Asmusr

Just played through it on a real machine. It's an absolutely playable demo with a few puzzles, and not too hard. A few glitches with the blood stains. The red potions give health and and green potions and the barrels give might (the ability to attack). You need to use the mouse or joystick to get and use the keys. I wish a had a TIPI so I could try the mouse interface, but it's supposed to work well.

The files I posted with my reply to Elia were not supposed to be there. Here's the latest version. texcaster.rpk texcaster8.bin

The first bottle holds a lot of potential. But you have moved away from 32x64 again.

But what about >2000->3fff?

Refactoring assembly code can be almost as difficult as writing it in the first instance. It helps to have good tools, but AFAIK GDMike is working retro style.

Is that because your program is running from 8K cartridge space? Since you're using SAMS anyway there must be other options.

It works for me. You need to select either the zip file or both the rom files. The emulator can only load files you select.

I have used lookup table for sin and cos lots of times, my raycaster being a good example. They are nice functions to look up because they are periodic and symmetric and different only by phase. A lookup takes only a couple of instructions whereas calling the TIPI of F18A would take a lot longer. I remember I got an FPU for my 386DX BITD when I became interested in ray tracing. It did speed up things quite a lot, but it could still take hours to render a screen.

Yes maybe hand drawn images at lower resolutions would do better at keeping important details than the basic sampling algorithm I'm using, but it's not something I'm going to investigate because I'm quite happy with how it's working now. The thing to remember when you draw textures is that small details are fine as long as they are not important. If you draw something that people need to see it has to be quite big.

If we wanted to achieve that you only see monsters when they are close and big there are several ways to do that, but I don't think that's desirable. On the contrary, the scaling of the textures at different sizes is a major feature of this game engine that's quite unique on the TI.

I'm not sure if a view that, for instance, dropped every second pixel would be that helpful. I'm not sure how that would help? Don't you think that would be slightly annoying? And how would you approach the monsters in the first instance? I don't think this is an issue that needs a solution. It's just something to be aware of when you draw textures.

What's the use case for the FPU?

No that's not what I'm saying. At close range you should see most of the pixels since the screen resolution of 128x64 is a good match for the texture resolution of 32x64. But when you move further away the quality deteriorates rapidly as I have tried to illustrate with these images. It's a bigger issue for the enemies, which you usually don't want very close to you, than for the walls.

Thank you for the drawings. It's fun be able to draw without color restrictions if you're used to draw for TI bitmap mode. But in reality on the TI many details will be lost. I really like the emerald.

The file length should be in the most significant byte of R1 before the call to VSBW. If you use LI R1,>15 it will be in the least significant byte, so you have to swap the bytes first: LI R0,PABADR+9 LI R1,>15 SWPB R1 BLWP @VSBW In the real program you won't use LI because the length will not be known until runtime, so you will need a MOV to get the length into R1.

Yes.

Yes, but I use a 32x64 resolution now, with 2x1 pixels. And any sprites, i.e. monsters and objects that are not 'walls', should have a transparent background (color 0).

I think there are enough Geneve related posts to justify a new sub-forum.

It's amazing to see SAMS memory used as it was supposed to be used. Sorry, but a haven't watched all the demoes: how do you load a file?

More pictures of the day, please. 🙂

It would be great to be able to pick .rpk files from any directory, so you don't have to copy each new version into the carts directory. As mizapf wrote, all you need to do is to provide the full path to MAME.

SID Master is great, but so far I haven't had the drive to support it in my games. For the hardware guys out there, if you're looking for a project, I'm repeating my idea for a new, backwards compatible, sound chip/card.

Thank you for the new version. It's working fine, except I haven't been able to load any config - the program just shuts down when I try.

Looks like "when either sprite has color 0, the bit will not".