel to am1933, he has wanted this for so long. It was not until I Googled "Flair Pool" and didn't find anything I discovered it was an anagram.

I found an interesting article about the Flair Pool algorithm.

Absolutely amazing, I didn't think anyone was clever enough to pull this off. It looks so great and fast on the opening screen, but I can't get past that. It says "Error: Fail Lo Pro 2014". This is on Classic99.

Thanks. Great demo!

Excellent news that your project has progressed that far. How big is the TI player and how many clock cycles does it use (rough estimate)? BTW, perhaps you can explain why a 14K VGM file (MISSION76496) grows to 31K when converted to epsgmod? I thought the latter was a much more compact format.

Check out this site: http://tigameshelf.net/

Yes, Titanium and Road Hunter are loading the maps from disk when needed because I can't fit them all into RAM. For Scramble I managed to avoid it by using compression.

I found this tune, Sonic Chaos by Chris Kelly, on http://www.smspower.org/Music/Homebrew I converted it from VGM to EPSGMOD format, adjusted the bass notes (periodic noise) for the TMS9919, and set it up to play with Tursi's player. The result is on the attached disk (E/A#3: SONICCHAOS or E/A#5:SONICC). sonicchaos.zip It's pretty amazing what you can do with our little PSG... @Tursi, any update on your VGM player?

Look at the price of the 10 units sold, it was 'only' £85. Same for the joy port, it was only EUR 39.99.

Not to mention that the F18A runs in 60Hz, which means a lot for graphics and sound.

He has actually commented on my Road Hunter video on YouTube: "Awesome stuff, great work!!"

The thing I find annoying about the byte operations is that they work on the most significant byte. That means you have to use additional operations (CLR, SWPB, SRL, etc.) when you want to use 8-bit values in 16-bit calculations. Why was it designed like that? Anyway, if you program an assembly game make sure to put your register workspace, main variables and perhaps copying loops into 16-bit RAM (scratchpad). You can generally use all of scratchpad as you want, it's only when you need to call console routines (e.g. for disk access) that you need to stay away from some areas.

Sounds great, I'm thinking streaming content... Does the 378 also have an indeterministic start-up bank?

See https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/TI99-4A/conversations/topics/84910

This version of my sound list ripper supports basic editing. To edit a sound list first Import it (for now this also works as the way to Open a saved (binary) file list). Then go to the Table tab and double-click on a cell to edit it. You can also cut/copy/paste or drag'n'drop full rows. When done, make sure to Export your work as a binary file (this works as the Save option). SoundListRipper.zip Disclaimer: not properly tested, may damage your ears.

Where is the cartridge port?

Pac-Man and Ms PacMan are using soft sprites for the ghosts' eyes. Are there any other examples? In theory it should be possible to use smooth scrolling techniques for soft sprites as long as the sprites move on an empty background and don't overlap.

Actually it's 4 pixel intervals.

Bullseye!

I like Atic Atac for the Speccy, and Sabre Wulf: There is a game in the GameBase with similar graphics to Sabre Wulf, which unfortunately suffers terribly from lack of speed: Anyway, what I wanted to say is that there is a lot more to game development than programming. Making the graphics/sprites/maps/music for my games has taken as least as long as the coding. So if you're interested in designing graphics/music for a game or can provide graphics ripped from a game from another platform I'm always interested.

It's strange, I remember Elite for the Amstrad CPC (the computer I had after the TI) as having filled polygons, but when I look at it on YouTube it looks like a disappointing Spectrum conversion: Which version can I be thinking of, or is there another similar game? I never had an Amiga, so that's not it. I remember playing Frontier (Elite II) on the PC quite a lot, but that's not it either.

How difficult would it be to write a library like The Missing Link to provide support for some of the F18A functions in XB? You could start out with very simple stuff like unlocking the F18A, setting palette colors, one page smooth scrolling (wrapped), and a generic function for setting VDP registers. A more advanced version could add two/four page scrolling, multi-colored tiles, multi-colored sprites (if they are compatible with the console ISR?), and perhaps bitmap layer functions. With the XB compiler you could produce some pretty nice games, with features we haven't seen used in assembly yet. As far as I have figured out the trick is to reserve VDP RAM by allocating more file buffers than required for files, and then use that RAM for graphics tables instead, right? Would XB do anything nasty like resetting the VDP registers?

The best chance of some decent vector graphics on the TI is probably the method recently described by artrag that allows the bottom 2/3 of the screen to be double buffered: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/210888-smooth-scrolling/page-11?do=findComment&comment=2900634 With this method you could produce flicker free monochrome vector graphics, but the update speed would probably be limited to a few frames per second depending on the complexity of the scene. Personally I would never attempt an Elite conversion as I think the result would be a disappointment.

If you get the error "v9t9 file header not found" you can use Ti99Dir to convert TIFILES to V9T9 files, but then I get another error "Too many banks <5> used by program, maximum allowed is <4>.". This is strange since it should be able to handle up to 16 banks.

Sorry, I mean bitmap color mode. On the TI you could use either full graphics mode or the hybrid half-bitmap mode.